Posts filed under 'seafood'
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!
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!
May 9th, 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
I am learning to use the new camera. Once I figure out what all the settings are, I should produce better photos, but this camera has possibilities the 10 year old one never dreamed of, and there’s definitely a learning curve. So yesterday I decided to make a very simple pasta and use the camera to illustrate the process while also exploring what I’ve read on the blogs of much better photographers than I.
The pasta is almost “aglio e olio” which is almost as simple as it gets with pasta. The only ones I can think of that are simpler is with just butter or with just oil.
These are the ingredients I used with the pasta.
I bought those cherry peppers to see how hot they were. Barb and I were discussing this only last week. The answer is pretty hot, but not atomic. I used half of one for one serving and it was pleasantly piquant for me, and maybe too hot for most Umbrians. The cherry tomatoes are from a Puglian vendor and are just as sugary sweet as I recall them being in Puglia. That could be a problem in some dishes, but it won’t be in this one. The photo was taken outside in full sun. Most good photographers recommend that, and I love the shadows and the flooding light. I wouldn’t love my pasta so much if it had to go outside before eating it.
I heated the water to boiling, salted it and put the penne in to cook before I started the sauce. The penne I used are from Gragnano, which is a word you should look for. It’s a place where they still do dried pasta the traditional way, and it doesn’t cost more. It actually costs less than better-known pastas. It takes up to 10 minutes (they say) to cook penne, but I think between 8 and 9. That’s how long it will take to make the sauce.
I heated the frying pan and added good olive oil, then the minced half of the cherry pepper and about 1/4 teaspoon of salt to sauté for a few minutes. I then added one minced clove of garlic and a ladle full of the pasta water, which is about 1/2 cup. Five minutes into the cooking of the pasta, I added cherry tomatoes which I had halved or quartered, depending on the size, and this is what it looked like at that point. Note that I see the steam, but the lens isn’t steaming up. I wonder if that is because it is so much smaller than the previous lens?
Once the pasta was done to my decidedly al dente taste, I drained it and quickly added it to the simmering sauce, plated it and put a little aged, grated Pecorino on it. I later added more, but I didn’t take the chance that it wouldn’t taste right and my pasta would already be covered in it. There are many things I will do for this blog but eating really bad food is not one of them.
That’s the least successful of all the photos. I haven’t yet really got a handle on doing close-up shots yet and the part that is in focus is in the middle of the plate while the leading edge is out of focus. I bought this camera largely for it’s superior ability to deliver macro photography, so obviously I need to read that part of the manual a few more times.
But the pasta was good, maybe even great. I could have eaten the same bowl twice, as a matter of fact. As they always say, the first law of Italian cookery is to choose the ingredients right and to respect them. It turns out that cherry peppers and very sweet cherry tomatoes make pleasant companions in the mouth.
It would also work to toss in some cooked white beans toward the end. What I’ve made here is the beginning of many Puglian pastas, to which are added the vegetables and fish which are the important things in the Puglian kitchen. This spiced oil would end up with beans and mussels to make the single best thing I ate last Spring in Puglia. I am going to offer this to Ruth for Presto Pasta Night, but shan’t be hurt if she turns it down, because it is just as much about a camera as it is about pasta.
I need to go back. To Puglia
The next day: Today I did the same thing only added beans instead of pasta. That was yummers!
So then I wandered over to Olga’s to talk about what an Umbrian would do with these peppers, and there were all the roofers taking coffee in her kitchen. They all had chili stories!
When they left, Olga and I decided to see where the heat is. We slivered off first flesh, nope. Then seeds, nope. I found it in the membranes and had to be stuffed with bread because I was ON FIRE!
September 17th, 2007
Ingredienti per 4 persone: ingredients for 4 people
-1,5 Kg. di Cozze 3 pounds of mussels
-200 gr. di pomodori tipo perini 7 ounces of peeled pear tomatoes
-50 gr. di olio extra vergine di oliva 1.75 oz extra virgin olive oil
-un bicchiere di vino bianco secco 3.5 oz. Dry white wine
-una costa di sedano one leg of celery
-una carota one carrot
-3 spicchi d’aglio 3 cloves garlic
-una cipolla one onion
-prezzemolo parsley
-un peperoncino a chili pepper
-pepe nero black pepper
-8 fette di pane casereccio del giorno prima 8 slices of rustic bread (if not using pasta)
PREPARAZIONE
Pulite e raschiate le cozze delle incrostazioni sotto l’acqua corrente, riponendole in un contenitore. Quando avrete finito, riempitelo d’acqua pulita e aiutandovi con un cucchiaio di legno, agitate le cozze nel contenitore per qualche minuto, quindi buttate l’acqua e ripetete l’operazione. Lasciatele a scolare. Bollite i pomodori in abbondante acqua salata, scolateli e spellateli. Tagliateli a pezzettini e tenete da parte. Pulite e mondate tutte le verdure, l’aglio e la cipolla. Fate un trito di finezza media e versate in una padella dove avrete fatto scaldare l’olio. Fate appassire a fiamma bassa. Versate ora le cozze nel tegame, coperchiando immediatamente. Dopo un minuto, rimestate le cozze e bagnate con il vino bianco. Ricoprite con il coperchio e aspettate che tutte le cozze siano aperte. Aggiungete i pomodori e il peperoncino intero. Proseguite la cottura, mescolando spesso, per circa 3 minuti. Nel frattempo tostate in forno le fette di pane. A fine cottura delle cozze, eliminate il peperoncino, versate le cozze in un piatto da portata e cospargetele di prezzemolo tritato e di un’abbondante macinata di pepe nero. Guarnite con le fette di pane, irrorate di un filo di olio extra vergine di oliva.
VINO CONSIGLIATO: Un bianco tipo Martina oppure un Rosato del Salento.
Clean the mussels of their beards and any loose incrustations under running water, then put them into a pot. Throw out any that are opened. When they are all cleaned, fill the pot with cold water and stir them with a wooden spoon for a few minutes. Then drain off that water and refill the pot and do it again. Pour them into a strainer and let them drain This is to get rid of sand, so if you buy cultured/farmed mussels, you may not need to do this.
Use boiling hot water to loosen the tomato peels, and then peel them. Cut them into small pieces.
Clean and peel as needed all the vegetables. Chop the vegetables medium finely—a food processor will do if you pulse it. Heat the oil in a very large pan and turn the chopped vegetables into it over a low flame. Allow to soften, but do not brown. Turn the mussels into that pot and immediately cover them. After a minute, uncover and stir the mussels and add the white wine. Recover the pot and continue to cook until all the mussels are opened. Add the tomato pieces and the whole chili and continue to cook it for about 3 minutes.
In the meantime, cook the pasta or toast/grill the slices of bread. At the end of the cooking of the mussels, remove the chili pepper and turn the mussels into a large serving bowl—which contains the cooked pasta if you are using it—then scatter chopped parsley over it and then grind abundant quantities of black pepper over it all. It takes lots and lots of pepper– more than you think is wise. There should be the perfume of pepper and a definite taste of pepper to be right.
If you do not use pasta, garnish the bowl of mussels with the slices of grilled bread which have been drizzled with great olive oil.
The wine suggested with this dish is a white similar to Martina or a rosé of Salento. We drank the rosé and it was terrific! Crisp and dry with a spicy, berryish nose and pretty, too.
August 30th, 2007
