Posts filed under 'vegetarian'
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
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
This exuberantly ugly thing is a spinach sformato, which means deformed and it surely is. It would have taken me about a minute to make a double cuff of baking paper and tie with a string around the top of the dish and then it would have been a soufflé. It would have been beautiful and delicious, but only beautiful for a minute. I figured that was how long it would take me to get the cuff off and by the time I photographed it, it would be deflating. In the end, this was a bit deflating anyway.
It was delicious. I ate it.
Hardly anybody makes soufflés anymore. They think it’s hard to do. It really isn’t, and if you bother with making the cuff, it will be beautiful. If you don’t want to bother with the cuff, my advice it to fill a lower baking dish 2/3 full to give it room to rise, and call it a sformato. Handy word. The thing is, because there was no restraint and because my oven has a hot spot, this rose up and spilled out like magma on the opposite side and now I have to clean the oven. Careless cook, indeed.
Elaborate vegetable it is, however, and good to eat and healthy. With eggs. milk and spinach in it, it can be a vegetarian meal or a puffily, steaming vegetable dish. You can not, however, drag it outside to photograph it nor get more than a few shots before it starts to deflate, so serve it quickly to some eager eaters.
Sformato or soufflé of spinach
Preheat the oven to 150°C or 300°F
about 6 ounces of steamed spinach, or about a cup, wrung dry with your hands
1 tablespoon of butter
2 tablespoons of flour
a pinch of cayenne or peperoncino in polvere
1 cup milk
3/4 teaspoons salt
2 eggs, separated
a generous amount of nutmeg, to taste
about 1 ounce of freshly and finely grated hard cheese, such as Parmigiano Reggiano
1 teaspoon butter for the cooking vessel
Chop the cooked and wrung out spinach finely with a knife.
Grate the cheese. Generously butter the inside of a baking dish, then use part of the cheese to coat it, as if you were flouring a cake pan. Shake any excess back into the container in which you’ve grated the cheese.
Use a fork to whip the egg yolks in a small bowl.
In a small, heavy pan, melt 1 tablespoon of butter and then stir in the 2 tablespoons of flour to form a thick paste. Remove the pan from the heat and very slowly stir in the milk, a little at a time, using a silicon spatula to flatten any lumpy bits. When the mixture reaches the consistency of cream, you may just stir in all the remaining milk. Add the salt and cayenne. Return the pan to the heat and bring to a boil, stirring, then reduce the heat to minimal and continue to cook a couple of minutes. It will thicken and become a white sauce.
Stir about 1/4 of the hot sauce into the egg yolks, then scrape that back into the pan. Stir in the chopped spinach very thoroughly. Grate some nutmeg into it, quite generously. Taste and correct. It should be a bit pungent, because it will be diluted with the egg whites shortly.
Using an egg beater or a mixer, and with the egg whites in a large, rigorously clean, non-plastic bowl, whip the egg whites until they are stiff but still glossy. It took about a minute for me.
One-third at a time, using a silicon spatula, fold the spinach mixture into the egg whites. Scrape all of the mixture into the prepared baking dish, then scatter the remaining grated cheese on top. Pop into the oven and leave it alone for 40 minutes. You literally do have a minute or so to serve it puffy. It’s best served with two forks.
The butter and cheese form a delicate crust that releases from the dish. All the prep dishes are easy to clean. It’s really not much trouble at all.
Dedicated to Kid Magnet, who loves spinach like I do.
December 3rd, 2007
It’s one of my descriptive phrases: elaborate vegetable. When you are serving something good that doesn’t look like much, the plate needs a hit of glamor. I’ve a list of these elaborate vegetables, mostly but not all Italian.
As anyone who will listen knows, I’ve recently lost most of my appetite. That’s really alarming for a cook. I try this and that, and yesterday I thought I’d try someone else’s cooking. I went to a little cafe that on two or three days a week makes a lot of contorni, or vegetable dishes. One of them was a torte di cime di rape, or a torte of turnip greens. It was stodgy and dull. I thought I could do better, so I gave it a try.
It was so good that at ten o’clock last night I was wiping up the crumbs. But it was far too late to get decent photos, so I made it again today to get daylight. Unfortunately it went cloudy while I was cooking, but it looks pretty edible anyway, doesn’t it? I had to shoot it sitting on my car to keep the cats off it. Recipe is after the leap into the future.
I varied the recipe by one ingredient on the two trials, and here’s the better recipe. It’s really easy, and you can keep everything but the fresh greens in your pantry or freezer, so you can make it any time you buy greens. Clean up was a snap, too. Hey, it all counts in my kitchen.
The photos show one-half recipe, which is one sheet of puff pastry divided in half. It would make a great picnic or work lunch, at that size. It’s good hot or room temperature, and there’s nothing in it that would spoil before you could eat it. Microwaving would make it soggy, though.
Torta di Bietola
Swiss chard or bietola, cleaned and cut into 1/4″ or 1 cm wide strips. Cooked in only the water from the washing, and only until just done. You will need 2 cups of these steamed greens.
2 tablespoons of good olive oil
2 smallish cloves of garlic, sliced
2 anchovy fillets (yes, use them, you won’t know they are in there!)
3 small chillies (peperoncini) broken in half
salt to taste (qb)
1 tablespoon of vinegar, whichever you like, but not balsamic
2 sheets of frozen puff pastry
1 egg, fork whipped with a teaspoon of cold water
Make sure to read the package instructions on the puff pastry, and thaw it the amount of time needed and not more or less. It’s only hard to handle if you mistake that.
Preheat the oven to 200°C or 400°F.
This was under my 40 watt hood light in my black pan.
In a large frying pan, put the oil, the garlic, the chillies and the anchovy fillets, and sizzle together for a few minutes over moderate heat, mashing the anchovy so it disappears. Remove the visible pieces of the chillies! Add the vinegar and then the cooked greens, and stir them together. Taste and salt as needed.
Lay one piece of puff pastry on a piece of baking paper or foil that you have put on a flat baking sheet with low or no sides. Spoon the greens onto it, then spread them out to cover all but about 1/2″ at the edges. Using a finger, brush that naked edge with some of the egg glaze.
With a sharp knife, cut some slashes or holes in the remaining piece of puff pastry. then lift it onto the filled piece, and lightly tap the edge down onto the egg glaze. Using a brush, brush the entire top with egg glaze. (you’ll have some leftover for the cats — makes them shiny.)
Put it into the heated oven and cook about 20 minutes, or until golden brown. Eat hot or at ambient temperature.
I like it so well I see myself experimenting with other fillings, other pastries. Yummmm.
All the small photos are clickable to make them bigger.
November 29th, 2007
This is a recipe I developed for Slow Travel. It’s a pasta I really love, and thanks to a fine friend from North Carolina, I have the pecans to make it with. It’s rich and crunchy and deeply satisfying to eat on these cold and gray days. Pecans are difficult to find here in Italy other than in my freezer or a big city like Rome, Milan or Torino.
Definitely use a mild blue cheese for this pasta. Experiments during the trial and testing period showed that to be essential. The pasta does moderate the flavor of the blue cheese, but not enough if you use a strong one. It become ammoniac with strong cheese.
Pasta with Gorgonzola and Pecans
* About 280 grams (10 ounces) of penne
* A huge pot of water
* A small handful of salt
* 1 tablespoon/cucchiaio olive oil
* A small onion, chopped somewhat finely
* A couple of handfuls of coarsely chopped pecans
* 250 grams (8 ounces - a typical package) of Gorgonzola dolce or other mild blue cheese, broken or cut into smallish pieces
Start the pasta water to boil. When the water is boiling, add the salt and the pasta and stir.
In a heavy frying pan, heat the oil, and add the onion, cooking it slowly until it is softened. Add the pecans and stir about to toast and crisp them. Add the broken up cheese to the fried onions and pecans, stirring to melt. Ladle a small amount of the pasta cooking water into the pan to make the sauce creamier. At this point, the pasta should be about done. It should be quite firm. Drain the pasta and toss it into the frying pan, stirring to coat the pasta with the sauce. Taste for salt and correct if necessary. Some cheeses are saltier than others, so you can’t tell ahead whether you’ll need it or not. Serve immediately, smoking hot.
Warning: This is a fast sauce. If it is cooked too long or cooked and reheated it will become lumpy and unpleasant. Gorgonzola piccante is very unpleasant in this sauce.
A fruit salad is nice with this if this pasta dish is your main course. And now let’s send it off to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night. Don’t forget to click into her terrific roundups to see what people all over the world are doing with the nicest noodles.
November 9th, 2007
Three cheers for Smitten Kitchen. Go have a look at her apple tart post, which is absolutely terrific. It’s accessible to amateurs and beginners, and different enough to appeal to veterans.
November 9th, 2007
Palma cooks so widely and so well, that it’s fabulous to find myself on her blog. She recently made the Gorgonzola Cookies and did a step by step photo log of the process. That’s more than I did for them!
November 3rd, 2007
or
To begin you do exactly the same things that we did in Carciofi 101.
When the artichoke slices are partly cooked, add the garlic slices to them. Once you get to the browned stage, however, add 6 small, sweet winter tomatoes cut into quarters and the pasta water as described, and as they cook, it will thicken up into a sweet and sour sauce. Cheese doesn’t go in this pasta, in my opinion.
So for two:
2 small or 1 globe artichoke, cleaned and sliced thinly
2 tablespoons of great olive oil — I used spicy oil from Puglia
2 cloves of garlic, sliced
salt to taste
6 sweet tomatoes on the branch (pomodori al grappolo)
from 100 to 200 grams (7 to 14 ounces) of pasta. The pasta shown is casarecce, which has a tube shape but looks homemade.
Flickr had stopped feeding the photos in Carciofi 101, so I had to load them into this program. It didn’t want them one bit! Since winter is artichoke season, let’’s send this to Ruth at Presto Pasta Night.
I had a small disaster making this. For the first time I oversalted the pasta water and had to start that all over again. Bleaugh!
October 31st, 2007
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