Posts filed under 'recipes'
We begin with this. It’s an inconveniently large, flat box filled with thinnest and crispest stuff called Pane Carasau or Carta di Musica
or music paper. It’s from Sardinia and in Sardinia it’s used in so many ways I may never work my way to the end of them. For me the only problem is how to store it, because 500 grams, or about a pound, can last a long time. Once you’ve broken into the plastic covering it is vulnerable to humidity, dust and critters. Fortunately, most uses require that it be broken into pieces, so you can stick it into a big sealable bag if you do that.
I can buy it at any grocery store and I know it is available at a horrific price in the UK, but I’m not sure how widely available it is across the Atlantic. The various labeling on the back of my brand is in German, French, English and Spanish, so do look for it. Otherwise, I am convinced you can use lavash bread instead, and that really is widely distributed in the US. If you are very ambitious, you will find a recipe for making it from scratch at home at The Ingredient Store. Please let me know if you do that! N.B. I think a pasta roller could help you get this thin as paper and who cares if it’s round?
OK, so why would you want this product? For its extreme usefulness and flexibility, say I. It’s delicious and crunchy as a bread or cracker, really tasty with baba ghanouj and hummus, just nice tucked in among other breads. But even more, it makes a series of traditional Sardegnan dishes that are perfect for how a lot of people live nowadays. You can make them in moments of few ingredients and for as many diners as there are. It can even be used to make a lasagna.
Today’s dish is Pane Frattau or just Frattau. I’ve made it and eaten it three times this week because I could not convince myself that was all there was to it. (OK, also because my poached eggs kept coming out warped.) I used the recipe on the back of the package and I can’t wait to get to the rest of them now. Each time I varied the cheese a bit, or how much I poached the egg, but no matter what, I couldn’t ruin it. 
Jump to the recipe:
Pane Frattau
tomato sauce (purchased or homemade)
Pane Carasau in the amount you want to eat
about 1 ounce per person/30 g of grated Pecorino (because that’s what they make in Sardinia which is very far from Parma!)
1 poached egg per person (crack it into a cup or a small bowl at this point)
I shall give you a simple recipe for the tomato sauce I used below. Whatever sauce you will use, you must gently heat it while you do the rest of this.
Grate the cheese you’ll use and set it aside. Start a pot of water to boil for poaching the egg(s) and put salt and a little vinegar in it. Put some water into a large pot and put it onto the flame. Make sure to have a slotted spoon or spatula for removing things.
When the egg water boils, stir it into a whirlpool and slide the egg into the vortex. This is how I wrecked my eggs. I broke them from the shell and couldn’t aim them, so they didn’t go into the center and became sort of sea slug shaped. Let the water return to a simmer while you drop the pieces of carasau into the big pot of hot water, a few pieces at a time, immediately removing them with the slotted spoon to a serving plate. When they are all dipped and drained, your egg will probably be done just right, with a firm white and a liquid yolk.
Pour tomato sauce over the wet carasau pieces, toss the grated cheese over that, top it all with the poached egg. Done. Yummy, too.
Oh, and the cleanup report is super easy, because although there are three pans, two have only had water in them, and a quick wash and rinse is all it takes.
The Tomato Sauce I made is simple and quick.
1/2 cup finely minced onion, celery and carrot
2 cloves of garlic cut up
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
1 28 ounce can of peeled Roma tomatoes, or others you like
salt to taste
You may add oregano or basil or any herb you like, but you don’t have to every time.
Sauté the vegetables and garlic in the oil until they soften, then add the tomatoes, stirring them in. Using a stick blender, puree the sauce and then heat it, tasting to correct salt, for ten to 15 minutes. Once cooled it can be kept covered in the fridge for many days or frozen in portions for almost forever.
And now, let’s slide this past the folks at Presto Pasta Night and see if they buy this idea for “instant” pasta.
March 6th, 2008
Today alisonk came to lunch. She is doing a low carbohydrate regime, so I had to whip up some flour-free goodies. For a first course in place of pasta or risotto, we had a mushroom soup. I made the basic soup a day ago because most soups get better for sitting. When I reheated it I added the part that might not have refrigerated well.
As you can see, it is very dark and filled with mushrooms. The following recipe made soup for two.
No Carbohydrate Mushroom Soup
1 pound (.5 kilo) champignon or button mushrooms, cleaned and sliced. stems chopped
2 tablespoons butter
about .75 quart or liter of strong beef broth
salt to taste
heavy cream to taste
In a heavy pot I sautéed the mushrooms in the butter until they were quite browned and almost dried. Then I added the beef broth. I allowed this to cook and cook down several times, adding water to bring it up to level each time. Because I used “Better Than Bouillon” for the broth I added and needed no salt. When the whole thing was thoroughly infused, I poured it into a container and refrigerated it.
Today, a few minutes before I needed it, I warmed it up almost to a simmer and then added heavy cream, stirring it in, until it tasted balanced and rich. I ladled it into two deep bowl/cups and this is what happened. 
The verdict was “Good!”
For main course, or secondo, we ate Pollo fra Diavolo from this page.
With it we ate a cabbage dish from Puglia that I once had made into a pasta, but today served it as it was meant to be. Because there is no chance at bread, pasta or dessert, I changed the fat used from oil to duck fat, but it will be good without it if you are not as lucky as we are.
Cavolo Pugliese or Pugliese cabbage
This would have been enough for four people normally, but this was a slender menu indeed.
about 3 cups of slivered fresh cabbage
2 small hot red peppers peperoncini
about 2 tablespoons oil or fat
salt to taste
5 cherry tomatoes, quartered
Heat a big frying pan with the fat you will use. Crumble the pepper into it (or take a pinch from a jar of crushed red pepper.) Add the cabbage and toss it about a bit to get the fat distributed. Continue to cook it, stirring once in a while, until some of the edges start to brown and there are no really hard parts left. Add about 1/2 teaspoon or a decent sized pinch of salt, stir and taste. Add salt until it seems right to you. Toss in the tomato pieces and stir until they wilt a bit. Serve.
I had prepared a salad, but there was no room left for it. We had eaten well.
March 4th, 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
I vacated my house two weekends in a row. I become so cooped up through winter and believe me, gray and drippy and cold are not tempting me out, that I start to get tunnel vision. So I’m getting a new look around lately.
This past weekend I went to Civitacastellana. That’s in northern Lazio, somewhere on the shin of the boot, almost at the foot. To get there I drive south to Terni in southern Umbria, then streak off southwest toward Viterbo and eventually south toward Rome. Civitacastellana used to be one day from Rome and so it was a stop off point for travelers north. It perches on a plateau with a rather dramatic gorge that runs through it now, but used to separate it for safety’s sake.
I probably wouldn’t even know it if a friend didn’t live there. Similarly, nearby Otricoli, to which I also went and where another friend now lives.
It’s just different. The terrain, the people, what they eat, the way the light looks, the architecture. It’s all just different. I’m jammed into the Apennines that run along the eastern side of Italy. They’re stuck into the western ones. It’s something like the difference between New Hampshire and West Virginia, only not so far apart.
My refrigerator wasn’t working as I left, so I dragged along a sack of things that wouldn’t be any good if it didn’t switch on while I was away. (It did and I was very happy.) Alison and I decided to make supper of that sack for our friend in Otricoli and her visiting art school student daughter. I played with Alison’s very cute cat. I watched satellite television a bit. I slept late.
The sun shone both days. Sunday we drove to see the house near Otricoli and ended up making lunch together. Alison grilled sausages in the fireplace, Lisa grilled bruschetta in the wood stove and I whipped up some vegetables that were lying around. It was very good and lots of fun to cook so effortlessly with friends, which really doesn’t happen here.
I left a bit early because I am not so crazy about driving after real dark descends. It meant driving through sunset, twilight and evening.
When I turned eastward, all the eastern Apennines were rosy with light coming from the sun sinking into the Mediterranean. Mile after mile the mountains, rocky and gray or whitely snowy, lay bathed in pink and looking like an illustration in a book of fairy tales. I was almost reluctant to turn north toward home, but as I did I saw that the western Apennines were deeply violet from the same sunset and for at least half an hour of the northward travel they slid by on my left like a thousand postcards.
All that pleasure and beauty affected the way I thought over the next couple of days. A bit of change is good for me. There is beauty all over this country if you just open your eyes and go out to meet it. It’s probably true where you are, too.
Cavollini di Bruxelles alla Lisa (Brussels Sprouts for Lisa)
1 Kilo (2.2 pounds) Brussels Sprouts, trimmed and washed
3 tablespoons (cucchiai) good extra virgin olive oil
1 big handful of roughly chopped walnuts
salt to taste
about 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
Heat a large pot of salted water and when it is vigorously boiling, toss in the brussels sprouts and cook briefly to set the color. They should still be crunchy. Drain them.
Heat the oil in a wide frying pan and toast/fry the walnut pieces for a few minutes, then add the drained brussels sprouts and sauté, stirring/tossing to dry them a bit. Some of the outer leaves may brown and that’s OK. Taste for salt and correct it. When ready to serve, add the balsamic vinegar and stir to coat the sprouts and nuts with a glaze then scrape all into a serving dish. Pretty good!
February 20th, 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
Cold weather food happening here:
Cream of celery soup
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cups chopped celery
1/2 teaspoon salt
a few grains of cayenne (peperoncino in polvere)
2 tablespoons butter
Sauté briefly to soften a bit, then add a cup or so of water and let simmer for 30 minutes or so.
2 tablespoons flour
1 1/2 cup milk
Pot these together in a jar and shake like mad until well blended.
Raise the flame under the simmering vegetables and pour this into it slowly, while stirring. Bring to a simmer and simmer for a couple of minutes. Taste and correct for salt. Grind fresh pepper over it when serving it HOT!
Mashed celery root
1/2 of a medium celery root (sedano rape) cut into cubes
1/4 teaspoon salt
water
Put into a pot, cover and simmer until soft– it’s pretty fast compared to potatoes. Drain, mash with a potato masher, add butter and salt and pepper to taste. Eat it up with a big grin. Serves 2 normal people or just me.
Later on there will be fresh homemade tagliatelle with ragù frozen the other day and a baked half of a poussin, or weensy chicken.
December 17th, 2007
Yes, that one right over there on the right. It searches only this blog and nothing else. I’ve been spending time on categories so that it’s more complete now. If you want to see everything ever written about pasta or lamb or every dessert ever posted here, stick the word that interests you into the box and search. With going on 400 posts here, I have to use it, too.
Sometimes there will appear articles about something else that mention your word, but overwhelmingly, you’ll find pages of posts that apply to the term you put in the box. I’m gradually adding in ingredients, too, so that if you are looking at a pile of something and are out of ideas for the moment, you should be able to find whatever contained that ingredient. Just watch out if you mention tomatoes or pasta, because that must be 25% of the blog!
Just because it’s something two years old doesn’t mean it won’t still be good right now. Blog articles never mold, as far as I know. I’m still making almost everything that ever was published here. I’d love for you to make it too, then post in the comments how it worked for you. Your comment won’t be lost. I get a list of all new comments everyday that I turn on the computer. Talk to me.
December 15th, 2007
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
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
Sometimes I feel inundated with facts, clues, offerings that pour in through my computer at plus or minus 50,000 bps.
Here, for example, is a really interesting look into international cuisine. The members are from absolutely everywhere, but most of the ideas are written in English of varying quality. It will not surprise you that some of the worst English comes from places where it is the mother tongue. Maybe familiarity does breed contempt. The quality is spotty, too. There are an enormous amount of semi-homemade and tinned soup ideas, none of which I even bother with. This morning there was a “Tuscan potpie” that I looked at just because I never heeard of any Tuscan eating potpie. Why is it Tuscan? It has canellini in it! Boh! But it’s made with canned biscuits which would confound any Tuscan I know.
Most of what is posted is derived from cookbooks, TV and blogs, but you might otherwise have missed it, so that doesn’t count that much. There are a number of professional chefs and caterers there, too. It’s all offered up free once you’ve registered. Maybe it’s Facebook for cooks. One interesting thing you can do is describe what’s in your kitchen, or describe what you feel like eating, i.e., spicy, sweet, hot; then the generator will serve you up a list of dishes that fit what you’ve got or what you want to taste. There’s even a page for Italian Speakers and their foods.
How can you keep up with the stream of that or any other changing content website? My answer is Bloglines. There are other agglomerators, but this was an early one and the one I use, although I turned down the new version because I couldn’t work it out in five minutes.
This is what I see, however. Bloglines will show 200 offerings per feed. Group Recipes will often go way over 200 in a single day. Even BBC World headlines can top 200. I choose to sift through and choose which ones to open in a new tab. When you newly subscribe to a feed it will show the latest 10 feeds. That feels a bit more manageable.
Then there are sales notifiers. Whoooo! And are they ever a sticky bunch. Miss the check off saying you don’t want email from them and you are their pal forever, with ads offering things you don’t want for prices that leave you breathless, and not in a good way, as long as there is life on Planet Earth.
It must be the 2007 version of those glossy catalogs that used to choke my mailbox in another country another time.
November 18th, 2007
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