Aroma Cucina

Cooking Simply: The Italian Way! Goodie Basket Giveaway

Click here for the post with all the details for our Goodie Giveaway.

Practical Application

Two nights ago as I was making dinner, the salad greens were a little....limpy.
Thinking about that lettuce video from yesterday, I threw the greens into a bowl of water for 20 minutes as I got the rest of dinner ready.
Guess what...it worked! The greens weren't market fresh crisp, but they were way better than they had been before their cold water bath.
Good to know, right?

Lettuce leaves and water.

A picture, or a YouTube is worth a thousand words. The effects of water on lettuce....does this mean we should store our lettuce in a tub of water? From those mad scientists at blog.khymos.org

Microwave?

Zapping?
I don’t know how to use a microwave oven. True confession. I can use methocel, but I can't zap.
We have one in Italy, only I never even knew it was there until I came into the kitchen one morning and found two of the ragazzi (young people) that were staying with us, and they had located a microwave buried on top of the fridge and were happily heating up leftovers after a wild night on the town.
It never really made sense to me. Why take up all that counter real estate to reheat coffee or make popcorn? Any articles that I’ve read seem to be looking for a reason to use the appliance that was sitting there gathering dust.
Mark Bittman’s article in the NY Times was probably the first time that I read anything that made me say, “hmmm….maybe I should play around with this…”. Then Harold McGee follows up with yet another article, although McGee is far more restrained in his enthusiasm for the microwave.
OK. So, I’ll think about using a microwave. But, where would I put it???

The Egg Experiment

Recently Alex Talbot and Aki Kamozawa of “Ideas in Food” fame had written about a post about a smoke infused egg. Based on the premise that eggshells are porous they coated an egg with a powdered smoke paste for 48 hours and produced an egg that already had the scent of bacon infused into. Pretty cool.
So, what if I took it a step further and tried the same thing with hard boiled eggs. I’m not a genius, it was right before Easter weekend and my mother called to ask if I was coloring eggs. That didn’t really appeal to me, but creating an ‘adult’ egg did. I had visions of cracking open an already deviled egg: all flavored and no evil mayo in sight.
So, I boiled the eggs, and coated one set in a wasabi paste and the other in a Coleman mustard paste and left them there to percolate for a few days.
We cracked them open today, and I’m here to tell you it was a total flop. There was absolutely no flavor transference.  Could the boiling process have closed the pores in the shell? My curious mind wants to know, but I’ve eaten enough hard boiled eggs to last me for awhile.

St. Patrick's Day, Horseradish and the Firehouse

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

A holiday that is synonymous with parades and drinking green beer in excessive quantities.  Here I am feeling sorry for myself that the streets will be full of drunken people, but at least it’s only for a day, in Dublin they celebrate for five days.

UH-OH! Apparently I should get out more often, as I just learned that this year St. Patrick’s Day was celebrated on March 15. Apparently the Roman Catholic Church can move the date around when it falls during Holy Week.  I guess it wouldn’t be seemly to have a drunken holiday during the solemn days leading up to Easter, but in our heart of hearts, we all know that today is really St. Patrick’s Day.

When I was a kid, we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day at our local firehouse with a traditional boiled dinner: corned beef, potatoes and cabbage. I remember pouring vinegar on the cabbage and letting it run into the boiled and buttered potatoes, and then slathering the meat with thick, white horseradish sauce.  I haven’t thought about horseradish sauce in such a long time, or boiled dinners at the firehouse. We had a volunteer fire department and the firehouse was a community gathering place where they held potluck dinners and where my mother went inside a mysterious curtained booth to vote. It was one of those kid things that you just take for granted, and I’m just now realizing how lucky I was to have that sense of community, and safety, and belonging.
I’m also just realizing that I miss horseradish sauce.

2 T butter
2 T flour
2 T horseradish
1 Cup milk
Salt to taste

Melt the butter in a heavy saucepan over medium heat, whisk in the flour and stir constantly until the flour starts to color (but don’t let it get brown), then slowly add the milk, and continue whisking until the sauce thickens.  Add the horseradish and a bit of salt to taste. Memories and corned beef are optional.

Eggs for dinner?

Sometimes meat is just too heavy at night. I’m not sure if it’s all the press about eating less meat that has gotten to me, or if it’s spending time in Italy, but I just can’t eat as much meat as I used to. So, standing at a nearly empty fridge (that’s part of my New Years resolution, not to fill up the fridge with nonsense that you throw out when it becomes a science experiment), I’m hungry, it’s dinnertime and I don’t know what I feel like making or eating. Sound familiar??

Most of the time I have eggs and onions around, so here's an easy, eggy, dinner dish:

Finely chop up half an onion and sauté in a bit of olive oil. If you have some around, add a tablespoon of veal demi-glace. It’s a super reduced veal stock that can add flavor and depth to any dish. Michael Ruhlman swears by it in his new book, "The Elements of Cooking" and contrary to the debate on eGullet, nothing else takes the place of veal demi-glace. Either you have it on hand, or you don’t and the world doesn’t end whether you do or don’t; it just makes your onions taste a bit richer and fuller.   
Break 2 eggs each into a bowl and whisk them with some salt and pepper until they are nice and foamy. When the onions are all soft and melting, try not to brown them, then whisk into the egg mixture. Pour the egg and onions into individual serving dishes, and bake at 350F until the eggs have set, about 10-15 minutes.  Finish with a splash of balsamic vinegar across the top and serve with a salad and a light white or rose wine, maybe some cheese, or salami, and a couple of olives.

Red Pepper Magic

Roasted red peppers. Who can resist them? When can you ever make enough of them? And does anyone really not mind peeling them? That is one job that I just HATE. I’ll clean a kilo of sardines before I’ll tackle a kilo of peppers.
(This applies to everyone but my friend Dario who is allergic to red peppers…now, that is a curse!)

A recent batch of red peppers was pureed and then turned into red pepper ‘glass’ and red pepper ‘leather’.    The glass is brittle and shatters and then instantly melts in your mouth, the leather is like fruit leather, soft, malleable and sometimes sticks to your back teeth.

The other night we wrapped some red pepper leather around a marinated white anchovy.  It was good, but next time, I think the addition of a little crème fraiche would make this much better.

Red Pepper Leather or Glass
100 g roasted, pureed and strained red peppers
25 g dextrose
5 g water
5 g salt
15 g port wine

Roast the peppers in a hot oven (375-400F) until the outsides are charred.  I lay mine on newspaper with a layer of salt underneath that both serves to soak up excess juice and helps keep the peppers from being soggy.  When they are done, remove and either place in a paper bag or cover with more newspaper until they are cool enough to handle. Peel the buggers, removing all the seeds and then puree the hell out of it. Now add the other ingredients and puree some more. You want a really smooth consistency, so a pass through a fine meshed strainer is a good idea.

Spread thinly and evenly on a silpat and roast in 225 F degree oven for about 1 hour.  Glass should be spread very thin, leather a bit thicker.  To check for done-ness, tickle the edge of the pepper mixture, and when you feel it is coherent enough to pull off the silpat, it’s done. Remove from the silpat and gently place on the counter to cool.
Shatter the glass and scatter on whatever needs a little red lift.
Wrap the leather around anything…an olive, a piece of cheese, your finger.

Out of the Kitchen

Saturday Travels

Saturday we went for a ride and wound up eating eggplant parmesan and spicy wings at Uncle Sonny’s Italian restaurant in Pine Plains, which is just north of nothing and has an excellent tractor dealership in the heart of town. We knew it was an Italian restaurant because the out of focus printed paper place mat told us so. The waitress was beautiful, the wine drinkable and it was fun to be in that foreign country of upstate NY.  Jeff made best friends with a group of guys in the parking lot as he bummed a cigarette and they talked motorcycle maintenance.
Next stop was the Bangall Country Store where we met the chef/owner Artie.  Artie and I started talking about hydration methods for bread baking, he made some excellent espresso and we chatted about life in general. By the time we left, we had sampled his outstanding homemade challah bread and then he gave us a loaf of his bread, claiming that he didn’t need two loaves, so we should take one. We had him autograph the bag, and we left, hoping that our travels would one day take us back to the Bangall Country Store. We followed the setting sun and found ourselves in the  chi-chi  town of Rhinebeck. Oh look, we had left behind the world of 15-cent wings and re-entered the world of the $7.50 glass of mediocre wine….and in such a short distance. We went window shopping, visited the lobby of the Oldest Inn in America, and headed back home. A fine Saturday.
P.S. Artie makes a damn fine loaf of bread.