Aroma Cucina

Pork Bolognese Sauce

My latest obsession: making bolognese sauce with pork sausage meat. Swap out the ground beef for pork and it's a whole new world.  I use my basic bologenese style recipe and the only other addition is a stalk of dried fennel weed which you know is one of my other obsessions. If you don't have whole stalks of fennel at your disposal, add fennel seed and consider planting fennel in the garden next season. Go for a big hearty red wine and if you are tapping into your Italian 'contadini' roots, serve the wine in an old juice glass, and laugh a lot while you are eating. Buon'appetito!

Basic Bolognese: Gently saute' chopped carrots, celery, onions.  Add the meat, chopping up the chunks with your wooden spoon. Then add a good glug of milk and let that simmer.  Now add a good glug of wine and let that simmer. Add some chopped garlic, throw in the fennel weed, add pureed tomatoes, turn down the heat and let simmer for a couple of hours or until the smell drives you insane and you just have to eat it!

Foodbuzz 24x24: 25K Umbrian Challenge

“Come over for dinner on Saturday night.” It wasn’t hard to round up a bunch of food loving friends to come to dinner. It certainly isn’t hard to find food loving friends in Italy. It’s a bit of challenge, but not that hard, to source a dinner within a 25 kilometer radius from our house in the medieval village of Montone in Umbria. What turned out to be the unexpected challenge was the look on our guest’s faces when we told them we were cooking local and Umbrian. That’s all we ever eat is local and Umbrian! It’s as if we were living in the States and I called everyone over for a big dinner and served....hamburgers and hot dogs. Good stuff, but hardly worth making a big fuss over.

A bit of background: the fantastic website Foodbuzz, has a monthly 24x24 blogging event and this dinner,  sponsored by Electrolux, is part of the September 24x24 event. It’s also an event to raise ovarian cancer awareness. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been touched by cancer. I’m a breast cancer survivor, I have family and friends who are fighting the battle right now. So, ladies, do your thing, be pro-active, and take good care of yourself.

Here’s the menu, along with the backstory on how this all came together. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as we did the foraging, the cooking and the eating.
Montone is a hilltop village, so everything is down the hill from us, to help orient you, click here.

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Il Menu`
Aperitivo sullo Tetto - Cocktails on our Rooftop Terrace
Selezione di formaggio di pecora, salumi e olive
Selection of sheep cheeses, salumi and olives
Wine: Decugnano  dei Barbi Spumante, Brut 2004

The original plan was to serve our neighbor Alberto’s home made spumante or sparkling wine, but as the guest list grew, and we only had one bottle of Alberto’s hooch, we needed to head out in search of Spumante. That meant a trip to the Blasi vineyard in nearby San Benedetto, but they didn’t have any. Emergenzia! A quick stop, in Umbertide at Enoteca di Mario Migliorati  (wine shop) and they turned us on to Decugnano’s spumante. It’s made in the classic methode champenoise way,  meaning the bottles are inverted and rotated a quarter turn every day.  This also means we went outside of the 25K range, but at least we stayed in Umbria.

Cheeses should have been easy. Our Sardinian sheep farming friends, the Monni’s, live just below Montone and they make excellent cheese.  So we went down to their house, and after much chatting and gossiping, we found out their cupboards were bare! This time of year, the sheep are pregnant so there is no fresh cheese production and Francesco was down in Umbertide at a festival, and he had all  the aged cheeses. 
So, it was off to Umbertide  where we found Francesco and we tasted and bought a soft, fresh pecorino, a sharp tangy pecorino that we would serve with honey from our neighbors and another pecorino that had been aged in walnut leaves. We also bought a super aged ricotta cheese that Francesco said was good for grating. Between us, I think this was either an experiment or he misplaced and forgot about this ricotta and then figured out he was onto something.

I already had a stash of salumi on hand, so that part was easy. Dry, cured salumi or salami is practically it’s own food group in Umbria. Maybe it’s closer to a religion, but everyone either makes their own, or knows someone who does. Recipes are closely guarded secrets, there are long discussions about the type of mold so-and-so grows, or humidity levels or whatever else could possibly affect the flavor. Salumi is such a part of life here, the Umbrian town of Norcia is literally synonymous with  salumi: a ‘norciaria’ in any part of Italy means a salumi store.

Home brined olives were the last item on the antipasto menu and I have a confession. The olives I made last season? Well, they tasted really bad...bitter, soft and mushy.  So I snuck in some home brined olives that we picked up in Puglia.

Everything was assembled, the guests were arriving and it was time for this dinner to begin.
The sun was setting as we all gathered on the roof, corks began popping and nibbles were nibbled.

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Primo - First Course
Maltagliata di basilico con pesto di basilico e noci
Basil flecked maltagliata pasta with basil and walnut pesto
Wine: Blasi, Rogaie, 2007

First a call to Bruce, “Come to dinner, but I need eggs.”  Bruce has these lovely red headed ‘ladies’ who happily produce some of the best eggs I’ve ever tasted. When the eggs showed up, it was time to make the pasta. I’m happy to report that even the flour is local. We live in a wheat growing area and the mulino or mill is outside of Umbertide, so that met the challenge.

Maltagliata means badly cut, or irregularly shaped pasta and it’s great to make when time is short. I added chopped basil to the pasta, just to give it a little color.  Just like you would with any fresh pasta, I used a 2:1 ratio. Two parts flour to one part liquid, or in this case, the liquid was eggs from Bruce’s ladies.
I make my pasta by hand, no machines involved.
Here is how I do it:
Make a well with the flour, incorporate the eggs, add a sprinkle of salt and knead until you have a smooth, elastic dough. Then tightly wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for about 20 minutes. This resting time, and the compression from the plastic wrap aids in the hydration of the flour and in developing the gluten network so you can roll out or extend the pasta.
When it came time to roll the dough, I added a small sprinkle of chopped basil to each batch of pasta. Then into the freezer. All ready for Saturday’s dinner.

Making the pesto sauce was the easy part.
Basil: Massive quantities from our garden
Walnuts: The last stash from last year’s walnut harvest
Olive Oil: Local, of course
Pecorino Cheese: from the Monni’s sheep
Garlic: from the farmer’s market. Next year we’re growing our own.
It all went into the blender and was ready to go.

Slowly people wandered down from the roof and we gathered at the kitchen table.

When we served the pasta, I topped it with a few scrapes of that super funky aged ricotta. Now, if the serving bowl is licked clean, the natural assumption is that it must have been good, but, before I get too swell headed, I have to remember who was at the table: Gianni. He can eat more pasta than any human being I’ve ever met, so a clean bowl probably just meant that Gianni was on cleanup.
We poured the Blasi Rogaie 2007 with this course and that turned out to be an excellent choice.  A chardonnay, Riesling and trebbiano blend, the minerality and acid were a good compliment to the lushness of the basil pasta.

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Secondo - Main Course
Grigliata Misto or Mixed Grill
Patate Arrosto - Roast Potatoes
Melanzanie Arrosto con Due Salse - Roast Eggplant with two sauces
Pomodrio Arrosto - Roasted Tomatoes

Mixed grill in Umbria doesn’t mean different types of meat grilled on an open fire, it just means you are grilling different cuts of pork. Pork is king!  Our favorite butcher hooked me up with capocollo (shoulder cut), costine (ribs), pancetta (belly), sausage (Hello! No grill is complete without sausage.) and I snuck in some chicken just because I was feeling rebellious.

One secret to a good grill is high heat, another is to grill over wood. It makes all the difference in the flavor, but you know I’ve been on that soapbox before.  A few hours before dinner, I gathered up a basket of herbs from the orto to prep the meat. Each cust was seasoned with a different herb: the capocollo slices were layered with rosemary, the pancetta with sage, the sausage with fennel fronds and the ribs and chicken got a bit of everything.

The vegetables were more problematic. We had an unusually cold, wet, long spring, followed by a few weeks of high heat, then back to cool weather. Our garden, or orto, has had a rough year. The yield is way off, even the prolific cherry tomatoes are sparse. The zucchini have literally stopped growing. I had my eye on one zucchini, waiting for it to grow, figuring it would be prime for dinner, but it just never grew. I picked it on Saturday, out of desperation and it was soggy and mushy and inedible. OK. Plan B: eggplant. One plant has 5 eggplants hanging from it, but they had stopped growing as well. The other eggplant plant is barren, it produced one lone fruit early in the season and that was it.  We’ve been hearing that everyone else is having a rough year in the orto, it’s not just us, which should make us feel better, but it  doesn’t.  As I harvested what I could, I had a long discussion with all the plants telling them to get it together because it’s already September and even colder weather is coming. I’m not sure it will make a difference.

Prepped and ready, the vegetables were in the oven and ready to be served just as we were pulling the last bits of meat off the grill. The roasted eggplant, was served with two sauces: parsley/mint and tomato/chili pepper. And there is no need to discuss the traitorous natural yeast mother that failed to perform up to par.

By this time, the noise level in the kitchen was high, conversations gliding from Italian to English and back to Italian. Dishes and glasses were piling up everywhere and it was a full blown festa in the kitchen!

Wine: Polidori, Rubino 2001 and Blasi, Regghia, 2008

Polidori is on the far side of Umbertide and he’s our” house wine” supplier. The affable Amerigo runs an organic vineyard and his ‘sfuso’ or bulk wine is delicious.  In Italy, or at least rural Italy, it’s common to go to the vineyard with large jugs that get filled directly from the tanks, then you go home and bottle and cork the wine. I wish this could happen in the US, it’s certainly cheaper and all the bottles are reused instead of recycled. Maybe someday.  Amerigo also has a stash of the ‘good stuff’, and that’s his Rubino. He only makes it when he has a particularly good crop of grapes and it’s primarily a blend of Sangiovese and Merlot. It’s perfect with grilled meats.

The other wine we sampled was Blasi’s Regghia which is mostly Sangiovese, with some Merlot and a touch of Alicante. It’s a lighter bodied wine than the Rubino, but full enough to pair very well with the meat.

The wine was flowing, everyone was switching seats, Paul was dancing but no one was paying him any attention, the fire had died down and it was time for dolce or dessert.

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Dolce
Panna Cotta di Miiele con Pesconoce Flambe - Honeyed Panna Cotta with Nectarines Flambe`
AND The First Fresh Figs of the Season!

Instead of sugar, I used honey to sweeten the panna cotta because, well because I have a ton of honey in the cupboard.  There is a lively honey industry around here and everyone brings me jars of honey. I’m not complaining, I’m just saying I have a lot of it on hand.
The nectarines? Well, they were a disappointment. We have a peach and nectarine orchard right below Montone, and everyone waits until he puts up the “Pesche” or “Peaches” sign because then we know it’s finally peach season. The farmer is old, and his dog is twice as old, but his peaches are fresh and young. His peaches are the essence of summer, the juice running down your arm kinda good. We went down, and as it’s the tail end of the season, all he had left were the pesconoce, which he assured us were divine. He lied! Rock hard and tasteless.  The only way I could serve these nectarines was to first poach them in spiced wine and then set them on fire. And they were just fine, served hot on top of the cool panna cotta.
The figs needed nothing. Just sliced open and served on a plate. I’m sooooo happy it’s fig season!

Wine:  Polidori Passito, 1998 and Blasi “Mamma Mia”
The Polidori tasted like a vintage sherry and some of us liked it, and some of us didn’t. The MammaMia is a classic, sweet dessert wine and worked really well with a mouthful of fresh fig.

By now, we were into the very wee hours of the morning and things were starting to quiet down, when Gianni brought out his guitar and sang the blues.  Now, that was a treat!  A round of coffees, a round of fair wells and there was nothing but the dishes to clean up.
Many, many thanks to Foodbuzz for their generosity and to Electrolux. We had a fine time, with good friends, good food and good wine. We are truly blessed with abundance in this little corner of the world, and eating local isn’t really a challenge, it’s a privilege.  I know I have it good, living La Vida Locale.

Barely Heat Kissed

The orto, our garden, is producing and life is good. Our store-bought produce has dwindled to lemons and oranges. If we could figure out a way to bring  lemon or better yet, lime trees, inside for the winter, then life would be just about perfect. Most people around here have lemon trees in large pots that they bring inside for the winter, but with our nomadic lifestyle, that won’t work.

I like to play with fire, so after harvesting some ripe tomatoes and a fistful of basil,  I decided to experiment with adding just a kiss of heat to two different dishes.  Just a bacio of heat to soften up the tomato sauce, and another kiss to add a warm parmigiana crust to a fresh tomato salad, why didn’t I try this sooner?

Spaghetti d’Estate
Summer Spaghetti

5 plum tomatoes, chopped
1 large handful of fresh basil leaves
1 small red onion, or sweet white onion, thinly sliced
2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
1 handful of small olives
Cheese for grating
Olive oil
500g pasta/serves 2

Put your pasta water on to boil. Choose a fine spaghetti like angel hair, spaghettini, or vermicelli.
Finely chop the basil and place in a bowl large enough to hold the cooked pasta. Chop the tomatoes and set aside in small bowl.
While the pasta water is coming to a boil, gently heat the sliced onion and garlic in a few tablespoons of olive oil. Turn the pan off if you hear the faintest sound of a sizzle, you want to wilt the garlic and onions, make them loose their crunchy rawness, but that’s all.

When the pasta is done, before you drain it, take about 1/2 cup of the pasta water and add it to the basil/oil mixture. Now drain the pasta and toss with the basil oil. Plate the pasta in a big bowl. Turn the heat back on and warm up the onion/garlic mixture, add the tomatoes and olives and toss until the tomatoes are just warm...about 30 seconds.  If you are using an electric stove, preheat the coil so when the pan is put on there is quick heat.
Add the warmed tomato sauce to the basil pasta and serve with a soft, quick melting cheese. In Umbria, I use ‘caciotta’ which is a fresh cheese made from sheep and cow milk. Try to find a soft, fresh cheese, not too aggressively flavored, or else use just a fine mist of freshly grated parmigiana.

Jeff wanted to know why the pasta felt so ‘velvety’ in his mouth. The secret is that bit of pasta water added to the basil oil and left to sit for a few moments while you heat kiss the tomatoes and olives. Don’t skip this step, ok?

Heat Kissed Tomato Salad
1 gorgeous tomato
Freshly grated parmigiana
Oregano, Olive Oil, Salt, Pepper

Turn on your broiler to its highest setting, and move the oven rack up as close as you can.

Now, slice and arrange that gorgeous tomato in a heat proof dish. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and oregano. Add a little drizzle of olive oil.
Generously grate the parmigiana over the tomatoes, making sure to cover all of the exposed tomatoes.

Place in the broiler and remove as SOON as it melts! In my oven, it took under 30 seconds.   The bottom of the dish wasn’t even warm, and it was out of the heat, making a crispy cheesy veil over the barely warmed tomatoes. It was almost as if the tomatoes were only sun warmed from the garden.

Add another tiny drizzle of olive oil and enjoy! A crust of bread to sop up the tomato juices would be a fine thing.

Tomatoes in August are a reason to live.

First Pesto of the Season

  Necessity, is without a doubt,  the mother of invention. Hunger amps necessity Especially at lunchtime.

So, the story goes like this. It’s about noon when I feel the first hunger rumble. I need to be fed regularly, it’s just the way I’m wired.  I’ve been on a grocery store strike, because I hate going to the grocery story. But the cupboard is getting bare so I’m going to have to knuckle down very soon. I tell Jeff we have no pasta for lunch. He starts to whimper.
It just breaks my heart when he whimpers like that.

I go downstairs and make some fresh pasta. It’s not so crazy: flour, eggs, knead, stretch  the pasta, cut it, done. Pasta for two: come on, no biggie.

The pasta water goes on the stove to boil, I run over to the orto and harvest the first of our basil. Poor basil, it’s had a hard season, too cold, too wet. It never had a chance to grow and now it’s flowering. Completely bypassed adolescence and went right into maturity. I harvest 10 or 12 nice size leaves, and a big chunk of rucola (arugula).  The rucola has gone berserk; you have to hack it off in chunks.

By the time I get back to the kitchen, the water is nearly boiling.  I’m thinking a little pesto would taste nice, and I go to the pine nut jar...and it’s empty. Grrr..... But, what good luck, there are some shelled pistachios! Into the blender: basil, garlic, olive oil, pinch of salt, hunk of cheese and some nuts.

The pasta gets cooked in about 90 seconds, it all gets tossed together with a little chopped tomato and there you have it, a very fresh lunch. Total time to make: 30 minutes. 

So, if you make pesto really fast, is it Presto Pesto? Well, then it would be Presto Pistachio Pesto. Say that 5 times fast...backwards!

Garden Arugula with Gorgonzola

Woo hoo!!! We have our first ‘harvest’ from our orto (vegetable garden). Well, OK, it might be an exaggeration to call it a harvest, but it was a colander full of rucola (or arugula or rocket, everyone calls it something different, depends on where you live).  I think the garden lettuces are doing well enough that we don’t have to buy lettuce anymore. Now that is good news!

The weather has not been kind to us this year, very cool, very rainy, so things are much further behind than they were last year. Nevertheless, it looks like we are getting back on track.

To celebrate our first growth, we made a ‘rucola con Gorgonzola’ sauce for pasta. It’s a classic pairing of the spicy green with Gorgonzola blue cheese.  Quick Gorgonzola lesson: it’s a cow’s milk cheese and it comes in two varieties, sweet/dolce/montagna or piccante. The sweet Gorgonzola is very creamy and mild and works beautifully as a pasta sauce. The piccante version is harder and sharper and works beautifully with a slice of pear and a hearty red wine. This is a great, quick sauce that you can have ready in less time than it takes to cook the pasta.

Rucola con Gorgonzola  

1 hunk of Gorgonzola (say 4-5 oz, or a chunk the size of a deck of cards)

1 finely minced shallot

Pancetta or bacon (optional)

Splash of wine (optional)
Minced pear (optional)
Olive oil (not optional)
1 colander full of fresh rucola

Put your pasta water on to boil…first thing!

Very gently sauté the minced shallot, you don’t want any brownage. If you are using pancetta or bacon, sauté that first, remove from the pan and cook the shallot in the fat from the meat, otherwise use olive oil for the shallot.
If you have a pear on hand, mince that into small pieces and sauté. Remove the bits of pear from the pan and hold for garnishing. Might sound a bit unusual in a pasta sauce, but pear and Gorgonzola is a match made in heaven.  And if you leave it in the pan while you melt the cheese, the pear gets really mushy and sort of disappears into the sauce. Which could be a good thing if you want to sneak  pear into the dish.
Break the Gorgonzola up into small bits and add to the saucepan, stirring frequently.

By now your pasta is nearly done, and all the Gorgonzola is melted.  You’ll need to add a bit of liquid, so you can add a splash of white wine (colored wine will make for a really unhealthy looking grey sauce…it will taste good, but will look very funky. I’m just sayin’….) or you can add a ladle full of the pasta water, or you can add a bit of both. The liquid will make the melted cheese into more of an emulsion, so it will be a sauce and not just a glop of melted cheese.

Strain and drain the pasta, add to the cheese sauce, add the clean and dry rucola and toss well.   If you’d like your rucola to be soft and wilted, and this is a much more traditional Italian way to serve the dish, add the rucola to the warm cheese sauce while it is still on the stove, stir for a minute or so until the rucola wilts, then add to the pasta. I like the rucola to still be crunchy because I like the contrast with the soft pasta, but to each his own. 
Add your crunchy bacon on top, scatter the sautéed pears and feast away.
Try a rose' wine with this pasta. No. Rose' is not a girly man wine. Get over that already!
We didn’t have a pear in the house, but we did have some prosciutto, so Jeff carved off a few slivers and that went on top of our pasta.  It’s good to have some cured pig leg around!

Pasta in Primavera with Asparagus

  

According to that ever-flowing fount of knowledge, also known as Wikipedia, Pasta Primavera is an American-Italian pasta dish invented in 1974 by Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque fame.

I beg to differ.

Pasta Primavera means “pasta in the springtime”, which means vegetables and pasta, and I’m dead certain people have been combining pasta and vegetables since way before Mr. Maccioni was a glimmer in his babo’s eye.  It’s a natural combination this time of year when after a winter of eating roots we can now eat the stuff that grows above ground.

We happened to pick up some gorgeous asparagus in the market this morning, and I had some tomatoes that needed to be eaten, and that’s how our version of “Pasta in Primavera” came to be. Like the carbonara recipe from the other day, its more about the technique and what you have on hand, than it is about being tied to a recipe.

I was wishing we had some spring onions to go with our lunch, but it was just tomatoes and asparagus. 

This is a delicately flavored pasta dish, so the trick here is to concentrate the flavors of the asparagus and tomatoes so that each bite gives you a nice crunchy burst of flavor.

 

Pasta in Primavera con Asparagi and Pomodori Arrosto or

Springtime Pasta with Asparagus and Roasted Tomatoes

For 2

 

8 small tomatoes

2-3 hefty garlic cloves (not the skinny cloves that are in the middle of the head)

1 bunch of crispy fresh asparagus

1 hunk of cheese, like a ricotta salata, or something soft and white and easily meltable

1 more clove of garlic

salt, pepper, olive oil

grated lemon peel

 

Soft, wide, noodle pasta like fettuccine

 

Slice the tomatoes in half, and place in an ovenproof dish, sprinkle with a bit of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Add the 2 large, unpeeled garlic cloves to the dish, and give them a little coating of oil. Place in the oven and roast at 325F/165C for about 20 minutes. If you are just getting home from work, put the tomatoes in the oven, then go change your clothes, walk the dog etc. When you come back into the kitchen it will already smell good and you’ll be in the mood to make dinner.

 

Wash your asparagus, then in one swift, humane motion, cut their heads off.  It’s the same as cutting the tips off, but say you’ve had a bad day at work; it’s so satisfying to just whop the head off of something. Set the tips or heads aside, and then chop the asparagus stems into ¼ to ½” slices. No, put the ruler back in the drawer; just chop into small, bite size pieces.

 

Grate the cheese into a bowl and set aside. If you can’t find ricotta salata, use something else mild and young or you could even use parmigiana if that’s what you have in the house.

Put the pasta water on to boil. Put another small pot of water onto boil because you are going to blanch and shock the asparagus. Unlike “Shock and Awe”, this actually works. The asparagus will turn a bright, beautiful green and stay that way.

As the little pot of water comes to a boil, add a bit of salt and toss in the asparagus tips, let the water come back to a boil, remove the tips and run cold water over them. Set aside. Do the same thing with the chopped asparagus stems (boil for a moment, drain, run cold water over the bits, drain again).

 

In a pan large enough to hold the pasta, add a few tablespoons of olive and the last clove of garlic only this time peel it and crack with your hand. (Lay the garlic clove on the cutting board, press down hard and fast with the heel of your hand, wait to feel the satisfying crack.) When the garlic clove starts to sizzle in the pan, add the asparagus tips and gently sauté for 2-3 minutes. Remove and keep warm (that just means put them in the oven with the roasted tomatoes).  By now, the pasta water has boiled, you are cooking your  pasta and its about 2 minutes away from being  done.

Sauté the chopped asparagus, just like you did with the tips, only leave them in the pan. Take a small ladle full of the pasta water and add it to the chopped asparagus.

Drain the pasta and add it to the asparagus, and add the cheese. Remove the roasted garlic from the tomatoes, slip the skins off and mush the soft garlic into the pasta. Now toss everything together.

Arrange the tips on a plate, add the pasta, and decorate the dish with the roasted tomatoes, pouring any extra tomato juice onto the pasta. Grate a little lemon peel over the whole thing. Stand back; admire your design, add a few grinds of fresh pepper and then eat!

Pasta in the springtime!

 

Carbonara Secrets Revealed

Spaghetti alla carbonara is the pasta you make when all you have in the house is pasta, cheese, an onion and an egg and maybe some bacon or pancetta. It's the back up plan, easy way out, in a pinch, gotta eat now sort of dish you should know about.  Take note, it does not include cream which is an American-Italian variation that is best forgotten.

Pasta Carbonara
Ingredients for 2
225g/8 oz/ or about a half a pack of spaghetti or fettuccine (which is a traditionalist's no-no, but I like it)
2 strips of chopped bacon strips, or 1T of chopped pancetta
1 minced shallot, or 2T of minced onion
1/2 cup of grated parmigiana or pecorino or asiago cheese

1 fresh egg

Variations on the theme: This is more of a technique than a recipe, meaning, the ingredients are flexible, but the process is always the same.
If you have pecorino or sheep cheese, that's cool, you have asiago, that's cool. You want a hard dry cheese, not a soft stringy one like Swiss cheese or Gruyere. Freshly grated is always better.  This means you dig the grater out of the cabinet and rub the cheese on it. It's 45 seconds worth of labor and you worked in a bit of upper body exercise. Stop buying the pre-grated stuff, it’s full of additives to keep it from clumping and drying out and there is added filler so you don't get just cheese. Pre-packaged grated cheese is nasty stuff, so unless you find something that is 100% cheese, stay away from little green canisters of cheese-like product.
Peas are good, fresh or frozen. I'm not a fresh, local, organic saint, I'm just being practical, frozen peas aren't so bad.
Fave beans are good.
Asparagus would be good.

Get your salted pasta water boiling.
Prep the onions and pancetta. Grate the cheese into a bowl.
Set the egg out on the counter to warm up a little.
Set the table, have a glass of wine, get out of your work clothes, make a salad. You've got some time to fool around as the pasta water comes to a boil.
Put the pasta into the boiling water and assuming it takes 10 minutes to cook (look on the spaghetti package, it will tell you how long to cook it).
Sauté your pancetta or bacon, then add the onion and let it soften but not brown.
If you are adding peas, or another vegetable, cook the vegetable now, but cook it lightly because you want the dish to be fresh and lively, not over cooked and mushy. By the way, canned peas are absolutely forbidden.
OK, your pasta is done, and now you have to pay attention and move quickly.
Drain the pasta and toss into the bowl with the grated cheese.  Add your vegetable. Add the pancetta and onion and mix thoroughly. Now, while its still mad hot and steaming up your glasses, break the raw egg into the pasta. Yes, break the egg into the pasta. This is the creamy secret. Stir very well and quickly.... grate lots of fresh pepper on top and go eat. Told you it was easy!
PS This recipe is for Steve, since you weren't around yesterday at lunchtime. The pasta in the photo had fresh raw peas tossed in at the last second and chopped fresh mint, parsley and basil tossed on top.

 

Springtime is Fava Bean Time

It's fava time in Italy, and pretty much everywhere else in the Northern Hemisphere. Italians are passionate about fave because it means spring has officially arrived when those giant pods show up in the market.

Fave beans. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

I love thee raw.
I love thee in salads.
I love thee paired with soft white cheeses.
I love thee as 'maro'.

And just to clear up any fava - fave confusion: fava is one fava bean, fave (fav-ay) is more than one fava bean. Italian is pluralized with an "i" or "e", depending on whether the noun is feminine or masculine. And there is your Italian lesson for today.

 

I love thee raw.
As I've learned, eating a pile of raw fava beans is an Italian spring tradition. Peel and eat, with a small pile of salt for dipping.

I love thee in salads.
If serving your guests a pile of raw beans pods doesn't make your heart go pitter-pat, try tossing them into a garden salad. 

 

I love thee paired with soft fresh cheeses.
A small pile of warm, peeled fava beans with some melted soft, fresh young cheese is a little pile of spring indulgence.

I love thee as maro`, a type of fava and mint pesto.

Maro, Fava Pesto
1 pound or 1/2 kilo fresh fave beans
1 chunk of pecorino cheese, fairly fresh, not overly aged
4 cloves of garlic
8 mint leaves
Olive oil, salt


Shell the fave beans. This is somewhat labor intensive and has the potential of burning your fingers, but its still worth the trouble.
Bring a medium size pot of water to boil. The pot should be big enough to fit a colander  because you are going to steam the fave in their pods. This makes them easier to shell. Working in small batches, squish the  fave out of its thick pod, then remove the tough outer shell of the fave, leaving only the bright green inner kernel.
If the pods are too long to fit in the colander, snap them in half. 

While you are shelling the fave, place the unpeeled cloves of garlic in a small roasting dish and roast at 325F/165C for about 20 minutes. Which is about how long it takes to shell a pound of fave.

Take your raw fave beans and place them in an overproof dish and toss with olive oil and a sprinkle of salt, let them roast for about 10 minutes.

At this point, you can set the table, slice some prosciutto, take a sip of wine, but don't check your email, because it totally ruins the vibe.

Once the fave have roasted a bit, add them to the blender, with the now peeled roasted garlic cloves, the mint leaves, the pecorino and another glug of olive oil. Puree until smooth. If you are totally feeling the ancient roots vibe of this recipe you could pound the ingredients smooth with a stone mortar and pestle, but I'll let you make the call on that one.


Use a soft egg noodle pasta like fettucine, not a regular spaghetti pasta.. Its a very delicate sauce and it needs the gentler egg pasta and a wider noodle.

Cook your pasta and toss with a few tablespoons of the maro` sauce. Serve with lots of fresh cracked pepper.

A note on the cheese: it's really hard to find fresh, Italian style pecorino in the States.  But an Italian chef friend of ours says that manchego makes a good substitute and its easy to find in the US. The cheese in the photo is an unusual blend of cow, sheep and goat milk and didn't have a name...it was just called 'formaggio per le fave", or cheese for fava beans. Go figure!

In case you have some leftover maro`, you could spread it on a cracker and be very happy munching away on this springy treat.
Or you could try pairing it with baccala, which is what we did the other night. We sauteed a few pieces of baccala, laid it on top of room temperature maro` and finished it with a few fave beans and some lemon zest.  I'm sure this would work well with any other dense meat white fish like fresh cod or halibut.

This is the moment for fresh fave, so what are you waiting for? Add them to your market list and have some fun.

Leftovers: Pasta Bolognese Picante Al Forno con Gorgonzola

  

I dislike leftovers. I don’t like reheating what I ate last night. Generally speaking I don’t take food home from restaurants. If there was food left over, I probably picked out all the good parts, so why would I want to eat the dregs of a doggy bag the next day for lunch? You eat old doggy food from a tin? See, when I put it that, it sounds really yukky, right? Day old salad makes me gag. I’ve seen my sister eat it for breakfast, and I’m still scarred by the vision. 

That being said, during the Great Moving Trauma, it was like a gift from the gods to find something in the freezer that we could eat.  You could even say we discovered greatness on the second from the bottom shelf of the freezer: a clump of Bolognese sauce! One of the advantages of our nomadic lifestyle is that very little accumulates in the fridge or cabinets. The disadvantage is that in times of need, there is literally nothing to eat in the house. We’re talking about finding a box of carbon datable unopened fat free crackers and thinking this might hold us over for a day or so.

Back to the Bolognese: reheated with a good bunch of chili peppers, lapped over some oversize rigatoni pasta and covered in Gorgonzola. Then into the broiler until everything was bubbly.  This just went from being an emergency recycle recipe to something I planning on making the first night around. Besides its so much fun to let the name of the dish roll off your tongue: Pas-tah   Bolo-Nay-Zay   Pee-can-tay  Al Fore-no con  Gor-gone-zola. Now, you speaka like an Italian!

 

One of my more creative ‘ingredient’ recycling inspirations was a small dish of left over cherries from a riff on cherries jubilee. Remember that 1950’s desert? It was the reason your mother had a copper chafing dish, so that once a year you could set the cherries on fire. So cool. I did a warm cherry over ice cream variation the other night, and realized that the cherries, which were only flavored with a bit of Apry Apricot Brandy, would taste just about perfect over seared duck breast. A swirl of mustard and that was all it took to make a perfect sauce. That and a bottle of ’81 Bordeaux. Yes, I’m still gloating over that bottle of wine.

The moral of the story is just because you ate it one way doesn’t mean you can’t mix it up another day. Let your creative mind run free when faced with a small dish of mashed potatoes! What do you do with your leftovers?  Hey, I’m willing to learn to love leftovers. 

Weekend Menu: Tagliatelle ala Bolognese & A Wild Turkey

The dedicated chefs at ItChefs have declared this Sunday, January 17, to be the International Day of Italian Cuisine  and the honored dish this year is tagliatelle al Ragu al Bolognese. One of the missions of the organization is to preserve and uphold the quality of Italian cuisine. Fair enough, although the rest of their mission involves getting paid for their work and was started by an Italian chef in Bali so I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

 

I see their point. Italian food in the States is usually Americanized Italian and a far cry from what is served in Italy. But, in authentic Italian tradition, of course its more complicated than that and as soon as you start to learn about Italian cooking, you begin to realize that the term “Italian cooking” is too generic to mean anything. A few basic things you need to know: Italy didn’t become a unified country until around 1860 and even though they do have a national anthem, they are deeply ambivalent about having a ‘national’ identity.  First you belong to your family, then your town, then your commune, then your region, then Italy, so by the time you get to Italy, you have identify fatigue.  In terms of cooking, it means: you make it like nonna, you share the same soil and weather with your town, you argue about recipes with the neighbors on the next block and all mention of “Italian cuisine” is reserved for the international press.

 

The ItChefs have declared war on “Italian cooking” by trying to raise awareness of the regional differences and they strive for accuracy in terminology.  For example: spaghetti Bolognese, that dish enjoyed everywhere in the world, doesn’t exist in the city of Bologna. That’s because the region is known for fresh egg pasta like tagliatelle and dried spaghetti style pasta is a southern Italy food product. That’s just the noodle and that’s fairly easy to explain. The ragu or sauce is where there are true fighting words. Should the sauce be beef only, just beef flank, can it include pork and do you get drummed out of the corps altogether if you use veal? It took the Accademia della Italiana Cucina 38 years (!!!) to agree on a definition of this dish. I am giving you fair warning, unless you have 38 years to devote to the conversation, be careful about starting any conversation about the authentic version of a treasured recipe because it will be a long night. Over the years, I’ve learned to seal my mouth, look momentarily engaged and then wander off whenever the conversation turns to the ‘right’ way to make a dish. 

 While I applaud their good intentions, it’s like closing the barn door long after the horses have fled. Spaghetti Bolognese is now an international dish with as many variations as a hamburger, so my suggestion is make a pot of tagliatelle or spaghetti this Sunday, and enjoy yourself.

 With the whole delicious weekend in front of us, and Sunday dinner planned, tonight’s mission is to get the brine ready for Saturday night’s wild turkey. I’ll share more of those details once I get a little more intimate with the bird.

 Well, Saturday and Sunday are taken care of, but the more pressing issue of what’s for dinner tonight has yet to be resolved. Happy Weekend!