Posts filed under 'vegetables'
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
When I woke up and climbed the stairs this morning to make coffee, look who was looking into the window. Remember her? At first I thought she was blooming there to give me a little summery pleasure. Then I went outside and I realized she was trying to get in.
Day dawned with a really hard frost. I tried to dress for it as I prepared to go to the Pugliese fruit and vegetable vendors. They are only at market on Saturday, so it’s buy today or eat supermarket produce. Our supermarkets sell good food, but not as good as this produce that trucks up from Foggia every week. Only Monday I bought Italian white grapes at the Coop, but they were only juicy and sweet. There was nothing about them that shouts grape like the ones grown in Puglia under nets.
Anyway, I’ve decided that this is a budget tip. Shop outside when it’s cold and blowy and you won’t hang around photographing fashions or dawdling through the streets being tempted to buy ridiculous things you really don’t need.
Here’s what we’ll cook this week. It cost €8.80, or about US$13.20.
There are four small artichokes called violetta. Nice name for an artichoke, no? There’s a nice head of romaine or insalata romana. The white grapes I like fill a colander, and there’s an entire tray of tiny new spinach. Those tiny tomatoes will pop up now and again whenever wanted.
Before I left I checked the pasta shelf, where I seal up opened pasta. The unopened pasta occupies a very large space in my pantry armoire. That little chest holds the spices not used in Italian cookery, and it isn’t Italian, either. What’s this?
Gasp! There are two empty jars and the others are close to empty too. I haven’t even made pasta for Presto Pasta Night in two weeks. Polenta, yes, pasta no. What kind of Italian cook doesn’t make pasta? My face is red.
I rushed back from market, abandoning all foolish pastimes, to where it may be a cool 18°C but there’s a radiator to embrace. Later tonight there will be chow. Ciao!
December 1st, 2007
To understand the cooking of an area takes a couple of small steps. Both of them, in Italy, are fortunately pleasant. If you know the basic tenets of Italian cookery, and if you never let yourself get sidetracked, you can cook anything from any part of the country as long as you can find the ingredients. For someone who lives in a small place far from big cities, it can be more difficult to find the “right stuff” than for someone who lives in an American city. Add to that that American supermarkets and food shops are a lot more eager to order something a bit unusual if you ask them to, and the ticket to Italian regional home cooking is yours. Big cities throughout Europe also carry lots of Italian ingredients, as well, I hear, as Australian markets. Anywhere Italians have gone, some of the “made in Italy” products will follow them. The regionality will probably depend on which regions are represented in the immigration. Some items can be made, too, and substitutes can be made, just as foreign expats in Italy can make or substitute here in Italy.
To repeat the basics, I’ll briefly say that the number one idea is to use the very best ingredients. The following one is to treat those ingredients with respect for their individual qualities.
How do people get sidetracked? The biggest and most common error is to get complicated. That one is responsible for the poor quality of most pizza around the world. It is also responsible for how heavy and fattening many Italian dishes become in foreign hands. Even restaurateurs do it when they play to their audience instead of winning eaters over to the real thing. Italian ethnic restaurants make the same mistake.
Now, how to learn a new region? First eat the food. It’s unfortunate that this will usually be in a restaurant, but if you ask people where to get real homemade food, they will fall over themselves to tell you. Thursday night we went to a simple restaurant recommended by the man we collected our house key from. Last Saturday I asked a farmer at his son’s cheese stand, and he had a place to recommend. He turned to his son and said, “Isn’t that right? Isn’t it just like your wife’s cooking?” The son agreed, and it wasn’t until later that I remarked to Alison that we forgot to ask if his wife was a good cook.
Next step is to go food shopping. That’s where the market comes in. You can read pages and pages about the local eating habits and it won’t be real until you see what there is to buy and what people are buying. I had read that the cuisine of Puglia was rooted in very poor times and so included lots of legumes and grains, loads of vegetables, some local cheeses, some of the tons of fish they bring to shore, and very little meat. And this is what we found as we entered the market Saturday morning.
I was dazzled. My hometown market has lots of cheap clothing and hardware at this time of year, and little in the way of fresh produce. What fresh produce there is comes from other areas in crates. My market in all the six and a half years I have been here has never had a counter of grains and legumes. For those I have to buy what the supermarkets and food shops sell. We have never had a spice stand, or a dried fruits stand, and I have only seen nuts in the shell when they are coming off the trees in the neighborhood.
In the market at Ostuni, which is a fraction of the size of my city, there were multiples of all those things. The produce stands had vegetables I’d never seen before and had to ask about. There were piles of something I had heard of but couldn’t find in a dictionary. The fresh fish was sparkling and firm and the prices were one-fourth or less what I pay at home. People were eager for us to taste things we didn’t know. It was a food lover’s Paradise with food-loving vendors. There were no cheap fashion trucks and no porchetta trucks. All the hardware and fashion was in a separate place, on the playing field of the football stadium, where they couldn’t interfere with food shoppers. There were flower stands and customers lined up to buy them. People left the market burdened with swollen plastic carrier bags and I wanted to follow them.
I bought some local wheat that I’ve not seen before. The ones I know were well-represented, and there were also many different kinds of rices. I bought round cucumbers that look like watermelons, and whose name is what other Italians call watermelon – cocomero. Puglians call watermelon anguria, and we do too, but there cocomero is a crunchy and delicious, fat salad ingredient. Lampascioni, it turned out, were an onion-like bulb from a wild hyacinth. Unlike an onion that can grow in six months, it takes five years to mature to edible. I am in the 3-day process of preparing those now. They were available raw, pickled, canned and packed in oil. The local cheeses are very nice, indeed, and we ate tastes of many of them.
That little jaunt through the weekly market of a city of 35,000 people was like a magic show to me. It made me want to be a magician. It made me want to see more and more of how they eat, now that they are prosperous and can eat as they like.
We decided on the spot to have Sunday lunch at the place recommended by the farmer at the cheese booth.
April 4th, 2007
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