Posts filed under 'one dish meal'
Don’t worry about the photo, I’ve got a bunch of them and one is bound to be focused better.
This is not aji de gallina as my favorite Peruvian used to make it for us. This is not even as genuine an effort as I could make in the United States. This is aji de gallina the way a person can make it in Italy if she is fortunate enough to have Texan friends who carry chilli peppers to her in their luggage. Someone who lives in Torino, Milano, Roma, and maybe other big, international cities of Italy may be able to buy chillis of all types– perhaps even the gorgeous yellow aji amarillo pepper. People who live in charming backwaters cannot.
The real thing is pink and feminine and complex and delicious with a fire that warms the tongue and never burns it. My Italian version is different every time I make it depending on which peppers I use and the color is not the pastel the aji pepper gives, but a robust autumny and coppery red.
I like a change once in a while. I adore cooking, writing about and eating Italian food, but inside lurks that American girl who always asked “Where is Chinatown in this city?” whenever she went to a new place. For a summer garden lunch in July, I indulged that lurker and Barb Skinner, who came to lunch, must have felt the same, because she asked me to post this recipe. It has taken all this time to have the occasion to make it again so I could photograph it. And here it is.
Aji de Gallina
Serves about 6
1 4-pound chicken, an old hen if you can buy one
4 slices of plain white bread without crusts
1/2 cup of oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 teaspoons minced garlic
3-6 dried chili peppers soaked in boiling chicken broth to soften them, the amount depending on how hot they are and how spicy you want your aji to be
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1/2 pound (200 g) chopped walnuts or other nutmeats
4 ounces (100 g) grated Parmesan cheese
about ½ liter of milk
6 yellow potatoes, cooked and halved
Black olives and hardboiled eggs, for garnish
Boiled rice
Cook the chicken by simmering in a tall pot with a carrot, an onion, a leg of celery, salt and water to cover it all. If it is a young chicken it won’t take very long, but if it is a hen you should leave it to cook by itself for 2 –4 hours, or until it is tender. Remove the chicken from the pot keeping the broth. Remove the meat from the bone and skin and cut into pieces.
Soak the chilis in the chicken broth. Soak the bread in milk to cover.
Heat the oil in a saucepan and fry the onion, garlic and softened chili peppers until golden. Use a stick blender or a food processor to make this into a smooth paste. Add the milk-soaked bread. Add enough of the chili-broth to make a cream. Cook over low heat, stirring, for 10 minutes and then add the chopped nuts, grated cheese and cut chicken. Simmer, stirring, adding more milk as necessary to make the sauce the consistency of heavy cream. Taste and correct for salt.
Using bread to thicken a sauce means that it can become very thick and sticky, so watch and stir carefully toward the end of the cooking.
Arrange chunks of cooked potato on a platter, then pile rice over that. Pour the aji over the rice and garnish with olives and wedges of boiled egg.
Now I know you are thinking you don’t really need to use both potatoes and rice under this aji. You’re wrong. It was my first occasion eating this that broke through what I thought I knew about food and made me want to learn and go to culinary school. Until I ate this, I thought rice and potatoes didn’t have much flavor. Eaten together they reveal what there is of the other and you discover that they in truth have strong flavors. It was that watershed experience that helped me understand that most good ingredients are perfect within themselves and properly respected can create art in the mouth without smothering sauces and piling on multiple flavors. It was not much of a leap to the day when eg made fun of me for saying a cucumber is sugary. To me it is, but she’ll still laugh her head off if you say it.
September 22nd, 2008
And it is really good, too. I have eaten them in Greece. I have eaten them in Italy. I ate them all my life in the United States. I liked them however they were done by whoever had cooked them.
The Greek ones did not have meat but did have lots of oil and rice. They were cooked to collapse and served at room temperature at lunch time. The Italian ones were cheesy and had crumbs over the rice filling. Sometimes they had meat, sometimes they didn’t. The American ones came in many different versions. Some were filled with a solid meatloaf type of filling and those were very nice. Some were made with breadcrumbs and vegetables. Those were good, too. Some were made with macaroni and cheese. Those were strange. Once I had them filled with chili and that was better then you’d think. This version, however, is the kind I remember from home as a kid. We never had them often enough.
Just lately eg has been talking about making and eating stuffed peppers in her home. When I saw these I knew I had to make them, too. They look like nice, big tomatoes. They have thick, substantial walls. They are beautiful and charming. I wanted to eat them.
Stuffed Peppers like Mom makes
for 4 people
heat the oven to 175°C or 350°F
4 nice peppers in any color and shape you like
1 cup of rice, cooked according to directions
1/2 onion, chopped
.5 pound or .25 kilo ground beef or lamb
about 3/4 teaspoon salt
handful of fresh oregano leaves or a different herb if you like
1 egg
olive oil
Clean the peppers removing all the innards and depending on the size, leave them whole like mine or half them vertically if they are those tall thin ones. Salt the inside very well. Really well. I did not salt enough.
Oil the bottom of a shallow baking dish that will hold your 4 peppers or 8 pepper halves. Put the peppers in it.
In a frying pan, heat some olive oil. Add the onion and fry it until it is transparent. Add the meat and fry until it loses its color. Add the rice and then salt, tasting as you go to make it suit you. This is separate from the salt inside the peppers. Toss in the oregano leaves and stir them in. Add the egg and stir that in quite well.
Using a big cooking spoon, put the stuffing into the peppers. Distribute any extra filling around the peppers– this part will get a crunch bottom and be really tasty. Drizzle a little oil over the peppers in the pan.
Put it into the oven and cook about an hour. The peppers should start to collapse a bit, to be really good. Depending on what you stuff these with, they could be anything from antipasto to contorno or side dish. With meat, mine were a one dish meal.
I like these best not really hot, but just warm. The peppers in this photo are not dancing, but my arms are. Sorry.
eg’s recipe actually sounds even nicer, but she doesn’t photograph her food, being normal and all that.
July 31st, 2008
Once upon a time there were only a few Europeans scattered along the eastern coast of the United States and Canada, and those few were all British or French. There was no pasta, there was no pizza, for that matter there were no stoves. Everything they ate had to be cooked over an open fire and made from the few things they’d carried across the Atlantic and what they could find where they were. Slowly, slowly, the toughest among them survived and were joined by more adventurers from back home, and slowly, slowly what they ate became something not quite like home but not at all like the food of the native population, either. Something in between. That is still true today. 
Italian food is not quite the same as it is in Italy, nor is Chinese nor French and after almost 400 years, even the original American food is very changed from what it was. The advent of the stove, the oven, the refrigerator and the microwave has widened the possibilities. Modern science has brought new techniques and chemicals into the mix. It’s not all bad, but it equally is not all the kind of progress we were promised.
The foods that our early settler ancestors made were easy to cook, cheap and practical. As more ethnic groups came, their foods came with them, and more flavors, more spices, more herbs became ordinary. American food marched across the centuries farther and farther from those early British and French peasant roots, so that even the oldest New England family ate things that would have puzzled its antecedents. As Americans grew richer, they ate more meat and sauces and separate vegetable courses, but the backbone of the kitchen was still the one dish meal made of ingredients that were cheap and easily available. The potpie is only one of those dishes and it represents the idea very well.
By now there are a couple of generations who might think that Chicken Potpie comes from the freezer, mostly in single serving size, nestled in an aluminum dish. In truth, pot pies of all kinds are one of the more successful frozen foods. If they are made with good ingredients and if the manufacturer doesn’t rely on monosodium glutamate and high fructose corn syrup for flavor instead of meat and vegetables and herbs, it’s a product that it would be safe to rely on. I can’t tell you whether there remains a single brand that has a clean label, but don’t buy one without checking.
Even better, make your own at least once so that you know what potpie should be. Certainly any Italian readers will have to do that, because potpie, frozen or otherwise, is rarer than caviar in Italy.
When I made this potpie, it was at least thirty-five years since the last time. I really don’t remember when I last made it. I do remember making lobster potpie for Christmas Eve one year, quite another kind of thing with puff pastry and sherry and cream involved. Potpie originally was a way to use leftovers. Mum would make chicken stew or chicken fricasee and then the leftovers some days later would become potpie. The crust on top made the meat stretch farther so that half a chicken could serve five or even six. The crust might be pastry, like mine, or it might be biscuits baked on top of the bubbling casserole. I like both. As a matter of fact, I discovered that I love potpie. As soon as I finished eating this one, I started to remember beef potpies, meatball potpies, pork potpies and fish ones. I quickly put that out of my mind and photographed a serving for posterity. The calorie load in potpie is ideal for a teenager who is just in from practicing football.
Why is it so good? It’s the gravy. If you go to the trouble to get the stock reduced enough and seasoned enough, you will make a splendid gravy and your potpie can’t fail. So how does that happen? Pick the right fowl and cook it long enough. That’s it.
You may be surmising that you can buy cooked chicken and use instant broth—cubes, powder, canned or “Better than Bouillon”. Wrong. To get the depth of flavor that really pays off, you must really reduce the broth. All those purchased broths are too salty to reduce much. In the end it would taste way too salty.
The right fowl is a stewing hen or an old rooster. A mature fowl has many times the flavor of a young one. I don’t know what happens to old roosters in the United States. There are not so many of them as there are hens, and the hens aren’t so easy to find either. In Italy I can walk into any supermarket and find a whole or a half hen. She has spent her life making eggs and will finish it making soup. When I was in the US I used sometimes to find them frozen, but even more often I had to use a roasting chicken, which isn’t right, but is better than those juvenile fryers. They also run about 5-7 pounds, so you only need half to make this potpie, and you can roast the other half if you like. Ask the service man at the meat counter to cut it in two for you.
Potpie isn’t something I make all in one day, but like the generations before me, I make the meat and broth one day and the pie another day. It does cook for a long time, but almost all of that time you are ignoring it as you go about your day. I even went grocery shopping while the chicken simmered away on the cooker, and she didn’t mind a bit.
Chicken Potpie
For 6 servings
.
Stewed chicken
2-3 pounds of stewing hen or roasting chicken
1 leek, cleaned and sliced or one onion with 2 cloves tuck into it (if you use a yellow one, leave the papery skin on)
1 leg of celery chunked
1 carrot chunked
1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves or 3 teaspoons fresh
1 teaspoon salt
3 peppercorns
water to cover
Put all of those ingredients into a large pot and bring to a simmer. Lower the heat so that the surface moves gently, but does not bubble or boil. Simmer gently for at least two hours, checking to be sure the water covers the chicken, until the meat is tender, then remove the meat from the broth and allow to cool a bit. I use surgical gloves so that I can handle the meat quicker, but you don’t have to.
Remove the meat from the bones, fat and skin. Put the bones, fat and skin back into the simmering broth. Cut the meat into bite-sized pieces and chill.
Continue to cook the broth until it is reduced by at least half. Taste the broth to see if it is strongly enough flavored of chicken, and if it is, salt it to your taste, then strain all the pieces out using a fine mesh strainer. You can now put it into a container and chill it.
Pastry
1 cup regular flour
.5 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup lard or 1/3 cup plus 1 tablespoon vegetable shortening
2 tablespoons ice water
Cut the fat into the flour and salt until it looks like peas, then sprinkle the water over and using a fork, mix until it gathers together. Pull it into a ball shape using your hands, then press it firmly together. Wrap in plastic and chill until ready to roll it out.
To make the pie
If you made a stew, you will already have what goes into the potpie. If you did not, you must now cook the vegetables that go into it.
For 6 people, pare and chunk 6 medium potatoes, pare and slice 4-6 carrots, clean and slice 2 legs of celery and clean and quarter 2 medium onions. Cover them all in water in a pot of the right size and bring them to a boil. Add 1.5 teaspoons of salt to the water and cover, allowing it to simmer until the potatoes are tender. Drain, then toss in the pieces of meat that you saved after the stewing. Add a handful of fresh or frozen peas.
The gravy
In a frying pan, melt 2 tablespoons of the fat that rose to the top of the broth you chilled. Add 4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) of flour, stirring it in as it foams and bubbles. Remove the pan from the heat and slowly, slowly, whisk in 2.5 cups of the reserved broth, making it smooth. Cook for a minute or so over low heat. Taste and correct for salt and pepper. It should need little because you reduced the broth considerably. If your other ingredients are not already hot, you can heat them now in the gravy. If you’ve just cooked them, they should already be hot.
Heat the oven to 425° F. (220° C)
Choose a deep casserole that will hold 3 –4 quarts/liters. Measure the top diameter. Remove the pastry from the fridge and roll it out to that size. Unlike dessert pies, it doesn’t need to be very thin and is nice thickish. At this point I also cut vent holes into the pastry—this time I made them shaped like leaves, reserving the shapes that I remove from them.
Put the mixed meat and vegetables into the casserole, then pour the gravy over it. Add the pastry over the top, trimming to fit, then add the decorative shapes as you like.
Put it into the oven and cook for 25 to 35 minutes, until golden and bubbling hot. It will fill six mouths with flavors not often tasted in the last 40 years.
In Italiano
Di solito quest’ é un piatto fatto dei resti di un altro piatto di pollo in umido o stufato. La vera cucina americana era da secoli una cucina povera, e questo piatto pratico conteneva le calorie e le vitamine che ci vuole per il lavoro duro che hanno fatto tutti, dal bambino al papà. Ha tutto il gusto ricco che domanda un giorno tempestoso. Provatelo!
Pasticcio di pollo americano
Serve 6 persone
Un piatto unico
La gallina
1 gallina di circa 1.5 chili
1 porro pulito e tagliato a fette
1 gamba di sedano in pezzi
1 carota in pezzi
3 file di zafferano
circa 1 cucchiaino di sale
2 chicchi di pepe nero
1 cucchiaino di foglie secche di timo (o 3 di fresche)
acqua di coprire tutto
Mettete tutto in una tegame grande a portatelo a prebolle. Abassate il fuoco e lasciarelo cuoce molto lentamente almeno 2 ore, controllando che rimane abbastanze acqua per coprire la carne. Quando é cotta la carne, toglietela a una ciottola e seperate la carne dagli ossi e la pelle. Tornate la pelle e gli ossi al brodo. Continuate la cottura del brodo fino a é ristretto almeno la metà. Assagiatelo e coreggiate il sale. Passatelo tra una rete fine in un contenitore e mettetelo in frigo per rinfrescare.
La pasta
130 g farina 00
75 g strutto
.5 cucchiaino sale
circa 2 cucchiai di acqua ghiacciata
Tagliate lo strutto nella farina con due coltelli da tavola, e quando somiglia piselli, aggiungete l’acqua, qb per fare una pasta abbastanza compatta. Fatela in pellicola e mettetela in frigo per almeno 30 minuti.
Il Pasticcio
Riscaldate il forno a 220° C
6 patate spellate e tagliate a pezzi di circa 3-4 cm
4-6 carote sbucciate e tagliate a fette
2 gambe di sedano a pezzi grandi
2 cipolle medie, tagliate a 4 pezzi
1.5 cucchiaino di sale
In una tagame, fate bollire tutti le verdure fino alle patate sono tenere. Sciogliete l’acqua. Aggiungete i pezzi di carne avete preperato prima.
Aggiungete una mancia di piselli freschi o scongelate.
Scieglete una casseruola addata al forno, capacità 3-4 litri e misurate il diametro. Togliete la pasta dal frigo e distendetela alla misura del caseruola. Fate delle bucche per scappare il vapore nella forma di foglie, mettete aparte le foglie.
La salsa
In una padella larga, sciogliete su un fuoco medio 2 cucchiai del grasso di pollo dal brodo freddo. Aggiungete 4 cucchiai di farina, mescolando bene bene. Togliete la padella dal fuoco e aggiungete man mano circa 625 ml del brodo, mescolando in continuo per fare una crema liscia. Tornatela al fuoco basso per circa un minuto. Questa é la salsa, e tutto la bontà di questo piatto dipende della salsa.
Mettete la carne e le verdure nella casseruola, aggiungete la salsa. Aggiungete la pasta sopra e poi le foglie riservate.
Infornatelo per 25 – 35 minute fino é colorato oro biondo ed é bollente. Servitelo caldissimo.
March 28th, 2008
This is the 50th week of Presto Pasta Roundup and I promised come hell or high water I would provide a pasta this time. Here is one of the best. It is a traditional recipe and not one of my own, but I’m proud to present it because it isn’t even well known around Italy and it is way too good to miss.
Those are mussels growing in a mussel farm in Australia. Farming mussels has made them available in places that never heard of them 60 years ago. Places where it is too hot to ship them, too cold for nature to grow them, with farming can provide them to almost everybody these days. The farmed mussels are a lot cleaner and easier to prepare than the wild ones I once knew. It really has made mussels a busy day choice, because they are cooked in a flash.
That’s what they look like raw. All you have to do is wash them under running cool water and tear off any “beard” that’s clinging, which resembles Spanish Moss. It’s how the mussel attaches himself to things. Throw away any that are lying there open and don’t close when touched. Those aren’t good. Once they are cleaned they need to be cooked quickly, because the cleaning process is the last thing you do before preparing them. Recipe follows the jump
In a big pot melt 2 ounces of butter and sauté in it a few halved cloves of garlic. Add about 1/2 cup or so of white wine. Toss in the mussels, heat on high, pop on a lid and cook until they open. It doesn’t take long, so keep an eye in them.
You can either proceed with 1) eating 2) preparing a dish or 3) storing them immediately. To store, remove them from their shells, throwing away any that are shut, because those also aren’t good. Put them into a container with the cooking juices and cover well, then refrigerate them.
These are fagioli or beans as imaged by Ciccio, a great blog. If yours look like that, pick out the white ones, soak and then cook them, because we want canellini.
These are cavatelli, a Pugliese pasta used in this dish. 
or use gnocchetti sardi which are almost exactly the same thing 
or even casariccia. 
I think I am getting carried away with the possibilities at IndustryPlayer!
To serve 6 lucky eaters you will need:
1.5 kilos or 3 pounds of mussels cleaned and cooked as above
.5 kilo or 1 pound of cooked white beans
2 cloves of garlic
7 to 8 tablespoons of great olive oil
1 peperoncino, or small dried chili pepper, crushed
5 or 6 cherry tomatoes, halved
salt and pepper to taste
600 grams or 18 ounces of dry pasta
Heat a big pot of water to boiling, add a very large 4 finger pinch of salt and the pasta. Note the time and the time the package says to cook your pasta.
Heat a wide frying pan with the oil, then add the garlic cloves. Sauté for a bit but do not brown the garlic as it is there to scent the oil. Add the beans and the cherry tomatoes, stirring around, then just before the pasta will be done, add the mussels with their cooking liquor, with a few shells for atmosphere.
Taste for seasoning and correct. I do not think you will need salt. You do NOT eat cheese on this pasta. (I know that makes some of you immediately want to have cheese on it and say, “So there!” Don’t.
This is how they were served to Luchena in Puglia.
I think this is one of the great dishes of Italy. You need the best ingredients you can find because there are so few of them and each must star. The first time I ever tasted it I screamed or fainted or did something embarrassing that I’ve forgotten. “This is the ONE!” came into it somehow.
February 28th, 2008
This was one of the best things I have eaten in months. It owes a little bow to Sicily where the North African way with dried fruits and nuts takes on an Italian sensibility.
It was what I was daydreaming last Sunday when I roasted the little leg of lamb and then made a stock of all the bones and trimmings. Nothing but the lamb, its seasonings and water, cooked a long, long time until I had almost a liter of strong broth.
This will serve two for a first course or one very hungry person <--- as a one dish meal.
almost a liter of lamb stock, simmering
1 ounce butter
1 small onion, chopped
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup of rice for risotto
1 tablespoon fortified wine (sherry, marsala, etc.)
about 1/2 cup julienned cooked lamb
1 tablespoon raisins
1 dried apricot diced very small
1 ounce butter
about 1 ounce hard aged cheese (pecorino my choice) freshly grated
2 tablespoons thinly sliced almonds, lightly toasted
Start the stock simmering before doing anything else.
In a heavy bottomed pot, melt the butter and add the chopped onion and salt. Sauté until the onion is transparent, then add the rice and stir until it turns opaque. Splash in the wine and stir until it is absorbed.
Add 1 cup of simmering stock and stir until almost absorbed. Continue to do this for about 15 minutes, then add the lamb, raisins and apricot, stirring in. Continue to stir in hot stock until the rice is creamy outside with a "bite" inside. Check for salt, recalling that the cheese will add a bit of salty flavor.
Toss in the last amount of butter and the grated cheese, remove from heat and stir in to make a thick, creamy risotto. Ladle into a serving plate and sprinkle the toasted almond slices over the top.
This is a dish that is more than the sum of its parts. Believe me, if you like lamb, you will love this risotto.
February 8th, 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
Almost everybody here is sick. Most of them have a stomach virus and they can’t eat, but when it starts to go they have the hunger of a roaring lion, but no ability to digest what we usually eat. I was talking to Sognatrice from Bleeding Espresso the other day about what sick people can eat. We both agreed that big, pillowy Mennonite noodles that they call dumplings are one of the things to eat when you are recovering.
I remember fundraising suppers for Meals on Wheels in Hardy County, West Virginia, which were focused on those dumplings. The first time I attended, I was expecting big, fluffy biscuity dumplings, but that’s not at all what I found. One of the two suppers would be a velvet chicken soup loaded with puffy little squares, the other one was ham dumplings. I approached the crock-pot where they kept warm and saw, what? It looked like white sauce. But when it was stirred up for serving, revealed were scraps of country ham and the ubiquitous dumpling noodles. It was really, really good and we ate it with really, really good cole slaw. Hurrah for Meals on Wheels!
I decided to make them for Presto Pasta Night and dedicate the effort to all the sickos currently lying around Italy with sore tummies.
I have only made the noodles once in my life, when some of us were trapped by snow at my friend Jane’s house in Chevy Chase. It was soup weather, for sure, so we made chicken soup and homemade noodles. That must have been a decade ago, but a noodle like this is not easily forgot. In casting about the house, it was clear that no soup-worthy hen was hiding out. But there was a scrap of prosciutto crudo, so off we go.
First thing to say is that prosciutto crudo is not the right ham. You need a bit of either smoked country ham, or speck if you are in Italy. This really needs the smoke. Not having the smoke, I had to add this and that to make this good. I finally got something I would eat, but it’s a lot more and very different ingredients than the wonderful Mennonite cooks of my past would have used.
I started with the noodles. I piled 100 grams of flour on the counter top and made a well in it, dropped in an egg and a good pinch of salt and stirred it with a fork until it was dampened. Then I added a fat tablespoon of water, because these are American noodles. Using a dough scraper and two floury hands, I kneaded it a lot more than I do when I make Italian pasta. Once it was smooth, I formed a neat ball and left it on the counter to rest. Why the pasta gets to rest and cook doesn’t, I don’t know, but that’s the way it is.
I then used a rolling pin to roll it out on the floury counter. If you look at the photo below you’ll see it doesn’t resemble my Italian pasta at all. It’s floury, thicker and not stretchy. It’s almost 1/8” thick. I used a pizza wheel to cut it into the squares you see. They are a fat 1 inch. I left it to rest again.
To make the sauce, I decided that sick people need vitamins and vitamins live in vegetables. Voila! A sofritto.
My elaborated Mennonite cream/ham sauce
½ cup finely chopped celery
½ cup finely chopped carrot
¼ cup finely chopped onion
2 tablespoons butter
½ cup finely minced country style ham
2 tablespoons flour
1 cup or more milk
three splashes of Tabasco
a glug of fortified wine, such as sherry or marsala
salt to taste
generous nutmeg to taste
the juice of half a lemon
Begin by heating the butter in a heavy pan and sautéing the first three ingredients until really soft. Don’t brown them. Sick people don’t want crispy vegetables, so check the carrots, because they are the hardest one. Add the bits of ham, and stir in. Sprinkle the flour over the mixture, and cook a minute or so, stirring. Slowly add the milk, stirring it in. With all those lumpy vegetables, this will go smoother than with a plain white sauce. Bring to a simmer and cook over a very low heat for about 15 minutes, adding milk if it is too stiff. You want the liquid part to be a bit like heavy cream. Taste for salt and correct it. Your individual ham will add some, so it’s definitely a thing to taste and work at.
If it isn’t very tasty yet, add the Tabasco, wine, and then the lemon juice. I blame my porky but not smoky ham for these last two ingredients.
Bring a pot of water to a brisk boil, salt it and dump in the noodle squares. Boil them until they are fairly soft, not al dente like Italian pasta. It was hard for me to do this, but I persevered. I feared to end with flour soup, but managed to rescue them at a point where you could still chew a bit.
If your sauce thickens again, you can add a bit of the noodle water to loosen it.
Drain the pasta, then toss it with the sauce. Hmmm, pretty white! Put it on a colored plate, add a small vegetable and a bunch of white grapes (I always eat those when I am sick) and serve it steaming hot. It should feed three sort of sick people, four fairly sick people, and a crowd of really sick people. Those recovering can probably eat half each.
And now I hope everybody gets well and starts being able to eat like royalty again. Or go to Hardy County and eat the original which shmecks like crazy. Those are some very fine cooks.
December 6th, 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
Here is a list of things to make starting now. They’re all from past indulgences eaten at my table. So, gobble these up while I finish the experiments I’m working on now.
Barzottini to start off with. A delicious appetizer/antipasto as crisp and savory as October days.
A pasta to love now that leeks are back in the markets? Try this Toasted Leek and Pecorino with Penne!
One of my favorites, the crunchy topped, cheesy goodness of this leek, bread and cheese casserole, as a replacement for pasta, a vegetable or a hearty meal in one.
Who has forgotten La Bomba? Not I. This is an ongoing love affair for me.
Where’s the meat? If you haven’t fixed this one yet, you’re missing one of the recipes I’m proudest of.
Room for dessert? Sin along with me with a bit of Hot Silk.
There, that ought to keep you busy for a day or two.
October 5th, 2007
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