Posts filed under 'Food'
In an interesting article. the New York Times has proposed that the traditional seeds that once made up the vast variety of food plants grown in Italy has started to disappear.
My neighbors save seeds and use them year after year, if you live in the country, I’ll bet some of yours do, too.
I’d like to propose that we who live in the country talk to our neighbors with ortos and ask about the seeds they use, ask further who else there is they can introduce us to who uses old seeds. Now is the time to do it, because now is when the seeds are in and are also in their minds.
We can contact the study group in Perugia and point them right at the seeds that we find. Some will be winners, some not, but nothing will happen if everyone doesn’t try.
Calabria? Puglia? Emilia-Romana? Le Marche? All of italy … rise up and save those seeds!
November 28th, 2007
I read somewhere on the internet that cranberry/grappa jelly was the hot new dish for Thanksgiving this year. Who wouldn’t want to make the hot new dish of the year? It’s from Gourmet magazine, too, so there you go.
Three years ago, eg brought me two bags of cranberries in her luggage. They have sat, triple-bagged, in my freezer since then, because like the story of the pig you wouldn’t want to eat all at once, I couldn’t bear for them to just go away. But for the hot new dish of 2007, I figured let’s do it! Those of you who don’t live here will think how silly we are to miss something most people eat once a year and many people deride as not real food. I love cranberries.
The original recipe is fairly straight forward but a little messy with a lot of straining and pressing to get the skins and seeds free of the juices. Note that not only does it star the elusive cranberry, but also granulated gelatin, which doesn’t exist here, as far as I have ever been able to tell.
Italian gelatin is evocatively named “fish glue.” Yum. It comes in transparent sheets or leaves in envelopes. I made a strawberry Bavarian some years back using fish glue and it didn’t jell. I didn’t know how much fish glue to use to replace granulated gelatin nor did anyone I asked.
But I am nothing if not determined when it comes to my cranberries. The package says that the enclosed leaves will jell 500 milliliters of liquid. I started adding up the liquids in the recipe, converting the number to milliliters and voila! It needed more than eleven sheets of gelatin. Whoa, said I, but I soaked twelve sheets in cold water. And you know what? It’s only a few hours later and it’s jelled. Hunh.
So here is the recipe for Cranberries Expatriated. Only the translation is mine.
Get 20 ounces of cranberries, frozen or fresh — or use lingonberries instead if that’s what you can find.
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups cold water
3/4 cup grappa
Remember that 250 milliliters is one cup, or close enough.
In a large pan, put those ingredients and bring them to a boil. Allow them to boil briskly, popping and eventually thickening, then remove that from the flame. Gradually pass all of it through the finest screen of a food mill. This is much cleaner than a China cap and kitchen towels, believe me.
You can soak 10 sheets of fish glue in cold water to cover while that’s cooking.
1/4 cup water
the soaked gelatin
1 cup of the juice you have now milled.
Put those into the same, now empty pan and bring it to a simmer, stirring. As soon as it is all melted and wonderful, remove it from the heat, and stir in 1.5 more cups of the juice and 1/2 cup of grappa. Oil a mold that holds at least 3 cups and pour the mixture into it. As soon as it is room temperature, put it in the fridge to chill until the next day.
To unmold it, run a sharp knife along the edges of the jelly in the mold. Dip the mold into a deep bowl of warm water for a few seconds and then turn it out onto a plate
I had a lot of leftover cranberry juice, so I put it into a jar in the fridge. I feel cranberry other things coming on. I will try to photograph this beauty (we can hope) tomorrow and add the photo when I get back from Massa Martana. And now, happy Thanksgiving to all the celebrators of same.
NB I have changed the number of leaves of fish glue, because it was too jelled.
November 22nd, 2007
1. next trial for the risotto with vinegared pork
2. showy desserts that you can make trouble free (no cooking, almost!)
3. the modern ragù
4. using chestnuts in splendid foods– this takes longer than you think!
5. Italian bread– no worries
6. Good things to have around through the holidays
It’s moving slowly but forward. It’s hard to cook lots of things when you have little appetite, and that can make you a poor judge of what you made, too. I actually tried to make 1/2 cup of risotto the other day. It doesn’t work.
7. The autumn column on what they’re wearing in Italy is submitted, and is being formatted for publication.
November 15th, 2007
Two in one: Elizabeth, cook and entertainer of many, and Martin, everyone’s favorite local artist and all-around great fellow. How can you celebrate two such exceptional people? Melchiorre knows. You roast a suckling pig in the kitchen fireplace.
The place is Melchiorre’s family home in Umbria. The festive ones are expatriates from many countries, and the chef is said Melchiorre, Sardegnan by birth and Umbrian by rearing. The man has a way with meat.
The first course was raviolone, or big ravioli, stuffed with potato and cheese and sauced with piquant honey from his own bees and chili peppers. There’s no photo of the finished dish, because I decided to be the assistant and waitress.
This capable and generous woman always seems to be the helper, and it seems like it might be time for her to a bit more the guest and a bit less the worker bee.
But what is Melchiorre doing in the kitchen? Why he’s talking the piglet through rehearsal.
Where shall we eat this feast?
Maybe this table set for twenty six will do.
Who is Martin, again? Right over there in the corner among his friends.
After dinner, Brian played the accordion for us as we pretended to know the words to the songs. At the British sea chanties, we gave even the pretense up.
Then I drove home and 2 miles from my house had a flat tire. It was dark, there were 80 kilos of salt in the trunk on top of the tiny spare and I hadn’t so much as a match to light the job, so I took off down the road in my party heels and halfway there I was rescued and given a ride the rest of they way. Did you know your cellphone makes a decent warning signal to approaching cars? Now you do. And who gave me a ride?
The Samaritan was the chef of a local restaurant, and I call that serendipity.
November 12th, 2007
This is a recipe I developed for Slow Travel. It’s a pasta I really love, and thanks to a fine friend from North Carolina, I have the pecans to make it with. It’s rich and crunchy and deeply satisfying to eat on these cold and gray days. Pecans are difficult to find here in Italy other than in my freezer or a big city like Rome, Milan or Torino.
Definitely use a mild blue cheese for this pasta. Experiments during the trial and testing period showed that to be essential. The pasta does moderate the flavor of the blue cheese, but not enough if you use a strong one. It become ammoniac with strong cheese.
Pasta with Gorgonzola and Pecans
* About 280 grams (10 ounces) of penne
* A huge pot of water
* A small handful of salt
* 1 tablespoon/cucchiaio olive oil
* A small onion, chopped somewhat finely
* A couple of handfuls of coarsely chopped pecans
* 250 grams (8 ounces - a typical package) of Gorgonzola dolce or other mild blue cheese, broken or cut into smallish pieces
Start the pasta water to boil. When the water is boiling, add the salt and the pasta and stir.
In a heavy frying pan, heat the oil, and add the onion, cooking it slowly until it is softened. Add the pecans and stir about to toast and crisp them. Add the broken up cheese to the fried onions and pecans, stirring to melt. Ladle a small amount of the pasta cooking water into the pan to make the sauce creamier. At this point, the pasta should be about done. It should be quite firm. Drain the pasta and toss it into the frying pan, stirring to coat the pasta with the sauce. Taste for salt and correct if necessary. Some cheeses are saltier than others, so you can’t tell ahead whether you’ll need it or not. Serve immediately, smoking hot.
Warning: This is a fast sauce. If it is cooked too long or cooked and reheated it will become lumpy and unpleasant. Gorgonzola piccante is very unpleasant in this sauce.
A fruit salad is nice with this if this pasta dish is your main course. And now let’s send it off to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night. Don’t forget to click into her terrific roundups to see what people all over the world are doing with the nicest noodles.
November 9th, 2007
I decided to try something different for a change. As I work through developing a recipe, I thought I would post the versions as they happen, as long as they are good to eat. Tonight I started working on this one. The dish as I ate it at a restaurant called Terra Terra in Florence, was brilliant with flavors and spicy and red as a devil. The waiter told me that vinegaring was one of the ways the old timers used to preserve pork before refrigeration.
I loved that risotto. As eg could tell you, I didn’t want to eat anything else, but went back and had to be cajoled into trying other dishes by being given a free sample of it. I love Italian food, but I miss hit-you-in-the-face strong flavors. They’re rare here.
When starting a new recipe, I always try the simplest things first. Unless you are at a four star restaurant with a dozen or more chefs, most kitchens are taking the simplest route to the end they envision. Besides, this was supposed to be a country dish made by housewives, so I figured simple was good.
This one didn’t quite make it for me. It was good and I feel like I ate well, but my face is still in one piece and it wasn’t red enough, either. I need a couple of ingredients I don’t have in the house.
Iit may be that the original dish would be too strong for you. Maybe you prefer a nicely spicy, but not revolutionary flavor? This version might be just right for you. It wasn’t a failure at being good, it was just not what I ate at Terra Terra. So here it is. It’s easy, cheap and yummy. It isn’t stirred endlessly like normal risotto and it only dirties two pots. That counts for something. It can be either a first course or a main dish.
Risotto with Vinegared Pork
Version One
2 servings
2 ounces lean pork, chopped
strong vinegar to moisten well, any kind
Prepare the pork a day ahead, completely mixing in the vinegar and let marinate in the fridge
2 tablespoons butter
½ onion chopped
½ cup arborio or other risotto rice
1 pint boiling broth
boiling water as needed
½ cup of tomato puree (passata)
1 pinch sugar
1 small pinch cloves
2 pinches of cayenne or peperoncino in polvere
about 1 ounce of pecorino, finely grated
Heat the butter in a pan and sauté the onions until transparent. Add the rice and sauté it until it turns opaque and white. Add all of the broth and stir up. Stir once in a while to prevent sticking, but you don’t have to stand there stirring constantly. Cook it to a stiff risotto consistency rather than creamy. You might need a tablespoon or so of the extra water to get the rice to al dente, just to where there is no crunchiness left. Toward the end, it does need stirring or it will stick.
Add the tomato puree and stir it in. Add the pinch of sugar, cayenne and clove. As it heats, taste for salt. You probably won’t need it.
Dump the water out of the pan you were boiling, and dry the pan. Put just a little olive oil in it, then the pork, and sauté it briefly. It foams, rather than browns, but when it loses its color, it is done. It takes only moments. Stir the pork and vinegar into the risotto. Add the grated pecorino and stir it in. Serve immediately, piping hot.
November 6th, 2007
I’ve just had an odd experience in the kitchen. It started in Florence when my friends and I stumbled into a little and not at all posh restaurant for supper a couple of weeks ago. I don’t even know its name, but I could find it if I had to.
The special of the evening was “fried chicken and vegetables.” Two of us ordered it. What arrived resembled in no manner fried chicken as we knew it. Instead there was a platter for the two of us piled high with something pale, fluffy and crunchy. As we munched through the pile we found small bone-in chunks of chicken, redolent of chicken essence and crisp as rice crackers. Among those and sometimes stuck to them were batons of carrot and zucchini with the same light and crispy crust. It was delicious.
After my friends returned to the USA, I started to think about that chicken. How did they do that? Why was that crust so light and crisp and filled with bubbles? How come that chicken was so juicy, when chicken is so usually over cooked in Italy? I went to the store and bought some chicken. I looked through the flours for rice flour, but there was none. Then I saw the potato starch (fecola di patata) and picked that up. I reckoned that an Italian restaurant was most likely using something you could buy in Italian shops, right?
In the kitchen I made the decision to make just a small amount, because I might have to try several approaches before I found the right batter. I used my heavy Chinese cleaver to chunk up a leg into two pieces, a thigh into three. I scattered a mixture of rosemary, salt, pepper and cayenne over it. I made carrot and zucchini sticks.
Ahhhh, the coating. I tossed about a half cup of corn starch/flour (Maizena) into a bowl, then an equal amount of the potato starch. Why did I use those? Because they have no gluten to toughen the batter. I added some of the seasoning to that, too. Then I gradually added Chinese beer that was lying around until the batter was about the consistency of yogurt. I added enough sparkling water to bring it to the consistency of cream. It would be it, or it wouldn’t.
I made up another bowl of plain flour with more of the seasoning to help the batter stick.
I heated sunflower oil in a small but deep pot, enough to deep fry the chicken pieces. One by one I dipped the chicken pieces into the flour, then into the batter, and then laid them into the hot oil. I turned them once. They almost don’t brown at all, so it’s difficult to know when they’re done, but I winged it — ha ha like a chicken — you can hit me now. When they looked done to me, I took them out and laid them on paper towels. On and on, through the chicken bites, then the vegetables, I fried.
Friends, one of those two starches is the right one. I don’t know which. The chicken and the vegetables were both just delicious, but the coating was a little hard on the edges, not perfectly falling away onto the lip in spicy, crackling shards. I thought to try just corn starch next time.
And then I thought again. This was easy. A person could do this any time a chicken happened by the kitchen counter. I liked it. I liked it too much. Perfecting this chicken might be the dumbest thing I would ever do. Does the world really need another fried chicken recipe? Does my world really need me after eating this every week for a while?
For now, the answer is no. All my clothes but one skirt currently fit. If there is one thing I learned from the ‘Chinese dumplings made easy’ episode, it’s that truly delicious and fattening things that are too easy to make are just perilous. I’ve whipped the dumplings into a once a year treat, I don’t have the character to battle this chicken too.
So go for it. It’s either all potato starch or all corn starch, a bit of beer, a bit of sparkling water. But please don’t invite me.
November 4th, 2007
Palma cooks so widely and so well, that it’s fabulous to find myself on her blog. She recently made the Gorgonzola Cookies and did a step by step photo log of the process. That’s more than I did for them!
November 3rd, 2007
We have lots of them. They are not dying to fall for expatriate women, in my experience, so imagine my delight when I finally met a male who could be bribed with food!
He’s not Italian, though. He’s sort of Ozglish. It hasn’t so far gotten in the way of our relationship. He blogs. If only he tolerated cats…
November 3rd, 2007
Look here to read an account of a cooking job as executed by a couple who write a blog I read everyday. You will never read accounts of cookery so completely and generously open about the new ideas they develop and the new ways with food they have.
Their blog is deceptively titled Ideas in Food. You and I have ideas in food. Alex and Aki dedicate the larger part of their lives to making food into forms and flavors that rival nature in their diversity.
We know that I am never going to cook like that. Just the investment in equipment would be insuperable. Working alone couldn’t be that yeasty and productive. Occasionally, when they fool around with something Italian, I find myself talking to the computer. But I read it and I’m fascinated. It was therefore irresistible to read the account of a meal they were hired to create for a small group of foodies. Read it. You will be astounded.
November 2nd, 2007
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