Think On It

Ognisanti: all saints

Today is a holiday all over Italy. Only entertainment venues are open so that holidayers can go out and eat or have their caffé. Schools are out until Monday, like Thanksgiving in the US.

Once upon a time, this was a religious holiday for visiting the graves of the ancestors, having masses said for them, spending time as a family to remember those who are no more. Now it’s a day off and everyone does as he likes.

The unique day off for the entire Italian world has made it easy for some Italians to take up Halloween and do it any way they like. Last night Tina had a potluck supper in her fun room that was once a garage. This year she’s added a wood cook stove, and that’s a happy thought indeed. We’ve had some chilly evenings out there in past years.

The dishes brought to the lengthy tables were varied and delicious. I wanted to know names for all of them. No one had a name for anything except one risotto for which Tina just made something up, “Riso al Duca.” For the rest, the makers told me to make up my own name. I think that’s an attitude that needs some tenderizer. After all, my American dish had a name.

I made Chili Mac. I used the homemade chili powder from the other day, and the flavor is wonderful, but the resultant chili is almost atomic, at least to an Umbrian. Some of my Umbrian friends like somewhat spicy foods, but this would have been a bit exaggerated even for them, and since I’d forgotten the shopping list in the car and therefore forgot to buy polenta, Tamale Pie wasn’t on, so I cooked some skinny, elongated elbows called gramigna, put them in the bottom of a big Dutch oven, then ladled chili over them and topped it all with grated American cheddar that my friend, Missjoe, had sent me this summer when her children visited. It bubbled and browned in the oven and perfumed my house in a way predicted to stimulate an American appetite. Lid clapped on, into the car, and onto the crackling wood fire of Tina’s stove.

They liked it! I saw a few people eat several helpings, so it wasn’t just kindness. Although they ate it like a primo, or first course, and called it a pasta, it was still impressive to me that so many Italians unbent to a foreign dish in which the flavors are absolutely unlike anything Italian. I can’t think of anything more American, can you? Although the particular chili peppers have Mexican roots, it isn’t Mexican. The cheese is certainly not much like British cheddar, it’s all-American. The combination looks, smells and tastes “molto particulare” or quite its own self.

I’ve always maintained that Italians would like cheddar if they were only allowed to try the real thing. It’s a bit the expatriate’s Holy Grail, with reports of finding some in this Auchan here, that Esselunga there — those are Italian supermarkets, well actually Auchan is French but we shan’t split hairs. I wish I had a photo to share, but really, who reading this has never seen a big pot of bubbling cheddar-topped something?

I first heard of Chili Mac when I was a young mum and wife living in Falls Church, Virginia. eg’s little friend gravely told me that his mother was the best cook in the entire world and that her best dish was Chili Mac. I’d never in all my New England rearing tasted a chili that was powerful enough to serve over anything, let alone spaghetti. It didn’t take long to find out what the lower part of the USA already knew — that chili was a deeply spiced meat stew with CHARACTER and not a mild creature from a can that looked like dog food until it was heated and served in a bowl. Chili never became an important part of my culinary repertoire, but something about autumn usually brought on a pot of chili. There’s hardly anything more cold weather appropriate in the American kitchen. Even the Thanksgiving roast turkey holds a single place in the autumn menu.

But chili can sit on a stovetop or in an oven and wait for you to come in cold and wet, and its perfume immediately promises the kind of comfort that warms the blood. Which wine? Are you joking? It’s beer for chili! Except last night the first offering of Franca’s new wine, or vino novello, was perfect. Right now the new wine still has a bit of sugar, not much alcohol and millions of the tiniest bubbles. It seemed a marriage made in Heaven.

I’m not sure that there has ever been an iconic recipe for chili. There’s more argument about chili than almost any dish I know. I bow to the vaster knowledge of the Southwesterners who have grown up knowing chili and eating chili and developing new chili recipes for chili contests. This recipe is just how I made it yesterday in a country far from Texas and New Mexico and a bunch of eaters who have never tasted any of the more expert chilis. As a practical cook, I used the meat that was on sale for €3.95 per kilo and it happened to be whole loin of pork. Ground beef was €7.95 per kilo and up. Argh! I figure no Mexican mamma ever spent that or failed to make chili if a cow hadn’t met her fate in the village. Chili is not rich folks food. I am not rich folk.

Meat: I cut the loin off a two kilo (4.4 pound) loin of pork. It was too lean, so I used lard to do the frying part to make up for that. I neglected to weigh the loin part before using it, sorry. There remain the bones with meat on them, which I will tackle later, and the tenderloin, which it will be my pleasure to use in other ways as well. I think I used about 3 pounds of pork, cut into a small dice.

3 onions, roughly chopped
1 large green pepper, diced
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
6 tablespoons of homemade chili powder
salt to taste
lard for frying
4 tablespoons of corn meal

optional: 2 400 gram tins of beans, drained

Melt some lard to cover the bottom of a moderately sized stock pot. Throw in the onions and sauté them until they are transparent. Add the diced pepper and fry that, too, until softened. Add the garlic, and reduce the heat, stirring once in a while. Add the chili powder, stirring in, and fry that, too. Add about one liter of boiling water and leave to simmer.

In a separate heavy frying pan, melt a small amount of lard and fry the meat cubes a bit at a time, adding them to the big pot as they lose their pink color. When you are finishing the last batch, dip some of the cooking water out of the stock pot into the frying pan so that you don’t leave any of the meat flavors behind.

Now add enough boiling water to come to about an inch over the solids in the stock pot, and keep the stew at a simmer for several hours. After about 2 hours, check for salt and correct it. Add the beans if you want them. A half hour before it needs to be done, stir in the corn meal to thicken the juices. My chili cooked for four hours and I would have happily left it for several more, but I had to put the Chili Mac together in time to get it bubbly before carting it away. I was frankly stunned at how spicy it was! I knew when I was making the chili powder that it was a chancy venture. The recipe says “three of this one, three of that one” but the chillies were all different sizes. One would be 1.5 inches by 2 inches, another 2.5 inches by 4.5. Weighing would have been a big help, but I didn’t find any recipes with estimated weights.

For the Chili Mac, I cooked the pasta for a bit less than the six minutes recommended. I drained it, put it in the bottom of the big casserole, ladled some of the chili over it, maybe half, then covered it generously with grated cheddar cheese. I popped it uncovered into the oven which I’d preheated to 175°C or 350°F. It cooked for about thirty minutes, then lidded, was carted off to Tina’s.

This is no revelatory recipe, I know. It’s just what I and my friends ate one night in the autumn of 2007. If any of the chili that was left un-macked gets turned into Chili Mac again, I’ll throw a photo in here. Buon appetito!

N.B. I think I have finally gotten really good at loving my friends. I was so happy to see them, old and new, and for the few hours we were together, I wouldn’t have chosen another place to be for any prize. Maybe the best thing about aging is being in the moment, loving whoever is there, not feeling nervous about how you look, what you’re wearing or what useful thing you might be doing instead of being happy.

4 comments November 1st, 2007

Winter foods you really CAN do

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.

10 comments August 22nd, 2007