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!
Add comment November 3rd, 2007
Today is a holiday all over Italy. Only entertainment venues are open so that holidayers can go out and eat or have their caffé. Schools are out until Monday, like Thanksgiving in the US.
Once upon a time, this was a religious holiday for visiting the graves of the ancestors, having masses said for them, spending time as a family to remember those who are no more. Now it’s a day off and everyone does as he likes.
The unique day off for the entire Italian world has made it easy for some Italians to take up Halloween and do it any way they like. Last night Tina had a potluck supper in her fun room that was once a garage. This year she’s added a wood cook stove, and that’s a happy thought indeed. We’ve had some chilly evenings out there in past years.
The dishes brought to the lengthy tables were varied and delicious. I wanted to know names for all of them. No one had a name for anything except one risotto for which Tina just made something up, “Riso al Duca.” For the rest, the makers told me to make up my own name. I think that’s an attitude that needs some tenderizer. After all, my American dish had a name.
I made Chili Mac. I used the homemade chili powder from the other day, and the flavor is wonderful, but the resultant chili is almost atomic, at least to an Umbrian. Some of my Umbrian friends like somewhat spicy foods, but this would have been a bit exaggerated even for them, and since I’d forgotten the shopping list in the car and therefore forgot to buy polenta, Tamale Pie wasn’t on, so I cooked some skinny, elongated elbows called gramigna, put them in the bottom of a big Dutch oven, then ladled chili over them and topped it all with grated American cheddar that my friend, Missjoe, had sent me this summer when her children visited. It bubbled and browned in the oven and perfumed my house in a way predicted to stimulate an American appetite. Lid clapped on, into the car, and onto the crackling wood fire of Tina’s stove.
They liked it! I saw a few people eat several helpings, so it wasn’t just kindness. Although they ate it like a primo, or first course, and called it a pasta, it was still impressive to me that so many Italians unbent to a foreign dish in which the flavors are absolutely unlike anything Italian. I can’t think of anything more American, can you? Although the particular chili peppers have Mexican roots, it isn’t Mexican. The cheese is certainly not much like British cheddar, it’s all-American. The combination looks, smells and tastes “molto particulare” or quite its own self.
I’ve always maintained that Italians would like cheddar if they were only allowed to try the real thing. It’s a bit the expatriate’s Holy Grail, with reports of finding some in this Auchan here, that Esselunga there — those are Italian supermarkets, well actually Auchan is French but we shan’t split hairs. I wish I had a photo to share, but really, who reading this has never seen a big pot of bubbling cheddar-topped something?
I first heard of Chili Mac when I was a young mum and wife living in Falls Church, Virginia. eg’s little friend gravely told me that his mother was the best cook in the entire world and that her best dish was Chili Mac. I’d never in all my New England rearing tasted a chili that was powerful enough to serve over anything, let alone spaghetti. It didn’t take long to find out what the lower part of the USA already knew — that chili was a deeply spiced meat stew with CHARACTER and not a mild creature from a can that looked like dog food until it was heated and served in a bowl. Chili never became an important part of my culinary repertoire, but something about autumn usually brought on a pot of chili. There’s hardly anything more cold weather appropriate in the American kitchen. Even the Thanksgiving roast turkey holds a single place in the autumn menu.
But chili can sit on a stovetop or in an oven and wait for you to come in cold and wet, and its perfume immediately promises the kind of comfort that warms the blood. Which wine? Are you joking? It’s beer for chili! Except last night the first offering of Franca’s new wine, or vino novello, was perfect. Right now the new wine still has a bit of sugar, not much alcohol and millions of the tiniest bubbles. It seemed a marriage made in Heaven.
I’m not sure that there has ever been an iconic recipe for chili. There’s more argument about chili than almost any dish I know. I bow to the vaster knowledge of the Southwesterners who have grown up knowing chili and eating chili and developing new chili recipes for chili contests. This recipe is just how I made it yesterday in a country far from Texas and New Mexico and a bunch of eaters who have never tasted any of the more expert chilis. As a practical cook, I used the meat that was on sale for €3.95 per kilo and it happened to be whole loin of pork. Ground beef was €7.95 per kilo and up. Argh! I figure no Mexican mamma ever spent that or failed to make chili if a cow hadn’t met her fate in the village. Chili is not rich folks food. I am not rich folk.
Meat: I cut the loin off a two kilo (4.4 pound) loin of pork. It was too lean, so I used lard to do the frying part to make up for that. I neglected to weigh the loin part before using it, sorry. There remain the bones with meat on them, which I will tackle later, and the tenderloin, which it will be my pleasure to use in other ways as well. I think I used about 3 pounds of pork, cut into a small dice.
3 onions, roughly chopped
1 large green pepper, diced
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
6 tablespoons of homemade chili powder
salt to taste
lard for frying
4 tablespoons of corn meal
optional: 2 400 gram tins of beans, drained
Melt some lard to cover the bottom of a moderately sized stock pot. Throw in the onions and sauté them until they are transparent. Add the diced pepper and fry that, too, until softened. Add the garlic, and reduce the heat, stirring once in a while. Add the chili powder, stirring in, and fry that, too. Add about one liter of boiling water and leave to simmer.
In a separate heavy frying pan, melt a small amount of lard and fry the meat cubes a bit at a time, adding them to the big pot as they lose their pink color. When you are finishing the last batch, dip some of the cooking water out of the stock pot into the frying pan so that you don’t leave any of the meat flavors behind.
Now add enough boiling water to come to about an inch over the solids in the stock pot, and keep the stew at a simmer for several hours. After about 2 hours, check for salt and correct it. Add the beans if you want them. A half hour before it needs to be done, stir in the corn meal to thicken the juices. My chili cooked for four hours and I would have happily left it for several more, but I had to put the Chili Mac together in time to get it bubbly before carting it away. I was frankly stunned at how spicy it was! I knew when I was making the chili powder that it was a chancy venture. The recipe says “three of this one, three of that one” but the chillies were all different sizes. One would be 1.5 inches by 2 inches, another 2.5 inches by 4.5. Weighing would have been a big help, but I didn’t find any recipes with estimated weights.
For the Chili Mac, I cooked the pasta for a bit less than the six minutes recommended. I drained it, put it in the bottom of the big casserole, ladled some of the chili over it, maybe half, then covered it generously with grated cheddar cheese. I popped it uncovered into the oven which I’d preheated to 175°C or 350°F. It cooked for about thirty minutes, then lidded, was carted off to Tina’s.
This is no revelatory recipe, I know. It’s just what I and my friends ate one night in the autumn of 2007. If any of the chili that was left un-macked gets turned into Chili Mac again, I’ll throw a photo in here. Buon appetito!
N.B. I think I have finally gotten really good at loving my friends. I was so happy to see them, old and new, and for the few hours we were together, I wouldn’t have chosen another place to be for any prize. Maybe the best thing about aging is being in the moment, loving whoever is there, not feeling nervous about how you look, what you’re wearing or what useful thing you might be doing instead of being happy.
4 comments November 1st, 2007
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To begin you do exactly the same things that we did in Carciofi 101.
When the artichoke slices are partly cooked, add the garlic slices to them. Once you get to the browned stage, however, add 6 small, sweet winter tomatoes cut into quarters and the pasta water as described, and as they cook, it will thicken up into a sweet and sour sauce. Cheese doesn’t go in this pasta, in my opinion.
So for two:
2 small or 1 globe artichoke, cleaned and sliced thinly
2 tablespoons of great olive oil — I used spicy oil from Puglia
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
salt to taste
6 sweet tomatoes on the branch (pomodori al grappolo)
from 100 to 200 grams (7 to 14 ounces) of pasta. The pasta shown is casarecce, which has a tube shape but looks homemade.
Flickr had stopped feeding the photos in Carciofi 101, so I had to load them into this program. It didn’t want them one bit! Since winter is artichoke season, let’’s send this to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night.
I had a small disaster making this. For the first time I oversalted the pasta water and had to start that all over again. Bleaugh!
7 comments October 31st, 2007
When I could hardly eat last week, I made a quintessential American pot of chili con carne. It was quite mild, but even so I used almost all of the rest of my chili powder so thoughtfully suggested by friend Jane and provided by eg. I happily ate it day after day, although it wasn’t that big a pot, since I’d used only half a pound of meat and a lot of cannellini. Yeah, yeah, cannellini don’t exactly taste like red kidney beans!
So then I started to worry about where my next comforting pot of chili might come from once the chili powder was gone. Here is an answer. I had much to choose from, but this was the least complicated. It happens that I do have those peppers, but once they’re gone I’ll be scrounging around ethnic food shops like everyone else. I’m going to leave out the garlic powder and use fresh garlic in the pot.
Italian food is great. I love Italian food. Somehow, though, when things go badly I often want something from the past. I made chicken a la king, too. Tomorrow night Tina is hosting a Halloween pot luck, and I think I will use homemade chili powder to create tamale pie. Sort of a Central American lasagne, eh? I think ground or chopped vitellone and pork should do it, with a crust made of polenta. Missjoe sent me some cheddar, so that will make a gloriously bubbly top to it all. And if no one likes it, I will have another week of practically no cooking. Sounds win-win to me.
Life is not all roasted duck breasts and truffled pasta. Sometimes it gets sucky and you need mummy food.
7 comments October 30th, 2007
Saturday I went to town, both for the market and because I needed to pry myself from my mousehole, to which I had become far too adapted when I wasn’t feeling so well. I lost an entire size in a week! I don’t recommend the method, however. Still, when my jeans wouldn’t stay where I put them, and I pulled out that tight, black pair and zipped them on, it was pretty interesting from my point of view.
Everybody was bundled up. Except me. It was cool and I was wearing this knit jacket, but they were wearing down jackets, all black but one. 
As the day wore on it got hot, but they only unzipped their jackets. Why do Italians feel the cold so much?
I visited friends here and there. I made an appointment and got a haircut. I lunched on ravioli ai porcini and it was splendid, the simplest rendition I have ever had and my favorite waitress in the world was right to recommend not using the cheese on it. I only ate half, so she proposed next time she’d give me a half portion. Oh, and they’ve added flavored ciabatte to the bread basket, which is a brilliant move in a place where the local bread is salt free! They make it in house, too, and the onion one was great. I drank my first glass of wine in over a week. Good.
The haircut is good as usual, but figlio Andrea was given the styling and made it so crazy I rinsed my hair when I got home. What gets into those two kids? Sister does that too, although Mata at least uses something flexible rather than what seems to be Elmer’s Glue-all. That family is one of the best things in Italy. Mum offered me homemade pastry as well as an espresso. I wish I could have eaten it.
So, I returned home with two tiny artichokes, a kilo of Pugliese tomatoes (in spite of Jeffo’s objections, they still truck them up here from Foggia,) a big bunch of white grapes that make my lips curl up into a smile, and two very small eggplant/aubergine. And 4 belts, all looking as if they might have come off Marc Jacobs’ runway, given me by a woman in Patrizia’s shop because I was the only one they fit. Three years ago I searched all over for a 24″ belt and never found a one. Now I have four, all in shades of red, red/brown and ranging from glazed leather to suede. The buckles are very nice indeed.
I need to get out more.
3 comments October 29th, 2007
Veronica has refined her macaron magic yet further. I dare you to go look.
2 comments October 23rd, 2007
The American girls have left. They actually left me on a street curb in a taxi to the airport at Florence. I have cooked nothing since. Nothing.
There are photos in the camera, maybe there’s something I’ve forgotten lying there?
I wanted to make this cake, but opted instead for saving the plums from an early death. You already have that recipe. The cake is an assemblage but tastes good to me. Problem is, I didn’t take a final photo when we had it. It consists of sponge layers drizzled with raspberry grappa, then spread with raspberry jam, then chocolate mousse, final layer frosted with whipped cream and studded with fresh raspberries. And it serves 12, so I can’t make it without some eaters around. Last time I served 6, then gave generous hunks away to guests and still had one-fourth to give the neighbors.
Somehow, I feel more interested in what other people are blogging than in what is in my mind. Maybe I need that sugar shock of the cake?
4 comments October 21st, 2007
The peach mostarda from this summer: you must break open the chilies before cooking, enough to release the flavor. Just crack them before putting them into the peaches.
Smoked pecorino from Sardegna: it is not called Fiore Sardo. The website where I got that information is incorrect. Fiore Sardo is a great cheese, but not smoked. Ask for smoked Sardegnan (Sardinian) pecorino, or Pecorino affumicato Sardo. I just bought 700 grams of it at the Mercato Centrale at Florence, so now I can try to copy some of the recipes I ate at Terra Terra.
The sloppy dough bread was made twice. Both times were different. The secrets seem to be 1) making it wetter than regular bread dough, 2) allowing it to rise very slowly, cool, many hours and 3) cooking the bread in a heavy, covered pot for the first half hour, then uncovering it to finish. Rather than translate the recipe measures, I just used Italian measures, because the yeast comes in packets that raise 500 grams of flour. Both versions worked, and that’s the important part.
I am off to a town near Rome today for an expat gathering, and will post something new when I get back… so see you later.
Add comment October 20th, 2007
It’s been a long time since the Sloppy Dough Revolution, and although I’ve made my pizza crusts always using that recipe, I have never gotten around to the bread that brought this method to the public eye.
Today, however, two old friends are arriving from the United States, and what is more welcoming than the perfume of baking? And which of those perfumes is more seductive than bread? So, there’s a loaf of No-Knead bread nel forno and the perfume has filled the house and I at least feel very welcome and looking forward to lunch.
The original recipe published in the New York Times is here I didn’t follow that one, but more or less my pizza dough recipe less the oil and plus a ton of flour to keep it from sticking to the dutch oven. Photo to follow, I think.
Two days ago I made chicken liver spread which seems like a good way to munch on warm, crusty loaves. When it gets a bit stale, then we can have crostini to toast and spread.
8 comments October 10th, 2007
One of the blogs I enjoy following is Veronica’s Test Kitchen. She really takes things apart and in coming to understand them, make you understand them, too.
I read the other day that people are either bakers or cooks, and rarely strong at both things. I am not so much a baker. It doesn’t interest me as much, so I try less and have accomplished less. It’s interesting then, to me, when I run into a post like this one about macarons, that I want macarons right now. I would even be willing to make them, if I had the time. Go see Veronica play macaroon chef.
13 comments October 9th, 2007
