Cavoli e orsi

Again a long silence from this Italian in the US! Application season has ended, and now seminars-for-job-interviews-preparation season has started! This is obviously a good sign, at least I have some interviews lining up. Combined with the rest of the work that I'm trying to get done, however, this means that my time for blogging has decreased. Moreover, my life has also significantly changed in the past few weeks, in good ways, but this also implies less time for evening blogging.

However, I cannot miss my own initiated event, The Fresh Produce of the Month, this month kindly hosted by Simona at bricole.
Simona chose cabbage as theme, so I'm going to post a recipe involving cabbage in this post. However, in this case, I didn't cook the food I'm going to talk about: in this past few weeks I have been spoiled and haven't cooked basically anything. Nevertheless I have enjoyed nightly delicious meals that I have scrupulously documented with an abundance of pictures, hoping at some point to have time to write about them. The cook of all of these dishes is Matt -- and to him I owe also a renewed taste for meat and coffee. :)

Alright, so here is Matt's dish involving cabbage.

Bear steak with red cabbage / Bistecca di orso con cavolo rosso
Yes, you have read well. This dish is prepared with bear meat! Matt brought the bear all the way from Idaho, where it was hunted by a neighbor. How many of you have ever tasted bear? I never had before this time. Matt prepared it in two different ways: first as a steak, because I really wanted to taste the meat flavor with as little coverage as possible, and then sauteed with other vegetables. Here I'm presenting the steak version, that was served with cabbage.
Bear is very dark, as you can see in this picture taken before cooking:
The steak was prepared according to Matt's special recipe for steaks, which involves a very careful and slow heating on both sides, repeated for ~4/5 times (depending on how rare one wants the meat), at intervals during which one leaves the meat to rest on a dish not on the stove. This technique ensures that no juices are lost during the cooking, and is in agreement with what McGee explains in his bible 'On food and cooking'. When the meat rests on the dish, some heat is transferred from the surface to the inside of the meat, which avoids burning the surface before the meat inside is completely cooked.
The bear was cooked this way in a pan with just a bit of olive oil on the bottom. After the bear was done, Matt added a little water and deglazed the pan with Hon-Dashi (bonito fish stock), mustard, soy sauce, and cooked the red cabbage in it. So the cabbage took up the small pieces of bear meat that were left on the bottom of the pan, which were delicious, and also had a really nice mustard taste.
The bear didn't taste as strong as I expected. It had a very particular taste, but not overwhelming, and it went very well with the cabbage, which was a great complement to this dish.

So this is my entry for the 'Fresh Produce of the Month': cabbage.. I know the dish is not exactly focused on cabbage, but the cabbage was indeed important for its completeness.

Just to show you another of Matt's dishes, here is what happened of the rest of the bear: since I was satisfied with the taste of the bare bear meat, we went for a more complex dish where the meat was cut into stripes, seasoned with soy sauce and then sauteed in a wok with vegetable oil, served with Chinese greens also sauteed in the wok at a later time.
This is an example of typical dinners we have had recently, with a combination of meat and vegetables, quickly cooked, often in the wok. I am very happy with this food -- and with all the rest that he's made so far. Hopefully I won't forget how to cook.. :)

Sondaggio / Poll!

Many blogs, including mine, have started to use a 'read more' option at the beginning of their posts. This way, only a few sentences (and sometimes a picture) are visible, whereas an expanded version of the whole post is accessible only after a click on the 'read more' link. However, some people strongly dislike this feature. The main complain is that one needs to go look for the link and click on it with the mouse, instead of being able to freely navigate just with the keyboard. I can see this point. However, I think I like the layout of the blog better with shorter summaries and just a picture after the post titles, and I like that people can see more than one subjects at a glance, on the first page of the blog.
So, I decided this argument is worth becoming the subject of the first poll hosted on this blog! Please look right below my picture on the right sidebar, and vote!! I will decide what to do of the future of the 'read more' button on my blog also depending on my readers' opinion. I'm for democracy, in the end. :)

Pesce

I decided I'll alternate a food post with a picture post from this trip, which is getting to an end. So, today's post will describe the delicious food that I ate with my aunt and uncle at the restaurant 'Risto` Civassa' (Via Martiniana, Torino) -- they deserve the advertisement, it is probably the best restaurant as for fish that I tried in Torino. I started with this 'trittico di carpaccio':
Carpaccio is raw thin slices of meat, which in this case was fish: swordfish, tuna and salmon. They seasoned it with just olive oil and green peppercorns, and a bit of parsley as decoration. It was delicious.
Then, my entree was this 'trofie con cannolicchi'.
Trofie are a typical ligurian pasta handmade, without eggs. I made it once with some friends, and I have explained how to make it here. Cannolicchi are molluscs (razor clams), served in this dish already shelled (luckily, given that the shell edges supposedly are as sharp as razors, hence the English name). These trofie were really wonderful.
I also had some of my aunt's entree: chitarrini all'astice.
Chitarrini are another hand-made pasta, similar to spaghetti but much thicker, and with a square section. Astice is lobster. Well, my aunt knows what to choose. :)
And, the other entree that we had was my uncle's 'spaghetti allo scoglio'
These spaghetti contained everything that you can find on the 'scogli', i.e. the rocks that are close to the sea. Prawns, shrimp, clams, crab, shells, scampi... just name one of these shellfish and molluscs, and it was there. It was really really good, and there was so much that we had to help him finish it.
So, I hope I made you hungry. Once I'm back in the US, I want to try to reproduce something like these dishes. I love fish and seashells, and I miss these pastas in Berkeley. So stay tuned for the recipes..
Here is a link that can be useful if you go to Italy and want to order some fish -- or viceversa, if you're an Italian in the US and want to know about fish names.. or in France, Spain or Germany!

Luci di Natale

I mentioned in my first post of the Torino series that in this time of the year, the city puts up 'Luci d'artista', a gorgeous exposition of lights built by artists, all throughout downtown. I noticed this year they haven't exposed all of them, sadly, maybe to save money, or maybe because some of them broke. In any case, the lights that are shown are as beautiful as always. I'm going to show here some pictures of them, which I took in these past few days.
The Church of the 'Gran Madre' (Great Mother, i.e. Mary) is the bright one at the end of the bridge. This church was erected in 1814 to celebrate the return of the King Vittorio Emanuele di Savoia after Napoleon's defeat. It's thought to be one of the 'magic' points in Torino. Torino is in fact supposedly one of the centers of the white and black magic in Europe, and there are points in the city that have significance for both 'trends'. In this case, the Holy Grail is thought to be buried under one of the statues that are in front of the church.
The building lit with blue lights at the right, on a hill, is another beautiful church, the 'Chesa dei Cappuccini', from the name of the order of the friars that live in the monastery ('cappuccio' is 'hood', which they wear all the time with their robe, being Franciscan fathers). The street that faces that gorgeous bridge is Via Po, from the name of the river Po, where the street ends.
Via Po shows one of the most peculiar characteristics of Torino: its arcades. One can walk for hours under arcades in Torino, and never get too hot or too wet, depending on the season. Above the arcades there are regular apartments, whereas below there are mostly stores, and people walk by them protected by the arcades. The lights are very pretty in this street - here is a close up of the starting one.
Another beautiful square with arcades is Piazza San Carlo, which I showed before. Here is just a detail of the lights:
The last square I'm going to show is the Piazza del Municipio (City Hall square), that has some strange but nice enough cubic lights:
The statue in the middle represents 'Il Conte Verde'. Don't ask me who he is, because I'm very ignorant on the subject..

Fresh Produce of the Month: cabbage

Before I go on with my Torino posts, here is at last the announcement of the 'Fresh Produce of the Month event for January! The theme is... cabbage!
For this month, the event will be hosted again by my dear friend Simona, at 'Briciole'. The theme has been chosen by Simona, and is focused on cabbage (cavolo) in its different incarnations: green, red, Savoy, napa, bok choy. After the Holidays, she thinks it is a good idea to reach for a lighter fare, which makes ample use of vegetables. Who can say she's wrong?

If you are inspired to participate (and I hope you are), here are the simple rules:

1. Publish a post on your blog with a recipe involving cabbage. Add a link to the announcement (either this one or the one on Simona's blog) and mention that it's an entry for the Fresh Produce of the Month event. Feel free to place the logo on your post.
2. Send Simona an email with a link to your post, your blog homepage and your name to me at simositeATmacDOTcom. Specify 'Fresh Produce of the Month: Cabbage' as subject. A photo is optional, though helpful.
3. If you don't have a blog just send me an email with your recipe and, if you have a picture of the food you made, that's great: Simona will add it to the roundup as well.

The deadline for entry submission is January 31st, 2009. Simona will post the roundup soon after.

Note: If you don't receive an answer to your email or a comment on your post within two days of sending me the email, please contact us again: sometimes email messages get lost in cyberspace.

Cibi dall'Italia

First of the year in Italy. A good occasion to start the year with the family, which hasn't happened in quite a while for me. I guess maybe some of my readers are curious about what people usually eat for the First of the Year in Italy, so I'll show you here a few pictures of the dinner and the lunch that we had over the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009.
On New Year's eve, I was at dinner with my mom and dad and aunt and uncle. It was a warm family dinner, with one typical dish that everybody has on this occasion: 'cotechino e lenticchie'. Cotechino is a huge very processed sausage, sold in aluminum packages, boiled in water and then freed from its aluminum cage and served typically with lentils (lenticchie). From my description, you can guess that cotechino is not really my favorite food. However, most people really like it.. so you have to see it. In my opinion it has a rather disturbing appearance too..
So instead of this cotechino, I strongly prefer to have another type of traditional food, which is bollito. Bollito is boiled meat (beef and chicken usually), served with a variety of sauces.
The water used to boil bollito becomes a delicious broth, which is served with cappelletti, a kind of filled pasta.
My favorite food in Italy, however, is cheese. Here is a selection of fresh cheese that my mom served at the beginning of the meal.
These are very light types of cheese, and some of them are best eaten with a drizzle of olive oil, salt and pepper. Unfortunately I am not allowed to bring these back to the US. However, I will be able to bring some hard cheese, which I'm going to select soon.
Filled pasta is in general considered very festive. So on the First of the Year lunch, which I had with my whole family and my grandma and grandpa, we had agnolotti.
Here you can see them served with meat sauce and tomatoes, although in the traditional piemontese cuisine, tomatoes are not there in the sauce. They were delicious. Cotechino was served again at this meal.. So considering my love for it, I decided to have more of the pasta and of the appetizers, instead. Here is an example of the appetizers we had:
These are stuffed little peppers, artichokes and small zucchini under oil. All of them were made by my grandmother, who is a young and active 90-year-old lady. I love her peppers, stuffed with tuna and capers, slightly spicy.
A traditional ending of these meals is dried fruits.
We had dates, peaches, apricots, ginger, prunes, figs, and all sort of nuts. I really like dried fruits, better than panettone and other desserts that are also traditionally served at the end of the meal.
To end this post, I will show you some images of my dear ones. My dad and his brother, talking after the meal:
My mom and her mom, in snowy Fubine:
And here it's almost all of us (my dad was taking the picture):
(from left to right, my mom, Lilla (my grandparents' helper), myself, my grandma, my sister and my grandpa). Being altogether was a very rare occasion, to be held dearly in memory.