Finalmente!

Obama won! For the first time I feel actually happy to be in the US also from a political point of view. Of course, the contrary would have been crazy - however, what happened is not just relieving: it's actually an event of historical proportions! And so many people felt the same way on Tuesday: for the first time I saw Americans flooding the streets! I thought it would never happen. :) Melynda and I left home after Obama's speech and went down Sproul Plaza (the most famous plaza on campus, where a lot of the parades took place in the Sixties). It was full of students, cheering and screaming! Then, at some point, a spontaneous march started going down Telegraph. I had never thought to see something like this.
I don't know how many we were, but it was a lot! The traffic was all blocked, and people who were stuck in the cars just decided to roll down their windows and unite their voices to ours. :)
We walked a few blocks and then went around and back on campus, to the Campanile, the symbol of the University, where we celebrated. Then a smaller group of people decided to go to the Chancellor's house (he lives on Campus). The students marched towards his house and asked for a speech! I'm not exactly sure why they decided to do that. I guess it was just the excitement of the moment, and the desire to declare this joy 'formally'. The Chancellor came out of his house after a few minutes (as I found out later, he was actually sleeping :) ). He said a few words of congratulations and happiness, and then everybody left.

It was a remarkable experience. Hopefully people will remain this engaged for a while. I am looking forward to see how the politics of this country will change.

To finish this post, I'll put a few more funny pictures: these are Melynda and I walking at the march on Telegraph (Melynda took the picture :) ).
And here it's me with Obama!
We're at 'Au Coquelet', one of the few places serving food after 11 pm in Berkeley. Melynda and I went there after the Chancellor's speech, and that's where we met him. :)

Cena piemontese

Tonight I have a little time to blog, finally. So after the pear cake, here is a post about a dinner party I threw a really really long time ago. It was a very nice one, in theme 'Piemontese cuisine', featuring homemade tajarin, rabbit 'al civet', and chocolate/amaretti-filled peaches. Many untranslatable words! So read more to find out what these things are. :)
(here you can see me cooking the sauce for the tajarin: my idea is to host more of these dinner parties in theme with a regional or national cuisine, and take pictures of each master chef. :) )
Tajarin
(this and most of the other pictures are Alice's courtesy!)
Tajarin (pronounciation 'taayareen') is a piemontese version of 'tagliatelle', which I believe everybody is more familiar with. The main difference is that tajarin have to be hand-cut. To make them, prepare a dough which is extremely similar to that of tagliatelle (except for the fact that you use more eggs/pound of flour: in particular, to make this, use 9 eggs and 2 egg yolks every two pounds of flour). Then, after you roll the dough very thin using a pasta machine, you have to flour it and cut it with a sharp knife: roll it up, and cut thin slices of it! Here you can see Matt's expert cutting hand.
We made a humongous amount of tajarin..
But they were ALL GONE very quickly! I served them with two sauces: one was mushrooms and parsley (simply sauteed with olive oil, garlic, and white wine towards the end: really easy and wonderfully delicious), and another was the simple and wonderful butter and sage (just melt some butter in a pot, and add a few leaves of sage to it. Serve with parmesan cheese grated on top). They were both really good.

NB: making tajarin for a large number of people is an effort that should be undertaken only with the help of many friends! This makes the process of pasta-making actually fun, whereas I don't think I would enjoy it as much if I had to do the whole thing by myself..

Coniglio al civet / Rabbit 'al civet'
As you know, I almost never cook meat. This was a special occasion. I really wanted to make rabbit for some of my Italian friends who were really happy about the idea. I bought the rabbit at the Berkeley Bowl, and it was delicious. In Piemonte, rabbit is a common dish. My grandma made it a lot, because she used to raise rabbits. So I still remember her really good 'coniglio al civet', which I tried to reproduce. Here is the recipe, if you want to try it:

Cut the rabbit into pieces and put it to marinate in one quart of red wine, with a stick of cinnamon, a few cloves, four garlic cloves, 2 onions, 8 juniper berries and a tad of marjoram. Marinate for at least 24h, then remove. In a pot, saute in butter one finely cut onion, two carrots cut into pieces, and some rosemary. After ~2 minutes, add the rabbit, salt, and some leaves of sage and bay. Saute the rabbit for ~5 minutes, turning the pieces, then add some red wine, enough to cover it. Cook it for ~40 minutes, making sure it's always covered in wine. Then let the wine evaporate and serve!

[Later addition: this recipe comes out quite well with chicken instead of rabbit, too. Just skin the chicken before marinating it. Also, I tried it again with my mom's trick, which is to reserve the marinate after you remove the meat from it, blend it, and add it to the meat pieces while they simmer. You'll have to add less wine to cover the meat and the result will be even more tasty!]

It's a delight. I served it together with some more carrots, cut into small pieces and sauteed in butter, served with parmesan grated on top, which is the way my grandma used to make her carrots. I strongly recommend trying this rabbit dish, if you're not vegetarian. The only problem I had with it was to cut the rabbit into pieces. It was really impressive for me, since I don't usually deal with meat.. Rather hypocritical since I eat meat from time to time.

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the peaches before they were all gone. They were also wonderful, but I will post the recipe when I can find some good peaches again. Which unfortunately will mean next year!

So this is it for the Piemontese dinner. Here is a picture of almost everybody who was at the dinner:
As you can see, we were all in the kitchen, making food altogether, chatting and drinking before sitting down. This is what I love about throwing a dinner party with friends: being together and enjoying each other's company. I love to see everybody having a good time. There will be more 'regional/national' dinner parties to come!

Torta di pere

Hrm - I'm late on my own event, as usual. :(
Well, sorry everybody, and this also means that whoever still wants to publish a recipe focused on pears, they can still submit their entry for this month 'Fresh Produce of the Month' event! I think I'll have time to put together the roundup this coming weekend.
So, here is my own entry: it's a pear cake that I made for the first time a few years ago, with a recipe given by my aunt Mariarosa. It's a very healthy cake, that contains no butter at all. I love it, and it's perfect for this season! The recipe was sent electronically to me by my mom, whom I thank very much. I'll copy down here her version, which accounts for an Italian translation. However, if you can read Italian, you'll realize what really this recipe is: just a theme over which one can improvise.. the oven temperature is not told, nor is the baking time.. and considering I don't have a scale, the weight of the pears I used was not controlled either. The English version that I'm writing down is more precise - however, don't be too worried. It works most likely with many other combinations. :) For example, I actually used nutmeg instead of cinnamon powder. I liked the substitution, although my mom thought it was a crazy idea, when I told her. :)

As a final note: I served this cake with a scoop of ice cream. The first night it was vanilla ice cream. The second night there were two slices left. My friend Anders and I made a rum and raisin ice cream which was just amazingly good with this cake. :) - I'll give the ice cream recipe in another post.

Torta di pere di zia Mariarosa / Aunt Mariarosa's pear cake

Ingredients
1+1/4 cup of flour
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup milk
2 pounds pears (long and hard)
1 egg + 1 yolk
2 tsp baking powder
grated zest of half a lemon
2 tsp cinnamon powder
1/2 tsp salt

Procedure:
Beat 1/2 cup sugar with the eggs. Add lemon zest, milk, and slowly, the flour previously mixed with baking powder and salt. Pour the dough in a baking pan.
On top, add the pears, cut in thin long slices. Don't worry: it will look like you have a humongous amount of pears on top. That's how it's supposed to be. On top, add the rest of the sugar mixed with cinnamon powder. Bake at 350C for ~45 min.



Versione Italiana:
---------------------
150 gr farina
200g zucchero
mezzo bicchiere di latte
1 kg pere (lunghe e dure, tipo Kaiser)
1 uovo intero + 1 tuorlo
1 bustina lievito
buccia grattugiata di mezzo limone
2 cucchiaini di cannella in polvere
1 pizzico di sale

Sbattere 100 gr di zucchero con uova e buccia di limone, aggingere il latte e poi unire poco per volta la farina mescolata con il lievito e il sale .
Stendere la pasta in una teglia (meglio se rettangolare), disporre sopra le pere (meglio se non sbucciate e tagliate a fettine verticali): cospargere il tutto con 100 gr di zucchero mescolato con la cannella.
Infornare a fuoco moderato (non so per quanto, vedi tu). **Direi circa 180C, per circa 45 min** (commento dell'editrice :) )
-------------------------------