Want to know what that is? It’s something delicious that is also the favorite dish of the two top Italian Communists. Go and see what Alex and I have cooked up this week to entertain you.
There are three great recipes this week.
5 comments August 22nd, 2008
NB: I had to change the name of the dessert because I copied myself.
What did we eat? I’ve not forgotten! Yummy foods from the South — or in Italian il Meridionale.
Antipasto was burrata, which may be the single most luxurious cheese made in any country. A firm exterior of mozzarella di bufala surrounds a center packed with fresh cream. How could that be bad? It was sliced and drizzled with a little oil and sprinkled with fine chiffonade of fresh basil leaves.
The primo was Pepata di Cozze con tagliatelle
, and this is when I discover that Alberta does not eat mussels. But you should because they are delicious, cheap and good for you. Buy farmed ones if you aren’t positive that the wild ones come from clean waters.
The secondo was Agnello con Piselli, or lamb with peas. I promise you that unless you have eaten this in southern Italy, it is nothing like you expect. It’s very good, too. Unfortunately for Alberta, she also doesn’t eat lamb.
Dolce was Crostata della stagione, named by me to reflect that the torte is made the same every time, but then you pile on the fruit of the season. This time it was strawberries, and quite nice ones, in spite of the cool and cloudy days we’re experiencing.
Agnello con piselli
Lamb with peas
Ingredients for 4
I onion
80 g pancetta in small cubes
800 g pieces of lamb, cubes
500 g frozen or shelled fresh peas
salt
1 coffee cup of hot broth– about 3 ounces
a large handful of grated Pecorino (or Parmigiano Reggiano) cheese, about 1 ounce
2 eggs
1 tablespoon grated Pecorino cheese
pepper
Method:
Thinly slice the onion and gently brown it with the little cubes of pancetta. When it is well browned, add the lamb and continue to brown well. Add the peas and the cup of boiling broth, correcting the salt and pepper. Cover it and leave it to cook. When it is cooked to your taste, which for us took about 35 minutes, add the two beaten eggs, which will have been beaten with a tablespoon of grated pecorino. Stir it in to thicken the sauce and then serve immediately.
To make it easier to time the courses of the meal, we cooked this to almost done then removed it from the heat. When the first course was over, we brought it back to a simmer, stirred in the cheese and then the eggs and finished it. It would easily have served six of us in this multi course meal.
Corstata della Stagione
for six people
Pasta Brisee for one torta
80 - 100 g of fresh, soft goat cheese
the finely grated rind of a lemon
1 tablespoon sugar
about 400 g of prepared fresh fruit
2 tablespoons sugar
First, make pasta brisee using any recipe you like. Here is a good recipe which you can half if you are making this crostata.
Pasta Brisee
2 1/2 cups (350 grams) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon (4 grams) salt
1 tablespoon (14 grams) granulated white sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) (226 grams) unsalted butter, chilled, and cut into 1 inch (2.54 cm) pieces
1/4 to 1/2 cup (60 - 120 ml) ice water
In a food processor, place the flour, salt, and sugar and process until combined. Add the butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse meal (about 15 seconds). Pour 1/4 cup (60 ml) water in a slow, steady stream, through the feed tube until the dough just holds together when pinched. Add remaining water, if necessary. Do not process more than 30 seconds.
Alternately, you can make a pile of the flour, salt and sugar on a work surface, then put the cut up butter in the center and using your fingers, mix it until it looks like coarse meal. Then add some of the water, kneading it in, adding only as much as it takes to form a ball, which you should wrap and chill for a few minutes before rolling it out to make the crostata shell.
Turn the dough out onto your work surface and gather it into a ball. Divide the dough into *two equal pieces, flatten each portion into a disk, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30 minutes to one hour before using. This will chill the butter and allow the gluten in the flour to relax. At this point you can also freeze the dough for later use.
*unless you have halved the recipe as mentioned above.
For each disk of pastry, on a lightly floured surface, roll out the pastry to fit into a 8 or 9 inch (20 to 23 cm) tart pan. To prevent the pastry from sticking to the counter and to ensure uniform thickness, keep lifting up and turning the pastry a quarter turn as you roll (always roll from the center of the pastry outwards to get uniform thickness). To make sure it is the right size, take your tart pan, flip it over, and place it on the rolled out pastry. The pastry should be about an inch larger than your pan.
When the pastry is rolled to the desired size, lightly roll pastry around your rolling pin, dusting off any excess flour as you roll. Unroll onto the top of your tart pan. Never pull the pastry or you will get shrinkage (shrinkage is caused by too much pulling of the pastry when placing it in the pan). Gently lay in pan and with a small floured piece of pastry, lightly press pastry into bottom and up sides of pan. Roll your rolling pin over top of pan to get rid of excess pastry. With a thumb up movement, again press dough into pan. Roll rolling pin over top again to get rid of any extra pastry. Prick bottom of dough (this will prevent the dough from puffing up as it bakes). Cover and refrigerate for 20 minutes to chill the butter and to rest the gluten.
To pre-bake the shell: Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (205 degrees C) and place rack in center of oven. Line the unbaked pastry shell with parchment paper or aluminum foil. Fill tart pan with pie weights or beans. I use beans and I keep them in the pantry wrapped in the foil I re-use many times. Bake crust for 20 to 25 minutes or until the crust is dry and lightly browned. Remove weights and cool crust on wire rack.
While the crust is still warm, spread the goat cheese over the bottom of it with a silicon spatula, being gentle, then grate the lemon rind over it, and then sprinkle the first tablespoon of sugar over that.
Arrange the clean and prepared fruit to cover the crostata completely. That means pit and half plums, peel, pit and slice peaches, etc. Berries just need to be clean and possibly hulled. Sprinkle the 2 tablespoons of sugar over the fruit.
You may want to serve this with lightly whipped and lightly sweetened cream, or you can make a pool of cream or sour cream on the plate and serve the slice of crostata on top of that. We garnished it with mint sprigs from my garden.
I personally could have eaten this entire crostata by myself. Only the fact that I liked the student and I need to lose weight prevented that happening. It is a very good thing that I have no fresh fruit in the house at the moment, because I could otherwise whip this up again in no time flat!
5 comments June 2nd, 2008
As someone who lived a great part of her life near the Chesapeake Bay and her blue crabs, crab cakes and most things crab are dreams in Italy, where I can find only surimi or tins from Belgium. Have you evet heard anyone go faint with praise of Belgian crab? Me neither.
Go to Mary’s blog and let’s find out how she managed this elusive culinary specialty in this country where they serve you whole crabs the size of a shilling and then grin with pride!
5 comments May 9th, 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.
8 comments February 28th, 2008
Everybody in Italy is yelling at me, “Those aren’t orecchiette!” And they’re right, they aren’t. They are the same boiling water and flour pasta, but shaped a different way. They might be considered cauliflower ears (orecchiette is little ears) except the traditional recipe is not made with cauliflower, but with broccoli.
This, unlike almost all the recipes here, is not my recipe. You would not like the recipe I came up with for this pasta dish when I tried to recreate it on my own. It was never good, no matter how good the broccoli or how authentic the pasta, so in desperation I went to the website for Bari, Italy, where this dish comes from. The local radio station had posted an official recipe with an ingredient I would never have guessed if I’d tried for years. Without it this is just broccoli with some pasta. Meh. With it, it’s “Orecchiette con broccoletti”. The secret ingredient disappears completely, but creates the genuine flavor although it’s unidentifiable. The Baresi use what we in the US called broccoli rabe. I like it, but I love broccoli, so that’s what I make and it is grudgingly acceptable to the Baresi.
This is the first broccoli of the year. It is not the best broccoli of the year, because it hasn’t been cold yet and that’s what makes broccoli go from nice to slap-me-in-my-face wonderful. There’s a whole nutty thing that goes on in frostbitten broccoli. Still, not having seen a stalk of broccoli since May, I was pretty darned happy to see this nice big flower in the market Wednesday afternoon.
Here’s what goes into this pasta for two people:
200 grams of orecchiette or another similar pasta
8 ounces of fresh broccoli; stems, leaves and all, cut into smallish pieces
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 fat cloves of garlic, sliced
2 hot chilies, broken up with fingers – mine were the standard little hot ones found here, you might want to use one if yours are hot or if you feel wimpy
2 anchovy fillets
Put a big pot of water on to boil and then clean, cut and slice the various ingredients. Heat the oil in a large frying pan and put the broken chilies, the garlic slices and the anchovy fillets into it to gently fry. This happens to be one of only a few recipes in which you brown garlic, but you can’t burn it or it will all be ruined forever, like Scarlet O’Hara. So keep the heat low and just let the oil simmer.
Once the water is boiling, throw a lump (an all-fingers pinch) of coarse salt into it and then the pasta. Check the package for cooking time, because you need to know the estimated finish time. Stir it up and then let it boil. About three minutes before the cooking time elapses, add the broccoli into the pasta. Take a ladle full of the pasta water and spill it into the frying pan so the garlic won’t burn.
A minute before you expect the pasta to be done, start biting it to test it. You will want it to be a little less done than al dente. When it is, drain everything that is in the pot and put it into the frying pan, stirring it around and getting it well covered in the garlicky sauce. The pasta continues to cook during this, and this kind of pasta goes soft very fast, so it should go in a bit too firm. Once it’s mixed and wonderful, drizzle a little raw oil over it and serve it up. Delicious.
Even if you think you don’t like anchovies, do try this, because you can’t tell they’re in there. Promise. I buy them in little jars that I keep in the fridge, as you can see from the fogged up glass in the picture. Do not put cheese on this, because it ruins it. Baresi propose that you brown breadcrumbs in oil to sprinkle over it, but I never bother. And now, we will send this off to Presto Pasta Night.
11 comments October 5th, 2007
