Aroma Cucina

Cooking for Love

What happens when you turn your passion into your day job? Could passion turn to drudgery? For me the passion is cooking, for Jeff & I the passion is having people gather around the dinner table. And for both us, the answer is, we’re still passionate about both.

I won’t kid you, it’s work. Making these videos means being on your feet all day, with a cranking hot oven behind you and blistering lights shining down on your head. Or trying to look natural while stirring a bowl of brownie batter, only the bowl is titled toward the camera and you really can’t see what you are doing.

We have small skirmishes all day long over creative choices. That’s a good thing. The overall project becomes better as we hone and fine tune our work.

Props go missing, only to find out someone ate the prop! Hey, who ate the potatoes?? We need to get the still shots!

But funnily enough, at the end of the day, what did we want to do? We wanted to make a good dinner. And there we were in the kitchen, slicing mushrooms, searing a steak, and finding a surprise bottle of great wine to share. 

Which tells me, the passion and the love are still in full swing. That cooking and sharing a meal isn’t drudgery, it’s primal, it’s satisfying, it’s an unbreakable bond. It’s work worth doing and sharing. Buon appettio indeed!

Making Food Videos: All Bright Lights & Glamour

Feeling restless at 4:00 am, I get out of bed and step on... a huge pile of grit. What on earth...it’s everywhere! It feels like kitty litter embedded on the soles of my feet...only...wait a minute! It’s cous cous! The floor is literally covered in cous cous. What??

Then I see our dear kitty, Raffaello dello Spillo, and he’s batting around an empty bag of fine grain cous cous. Could someone please explain to me why the cat felt the need to jump up on the counter, grab a bag of cous cous, bring it over to my side of the bedroom and empty it?

As I’m sweeping up the mess, I realize he also brought over the bag of medium sized Israeli toasted cous cous,  but didn’t have time to completely shred and scatter his booty.

So, we’re down two food props and we haven’t even begun to shoot.

Saturday was a glorious day in NYC to get on our bikes and procure the food we’ll need. Armed with neatly detailed shopping lists, our first stop was on Lexington Ave at Kalustyan’s for spices, cous cous, nuts and bitters. Instant gratification was ours as we loaded the fragrant bag onto Jeff’s bike. Then over to Chelsea Market on 9th Ave., where we loaded up on fresh produce and some odds and ends from the Italian Market. 

Despite the overwhelming humidity, we had a great time riding around and taking in the city.  There’s a good feeling to having things organized and ready. Little did we realize we were about to be victims of kitten sabotage. 

I suppose the moral of the story is to put all groceries safely out of the way of inquiring kitties and to have a sense of humor, because something is always bound to go wrong.  We certainly learned that in Italy as lights blew, stick blenders wouldn’t blend, and the heat was melting.

Tonight we’ll set up for a tech check, and we’ll have everything in place for the first video tomorrow morning.  I’m eager to get started but a little nervous about what other surprises are in store. 
Stay tuned for the Aroma Cucina Adventures as tomorrow we bake brownies and roast a few birds. I mean really, what could go wrong? 

Kitchen Confidence at an all time high!

The results of our Kitchen Confidence survey are in! There are some surprising food and cooking trends: 23% of you use your microwave as a butter melting device, and no one buys bottled salad dressing. Oh, really now.... ?

Here are the delicious details:

1) Kitchen Confidence: Most of us are decent cooks, with an almost even split between novices and Supremely Good Chefs.  Which means that a whopping 82% of us know when to whisk and when to fold.

2) Making dinner for friends: The responses fell into three broad categories: Show-Off, Adventurer, and the Spontaneous Forager.  Obviously the Show-Offs are our Top Chefs,  the Adventurer hits the web and cookbooks for inspiration and isn’t afraid of trying out new recipes on friends, the Spontaneous Forager waits until the last moment and is confident they can pull a rabbit out of the hat.

3) How would we cook a rib eye steak? 98% of us are going to grill or sear that steak. Happily the 5% of us that would give the steak away, can give it to the 5% that are going to make steak tartare.


4) Overwhelmingly we all want more cabinet space (74%) instead of a microwave.

5) What do we do with a microwave? I put this question in because I don’t own or use a microwave and I was curious what people do with this hunk of equipment. It takes up a lot of space, so it better be seriously useful. My favorite response was “Clock” because you know we all use for it that but only one of us ‘fessed up.

 
6) If cooking skills and cost were no object what would you make? Seafood was the number one choice with oysters getting top honors, followed by lobster.
Foie gras gets honorable mention as the next runner up.
Then it broke down into roasts, steaks, and multi-ethnic delicacies like Creole Seitan stew, Mexican, porchetta, mole poblano, xiao long bao.
That all sounds delicious to me!
For a vegetable, asparagus wins. Whoever is making the asparagus souffle, can you share that recipe?

7) Comfort Food: Is there a scientist in the house because I think we’ve discovered something: we are comforted by carbs. When we need a cuddle we turn to pasta, potatoes and rice.
 A distant runner up was soup, lots of tomato soup and a few lentil soups and a few any kind of soup at all.
    I need to know, what is Nailey’s canned chili?? There is more than one of you that confesses to loving Nailey’s chili.
And I’m not going to out the person who has an herb butter dependancy.

8) Mystery Basket Menu: We’re all having some kind of lemon chicken, garlic mashed potatoes and a custard for dessert (Or a pudding as our British friends call the sweet at the end of a meal, and based on the responses we’ve got a  few British friends!)  As one commenter noted, we’ve got a color issue with this menu, tasty but blonde.

9) Ready Made, Either Way or Store Bought? Come on...nobody buys salad dressing/cream?? There are whole aisles dedicated to the stuff, so somebody is buying it.

10) One thing you screw up: We were all over the board here except for timing of dishes.  All I can say is practice helps and so does an extra glass of wine or two. For the guests, not for the cook.


Thank you everyone for helping out with our survey!  I had fun and I learned a few things, although I’m still trying to figure out what goes on with all that melted butter.

We start shooting video next week, so I’m trying to get my Julia Child groove on...wish us luck!

Cooking Simply: The Italian Way! Goodie Basket Giveaway

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

Shooting Our Next Cook Vook

We’re on the move again; this time back to NYC to shoot the video for our next cook Vook. I hope we have half as much fun shooting this as we did last summer.

At least this time, if a light bulb blows out it won’t be catastrophic. After three days of working perfectly, with a major converter box, the main lights blow. In four minutes we went through our entire stash of back up bulbs. It’s just like watching cash burn.

Talk about needing a village...we needed half of Italy to help us track down pro lighting bulbs, and in the end it was easier to just move the shoot to another kitchen.

That kitchen had tons of natural light, on three sides. And a bazillion birds tweeting. So we had to shut the doors, and the kitchen became known as “The Death Box”.   Instead of “Quiet on the set!”, it was “Oh God...it’s Death Box time!”.  The Death Box house does have one very significant advantage: an incredibly gorgeous pool.

And we won’t have the bells to worry about. The bells in Montone ring every 15 minutes, so all shots had to be timed around the bells. This time we’ll have to contend with traffic noises, helicopters and fire engines.

Lunch options will be easier this time because we can order up. You have no idea what a luxury that is. You’re working with food all day long, but maybe you don’t want a massive pile of tiramisu for lunch. Other days, a bowl of pasta was just fine.  And no matter where we shoot, I have a feeling that Prop Boy (aka Jeff) will be in charge of the cocktail hour, because all work and no play just isn’t fun.

We’re back in NY tomorrow and we’ll keep you posted on our video adventures because  I know enough to expect the unexpected. Ciao!

Cooking Simply: The Italian Way! Goodie Basket Giveaway

We’ve hit the e-book Trifecta! Cooking Simply: The Italian Way! is now available on Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook and iTunes. And to celebrate, we’re giving away a Cooking Simply pantry basket from Gustiamo. Tell me why you deserve this booty!

Our basket is packed with outstanding Italian ingredients that will help you make the recipes in Cooking Simply: The Italian Way! We’re giving away dry porcini, extra virgin olive oil from Tuscany, sea salt from Sicily, succulent tomatoes, Martelli pasta, lentils, farro, risotto rice, saffron powder and a special bonus...perfect capers.

Gustiamo scours Italy for the best of the best, and we’re giving it away to the person who gives us the most creative comment about why you deserve this motherlode of goodies. 

And you know I expect creativity from you, because if there is anything I hate..it’s being beige.

Contest opens today, May 16 and we’ll announce the very lucky winner on May 24. Sorry, we can only ship to US addresses. :-(     

 

10 Things I Need to Know About How You Cook

What kind of cook are you? Do you cook a little? Do you cook a lot?
I’ve set up a quick, fun Kitchen Confidence survey to get an idea of what goes on in our kitchens. We’re working on our second cookbook and I’d love to hear what you think about cooking.

We’re thinking of this project as a prequel to "Cooking Simply: The Italian Way". After talking with people, and listening to my niece tell me  for the 800th time, we’ve decided to develop a real nuts & bolts how-to-cook survival strategy book. 

 I think cooking is simple. It’s just as much a part of my day as brushing my teeth. But there must be a reason that grocery stores dedicate an entire aisle to bottled salad dressing.  It costs about 90 million times more than making your own and you won’t be adding BHA, BHT, red dye #15 and lots of high fructose corn syrup..or do you keep that stuff in the cabinet?  Clearly, I need to get out more often and talk to people about how they cook.

  So, please take the survey and help us out. Pass it along to anyone who even thinks about cooking!  And Mom..this means you too...take the survey. I already know you buy bottled salad dressing.
Thanks and I’ll keep you posted as we move along on this crazy, but very fun project.

Click here to take survey

Fava Bean & Crispy Prosciutto Make a Seasonal Risotto

Springtime means fava bean time. To the uninitiated, fava bean pods look like string beans on steroids. You don’t eat the pod, you eat the inner, bright green, crispy, flavor packed bean.
These are NOT lima beans. I’ve always hated lima beans;  they’re like gummy starch balls in your mouth. I also spit out chic peas for the same reason. If it’s an upscale party, I stack the chic peas on the side of my plate.


But I digress from the spring-wonderfulness of fava beans. Once shucked, you can eat them raw, just like edamame beans. Or they are outstanding paired with a soft, white cheese like Robiola or a fresh Manchego cheese.

However, there is a ‘but’ with fava beans that you need to know about. They are kind of a bitch to shuck. First, you need to remove the beans from the pod, which is no big deal, but then you have to remove the tough outer skin from the beans, leaving only the tender, inner, bright green bean.  For years, I’ve steamed the pods, then shucked the beans. But that means you are fooling around with colanders, and hot steamy water that runs down the channel of the tongs and onto your arm and a mess to clean up and,,,blah, blah, blah. 

Today I had a breakthrough: remove the beans from the raw pods, then pour boiling water over them. Take a sharp knife, slit the outer skin and pop out the bean. Same principle as skinning a tomato. Works like a charm.

Fava Bean & Crispy Prosciutto Risotto
1 medium carrot
1 medium stalk of celery
1 teeny peeled onion or a shallot
1 cup aborio or carnaroli rice
3 cups chicken broth
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 cup cleaned fava beans
4 T Robiola cheese, or fresh white Manchego
2T Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1-2 slice prosciutto, thinly sliced.
Serves 2
 
Finely chop the soffrito (carrot+celery+onion = soffrito) and saute in the olive oil. Add the risotto rice and saute for about a minute. Begin adding the warm chicken broth to the risotto pan, adding more broth as it is absorbed.  Listen to the risotto as you putter around the kitchen.  You should hear it gently simmer; if you hear sizzle...get over there and add broth ASAP!

Risotto takes about 18 minutes to cook; at the 16 minute mark, add the white wine to the pot and let the rice absorb the wine.  Add any remaining chicken stock if the risotto still tastes a little underdone or dry. Keep stirring, but you knew that.

While the risotto is cooking, gently saute the prosciutto in a small pan until crispy. If there isn’t enough fat on the prosciutto add a small quantity of olive oil to the pan.

When the rice is done, turn off the heat add the fava beans and cheese and mix well until the cheese is all melted. Plate into individual, warm bowls and top with the crispy prosciutto. Eat immediately. Risotto waits for no man. But you knew that too!

Dinner in the Time of Twitter: Ravioli with Butter & Sage

“I don’t have time to cook.” How many times have you heard this or said it yourself? It really isn’t about time, is it? It’s about priorities. I get it. Twitter is an addictive time suck, but you have to fight the cravings if you want to eat ravioli.

How long does it take to make ravioli with butter & sage?  5 minutes for the  water to boil, 3 minutes to make the sauce and cook the ravioli.

How long does it take to make spaghetti carbonara? 5 minutes for the water to boil, 8 minutes to cook the pasta, 1 minute to finish and serve.

 

That’s not really fair, because I’m not factoring in shopping time. But either you batch shop about once a week, or you stop on your way home. Sometimes the shopping can be an adventure unto itself. We called it foraging when we were in Puglia. We never knew what we would come home with.

And I didn’t factor in the learning curve. Practice and things get better and quicker. There’s no way to avoid the curve. Embrace it.

So, make some dinner tonight. OK?

Ravioli with Butter & Sage
6 fresh ravioli per person, cheese or butternut squash are good choices
3-4 T butter
5 or 6 fresh sage leaves
Grated parmigiano cheese

Put the water on to boil, salt it just as it comes to a boil. 

Make a salad, take off your work clothes, play with the cat, check Twitter if you must.

When the water comes to a boil, add the ravioli and cook for about 1 minute.

In a saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Using scissors, snip the sage leaves into little strips.

Add the sage to the butter.

Drain the ravioli and toss in the sauce pan with the butter and sage. Saute for 30 seconds, flip the raviolis, saute for another 30 seconds.

Arrange the raviolis on a plate, spoon the extra butter over the top. Serve with grated cheese. Enjoy, relax, and savor the moment.  You can Tweet me later @judithklinger.

This video and recipe are from our Cook Vook,  "Cooking Simply: The Italian Way!"

Picking, harvesting, storing, using olive oil

For centuries, for millennium, olives were picked the same way: grasp a branch and lightly running your fingers downward, gently pluck and pull the olive away from the branch. Let the olives drop into a basket or a well placed net. At the end of the day, your hands feel soft and supple from handling the fruit, and your arms are a little stiff from reaching for the next branch. Picking olives is fun and romantic when it’s a hobby, but far more serious when it’s your life’s work.

Continuing our conversation with olive oil producer Nicola Bovoli, of Vicopisanolio in Tuscany, he tends about a thousand trees, and each tree yields on average 10 kilos of olives, but it can range up to 25 kilos per tree. Last year’s harvest was about 12-13% oil. If you hang around an oil mill at pressing time, yield is a big topic.  Many factors will affect the fruit yield and the oil yield. Sometimes the olives have more water in them, so even though you deliver more fruit, you won’t necessarily get more oil. And you pay the mill by weight, so having water heavy olives, or processing fruit filled with branches and leaves is a drag because you pay by the bulk weight of the olives delivered, not by the oil yield. Olive trees tend to produce abundant olives in an every other year cycle so once again you have to yield to Mother Nature’s capricious rules.

After you’ve harvested your olives, it’s time to press them, and historically at Vicopisano, the olives were crushed between two large stones that were turned by animals. However, Signor Bovoli was intent on getting the best yield and the best oil so two years ago he upgraded the system.  He explained some of the problems with the stone method.  Let’s say, your neighbor accidentally delivered moldy fruit and his olives were crushed before yours. The stones are now contaminated and even though they are washed, your oil will pick up some of the muffa or mold. Now that’s going to be a real bummer after all the work that went into the growing and harvest of your oil. There is also a degradation of the flavor and quality of the oil the longer it is exposed to air and light. Oxidation is the enemy of olive oil.

Vicopisano upgraded to the Pieralisi system about two years ago, and it was a difficult process. The problem wasn’t the installation of the high tech Pieralisi machinery, but convincing the customers of his mill that this machine was better than the traditional stone method of crushing the olives. Have you ever tried to change an Italian’s mind about something?? The system used at Vicopisano is a little different than this post, because he uses a vertical centrifuge, but the basic idea is the same.  Within 45 minutes, the olives are processed into oil without ever exceeding 24C and without any oxidation. A pure expression of the fruit.

Once the oil is produced, Nicola stores his olive oil in stainless steel tanks, maintained at a constant temperature of 18C. Oil that is stored this way will remain at its optimal quality and can be sold for up to 18 months after the harvest. But, Nicola’s oil never lasts that long!

What this means for those of us who don’t have our own olive groves is: store your olive in a dark colored bottle, away from light, away from heat. I buy olive oil in bulk 3 or 5 liter tins and decant it into a bottle. In our case, we’ve found an old whiskey bottle works superbly, however you should label it or you wind up with strange salad dressing and even stranger cocktails.  Properly stored,  an open bottle of olive oil will last from 2 to 4 months, but be aware that the flavor degrades and fades as it ages. Use it or lose it.

A general rule of thumb is to buy what you can use in a two month period. Use industrial grade extra virgin olive oil for cooking and save the good quality artisinal olive oil for finishing or for when you want to truly experience the unique flavor of that oil. For the good stuff, I only use it for finishing, never with heat.

Vicopisanolio is available at Gustiamo.com and is part of the Pantry Basket that provides essential ingredients for the recipes in Cooking Simply: The Italian Way! Buon’appetito.