Posts filed under 'polenta'
I have this theory, and I am willing to be told I am wrong in this. My theory is that the familiar foods we call comfort foods can make us fat. Why would that be? Because we invest those foods with emotional content. We pull them out when life is hard, when the weather is terrible or when we feel bad for some reason. It’s often the first thing that comes to mind when we want to comfort a friend, too.
So, if it’s been a hard week and things haven’t gone our way, we make mashed potatoes, macaroni and cheese, stew, or whatever we find comforting and that reminds us of easier times. These are all things we know very well. Our tongue responds with impulses to the brain that open the doors to good memories and good feelings.
And then we overdo it. After three to five bites we’re relying on experience, and our taste buds take a rest, but we don’t stop.
Foods don’t really have emotional content. They have triggers to parts of us that have remembered emotional content. Whether the memory is good or bad, we connect to it. I once had a liverwurst sandwich hours before coming down with a bad flu, and I have never had another liverwurst anything since, although I used to love it.
Knowing that this is true for me, I don’t fix comfort foods of my past when I feel down. I, instead, try something outside of my experience and try to lose myself in learning new tastes, which for me is as distracting as mashed potatoes.
I do not believe that nothing says loving like something from the oven. Things from the oven are a delight. They are not love, but might inspire a memory of love, and not a thing more. If I am capable of thinking, I can inspire memories of love that don’t have anything to do with doughnuts, brownies or even holiday roast turkeys. If I am incapable of thinking, I take an orange or an apple and get over it.
I am 5’-1 ½” tall. As much as I cook, I could easily weigh 200 pounds if I let food and love get mixed up. Since I have the opportunity every four weeks of carrying 50-pound bags of salt, I know how I would feel if I gained even only 50 pounds. It wouldn’t be nice. Sometimes it even hurts my back for a day or two.
Divest yourself of habit and your mouth will deal with surprise. You’ll taste more. If food is an adventure rather than a happy-pill, you’ll know when you’ve had enough and won’t keep putting it in your mouth to keep the love going. Unless it is just an extraordinary thing you’ve happened on, in which case you may need a life coach to pull you off the plate. That would be me with the Sardegnan risotto with vinegared pork, which I ate yet one more time yesterday in Florence! You know what? My recipe is pretty good. I need to leave the pork in the vinegar longer, two days, I’m told, and make a more interesting tomato sauce as well.
That brings me to spaghetti sauce, which is a rather stupid term in Italian. There is no one sauce, as you know if you read this blog. I have recently found, however, that in the USA people do tend to think that there is something called spaghetti sauce and that their recipe is it. They also think you can buy it in a jar or a can. Well, you can buy various sauces in jars, cans and the refrigerated cases in Italy. The best I can say of any of them is: it’s alright. I never said that in the US, because they were too sweet.
There are thousands of ways to serve pasta wherever you are. Sometimes it’s even spaghetti. Most of the ways to serve pasta can also be used to sauce cooked grains or polenta, too. Just a glance at Presto Pasta Night ever Friday should convince you that this time I’m right.
Here is a modernized ragù that I like more often than the original recipe by Artusi, a meat sauce I find very rich and that for me lacks the brightness of modern foods. I like the spike of a little acidity from tomatoes, the slight smokiness and the reduced fat. I am still a dedicated Artusi fan, and I will still on occasion make his ragù, but this is my new fall back recipe, because it lends itself to other foods besides pasta, and yet is a wonderful thing with pasta, too. This is a spag bol, a polenta sauce, and today I ate it on boiled farro or spelt. That looked bad, but it was delicious. I used a tiny bit of Parmigiano Reggiano, but not much, because it was full-flavored on its own. This is a sauce to make up in quantity and freeze in portions that make sense for your home. It takes about 15 minutes to chop the vegetables, another 15 minutes to sauté them, perhaps ten minutes to cook the meat, and then, other than the occasional visit, it cooks itself.
A 21st century Ragù
1 cup of chopped onions
1 cup of chopped carrot
1 cup of chopped celery and leaves
2 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of salt
1 small chili pepper (peperoncino) broken in half
1 tablespoon dried oregano or 3 tablespoons of fresh basil – if you use fresh, add it toward the end of cooking
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
100 grams (3.5 ounces) diced smoked pancetta or bacon (cook it first and then drain the fat if you use bacon, then pick the cooking up from the oil *and proceed)
2 pounds (1 kilo) of lean chopped meat – all beef or vitellone or part that and part pork
A glug of fortified wine like Sherry or Marsala
About 1 cup of milk—fat free is fine
Water
1 can (14 ounces, these days) of peeled canned tomatoes or a similar quantity of peeled fresh tomatoes
Salt to taste
Nutmeg to taste
Heat a large frying pan with the oil*. Sauté the chopped vegetables and the pancetta or cooked bacon with the salt very slowly until they are starting to brown a bit. Add the wine and cook until it dries out. Add the dried herb and the chili pepper, and then the chopped meat. Stir it up to mix while the meat loses its red color.
Add milk almost to the top of the mixture, lower the heat and walk away until you can hear it sizzling again. This took about 30 minutes for me. Then add hot water to cover and leave it alone again, checking back every 30-40 minutes to keep it wet until it has cooked about two hours and then allow the juices to evaporate away. The meat should then be very tender.
Add the tomatoes and break them up with a wooden spoon. Simmer that mixture ten minutes, then taste for salt and correct for it.
Allow it to cool in the pan, and then fill plastic freezer bags with the quantity you think you will use.
When you thaw and reheat it, grate nutmeg at the end until it suits you. Some like a lot, some none.
This recipe made 4 packages of something over a cup for my freezer.
There’s nothing tricky or out of bounds about this recipe. It’s a great thing to have in your fridge freezer, ready to pull out when tagliatelle, cooked grain or polenta is the right thing to eat. It will make a lasagna much richer than my taste, but certainly a tasty one.
Give it a try. You have nothing to lose but the handy extra jars from the Prego you thought you liked.
December 14th, 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
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
