Posts filed under 'one dish meal'
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
If you buy a duck, you buy into many possibilities in the Italian kitchen. Roast duck is only one of them. Roasting a whole duck is an ongoing adventure, with many wonderful varieties in many cultures as well as the final adventure of cleaning your oven. Today we are making an Italian meal for which we cook the leg portions for the first course and the breasts for the meat course. Those could be two different meals if you like.
Ducks are fat. Ducks are especially fat where they sit in the water, but ducks have a layer of fat under the skin all over. This particular approach takes advantage of that. My clients this Sunday were young and healthy and I thought they ought to stay that way.
I butchered this duck the way I would take apart a chicken. I removed the wings, which aren’t particularly wonderful, then cut the breast portion away from the thighs, cutting through the backbone. It was easy. I used a long, sharp knife to gradually remove the breast meat from the bones, which are much easier than a chicken’s bones to navigate. It really only required cutting away the wishbone, right through the skin, and the rest of the breast came away cleanly. The breasts I wrapped and refrigerated for another dish with their skin left on them.
I removed the skin from the thighs and legs as if I were removing pants. I cut away the pads of fat near the tail as well as the tail. I ended up with a pile of skin and cut away fat, a pile of bones and wings and a pile of skinned legs and thighs. I packed up and froze the fat, skin and tail. I packed up and refrigerated the bones, and I prepared to deal with the legs and thighs.
Once preparation is done, there is a brief busy period, and then this sauce just cooks for at least 2 hours, and maybe more. It’s okay to cook it and then keep it and reheat it when you want to serve it. I might even do that and carry the sauce already made to a job if the job were close by. Sometimes this sauce seems improved by refrigerating overnight. I, however, made this sauce far away from home and without the luxury of hours in the kitchen to make it, and it took 2.5 hours from beginning it to serving it. The legs took that long to become tender. There wasn’t anything to do to it most of the time. It just sat and cooked without attention quite peacefully.
This sauce tastes rich without a lot of fat. Every part of the recipe is meant to increase the depth of flavors, to accentuate the gamy qualities of the dark duck meat, and it uses Byzantine spices of the Middle Ages to do that. You can’t taste it and say, “Oh, cloves, rosemary, nutmeg, how spicy this is!” You should instead think, “This is deep and rich and there are unnameable things in there that lay softly on my tongue.”
Pappardelle with duck sauce
The ingredients for four people:
Legs and thighs of a duck, skinless
1 carrot minced
1 leg of celery, including leaves, minced
1 onion, minced
2 tablespoons of powdered porcini, or a handful of dried porcini soaked, cleaned, squeezed out and minced, then fried with the soffritto
a splash of olive oil
1 small piece of duck fat
2 whole cloves of garlic
a glass of red wine
1 can of peeled tomatoes, 14 ounces
a sprig of rosemary
1 bay leaf
1 chili pepper, whole
2 whole cloves
salt to taste
nutmeg to taste
Parmigiano Reggiano, grated
300 grams pappardelle or pappardelle made with 300 grams of flour and three eggs.
Heat a large pot with the splash of oil and the duck fat. I wanted this to taste like duck, but not be greasy and require cooling and de-fatting, ergo just the small piece of fat. When it has become crispy, remove it. Put the duck pieces into the pan and brown them a bit. Since there is no skin, they won’t look very brown, but they’ll lose their redness. Add the minced vegetables. In my case, I had prepared this soffritto ahead of time in the food processor, so it was very finely minced indeed.
Add about 1 teaspoon of salt to the soffritto, and fry it, stirring, until the perfume really develops and the vegetables become soft. Add the whole garlic cloves. Then add the red wine and continue to cook the mixture until the wine cooks into the soffritto and seems to disappear. This all takes only 10-15 minutes, but it is clearly the foundation of your flavor and the kitchen smells paradisaical.
Open the can of tomatoes and add it to the pan, stirring in well, then add the rosemary, the bay leaf, the cloves, the mushroom powder and the chili pepper. I think it is a good idea to stick a toothpick into the chili so you can find and remove it later. Cover the pot and lower the heat to a simmer and leave it for an hour or so. When you come back to it, you can taste it for salt. It will need some, how much depends on you. Add it now so the duck meat will be well-flavored. Then recover it and leave it again to simmer until the duck meat is tender—about another hour or hour and a half. Start early enough so it won’t ruin your dinner plans. If you want to leave the house, you might even put it into the oven to cook so you won’t have to be concerned that it might dry out or catch onto the bottom of the pan. You really can’t overcook it, but you could burn it. Were I to put it into the oven, I’d use a temperature of about 150°C or 300°F.
When the meat is tender to a cooking fork, remove it to a plate and let it cool just enough so that you can handle it. Remove the meat from the bones and cut it into pieces of about 1-1/2” long. Return the meat to the sauce. Check one last time for salt. It shouldn’t taste salty, but should be spritely and savory. Remove the chili pepper and using a wooden spoon, break up any pieces of tomato that still look large and mash the cooked garlic cloves so that they disappear. Now, add enough nutmeg so that the perfume of it rises into your nose.
Nutmeg is a bone of contention with some cooks. There is a regrettable tendency for some cooks to be too generous with nutmeg so that everything tastes of it. That is wrong. The nutmeg should be subtle. It adds a certain gaminess when used correctly without smelling like Christmas. That’s what you want.
This sauce is done. If you are cooking ahead you can now put it into the fridge or even the freezer until you want it, and then reheat it in a big pot when you prepare the pasta.
You can make pappardelle very easily using the basic pasta recipe from weeks ago. You can also fake them by buying fresh lasagna sheets of pasta and cutting them into wide ribbons. Or, you can buy dried pappardelle. In every case, you need to heat a large amount of water to a boil, salt it and cook the pappardelle until they are just firmly done. Fresh ones will cook in 2-3 minutes. They rise to the surface of the water and when you bite one it resists. Drain the pasta and put it into the pot that contains the duck sauce and toss it all together. Serve it immediately, smoking hot, and pass a bowl of freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano. You will please four people very well.
Now, let’s send this off to Presto Pasta Night and see what the world makes of it.
September 6th, 2007
All over Italy, millions of Italians are on their summer vacations. They are huddled on the beaches and scattered on mountaintops, in the traditional holiday that gives them a break from summer. This year, however, a cold mass moved in and they are all freezing. This meal, written up for winter, I made this week and it was just the perfect thing. No, it isn’t like January now. The windows are still open a crack, the heat isn’t on and I am not wearing twinsets and socks, but it’s gray and cool and having the oven on for a while feels pretty darned good.
I am republishing this at the request of Ruth, of Presto Pasta Night. This will be a long post, because it is about cooking one thing that you can eat in more than one way. It’s cheap, easy and some of my favorite cold weather indulgence. Remember, once a week you can go to Once upon a Feast and see pasta recipes from the world, not just Italian pasta, either, but ways to use bean thread, rice noodles and every sort of noodle that exists.
This is brasato of pork spare ribs on polenta and with grated Parmigiano Reggiano. Here is how I made three single meals of it. It can be expanded to any size you like.
1 pound of lean pork spareribs
1 large onion cut into spears and then those halved
salt
1 whole clove of garlic
a handful of flatleaf parsley
2 allspice berries
2 cloves
1/4 cup of fortified wine, like Martini and Rossi or sherry or whatever, but NOT sweet
1 large 18 ounce tin of peeled whole tomatoes.
I heated a heavy iron pan to quite hot and then seared the ribs until
they were browned. Remove the ribs to a plate, and put the onions into
the fat the ribs gave up, adding about 1/2 teaspoon of salt, and stirred
them around until they were transparent and starting to brown. Add the
garlic and stir in a bit. Add the wine. Put the ribs back in, then
the allspice, the cloves, the parsley and stir about. Add about
another 1/2 teaspoon of salt. Pour the tin of tomatoes over all.
Bring to a simmer, then put a lid on and reduce the heat the minimum
possible on your stove. You don’t have to do anything else, as the long cooking will do all the work.
Leave them alone for a couple of hours,making sure that they don’t dry out and burn on. Add a bit of water if
they seem in danger.
The polenta is made according to the directions on the package , and I use Valsugana, which takes eight minutes to cook. If you use the thirty minute kind, you may want to make extra to cool into a block that you can slice and use for other dishes. There are any number of them here on Think On It, and one memorable restaurant dish I loved consisted of a roasted quail perched on a slice of toasted polenta and surrounded by salsa verde. Go with it.
I ate that version two times, even though I don’t like leftovers, because this is one of those dishes that gets tastier after a day or so in the fridge.
Then today, when there was pretty much only the sauce left, I decided it would be a great day to make tagliatelle for the sauce. People make such a thing out of making pasta. That’s just wrong! I watch an Italian cooking show sometimes, and in the twenty minutes they have to prepare a whole meal, they can make fresh pasta, a sauce, then cook and serve it in twenty minutes. So can I, and so can you. I never buy egg pasta.
My secret is a pasta rolling machine. It is cheap and sturdy and YOU MUST NEVER WASH IT. How about that? Something you don’t have to clean up. Otherwise you have to roll it out with a rolling pin, letting it rest if it doesn’t behave, cut it by hand. Get the little roller!
Here is where it starts.
That is merely 100 grams of plain flour, an egg and a pinch of salt. I stir it around with a fork until the flour starts to soak up the egg. Then with floury hands I start to knead it until it doesn’t have lumps and graininess and looks like this.
Remember, this is a single serving if you are eating only pasta. The recipe is expandable to whatever amount of dough you can handle. Every 100 grams of flour gets an egg and a pinch of salt. That’s it! You can also see that my dough scraper gets lots of use.
The pasta roller has a wheel with numbers on it. You always start with #1. Cut that ball into two pieces and put it into the slot and turn the crank. It will roll right through and turn into a strip. Fold it to make a short piece again and roll it through again. Fold and roll about 12 times. It will become flexible and smooth and almost like damp skin. Every once in a while you may want to lay it in some flour on the counter to keep it from getting sticky.
No brushing it with basting brushes, no cutting off irregular edges, just fold and roll. I am making homemade pasta and I have no desire to have it look like factory made pasta. When it has become slick and soft, start changing the numbers to 2, then 3, etc. until you get to #6. This shot is just as I am thinning it down.
When you get to #6, it will be very long. Lay it on the floury counter and cut it in two to make it shorter. Then change the crank on the machine to the cutting part and run that through the wide noodle slot. And when you have done it all, you will have this.
Start warming the sauce you want to use. Put a big pot of water on to boil. When the water is boiling hard, throw about a heaping soup spoon of salt into it, or the amount you like if it’s more than that. Pick up these lovely tagliatelle and lay them into the boiling water, then give them a good stir or two. They will be cooked in just about one minute. Don’t wander off!
Drain them and immediately put them into the pan in which you have heated your sauce. Toss about, serve them immediately.
Not bad, eh? My sauce from the brasato is a pretty chunky sauce, so yours may look more refined, but these tasted good!
And the clean up? I brushed the flour off the pasta roller and put it back into the cupboard. I used the dough scraper to scrape up every scrap of flour from the counter. A quick swish with a damp sponge finished it off.
As always, click to see bigger photos.
August 22nd, 2007
The genuine Greek salad, as I found it when eating in Mykonos in 1984.
This summer there’s one difference. Instead of chunks of plain fresh tomatoes, the tomatoes are made up into Ligurian tomato salad. The tomatoes are chunked, sprinkled with salt, a finely minced clove of garlic goes in, and then it is doused with good olive oil. When eating it on its own, I add a generous amount of finely sliced fresh basil, but for Greek salad I do not. The bowl of tomatoes is covered with a clean dishtowel and left to marinate for at least 30 minutes.
To assemble this Greek salad, which I love to have composed rather than tossed, I peel and chunk a cucumber for the first layer. Over that goes a similar amount of the tomato salad, then a layer of finely sliced onion, a layer of crumbled Feta, and last a handful of dry-cured black olives. This has made me happy five times this week! One other time I sliced everything very thin instead and layered it onto a dry-grilled piadina– a dead ringer for a flour tortilla. A bit of oil and then roll ‘her up. Cut in two and tackle with your hands.
It makes me feel like a Greek island goddess.
August 18th, 2007
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