It happens every spring. I garden too hard and too long– the window of opportunity is short– and mess up my back, arms and shoulders. Typing hurts.
I will, as planned, be posting another American recipe on Friday, however.
7 comments May 13th, 2008
This recipe is just a lovely thing, but I have been having a hard time sitting myself down to write it. It is the meat course from the menu of April 7, 2008. I’ve cooked it four times, photographed it once and still I haven’t typed it up and published it. I’m not sure why.
My suspicions lie with the fact that although it’s easy, it’s also easy to screw up. It depends very much on good meat. The first and third times I made it I used ordinary supermarket meat and it was a fine dish if you hadn’t had it the other way. When I used local hand-reared pork from this area that I bought and had prepared at the butcher shop for euro 13 per kilo, it was fabulous. My local Coop now offers the same service at half the price, and it was good, but not nearly as good as the pampered pork
The recipe here was inspired by a recipe I found in an Italian culinary magazine. I actually made their recipe, but I found the stuffing mixture of sausage meat, two cheeses and three salamis too heavy, although it might be great in January. I wanted something springy, and something in which I could use all the fresh herbs jumping up out of the ground these days.
The stuffing looks, even to me, unnecessarily complicated in terms of ingredients, but I found out the hard way that you really do need two different kinds of breadcrumbs and two different kinds of cheese.
The amount it makes is awkward. A whole one of these double chops is too much meat for one person, especially in an Italian meal. On the other hand, I found it impossible to cook less than one per person, because it thought it looked chintzy not to have one bony piece per person, just in case. On the plus side, the leftovers are terrific either cold or gently heated. Oh, and by the way, there is a reason why these are rib chops and not loin chops. By the time these thick stuffed chops were cooked through, the tenderloin bit of the loin chop would have become sawdust. Use the cheaper rib chop.
So how come if I like this dish so well, well enough to have cooked it four times, have fed it to clients and again to friends, how come I haven’t splashed it out onto this page? Never mind, it’s making it today.
Costellette di Maiale Ripiene or stuffed rib pork chops
Four pieces, which I think should serve six people
4 rib chops one rib wide, or about 2 centimeters thick, with a pocket cut in them to the bone
6 to 12 toothpicks
the stuffing:
soft breadcrumbs from one slice of Italian or other real bread
½ cup of dry bread crumbs (a couple of handfuls or 2 espresso cups full)
one medium onion, minced fine
2 teaspoons of fresh thyme leaves
2 teaspoons of minced chives
2 teaspoons of fresh oregano leaves
salt to taste
half of one beaten egg
enough white wine to moisten the mixture
3 ounces of coarsely grated relatively unaged pecorino cheese or another very tasty not very hard cheese
another stuffing:
4 ounces of Rambol herbed cheese in Italy and Boursin in other countries
the cooking:
olive oil for frying
about 2 teaspoons of salt
sprigs of all the herbs used in the stuffing
three or four whole garlic cloves
a couple of espresso cups of white wine
Preheat the oven to 375°F or 165°C
If you have not talked your meat seller into making the pockets for you, then you will need to use a sharp knife and carefully cut pockets from the fatty edge toward the bone, being careful not to let the knife wander and cut through the meat. I recommend using your charm on the meat person of your choice!
Mix up the stuffing. It should be moist and cling together when you gather it in your hand, but not wet.
Using your hands, (I use surgical gloves when cooking professionally and touching raw meat) open the pocket in the chop and stuff in a good spoonful of the herbed cheese. Then gather up a fistful of the stuffing and push it in after the cheese. Add another good spoonful of the cheese and then close the pocket up using one or two toothpicks, depending on how wide the meat person made the pocket opening. You can pretend you are a plastic surgeon when doing this part of the operation.
Heat a quite large frying pan, or two of them, if you don’t have one that fits all four chops. Pour in about 2 tablespoons of oil, and then brown the chops on both sides. Be patient so that you will get a lovely golden brown without chancing a scorching. When they are all nicely browned, toss in the garlic and the herb sprigs, toss the salt over the chops, then pour the wine into the sizzling pan.
Put the pan into the oven and cook about 40 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 160°F or 72°C. Remove the chops to a board and allow them to rest 10 minutes while you reduce the sauce in the pan over a fairly high heat.
Using a sharp knife, cut 1 cm (fat ¼ inch) slices off the chops until you almost reach the bone. Arrange the chops on a serving dish and garnish with some of the fresh herbs you used in the dish. Drizzle some of the reduced pan juices over the meat.
You know what’s really nice about this dish? That soft herby cheese melts and coats the inside of the pocket and the outside of the stuffing, making both things extraordinarily creamy and herbalicious. The meat is tender and gently seasoned. The stuffing is springlike with its herbs. I consider it a four-star meat course.
With it I served a good old American carrot and raisin salad which was new to my guests and they liked it!
5 comments May 7th, 2008
Judy Witts, the American cook that Italians respect, has posted this week’s recipe for La Buona Cucina Americana. I think it would be just amazing if everybody made pickles this year.
Uhh, Judy? When I made dill pickles I had to grow my own pickling cucumbers. Where are you getting yours?
1 comment May 2nd, 2008
This is a public service announcement to allow my houseguest to send greetings to her mother in Seattle.
This is Tilda.
As you can see, her haircut is improving quite nicely. She doesn’t do many picturesque things, but goes from favorite chair to windowsill and back again. She doesn’t like the other cats any better than she did, my animal expert sister says Persians do not know they are cats, but she certainly enjoys company if they will pet her. With four windows to choose from, her view on the world while not wide, is varied. She has actually been on the ground of outside once, but hasn’t expressed much interest in returning.
16 comments April 28th, 2008
Cherrye is cooking up biscuits Texas style! Biscuits are just as important in New England, from where I hail, but they are made vastly different to Texas ones. Jump over and have a look at America’s famous hot and flighty quick bread.
Add comment April 25th, 2008
I made Gateau St. Honoré yesterday for Gianna’s birthday. To make it I had to unearth skills I had not used in years or even decades. No part of the job is very difficult, but unless you do some of them all the time, your result, like mine, will not look like a pro’s work. I am not a pastry chef and generally leave pastries to people like Shuna Lydon and David Lebowitz. Birthdays, however, bring out the sugar baker in me. Whether it is a layer cake filled with lemon curd and frosted with marshmallowy frosting and flaked coconut, or a chocolate sponge with raspberry sauce and chocolate ganache, or even nine pumpkin pies, if it is your birthday, you can count on me to make a “cake”.
This particular cake requires what Americans call cream puffs and Italians call beignets, which are made of pate choux. The recipe I chose made so much pate à choux that I ended up making cream puffs and éclairs for the neighbors as well as the cake for Gianna. It’s pretty darned easy to make pate à choux, not so darned easy to pipe it out evenly so it puffs up into predictable balls like those you can buy by the bag n the supermarket. My newest philosophy is quickly developing to be “If it looks sort of crazy and resembles farmyard animals more than pastry, it’s bound to be good.” As you can see many of my puffs resemble chicks more than Peeps do.
What the heck! I know from experience that most people have never had the real thing. Most people have only had this gateau made with ice cream as a frozen dessert or plopped together from a bakery that uses pastry cream from a barrel, stabilizer in the cream and the pate à choux comes in 50 pound sacks and you “just add oil and water”. The real thing takes four hours of steady work if you have one oven.
I don’t expect most of you or perhaps any of you to make the real thing, but you could. I promise you, it is just a series of easy things that then get assembled to become a rather complicated thing. What I do want you to know is how to make and bake pate à choux because it is one of the most useful easy things in the world of cookery. Make them big and stuff them with chicken salad, or shrimp, ham or vegetable and cheese salad. Make them big and use them as shells for a creamed chicken with sherry and mushrooms. Turn them into the éclairs and cream puffs of your daydreams, so much better than bakery ones that you’ll weep for lost years. The bagged beignets from the supermarket do not belong on the same page as these you can so easily make. They are also lovely filled with ice cream and sauced with chocolate, butterscotch or a berry sauce.
Pate à Choux
Preheat oven to 200°C or 400°F
17 ounces or 500 ml of water
4 ounces or 115 g butter
a good pinch of salt
2 cups or 260 g regular flour or farina 00
4 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
Heat the water, salt and butter until the butter melts and then turn the heat up to bring it to a boil. Remove it from the heat and dump in all the flour at once, stirring it vigorously until it forms a thick, smooth and sticky dough. Using an electric mixer, beat the eggs and yolks in one by one until the dough becomes very smooth and shiny.
Put parchment or baking paper on a baking sheet or placca and then, if you want the easy way, pipe the dough from a pastry bag in the shapes you want. Longish bars make éclairs, round mounds make cream puffs. You do not have to leave a lot of space around your shapes because most of their growth is up, and if they do touch as they grow, they are easily separated.
If you want to do it the hard way, use two spoons to form the shapes. The first time I ever made pate à choux as a young wife I had neither electric mixer nor pastry bag. By the time I finished them I was convinced I would never bother again. With those two inexpensive helpers, it’s almost child’s play. Almost.
Put one baking sheet into the oven on a middle rack and bake for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 190°C or 375°F and cook for 10 t0 15 minutes more. They should be puffed up, dry and firm on the outside. Using a skewer or a sharp knife, pierce each pastry to allow steam to escape. You’ll need to turn the oven up again for the next batch.
As soon as they are out of the oven and have been pierced, cool them on a cooling rack. If they seem too delicate they may be a bit undercooked. Bite into one and see. They can be put back into the oven and cooked a few more minutes with no penalty at all.
This recipe will make about three baking batches. The only time consuming thing is putting them in, taking them out. They mix up easier and faster than brownie mix.
As you can see from the picture above, part of mine had to be piped on to form a border on the base of the gateau. I needed a further 20 medium sized puffs to be glued on with caramel to that border, and then a bunch of little bitty ones to cover the pastry cream center. All of those puffs are stuffed with whipped cream using my trusty pastry bag with an elongated feed that came with it.
Now you all know how to make cream puffs, éclairs, and fancy shapes of choux pastry, all of which have a lovely cavity to be filled at whimsy. If anyone really wants to know how to make the pastry cream and glue this whole thing together, let me know and I’ll oblige. I think everyone ought to have the real thing once in a lifetime, but there’s always Paris, you know. Meanwhile, here it is finished and in a big copper pot about to be hauled off to Gianna’s house.
14 comments April 19th, 2008
This is another dish from last Monday’s dinner. It’s an antipasto/appetizer from Puglia. Although recipes I found when I first tried to make it called for using vegetable broth to cook it, I soon discovered that I could make the vegetable broth and cook it all at the same time. It is a very healthy dish in the highest level of Mediterranean attention to vitamins, fiber and animal fat completely replaced with healthy olive oil. I cannot tell you where to buy dried fave in your country, but I know people have bought them in every country I know. If all you can find are fave with their skins, you can use them, but it will have to cook longer and you will need to use a food mill to remove the skins which I am told cause really dramatic intestinal gas.
I was served this garnished or plain in Puglia several times, but this version is my favorite one so far. I ate this by itself for supper yesterday. Jump to the recipe:
Purea di Fave
1 carrot cleaned and diced
1 leg of celery cleaned and diced
1 onion cleaned and diced
1 small dried red pepper crushed
1 teaspoon salt
water to cover
1 large or 2 medium potatoes peeled and diced
250 g or 1/2 pound dried fave/favas/broadbeans without skins
water as needed
salt to taste
Garnish:
red sweet pepper/peperone/capsicum, cleaned and cut in thin slivers
good olive oil
salt to taste
In a tall pot, put the first list of vegetables and salt, then cover with water and bring to a boil. When it is boiling, add the diced potato and water to keep it covered. When it comes back to a boil, add the dried fave and more water to cover.
Cook this at a simmer for about 45 minutes, adding water periodically so that there is always about 1/2″ or one finger’s thickness of water over the top of the vegetables. At 45 minutes, take a fava out and bite it. It should be soft throughout. If it isn’t cook a bit more until it is. Check for salt at this point and stir in more until it tastes right to you.
You can use a stick blender to puree this in the pot, or you can cool it a bit and put it through a medium-fine plate on a food mill. If you do that, you will need to rewarm it before serving.
Before serving, heat the olive oil in a frying pan and quickly fry the pepper slivers with a bit of salt. Scatter them over the purea, drizzle the pink oil as well, and then add a thread of raw oil. Serve warm.
Leftovers will need a bit of added water to become semi-liquid again. You can, however, make this quite a while ahead and keep it in the refrigerator, then warm the amount you want to serve.
7 comments April 16th, 2008
Vai! Vai a Msadventures in Italia per una ricetta iconica.
2 comments April 11th, 2008
I wrote this yesterday and it went poof!
Some of the dishes on this menu are already on the blog as recipes. Those that are not are being written and will be published over time. Everyone seemed to really enjoy all of it, and all but one eater were Italian. I consider that a yea vote, right?
Antipasto:
purea di fave secche con peperoni fritti (puree of dried fava beans/broadbeans with fried sweet red peppers)
piccole patate arroste sotto sale con formagino di capra (tiny potatoes roasted under salt with goat cheese)
Primo:
tagliatelle ai carciofi con pecorino sardo affumicato (egg pasta with artichokes and shards of smoked Sardegnan pecorino cheese)
Contorno:
sformato di asparagi (puffy custard of asparagus)
Secondo:
Costolette di maiale ripiene di formaggi (double rib pork chops stuffed with a cheese stuffing)
Dolce:
palline di cocco con due cioccolati (coconut balls with two chocolate ganaches)
jump to recipe
Palline di cocco (coconut balls or cocopuffs to me)
Makes enough for at least 8 people
Preheat oven to 170°C or 350°F (yes, the F temp is higher than reality, but these droop and spread if the temp is too low.)
2 eggs
175 g sugar (6 ounces or about 7/8 cup)
240 g dried coconut (8-1/2 ounces or about 3 cups)
I have been fussing for years about how to use the coconut one can buy here, which is dried and not shredded, sugared or any of the things that are done to coconut in America. I checked, and you can buy dried or dessicated coconut in US health food stores and perhaps the nicer grocery stores. Check out Indian groceries, too, for lower prices. Anyway, at last I found a recipe for using it. I misread one of the directions in a way that made it intriguing to me, so away I went. When I discovered my error, I decided to go for it anyway and I really like the result. If you don’t try this you’re nuts, because it is just about the easiest way I know to please some diners.
In a large mixing bowl, break the eggs and toss in the sugar. Using an electric mixer, beat them on high speed until they become thick and almost white. Add the coconut and at low speed, stir it in until it is blended.
Here’s the tricky, cute part. Line a baking sheet (placca) with baking paper. Using an espresso cup, scoop up this coco-dough, about 2/3 full, and press slightly with your fingers, then turn it upside down on the paper, rapping sharply to release the little form. You can place them fairly closely because they should not spread. When they are all on the paper, put them into the pre-heated oven and cook 15 minutes.
If they spread or are not that lovely golden color, your oven is running cool and you should probably get it calibrated. Cook them a little longer this time.
These are delicious. Crunchy on the outside and chewy, damp and slightly sweet inside.
For the two chocolates, choose a good dark chocolate and a good white chocolate. In two very tiny pans put the chocolate and add an equal weight of heavy cream. Over the lowest achievable heat stir the two chocolates and when each is melted and blended with the cream — you can take them off the heat when almost melted and they’ll safely finish melting with no chance of overheating disasters — use a spoon to drizzle streaks and drops on a plate and dip the bottom of each pallina into the dark before placing it on the dessert plate.
Try it. It’s really good and dessert doesn’t get any easier unless you buy it.
9 comments April 9th, 2008
I sure wish they were at my house this rainy day! But you will find them instead at Barb’s house.
Scalloped potatoes are such a favorite with me that when I was in the hospital having my baby, my sister brought me scalloped potatoes instead of flowers.
Add comment April 4th, 2008
