An Italian in the US: February 2007

Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Thursday, February 08, 2007

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Ricette Piemontesi / Piemontese recipes

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

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Weekend Coobook Challenge Roundup

Sunday, February 04, 2007

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Sformato di spinaci e dolce di ricotta

I mentioned I tried a few recipes from 'Cucina di tradizione del Piemonte n.2' for the weekend cookbook challenge. So I took the occasion of a Sunday get-together with many friends to prepare two more recipes taken from that book: a spinach 'sformato' (sformato is something that you bake and it's not sweet, and has some sort of self sustaining shape (forma=shape, in Italian) and a ricotta dessert.

Sformato di spinaci / Spinach sformato

1 lb spinach
1/2 lb besciamella
2 tbsp grated parmigiano
2 tbsp salt
4 eggs
Prepare a spinach puree: boil the spinach, puree them, and mix the besciamella with them. Besciamella is the white sauce I already gave the recipe for here. Add the parmigiano, salt, and the eggs, beaten. Pour in a buttered and floured pan and cook in the oven in a double boiler at 350 F for ~45 min (until a knife comes out dry from it). When cold you can 'sformarlo' (take it out of its baking pan) on a serving dish. Serve it warm. It's really good! I'd suggest it also for people who don't usually like vegetables very much.

If you 'read more' you'll find the ricotta dessert.

Dolce di ricotta / Ricotta dessert / Torta 'd seirass (Piemontese!)

I was quite curious about how this dessert would come out. Even if it's in this traditional Piemontese cookbook, I never had it before.
8 eggs
1/2 lb ricotta
1/2 lb powder sugar
rum
1 1/2 cup almond flour
1 3/4 cup butter
Separate the yolks from the eggs. Beat the yolks with the sugar, add the ricotta, the butter, softened, and the almond flour. Beat the whites till stiff and mix together with the other ingriedents. Pour some rum in the serving pan, and the mixture of all the ingredients on top. Refrigerate for at least two hours before serving.

It turned out to have a good flavor but a funny consistency. I refrigerated it for ~6 hours, and it was half kind of solid and half liquid (the bottom part). So we when served it, in cups, it was a little bit like an 'ile flotant'. I must admit that I cut quite a bit on the butter, and most of all, the recipe didn't specify how much rum to put - and since I like it, I may have put too much (~1/2 cup?).. this was probably the reason for the fact that not all the dessert was dense.. but the taste was very good. A friend of mine added some coffee liquor to it, and it was a nice idea too :)

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Torta di mele con zabaione

The 'Weekend cookbook challenge' theme this month is to make a recipe from the newest cookbook we received. Last time I went to Italy, my father gave me two really interesting cookbooks, both about Piemontese cuisine. So I decided I will try to make a few recipes from one of them, which is called 'Cucina di tradizione del Piemonte 2, secondo ricettario a fumetti' ('Traditional Piemontese cuisine n.2, second cooking book - comic stripes'). It's the continuation of that book of Piemontese cuisine that I took so many wonderful recipes from.. And it's made in a comic strip format. For example:Isn't it cute?!?! Doesn't it make you want to try the recipe!??
So I decided that in order to welcome Lucas coming to visit me this week, I would make a nice cake for him, and I chose the apple cake that's described above. English version with pictures follow. It turned out to be the best apple cake I ever had..

Torta di mele servita con zabaione / Apple cake served with zabaione cream
Ingredients (btw: my cake was made with only 3/4 of these doses and 1/2 of the butter):
4 eggs
3/4 cups + 2 tbsp sugar
1 tsp vanilla flavor
2 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 sticks of butter
2 lb apples (if you find the 'rusty' ones that's the best)
Soften the butter, by leaving it out of the fridge for a while. Peel and cut the apples. Beat the eggs in a bowl and add slowly the sugar, keep beating. Add vanilla, flour (previously mixed with baking powder), and butter. Add the apples to this batter. Butter and flour a pan, flatten the cake dough with your fingers, and sprinkle with sugar. Bake at 330 F for 40 minutes.
When I made it I was very curious to see how it would come out, because it's a really 'dense' batter (you can see that there's no milk or other liquid except than the yolks). But after you make it, it turns out to be the softest cake ever!

At the end, the recipe suggests to serve it warm together with zabaione. This was the real reason why I wanter to try the recipe, because I just had zabaione in Turin and I loved it so much.

Zabaione
It's a traditional torinese cream, served warm or cold, usually with small cookies to dip into. It's made of eggs, sugar, and an alcoholic beverage. The traditional one is made with Marsala (a liquor-like white wine, very strong). Otherwise you can use another strong white wine, or I just found out (in this same cookbook) that you can use even red wines.
The apple cake recipe suggested to serve with 'zabaione al moscato', so I prepared the zabaione with moscato d'Asti, a white sparkling delicious wine from Piemonte (which I found here in Harris Teeter).
To make it, for example for 2 people, mix very well 2 egg yolks and 2 tbsp sugar. Put on the stove, and cook at _very_ low power until you have a smooth cream. You can use a double boiler if you you want to be sure not to burn it. Add slowly 1/4 cup wine, and keep mixing and slowly cooking, until the cream is smooth, dense, and kind of fluffy. If you're using the double boiler, the water in it shouldn't boil.
It's absolutely delicious.

Friday, February 02, 2007

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Il farmers market non smette mai di stupirmi

Raleigh Farmers' market can always surprise me. Last Saturday I was so amazed when I saw this:
Orange and purple cauliflowers!!!!! I never ever saw anything like that in my life so I couldn't avoid buying them.
Here is a zoom-in on the flowers:
The guy at the market suggested either eating them raw or steaming them if I didn't want them to lose their color. So I tried them both raw and steamed, and I made some quite colorful salads with them which you can look at if you 'read more'.
As for the taste, to be really honest, they didn't taste like much. When I tried them with my American friends, they told me that they tasted like normal cauliflower does. This is pretty sad: in Italy, cauliflower has a strong taste, and I don't understand why American cauliflower shouldn't taste like much.
As for the color: I found out that these colored cauliflower are well-known, they have more nutrients than regular white cauliflower, and actually, the purple one is supposed to be original from Souther Italy! You can read a lot about it on Wikipedia.

This is an example of basically the same salad that I made, just two different styles of presentation (I like them both).
Insalata di quinoa e cavolfiori colorati /Quinoa and colored cauliflower salad

I steamed the cauliflowers for ~20 minutes, and at the same time, cooked some quinoa. This is the first time I made quinoa in a while, and I never talked about it on this blog. Quinoa is a 'wonder-grain': you can prepare it and eat it like rice, but it has a lot more proteins than normal rice. It has also a specific taste, which I like very much. So, this time, I mixed 2 cups of quinoa and 4 cups of water, added some salt, and brought to boil, and let cooked (covered) until the water was adsorbed (~20 min). You should rinse the quinoa before cooking it, because it releases a soapy liquid that's a bit bitter (I forgot to do it but I still liked it a lot). To complete the salad, I added tomatoes, and seasoned with olive oil, garlic and parsley, to eat cold (first version), or I warmed it up, added just olive oil, salt and pepper, and some cottage cheese (second version).

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Cena di donne italiane - a casa mia!

This month I decided that our Italian women dinner would be a little different. Instead of going to the restaurant, I wanted to host the dinner at my place, and I asked everyone to bring a dish typical of their region, or some wine in case they didn't like to cook.
I already mentioned how varied Italian cuisine is, and so, I though it would have been a pretty nice experience for all of us! In fact, it turned out to be a very good and fun dinner.. and we had plenty of wine :) :) :)
This is a picture of all the people who attended, and if you read more you can have a look at our menu.
Left to right, top to bottom: Marta, Angela, Danila, Giovanna, Ross, Cindy (top); Donnaliz, Julie, Ross, Antonella (bottom).

Appetizers
French cheese and crackers
Eh-ehm - this was brought by Antonella.. not really typical of Rome.. but this diversion was very appreciated :)
San Francisco salad
One of our friends is American, from San Francisco - our group welcomes anyone who speaks Italian, and so we have a few people who are either married to Italians, or lived in Italy for a while, without being born there. So, the San Francisco salad was a mixture of green, boiled shrimp, avocado with a 'Thousand Islands' sauce, and Cindy also brought the typical bread from San Francisco, i.e. sourdough.
Peperoni con la bagna cauda
This is a real Italian dish, and to be more precise, it's a Piemontese dish! So it comes from my same region, but it wasn't made by me. Luisa prepared it and it was delicious. It's roasted peppers served with a sauce made with a lot of garlic, anchovies and olive oil, which has boiled for a long time, until everything is dissolved like a delicate mousse. I love it. :)
Entrees
Risotto alla Milanese
This was made by Ross. It's 'rice Milano style'. It's basically just rice, saffron, butter and parmisan. I'm not sure if it's baked, and not only cooked in a pan like a usual risotto.
Melanzane alla parmigiana
I must have had already quite a lot of all the wine, at this point, considering how bad of a picture I took :)
Anyway, these are 'eggplants parmigiana style', and are typical from Sicily. They were made by Maia, and they were delicious. She explained to us that she sliced the eggplants, put some salt on them for ~30 min to remove the bitterness, rinsed them, then fried them in olive oil. Then, she made different layers of eggplants, tomato sauce, parmigiano cheese, ending with parmigiano as the last layer, and she passed them in the oven for a few minutes to make the cheese melt. They were really good!
Desserts
Dulce de tres leches and Bunet
'Dulce de tres leches' (on the left) is a typical South american/Mexican dessert, and it was brought by Julie. It was really good. The name means 'cake of the three milks', due to the fact that you use three kinds of milk to soak it into (condensed, evaporated and cream). It's a soft and sweet dessert, which I already tried in the Mexican version made by Luisa, and it's really good. 'Bunet' (on the right) was the Piemontese chocolate/amaretti pudding that I already gave the recipe for - I made it, and I was pretty happy of how nicely it layered. I also made some of my good biova bread to go with the dinner.. and the two big loaves were all gone in the end!!