Posts filed under 'meat'
This recipe is just a lovely thing, but I have been having a hard time sitting myself down to write it. It is the meat course from the menu of April 7, 2008. I’ve cooked it four times, photographed it once and still I haven’t typed it up and published it. I’m not sure why.
My suspicions lie with the fact that although it’s easy, it’s also easy to screw up. It depends very much on good meat. The first and third times I made it I used ordinary supermarket meat and it was a fine dish if you hadn’t had it the other way. When I used local hand-reared pork from this area that I bought and had prepared at the butcher shop for euro 13 per kilo, it was fabulous. My local Coop now offers the same service at half the price, and it was good, but not nearly as good as the pampered pork
The recipe here was inspired by a recipe I found in an Italian culinary magazine. I actually made their recipe, but I found the stuffing mixture of sausage meat, two cheeses and three salamis too heavy, although it might be great in January. I wanted something springy, and something in which I could use all the fresh herbs jumping up out of the ground these days.
The stuffing looks, even to me, unnecessarily complicated in terms of ingredients, but I found out the hard way that you really do need two different kinds of breadcrumbs and two different kinds of cheese.
The amount it makes is awkward. A whole one of these double chops is too much meat for one person, especially in an Italian meal. On the other hand, I found it impossible to cook less than one per person, because it thought it looked chintzy not to have one bony piece per person, just in case. On the plus side, the leftovers are terrific either cold or gently heated. Oh, and by the way, there is a reason why these are rib chops and not loin chops. By the time these thick stuffed chops were cooked through, the tenderloin bit of the loin chop would have become sawdust. Use the cheaper rib chop.
So how come if I like this dish so well, well enough to have cooked it four times, have fed it to clients and again to friends, how come I haven’t splashed it out onto this page? Never mind, it’s making it today.
Costellette di Maiale Ripiene or stuffed rib pork chops
Four pieces, which I think should serve six people
4 rib chops one rib wide, or about 2 centimeters thick, with a pocket cut in them to the bone
6 to 12 toothpicks
the stuffing:
soft breadcrumbs from one slice of Italian or other real bread
½ cup of dry bread crumbs (a couple of handfuls or 2 espresso cups full)
one medium onion, minced fine
2 teaspoons of fresh thyme leaves
2 teaspoons of minced chives
2 teaspoons of fresh oregano leaves
salt to taste
half of one beaten egg
enough white wine to moisten the mixture
3 ounces of coarsely grated relatively unaged pecorino cheese or another very tasty not very hard cheese
another stuffing:
4 ounces of Rambol herbed cheese in Italy and Boursin in other countries
the cooking:
olive oil for frying
about 2 teaspoons of salt
sprigs of all the herbs used in the stuffing
three or four whole garlic cloves
a couple of espresso cups of white wine
Preheat the oven to 375°F or 165°C
If you have not talked your meat seller into making the pockets for you, then you will need to use a sharp knife and carefully cut pockets from the fatty edge toward the bone, being careful not to let the knife wander and cut through the meat. I recommend using your charm on the meat person of your choice!
Mix up the stuffing. It should be moist and cling together when you gather it in your hand, but not wet.
Using your hands, (I use surgical gloves when cooking professionally and touching raw meat) open the pocket in the chop and stuff in a good spoonful of the herbed cheese. Then gather up a fistful of the stuffing and push it in after the cheese. Add another good spoonful of the cheese and then close the pocket up using one or two toothpicks, depending on how wide the meat person made the pocket opening. You can pretend you are a plastic surgeon when doing this part of the operation.
Heat a quite large frying pan, or two of them, if you don’t have one that fits all four chops. Pour in about 2 tablespoons of oil, and then brown the chops on both sides. Be patient so that you will get a lovely golden brown without chancing a scorching. When they are all nicely browned, toss in the garlic and the herb sprigs, toss the salt over the chops, then pour the wine into the sizzling pan.
Put the pan into the oven and cook about 40 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 160°F or 72°C. Remove the chops to a board and allow them to rest 10 minutes while you reduce the sauce in the pan over a fairly high heat.
Using a sharp knife, cut 1 cm (fat ¼ inch) slices off the chops until you almost reach the bone. Arrange the chops on a serving dish and garnish with some of the fresh herbs you used in the dish. Drizzle some of the reduced pan juices over the meat.
You know what’s really nice about this dish? That soft herby cheese melts and coats the inside of the pocket and the outside of the stuffing, making both things extraordinarily creamy and herbalicious. The meat is tender and gently seasoned. The stuffing is springlike with its herbs. I consider it a four-star meat course.
With it I served a good old American carrot and raisin salad which was new to my guests and they liked it!
May 7th, 2008
San Pellegrino is using one of my dishes that I photographed on their website. It’s not easy to find… you have to click on search then use the name Pienza to find the article, then the line of photos at the bottom. Mine is number 19. As someone who struggles with bad eyesight and shaky camera syndrome, it is not a bad thing to have someone like your shot of Fegatelli!
It’s just too bad that they are illustrating Tuscany with a photo of a dish cooked in Umbria and made of Umbrian hand reared pork. See why I think Tuscany is too well known?
There is also an article on Gallipoli, in Puglia and also the site of a terrible battle in which mistakes led to the unnecessary deaths of many young soldiers. The article doesn’t touch on that, but does paint a picture of a forgotten and silent place to find the end of the earth.
March 29th, 2008
It just means ham in Italy now, so if you happen to be ordering it at a delicatessen counter say prosciutto crudo to get the ham sold in other countries under that umbrella term. If, instead, you want the familiar boiled or baked ham you may have eaten all your life, ask for Prosciutto cotto.
Prosciutto crudo is pretty special stuff, no matter where you get it. Try to find out from your vendor where theirs comes from. It has to be labeled, so they can tell you. I won’t tell you that if all they have is something that isn’t Italian you shouldn’t try it or use it in a recipe, because it doesn’t have to be Italian to be good, but your chances are higher if it is Italian.
Not all Prosciutto crudo italiano is the same. Through most of Italy there is a local type which will be called nostrano, meaning ours. Our local Umbrian is rather salty for me, so I order Prosciutto di Parma, or Parma ham, or Prosciutto San Daniele from Friuli Venezia-Giulia. Both of them are less salty, tenderer and moister than others I’ve tried. Read here about San Daniele. Trust me, it’s delicious. If you click onto the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma above, you’ll get a visual treat that will be as good as a meal and give you some ideas about what you can do with that glorious pig.
There are some don’ts about buying prosciutto crudo. Don’t buy too much at a time. A real purist would say to buy what you can consume that very day, but I think it’s fine to buy it a day ahead. Just leave it in the carefully wrapped package it came in and remove it from the refrigerator 30 to 60 minutes before you want to serve it. Here in Italy you can buy the number of slices you want or you can buy it by the etto, which is 100 grams and close to four ounces. Unless you are feeding a huge crowd, you’ll never need a pound, let alone a kilo of it.
If you see it at a counter already “shaved” and piled up like a mess, don’t touch it with a ten foot pole. No one would treat real prosciutto crudo that way, so it’s bound to be nasty, plus it’s meant to be cut one thin slice at a time and arranged carefully so that it is beautiful when it’s served. It’s never meant to be piled up on a chunk of bread like cheap bologna, which is pretty much what those piles of shavings can do.
Don’t put mustard or pickle with it as you might with ordinary ham. You’ll miss the true delight of this special thing if you kill it with strong flavors like those.
Don’t fry it. Really, just don’t.
So you’ve found it, you’ve bought 100 grams; what to do with it now? Most of mine gets picked up, slice by slice, and nibbled straight from the package. Maybe you’re a more disciplined type. I like prosciutto crudo with fruits, not just melon or figs, but any fruit. That’s a perfect antipasto course in almost anyone’s terms. Very occasionally I order prosciutto and eggs at a cafe. It’s served as a crunchy slab of toasted bread topped with fried eggs, and prosciutto is laid over all, so that the heat of the eggs starts to melt it a bit, draping it gracefully over the plate. It’s a lot better than it reads, or so I found after gagging at the thought for a couple of years, then finally giving it a shot. Nice.
Crudo is often use minced and added to things for its wonderful flavor; things like ravioli or tortellini stuffings, or minced fillings for involtini or meat roll-ups. I usually look for the end pieces too small to slice and sold at a bargain pèrice for those purposes. It makes a very unsatisfactory broth, in my opinion. Since it isn’t smoked, it turns back into pork and makes pork broth. There are easier ways to get pork broth.
If you are interested to know more about prosciutto, Wikipedia has a page on it. I can’t guarantee every word as I am more of an eater than a researcher when it comes to hams, but I did not see Prosciutto di Praga there, which I hear good things about. I also note a lack of detail in the handling of San Daniele, but it isn’t our only resource. If you know something that author didn’t know, fill in the blanks and I’ll go read it.
Speaking of smoked, there is smoked prosciutto in Italy. It’s called Speck and comes from the Austro-Germanic parts of Italy in the Dolomites.
You can read what Kyle Philips has to say about Speck and what to do with it at about.com. It’s approximate to Virginia country ham, and I use it as I would the US product, but I also eat it as it comes, which I never did with country ham.
A word on cotto? It’s just like what you are used to. It can be arrosto, or baked, or just cotto, boiled. There are grades and if possible get “alta qualità” which doesn’t have additives. 
If you come to Italy, just go to a grocery store and order un etto of each kind that interests you, get a loaf of good bread. some fruit and a bottle of Prosecco. It may be a supper you’ll want only once in your life, but it will give you an education and an attitude on prosciutto. Or seek out a good source wherever you are, buy what you can find, following the few rules and when you come to Italy, you’ll already approach the deli counter with attitude, just like we do.
January 2nd, 2008
I’ve been reading lists all over the internet food world based on the best recipes of 2007, either their own trials or recipes they’ve picked up from this site or that one. I have never done a list like that for Think On It, so I thought I would instead farm the entire life of this blog and list what has been mentioned most often or eaten most often here casa mia.
Think On It, as a food blog, is in main dedicated to food prepared according to the basic tenets of Italian cookery, but simple enough for anyone to make. I mean anyone, and that includes you as well as the cook who has been turning out great meals for twenty years. I avoid piling up flavors and sauces, because that’s not Italian!
Toasted leeks and pecorino pasta is still Art’s favorite pasta. I am really proud of that, that living in Italy where pasta is tossed about like M&Ms Art still likes one of my original recipes the best! What would one do for reassurance without one’s friends?
The best carrots I know are still the best to me. I made this dish for a shared Christmas dinner this year and they disappeared like snow in Miami. I left out the thyme, too, because the real secret is the cumin, or comino. For a former carrot-avoider, this recipe has turned out to really have legs. Try them. (For some reason this link won’t work. Go to: http://www.judithgreenwood.com/thinkonit/the-best-carrots-i-know/
My vote for best one dish meal from the pages of Think On It, is Insalatona fra diavolo. I always freeze some pitted black cherries so that I can have this salad when cherries aren’t in season (and because you can’t buy bags of frozen plain cherries in my city.) When they are used up I have to wait until cherries come back in May and it makes me sad. The recipe actually makes two meals I love at once, and there can’t be anything wrong with that idea!
Antipasto is well represented here, but on another international food site Tiny Baked Potatoes has been the hands down winner, voted among the top one hundred appetizer recipes worldwide. I can only take credit for figuring out how you can make this Pugliese dish at home, if you, like I, can’t rush off to Puglia today. How I would love to.
My most often cooked non pasta first course, or primo, is surely Toasted Leek and Potato Soufflé, a dish I find beautiful and absolutely delicious. I know it looks difficult, but it isn’t at all, and you don’t have to use a soufflé dish to cook it, although if you have one, why not?
The vote for best vegetarian dish is split. The first one has to be Pasta e Fagioli which is a feel-good dish without equal. I can make a little for just me, or a lot for a crowd and it always is good. When the weather is awful, this makes up for it. Just leave out the ham and you can feed it to a Bhuddist.
The second one is la Bomba although it is not Italian other than that I developed it here in my Italian kitchen using ingredients I bought in Italy. My evenings in Paris are about food. Sad, isn’t it? Just leave out the ham, and you’ll never miss it. I love, love, love this way with lentils. Ahh, Paris, how you inspire me.
Best cucina alta, the Italian version of haute cuisine, dish is the veal stuffed with veal on that page. I’ve come up with one small improvement lately, which is the inclusion of finely minced prosciutto crudo, or parma ham in the stuffing. This is a dish that goes on giving, because if you don’t slurp the cooking broth down immediately, you can have it another day with some tiny stuffed pasta, like capelletti or tortellini, or you can freeze it and cook another meat in it another day. I consider that practical as all get out.
Okay, that’s nine choices, and everybody does ten. The tenth is waiting for you. Please comment and tell me about something you’ve cooked from here and how it came out for you. If it wasn’t a success, tell me, because I’m determined to make every recipe just right.
If you click on something and there’s no photo, it may be that it’s a Flickr feed that isn’t working. Flickr has become irregular in what they show and I can’t count on them any more. That’s a shame, ma è la vita, sì?
December 31st, 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
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.
November 1st, 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.
October 30th, 2007
No picture, but Lucy Vanel published one recently that looked very similar. She is a great photographer.
So we took the duck all apart and put the breasts in the refrigerator. Now we have to take them out. They need to come to room temperature, but they are easier to work with when they are quite cold.
The ingredients for four people:
2 boned duck breast halves
a mixture of salt, rosemary, garlic and pepper ground together or bought
honey
Oven should be preheated to 200°C or 400°F.
The first thing to do is to use a very sharp knife to score the skin in a checkerboard pattern. This will allow the fat to render out from under the skin as they bake. Fortunately, there is not so much fat under the breast skin, and much of it will melt away in the cooking. These are quite big and each is big enough for two. You can actually pretend this is TV now that your imagination is engaged. Now have a look at those edges. Any overhanging pieces of skin? If so, use that sharp knife to cut them away.
This recipe is so easy that it seems disgraceful to claim it. I’m going to anyway, otherwise the inventor of Hamburger Helper will get all the credit for being a time saver. Turn the breasts skin side down and sprinkle on and rub in some of the spice mixture, not a lot. Turn them back over and do the same to the skin side.
Line a shallow baking dish with aluminum foil. If you don’t you will be sorry. I used a broiling pan, but I was also making double the amount. Lay the breasts on the foil and drizzle honey over the skin, fairly lightly, just moisten it. Pop it into the hot oven. After 10 minutes or so, take it out. You should see red juices welling up through the cuts and a lot of fat melted around on the foil. Drizzle honey over it all again and put it back in the oven. Start watching the progress, because as soon as the skin becomes really golden and crisp, you must take it out of the oven. It takes perhaps 20 minutes total cooking time. The meat should be rare. The skin should look like cracklings. The smell should drive you mad. Let it sit for about five minutes, then using a very sharp knife, carve each breast into slanted slices. A garnish of rosemary branches is a reminder of what’s in there.
I served these with the Ligurian tomato salad I posted in August and the rosemary baked onions from the Slow Travel cookbook, for which there is a link to your right.
If you did not line the pan with foil, drain off the fat into the garbage and start soaking the blackened crusts of honey/fat immediately. It will take hours. Thanks to the reduced fat in duck breasts, however, a quick swish with a damp sponge will do for the oven.
September 7th, 2007
This can be made of thin, lean slices of veal, (the original) pork, chicken or turkey. We used turkey. We cut the slices from a boneless turkey breast of just under 1 kilo to serve 8 people. As I explained to the class, every dish in an Italian meal is as important as the others, so we don’t say something is a main course, signifying that the others are less important. The antipasto was an exceptional cheese served with a very nice fig jam, then the cozze with pasta was important, and now we have a meat course. So we’re not planning on everyone eating a huge amount of meat and just a little of this and that on the side. This was served with a dish of sautéed bietola, or Swiss chard.
For 8 people:
1 kilo mild, lean meat, not beef, cut in thin slices– usually you can buy them sliced here. Graeme cut ours because he said the pre-cut ones looked like they’d been cut with a dull ax. Using a sharp knife, he pressed down with his hand and sliced horizontally, which is a good way to get the meat to behave and not quiver with fear when it sees the knife. Partially freezing it helps, too.
Some good olive oil
1 glass (here meant to be about 4 ounces liquid measure) of white wine
grated peel of two lemons
125 g or 4 oz. of butter
1 glass of heavy cream
juice of two lemons
salt to taste
100 g or 3 ounces of Parmigiano Reggiano, grated fine
If you bought a batticarne when I told you to, here’s a chance to use it. If you didn’t, you’ll have to use the bottom of a bottle or the side of a meat mallet, but don’t use the spiky sides!
One by one, put the cutlets on a board and flatten them with the batticarne, then put them aside. We used layers of baking paper to separate the layers, but in the US I would have used waxed paper. You can do this way ahead, even the day before, then refrigerate them.
A few minutes before you want to serve, heat some oil in a wide frying pan over medium-high heat and start frying the cutlets a few at a time. It takes less than a minute per side if you’ve gotten them thin and well-beaten. Turn, salt a bit, cook the second side and put on a plate. Continue until they are all done. You don’t want to brown the meat, just make it opaque from its translucent beginnings. You may have to add a bit of oil once in a while.
When the cutlets are all cooked, turn the heat up and add the wine, stirring a bit. Then add the cream and the lemon rind and let boil furiously for a few minutes. It gets quite bubbly. Add the lemon juice, stirring constantly, then taste. Stir in salt and taste again. You have to balance the lemon and the salt– it should be very spritely and citrusy, but not too acid, which is what the salt does; it dampers the lemon juice. Reduce the heat to low.
When it is perfect, put the cutlets back into the sauce and turn them to coat them. Using tongs, arrange the cutlets on a platter being very artistic, and dump the rest of the sauce over them. Scatter the Parmigiano over the dish and serve.
The sauce is very good with bread, and leftovers are welcome even here in leftover-haters house. Because it is a very pronounced flavor, I like to serve gentle vegetables with it.
September 1st, 2007
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