Agnello al finocchio

Hrm.... Once again, I'm late on posting the recipe for my own blog event.... Probably not too bad, though: so far I didn't receive any submissions! I guess fennel is not in season in many parts of the world. So, this is a good occasion to send out a reminder to anybody who could be interested in participating.
You can find the rules for submission here. And, the deadline is now officially extended till April 25!

So here is the fennel-centered dish that I made tonight. I thought about the pairing of lamb and fennel after reading a few online recipes on cooker.net, and I decided to add some spices to the dish to make it curry-like. It turned out quite good. I wonder if there are any real Indian curries using fennel as a vegetable.

Curry di agnello e finocchio / Fennel and lamb curry
Ingredients
One onion
Three cloves of garlic
Two fennels
One pound lamb, cubed
Half a pound small tomatoes (romanitas)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1/2 tsp fennel seeds
1/2 tsp fenugreek seeds
1/2 tsp garam masala powder
4 dried spicy chili peppers, cut into pieces
Salt
Pepper

Prepare the ingredients: finely mince the onion, the garlic, cut the white bulb of the fennels in thin slices, separate and finely cut the stems and the leaves, and cut the tomatoes in quarters or halves depending on the size. Dry roast the spices, except for the garam masala powder. Grind them.
Sautee the onion in abundant olive oil and add the ground spices. Add the pieces of lamb and brown, about 7 minutes. Remove the meat from the pan, and add the fennel slices and some salt. Sautee the slices for about 7 minutes, stirring frequently to coat with the oil, onion and spice mixture. Remove from the pan and add the rest of the pieces of the fennel and the tomatoes. Cook for 3 minutes and place the meat back in the pan. Cook for 5 more minutes, add garam masala powder, and salt and pepper to taste. If your pan is large enough, stir in the fennel slices, otherwise assemble the dish by placing the fennel slices and the meat, fennel and tomatoes mixture directly in serving bowls, over some boiled basmati rice.

If you try it, let me know what you think about it. I thought it was quite nice, even though I never had a curry containing fennel.

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.. :)

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!

Waiter there's something in my... sauce!

This month's Waiter there's something in my.. event is dedicated to sauce! I found out I'm really late, but apparently they're still waiting for entries... yeeeh!
So, I'm posting the recipe for a Mexican mole, which we made a few nights ago at a Mexican dinner we cooked at my place. It's a really special one: 'Pipian Verde' / 'Pumpkin Seed Sauce'!
To make it, you have to boil 12 chiles serranos in water, for 8 minutes, then add 1 kg of tomates verdes (green tomatoes), husks removed, and boil for ~5 more minutes. Drain, remove the stem from the peppers, if there were some, and blend in a blender. Add 1/4 of onion, 2 cloves of garlic, 1 cup of cilantro, 1 leaf of lettuce (I didn't add this), and blend altogether.
Then, heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a pan, add 1 1/2 cups pumpkin seeds, and toast for a few minutes. Grind in a blender or nut grinder, then add 1/4 cup unsalted peanuts and blend together.
Heat up 2 tbsp olive oil in a pan, add the grounded nuts and cook for ~2 minutes. Add the blended tomates verdes stirring constantly. At this point, add a chicken bouillon and 1 cup water (or 1 cup chicken stock) and simmer uncovered for ~10 minutes. It's ready! (recipe from 'Mexico, The beautiful cookbook')
This mole is usually served with chicken. So, we had also boiled 3 chicken breasts with 1/4 onion, 3 cloves garlic and 3 springs of parseley for 20 minutes, and then simmered the chicken breasts in the sauce for another 15 minutes:
But we had a huge amount of mole for the chicken we made.. and it's so good: creamy, nutty and spicy at the same time! My Mexican friend who cooked with us suggested to use it later with white rice, or with fish, or just breaking some eggs and cooking them in it.. I'm looking forward to trying some of these suggestions!

Thanks Andrew for organizing this round of 'Waiter, there's something in my..' - looking forward to the roundup!

Fresh Produce of the Month - Roundup!

Yeeeh!!! It's time for the first roundup of 'Fresh Produce of the Month' themed on lemons for this first time. I'm SO happy: I received many entries, all of them gorgeous! I really want to try to make at least a few of them.. So, let's not waste any more time, and let the show start!

Susan from Porcini Chronicles: Lemon Basil Flan
She says she was inspired by a chef she tasted the recipes of in a small hotel. Following his example of using unusual ingredient pairs, she prepares this flan: "In this flan recipe, I substitute the deep, rich flavor of burned sugar caramel with the bright flavors and colors of lemon and basil."





Sukanya from Hot n' Sweet Bowl: Lemon Cookies with Lemon Glaze
Sukanya loves eating cookies all the time, and her jar was empty.. the cookies "were calling me for a refill since a long time.....Its time now!...."






Meeta at What's for Lunch Honey: Fresh Ginger and Tangy Lemon Ice Cream
She is inspired by David Lebovitz's recipe from "The perfect scoop", attracted by the idea of having ginger in an ice cream, and the combination with lemon was delicious: "In my opinion, lemons and ginger go so perfectly together and combining them in an ice cream is soooo ingenious."




Ruth from Once Upon A Feast:
Even though Ruth never saw a lemon tree growing around where she has lived, she uses lemons in many of her favorite recipes.. and so she shares with us three great recipes with chicken and lemon: "I thought I would just share a few of my favorite lemony chicken recipes......"





Nora B. from Life's Smorgasbord: Zesty torta di ricotta
Nora prepares a cake/pie inspired by the Italian 'Pastiera napoletana' and by another Sicilian dessert recipe. Pastiera is one of my favorite Italian desserts! "The result is a crispy pie-like crust, a moist, lemony filling and a cake-like base."





Anupama from Food-n-more: A delicious summer cooler
Lemon, ginger and orange are the main ingredients of this delicious summer drink that Anupama prepares: "You could say this combination of ingredients was discovered quite by chance by my mother one day as she set about making the ordinary nimbu pani or serbat as we call it in Marathi."










Pip from Pip in the city: Lemony Buttery Bites

Marce fuses together a recipe from Dorie Greenspan's book and one from Pierre Herme's collection, to create this tart version of a lemon meringue pie, with no meringue: "this tart made my wishes come true. It´s a softer, creamier variation of the lemon curd with no meringue. "




Marta (i.e., me!) from An Italian in The US: Limoncello and Marmellata di Limoni
With the lemons I found at my friend's house in LA, I made a ton of different recipes. I shared this lemon jam and the limoncello drink for the Fresh Produce of the Month event.. Limoncello had a great success! "Making limoncello seems like a hard task, because it takes a long time for it to be done. But mostly, it's just waiting time.. so just be patient, and start tomorrow!!!"




And to finish, I need to add that my mom wants to take part to this event!!
I'm really honored and happy :) She sent me a recipe for 'Faraona con salvia e limone', which is what her mom (my grandma) makes in special occasions. I can witness that it's delicious. Faraona is a bird that I'm not sure if it's easy to find outside Italy. In English it's called 'Guinea fowl'. It's bigger than a chicken, but its flesh is tastier. This recipe suggests baking it with lemon and sage. I'll write it down both in Italian and in English in the 'Read more' part of this post. Grazie, mamma!!!!!!!

There we are, this is the summary for this first event! I'm really happy about it.. there is a collection of great recipes! So great to know and be friend with other food bloggers. I hope everyone enjoyed this event as much as I did :)

For next month, the fresh produce is going to be... Apricots! Here in California, they are already in full season. Travelling back from Yosemite to Berkeley, I saw lots of stands of people selling their super local produces, and apricots were among the most common fruits I could find. I was really happy when I tried some of them, they tasted similar to those I used to have in Italy.. we had two great apricot trees in the backyard of our house in the moutains, and they were often loaded with fruits! So, for me, apricot represents the fruit of the summer, and lots of nice memories.
There are plenty of interesting recipes involving apricots: desserts of every possible type, and even meat, for example, in Indian cuisine! So, I'm really curious to see what you will come up with!
The deadline will be in about one month: July 26th. So, make sure to send me the links to your recipes at chemcookit at gmail dot com.. please put a link to this announcement in your post, and if you like it, add the logo:
(This wonderful image of the apricots on the tree is taken from Wikipedia)



Faraona alla salvia e limone - ricetta di Nonna Giovanna
Prendi una faraona di circa 1kg (anche 1,5 va bene, non di piu' perche' sarebbe troppo grassa), puliscila bene dentro, poi passala interiormente con un po' di olio misto con sale e pepe. Poi riempi la faraona con una grossa manciata di salvia (devi proprio riempirla con la salvia, non solo mettere qualche foglia) e infine comprimi dentro un bel limone intero (con tutta la buccia), possibilmente naturale; chiudi il buco cucendolo con un po’ di filo. Spruzzala con un po' di sale e pepe anche all'esterno. Fa' rosolare la faraona a fuoco vivace in una teglia con burro e olio. Continua poi la cottura in teglia coperta a fuoco basso, girandola ogni tanto, per circa 1 ora e mezza. Se la vuoi piu' asciutta, puoi continuare la cottura in
forno, a bassa temperatura (130 gradi) per circa due ore, bagnando di tanto in tanto con un po' di brodo e con il sugo che colerà dalla cottura. A cottura ultimata taglia la faraona, restringi il fondo e spargilo sui pezzi di faraona. E' squisita e profumatissima! Inoltre la salvia e' proprio di stagione.

Guinea fowl with sage and lemon - Grandma Giovanna's recipe
Take a 1-1.5 kg guinea fowl (or chicken, I suppose, if you can't find the guinea fowl), remove the interiors, clean it, and spread some olive oil, salt and pepper inside. Stuff the fowl with sage (really stuff it, not just a few leaves), then add a whole lemon inside, too (including the peel, so use an organic lemon). Close the hole in the fowl by sawing it a little. Sprinkle salt and pepper also outside. Then, heat up a little olive oil and butter in a tall pan, and 'roast' the fowl in it for ~10 min at high heat, turning it every once in a while. Then, close the lid of the pan, and keep cooking it at lower heat for ~1 hour, turning it from time to time. Alternatively, you can continue to cook the fowl in the oven, for ~2 hours, at low heat (270 F) making sure to sprinkle some of its own juices and some broth on the exterior part of the chicken every now and then. When it's done, cut the chicken into pieces, thicken the sauce by heating it some more, and sprinkle the sauce on the meat. It's delicious, and moreover, sage is in season too!

Pess-coj

I was inspired to make this recipe because I happened to have at the same time in my fridge some cabbage and some ground meat, and I had just read the recipe on my favorite traditional Piemontese cookbook.
Pess-coj is piemontese dialect. I never spoke about dialects in this blog, but in Italy, not only every region, but every town and village has its own dialogue. Honestly I struggle to understand Piemontese (my region's dialect), I cannot speak it, and if I go to Milan or to Genova (1h 1/2 from Turin) I just don't understand anything. Just imagine how I feel if I go to Naples or Sicily and people speak in dialect. It's like being in a foreign country!
So, here you have an example in the title of this recipe: 'pess-coj' means, in Italian, 'pesce-cavolo', i.e. 'fish-cabbage'. Now, do you see any resemblance between 'cavolo' and 'coj' (cabbage for both of them)? Honestly they're not very similar.. so, that's the same for every word. Dialects are different languages, in Italian. If for example you are interested in Piemontese, I even found a dictionary Piemontese-Italiano on- line :)
Anyway, given this small introduction, here is the recipe for 'Pess-coj', taken from the Piemontese cookbook.

Pess-coj
Boil ~8 leaves of cabbage for ~5 min in salted water. Let them dry and cool down on a towel.
In the meanwhile cut finely a handful of leaves of some greens (I used kale, which doesn't exist in Piemonte, so the original recipe would call for spinach), and mix it with 1 lb ground meat (you can mix beef and sausage, I used only beef). Add 2 eggs, ~2 tsp salt, a pinch of pepper, a pinch of nutmeg, 3 minced garlic cloves, and ~2 tbsp grated parmigiano cheese.
Set this mixture at the center of the cabbage leaves and fold them. Then, the original recipe suggests either baking, to eat this as a hot dish, or frying and then soak in a mixture of vinegar, wine and sage, to eat this cold. I chose to saute them in a bit of olive oil, and add some red wine to them while they were cooking, and eat them hot. They were very good! They are called 'fish-cabbage' because they do really look a bit like fish, when they're done!
I ate them with rice and some kale, which I cooked in the same pan where I cooked the cabbage rolls, so there was a tiny bit of olive oil and wine on the bottom of it, and I just added ~ 4 tbsp water and ~1 tbsp salt to it, so it was kind of like steamed but with some more taste to it. It was really good!!

Due tipi di carne cotti con il vino

And now some meat recipes. They have in common the fact that I cooked them with wine.
The first one will be chicken and the second one pork.

Pollo ubriaco (Drunk chicken)


These chicken drums were bought in the farmer's market, so I was sure they would be good. I removed the skin, then sauteed them together with small pieces of garlic in olive oil, until they were starting to get brown on the outside. Then I added salt, ~1 cup red wine (it was a good wine, but we had the bottle open too long so it wasn't as good to drink, but that's when it's perfect to cook) and some of the rosemary that I grow on our balcony. The house was smelling so good, with the wine/rosemary smell diffusing everywhere. Let cook covered, until the wine is almost all consumed (about 40 min). Lift the lid, taste and adjust the salt, and add a bit of cornstarch to thicken the sauce. The chicken becomes all purple! And it's so tender, juicy and tasty :).
I served this chicken with some mashed potatoes (everyone knows how to make them, right? I add a very small amount of butter to it, and then milk and pepper). I love it. :)

Arrosto di maiale al vino bianco e spezie (Pork roast with white wine and spices)
I bought already two other pork pieces from my friend at the Farmer's market (the goat cheese guy). His pork is just delicious. He has only humongous pieces, but it's ok, I make a roast and then freeze part of it so I have to cook only once and we can eat 4-6 meals over the course of two-three weeks, and we don't get bored of it.
First, I remove most of the fat that's on the outside of the meat (this was the shoulder but it was as fatty as the butt that I bought last time). I don't like too much fat but a little bit is ok. Then, I heat a little bit of olive oil and garlic pieces, add the meat, and with high heat I roll it in the pan until it's browned on all sides. Only after that I add the salt: if you add it before, it makes the meat juices come out and it's not good. So, I add some coarse salt on the meat. Then, in this case, I added 1 cup of white wine (again, some good white wine that had been open for too long) and lowered the heat. Then I added a lot of different spices: my goal was to spice up the meat surface and the wine. So I added some spices directly on the meat and some in the wine that was in the pan. I added a few cloves, thyme, a bit of mint, and oregano. Then I covered the pan and let cook for more than one hour, turning it from time to time to cook it evenly.
The result was amazingly good. I am happy to be learning how to make good roasts. I didn't like to cook big pieces of meat until I tried this meat from the farmer's market :). I always serve it with some veggies. In this case I made some zucchini sauteed with garlic and oregano, to match the spices.

Cucinare con la frutta

In the past two weeks I was in the mood of using fruit to cook savory dishes. So, I made up a few new dishes, and I also made some more traditional ones.

Maiale con barbabietole e pere (pork with beets and pears)
This was a pork chop, that I just cooked in olive oil for about ten minutes, turning it from time to time so that it was well roasted on both sides, and then, I added a puree of a beet, a pear and two tablespoons of yogurt. The beet had been previously roasted in the oven. I let the meat finish to cook in the sauce (about another 10-15 minutes), and in the end, I served it topped by the red sauce - in the picture, it's served together with steamed rice and sauteed cabbage and peas, spiced up by red pepper to contrast the sweetness of the meat. It was good! In fact, pork and fruit are well known to go well together.
And doesn't it look pretty, like a red heart? :)

Salsiccia di tacchino con peperoni e banane (turkey sausage with peppers and bananas)
In this case, I sauteed some onions, green peppers, and added turkey sausage, cut up into pieces. I let it cook for about 20 minutes, adding salt and pepper to spice it up a little bit, and then, in the last 5-10 minutes, I added some mushrooms and a banana cut into pieces. I added some rum, and let it evaporate. I really liked it. I think banana is great with this type of food! It made a sweet sauce, that went really well with the peppers and the sausage. In the picture, it's served together with a 'bruschetta' topped with freshly made guacamole (to make it, cut into pieces a ripe avocado, a small tomato, garlic and cilantro, add red pepper, salt and the juice of a lime, and mix everything up. Quick and delicious. Usually eaten with tortilla chips in Mexican restaurants).

Risotto con fragole (rice with strawberries)
This is a dish that is part of the 'new' Italian cuisine, in that it's become famous in the last few years. I never tried it in Italy, so I decided to make it for a dinner that we had on a girls'night at my place, when Lucas was away.
It was a great success. To make it, soak in white wine about 1 pound of strawberries cut into pieces. Then, sautee some onions in a little butter (1 tablespoon), add 8 handfuls of rice, sautee the rice. Then, add the wine where the strawberries had been soaked. The liquid should be enough to cover the rice, and about one finger more than that. If it's not enough, add a little water. Add salt and cover the lid. Let the rice cook for about 20 minutes. Open, make sure there's still a little bit of liquid, and add the pieces of strawberries. Cook for another 5-10 minutes, until rice is done. The rice is very good, the taste is very different from every type of rice I had before, and it's nicely colored.

This procedure is my mom's simplified version to make every possible type of risotto (the real recipe would make you add the water a little at at time, stirring continously. It's a lot more boring). We used the same procedure to make risotto agli asparagi (rice with asparagus), on that girls' night. Just, instead of adding the wine, add some water and a bouillon to give a nice taste to the rice, and at about 10 minutes from the end, add about a pound of asparagus cut into pieces. Before serving, stir in some pieces of cheese that can nicely melt (I used Italian pecorino di Pienza, which is delicious, but you can use colby or whatever you like).

Spiedini di frutta e formaggio (cheese and fruit skewers)
My aunt used to make something similar when she had nice dinners at her place. She used to use a grapefruit instead of a loaf of bread, to stick the skewers into, but I decided we had too many for a grapefruit and a loaf of bread would be better.
It makes a very nice centertable and it's easy and fun to prepare. Basically, you cut into pieces all sort of things that can come into your mind and put them onto the skewers. Since I was in this fruit mood, I decided to use different types of fruit and cheese, and a little ham and olives. The fruits we used were pineapple, papaja, apple, pear and avocado. The cheese was 'ricotta salata' and another Spanish cheese that I found in Whole Foods and I may look for the name if someone is interested, because I forgot it. When the skewers are ready, stick them on the bread loaf.

Mousse di frutta (fruit mousse)
At last, a sweet thing made with fruit :) - I prepared these two types of mousse for the girls'night. One was a simple strawberry mousse, because it's strawberry season! So, just blend strawberries, add whipped cream (make it!!!), and honey, cool down and add grated chocolate on top before serving. Nice and sweet, probably very good for children. For more 'adult' tastes, try the other type, though, because it was really delicious. I blended together two mangos, a quarter of papaja and two bananas, and then added some ginger powder to it and two tablespoons of whipping cream. After pouring it in the glasses, I added a strawberry sauce on top (just blend some strawberries) - this was to cut the sweetness of the banana and mango. All of the girls loved it.. it was very flavorful, and at first you could taste the banana, and in the end, you would have a taste of mango and papaja in your mouth, and a tickling due to the ginger. :) - you can also cut down on the banana, I think, if you want the mango taste show up more. Again, to be served chilled and with pieces of chocolate on top.

Due cene italiane prima del viaggio in Italia

As I mentioned a few days ago, I intend to catch up with the 'old stuff' before speaking about Toscana.. that I know everyone is looking forward to read! :p :)
But I know I had some requests about the recipes for some food that we had at two Italian dinners that we had the two weekends before leaving...So here is a short description of the main things of the two dinners. These two dinners have an interesting story behind.. I will not describe it all, but in the end, only three of the many people expected came for the first dinner, and so we decided to give a second dinner to let also the other people try Italian cuisine.
So...

First Dinner
Guests: Rich and his wife (AAAHHH I can't remember her name.. shame on me....), and Crissy with Everest :)

Appetizers:
Tomini al verde e Acciughe al verde - Cheese and anchovies "in the green sauce"
Rotolo di tonno - Tuna roll
First course:
Linguine al pesto - Pesto linguine
Second courses:
Coniglio alla cacciatora - Rabbit "hunting style"
Pollo ai peperoni - Chicken with peppers
Dessert:
Macedonia con Rum -Fruit salad with Rum.

And here are the pictures and recipes of the most interesting things:
Tomini and acciughe al verde:
These appetizers are extremely easy to make, and very good. Prepare a sauce with oil, parseley, and garlic finely chopped. Soak anchovies or slices of some type of soft cheese (we had here plain and spicy goat chees rolls) in the oil. You should let it rest in the sauce for about two hours before serving. You should serve it with some good bread, to eat with it.

Rotolo di tonno:
This is also quite easy and very good. Make a paste with canned tuna, bread crumbs and eggs. I think I used 2 tuna cans with 2 eggs and enough bread crumbs to make it reasonably thick. Spread this dough on a piece of aluminum foil. Place some olives (better if the olives have some nice red peppers inside) in two rows, in the center, along the lenght of the 'rectangle' of dough. Roll the aluminum foil and close the ends of it, making a sort of big candy. Drop in hot/boiling water, so that the roll is completely covered by water. Let cook for about 20 minutes. When cold, open the aluminum foil, slice the tuna roll, and pour on the slices a sauce made of olive oil, lemon juice and parseley finely chopped before serving.

Linguine al pesto: I will not describe this, since I already spoke about pesto a few times, and I will describe the more complicated pesto dish that I made for the second dinner.

Coniglio alla cacciatora:
This in my opinion was the 'top' of the dinner, but some of my American guests refused to eat rabbit.. :) - I was afraid of that, that's why I also made the other second course with chicken :)
So, I was really happy that I had found a rabbit, at the Farmers Market in Raleigh, from a farmer that is now a friend of mine (I buy the goat cheese from him nearly on a weekly base :) ). He assured me it was really tender.. and in fact it was.
So, to make this dish, you should marinate the meat in a mixture of red wine, vinegar, rosemary, sage, and pepper overnight. Then, drain the meat and throw away the sauce. This at least is the suggestion that my recipe gave, but I'd say that next time I will not follow this. It was supposedly to remove the 'wild' taste of the rabbit, but in fact, the rabbit in the end nearly didn't have any rabbit taste any more.. so, next time, keep the marinade :) Saute the rabbit in some olive oil, and when it begins to become white, add some white wine (I think I'll add the marinade at this point, next time). In the meanwhile, prepare a mixture of 2 carrots, two pieces of celery and an onion, all minced finely in a food processor (NB, not liquefied!). Add the mixture to the rabbit and let cook for about 30-40 minutes. Add salt and pepper. Add a little tomato sauce, and cook for another 20 min, or until meat is done. Two minutes before turning off, I added some wonderful little red onions that I had found in Whole Foods, and that I had previously caramelized by cooking them in vinegar, water and sugar. They were really delicious!

Pollo con peperoni:
Cut some boneless-skinless chicken thighs into pieces. Roll the pieces in flour to cover them with it. Saute some onions in olive oil, add the pieces of chicken and cook for 10 min. Add a can of diced tomatoes, salt, and some pieces of bell peppers, better if different colors. Cook for about 30 min or until meat is done. Serve with some basil leaves minced on top.

Macedonia con rum: easy to imagine.. Italians eat fruit salad with Maraschino, a sweet liquor.. I substituted eat with Rum. Don't exaggerate when you pour the rum on your fruit!

Actually, it was a nice dinner, more intimate than I was imagining at the beginning. It was nice to get to know better Rich and his wife.


Second dinner.
Guests: Jennifer and Curtis, Jennifer, Crissy, Lina and JeyJey.

Appetizers:
Tomini e acciughe al verde - well, they had to try them, or not?!?
Melanzane con mozzarella - Eggplants with mozzarella
Insalata appetitosa - Savory salad
Pomodori ripieni - Stuffed tomatoes

Entree:
Farfalle con pesto, gamberetti e pomodori - Farfalle with pesto, shrimp and tomatoes

Dessert: Macedonia con rum
So here are the recipes of the things that I didn't describe already:

Melanzane con mozzarella:
Grill the eggplant slices in a pan (non-sticking, or with just a minuscule amount of olive oil on the bottom). Place the slices on a baking pan. Add little pieces of mozzarella on top, and salt. Bake in the oven until the mozzarella is melted. Serve immediately with some basil leaves on top.

Insalata appetitosa e pomodori ripieni
I don't have a better picture for pomodori ripieni, so this little piece which is visible in the right corner will be enough.. :)
The insalata turned out to be very good. I made it with cabbage, pecan nunts, celery, pears and gorgonzola cheese, seasoned with olive oil, vinegar and salt. Pears and gorgonzola are a typical Italian matching.
To make the tomatoes: cut them (5) in half, remove the pulp, mix it with salt, a spoon of mayonnaise, three spoons of plain yogurt, two tuna cans, capers, pepper. Fill the halves and add scallion on top.

Farfalle con pesto, gamberetti e pomodori
One of the main goals of this dinner was to teach Jennifer how easy it is to make pesto.. so, she saw it :) - I'll write it again here: put a bunch of basil leaves, a piece of pecorino romano or parmesan cheese, two cloves of garlic, and a handful of pinenuts in the food processor. Chop finely. Add olive oil to cover and a little salt.. and that's it :)
This dish was a little more elaborated: Jennifer had also brought some wonderful shrimp, that we sauteed in olive oil. In the meanwhile I had sliced some tomatoes, covered them with bread crumbs and a little salt and baked them for 20 minutes. When the pasta was cooked, we poured the pesto, shrimp and tomatoes on it, and sprinkled some pepper on top. It was really good :)
There was also a similar version with tuna instead of shrimp, in case someone didn't like the shrimp.

The dessert was the same, basically it was Lent and I didn't want to make any real dessert :)

For both dinners, one of the most important foods was the bread, that I baked and it turned out to be really good.. quite amazing considering how little experience I have with it, and how bad I am at following doses :)
So, here it is: Biova (biova is the name of a typical italian bread, similar to what I made)
(my bread with a bottle of Chianti)
(the inside of the bread).

To make this delicious bread, pour abuot two cups of water in a bowl, warm it up in the microwave. Add three teaspoons of yeast. Stir in flour until the dough is elastic and nice. I don't remember, probably it's about 6 cups. I can check it better next time I make it.
Let the dough rest for 45 min, then fold it in 4 parts. Let it rest for another 45 minutes. Divide it into two big shapes and put them on the baking pan you want to use. Let the bread rest for another hour. It should keep increasing in volume. Draw a cross on the surface. Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes then decrease to 400 and finish cooking (another 15 minutes, more or less). I know I had the oven at the high temperature for a longer time the second time, and it was even better. So, not sure exactly.. just try yourself!

L'importante e' variare

For some reasons, I've been receiving "Newsweek" in the mail box at my name for the past two months. Not sure how it happened, or how long it will continue, but so far, I kind of like it :). I like to read about the main news of the week, they always have reports that seem to be quite balanced. Moreover, they often have more "society/health" related things, which are interesting too. In their last number, they have a long article that I didn't completely read yet, about science and the media talking about food. They show how confusing it is for people to understand what's "good" or "bad", if they want to follow the suggestions that scientific studies find and media report. Basically, in the course of the past ten years, it's been said every possible opinion about every class of food: eat more carbs than fats, then the opposite, fish is good, but then, it's also full of mercury, eggs have too much colesterol, but at the same time, one egg per day is supposed to be good according to some other studies.. recently, on NPR I heard an expert discussing how soy products are bad for you - so, forget about proteins taken from something different than meat..
In summary: just a crazy mess. In my opinion.. everything is good if you eat a little bit of everything. Obviously, I have some favorite ingredients, but maybe it's more a cultural thing than anything else. At least one of these ingredients: olive oil, garlic, onions, tomatoes (and recently, yogurt) is basically always present in my dishes.
For the rest, I try to vary. Also, I try to make both me and Lucas happy.. he seems to need more meat and proteins than I do, so I make meat at least twice per week, and then we alternate that with fish, eggs, pasta, seitan, tofu, cous cous and so on.
So, I collected a few pictures from last week dinners.

Zuppa di tofu con contorno di insalata di erbe al vapore / Tofu soup with steamed creasy greens on a side
The recipe is quite simple (this was for a night were we weren't too hungry): bring some water to boil, dissolve a vegetable bouillon in it, add the tofu cut in cubes, some spinach, seasonings (olive oil, salt, pepper, curry if you want it more indian-like) to taste. Serve with some rice or cous cous. If you want it richer, add an egg or two in the soup and scramble with a spoon. It will give a nice thicker consistency to it and it will make it more chinese-style.
For the side dish: I bought these 'creasy greens' that I had no idea what they were. I looked for them on the web, and found out that they're very popular in the South, and apparently really easy to grow..and I agree, they're really good! I just steamed them and tossed them with some olive oil, salt and lemon juice. They tasted very nice, kind of like collard greens but less strong. :)

Pollo e patate al forno / Baked chicken and potatoes
This dish is really easy and Lucas likes it a lot - me too.. :) It also reminds me of an old Italian song that my dad used to song, so it makes me happy to remember about it. :) (The song is really silly.. spaghetti, pollo, patatine, una tazzina di caffe'.. a malapena riesco a mandar giu'.. :) ).
I think you can easily guess how to make it, but just a few details: I like to make the potatoes in a different pan than the chicken, so they don't get greasy, but I guess if you don't care you could, so they would taste more like chicken. I just toss them with olive oil, salt, garlic powder and oregano or rosmary. Also, if you put salt and rosemary or oregano on the chicken before putting it in the oven, it takes a nice taste. It does take a while to cook this dish, but you don't need to take too much care of it. Basically, you flip the chicken legs and you mix up the potatoes every 20 minutes - it usually takes 2-3 flips before the chicken is done.. for the potatoes, it depends on how big you cut the pieces.

Uova all'occhio di bue con fagioli e sedano/ Sunny-side-up eggs with beans and celery
Isn't this dish pretty? :) I like to make colorful dishes. :) It's also very easy... and it made me happy that I could make a good egg dish different from frittata (my typical way of using eggs, I'll talk about it another time). Eggs were always related in my mind to those evenings when we didn't have anything else in the fridge, and my mom made them with some ham that wasn't good enough anymore to eat by itself (not to criticize her, it was actually a good idea :) ). This dish, though, was quite good and merry - and as easy to make. :) Basically, I sauteed some onions and pieces of celery in olive oil, added canned tomatoes and canned mixed beans, spiced it with salt and pepper. After the sauce was thickened a bit, I broke the eggs in it and covered. The only difficulty of this dish is to get the timing right for the eggs. In fact, if you do, you'll get a wonderful crispy white and a tasty liquid yolk, that spills out as soon as you hit it with a piece of bread to eat it.. But if you overcook it, the yolk becomes solid, and if you undercook it, the white is slimy (better the first than the second one). To get it right, you need to help the white cook fast enough.. since the part that doesn't touch the pan and is on top of the red tends not to cook.. so you'd better pour some hot olive oil or sauce on top of it, so it gets cook by the heat of it. But other than that, the egg 'all'occhio di bue' (look for 'occhio' and 'bue' on wordreference.com to understand how we call the sunny-side-up egg!) is easy, quick and good! If you like, you can add some cheese on top of it before removing it from the pan (in the picture, you can see some melted cheddar cheese).
And if you don't use all the bean and celery sauce, you can use it the day after for a good pasta dish! Just dilute it with yogurt and spice it up with a little curry or curcuma or something similar.


Pesce al forno con barbabietole e kale/ Baked mackarel with beets and kale
Usually I make fish in a pan, but today I wanted to try to bake it. I just made a bed of greens, cut some beets and put the makarel on top of it, with some garlic, salt, olive oil, and white wine. You can see the picture of the preparation above (I didn't take a good picture of the cooked dish :( ). I cooked it for about 40 minutes at 350F, flipping the fish once. The result was good, I especially liked the taste and consistency of the fish better than when I cooked it in a pan. The greens were a bit too crispy, though, in particular those that were on top. Next time I'll try to cook it in a smaller pan, so that the greens are completely covered with the fish fillets and are not exposed to the direct heat of the oven. I served it with whole basmati rice.

Una cena 'wrap'

A few days ago I decided that my next dinner would have been a 'wrap-dinner'.. The idea was that I would put a lot of different things on the table, some tortillas, and everyone would make his own wraps. Then, I thought that I could not only make the different fillings, but.. the tortillas themselves!
So, I looked online at various recipes. There are a lot. I ended up choosing the recipe from epicurious.com for the basic dough. Then, I decided I also wanted to make some spinach wraps, so I looked for a recipe of spinach tortillas.. and I found this one. Go look at it.. the idea of making bicolor spinach/beets tortillas obviously attracted me and I decided to try.

So, Saturday morning I dedicated about two hours making multicolored tortillas. The white ones are actually very easy, once you get confortable with it. You can easily do the doses by eye, in the end: just put some flour (I tried with both white and whole weat flour), and add some salted warm water to it until the dough has a nice workable consistency. In the original recipe, they add some shortening to the flour.. In the first batch, I added olive oil instead, and then I decided to just go without any fat, and they seemed to be quite good. With olive oil, they also had a nice taste, but a bit too 'aggressive'.
For the colored ones.. at first I tried to make the green dough, with spinach. These are not too difficult, but they require a bit more patience because you have to incorporate the flour to the spinach slowly, until the dough has the right consistency. I made some tortillas just with the spinach, and they were really good. So I tried to make the red ones. These were the most difficult ones, basically because I didn't have the right tool to puree the beets. So, the beets were just finely chopped, and the little pieces remaining in the dough were difficult to work with. They also made the dough a bit too moist, and more difficult to roll. I tried to cook some red tortillas, and they were good, but the beets were hard to taste. So I went for the bicolor-spiral ones, according to the recipe cited above. Obviously, the red dough being so annoying, I couldn't really get nice spirals as they show in the pictures of the website.. So, they were just bicolor. Not too bad, though, being this my first trial, I decided.

In the afternoon, I prepared the fillings. I made
- beef: cut into small pieces, sauteed in some olive oil, then cooked in some yogurt, red wine, honey, rosmary and sage, for a long time (about one hour). It was really really good.
- chicken: similar to the beef, but with white wine and no honey and rosmary and sage. Quite good too.
- seitan: sauteed with onions, cooked with corn and little pieces of sage.
- black beans (from a can): sauteed in olive oil with some onion, then slowly cooked for a long time in their own sauce and some maple syrup.
- green bell peppers: sauteed with onions in olive oil, then cooked with some nutmeg.

For appetizer, I prepared a salad with cabbage, olives, oranges, fresh mozzarella (ciliegini), carrots (cut in small round pieces), avocados, seasoned with olive oil and salt. Also, I prepared some mini-wraps: I took some of the bicolor tortillas, spread some mayonnaise on them, put some slices of Salame di Genova, slices of mozzarella, then I rolled it tightly, making like a 'cigar', and then I cut the rolls into small pieces, that I held together with some nice colored toothpicks. So, they were bite-size mini rolls.. They were finished quite soon. :)

I served all the tortillas and the fillings together, with also some steamed rice and some salsa (salsa=pezzettini di pomodoro, peperoncini piccanti e altre spezie, per gli Americani. :) E' usata appunto per tortillas/burritos, o per pucciarci dentro delle patatine di mais).

I think it was a lot of fun. I decided that in the future I want to have some more of these 'interactive' dinnners, where people have to put together the things by themselves. It's a little bit like making them cook, and maybe some of them will be interested and will try themselves with some variations once they're at home..

Unfortunately, the batteries of my camera decided to stop working right after I took the picture of the wine that we had for dinner.. so I don't have pictures of my wonderful mini-wraps, or of the stack of tortillas that I prepared, or of all the fillings on the table.. :(

Well, here is the wine at least :)
It was really good - a Portoguese wine brought by Filipe and Vlasta.

The day after, we had a few leftovers, so I have a picture here of an example of a possible wrap made with them.. but the wrap is one of the commercial ones that we had in the fridge.. no homemade tortillas were left. :) (also the beef was quickly finished, so you can't see it in this wrap). The commercial ones taste really bad, now that we tried the real ones. :)
Per i miei lettori Italiani: considerate la possibilita' di prepararvi questi wraps... sono molto buoni, e in Italia non ero mai riuscita a trovare le tortillas, per cui non avevo mai potuto fare tutti questi piatti buonissimi tipo fajitas.. non sono difficili, in realta', soprattutto se non ci si avventura in quelli con le barbabietole.. :)

Due piatti a base di carne e verdure un po' particolari

As I mentioned, I wanted to try little by little all those really interesting vegetables that they have at the Farmers' Market.. so, I'll show you here two recipes that I created with Collard Greens and Bok Choi and two different types of meat.
The 'philosophy' under these recipes is similar - you'll notice that I like a lot to put yogurt with meat. I think it gives a nice taste and texture to it.

Maiale piccante con collard greens (spicy pork with collard greens)
You'll prepare the pork and the vegetables separately. The preparation of the collards is very easy: wash them and put them in a pot with a little water on the bottom, cover, and let cook basically by steaming. Turn them from time to time, so the leaves on the bottom don't get overcooked by the water. When they're done (soft but not too much), cut them and toss with some olive oil, salt and if you like a little balsamic vinegar.
Cut some deboned pork chops into bite-size pieces and put them in a pan where you will have heated some olive oil. Stir for a while under high heat, until they are white on the exterior. At this point you can add salt and some sauces: a little barbecue sauce, some red curry paste and some yogurt (two tablespoons). This mixture will give a nice spicy strong taste to the meat, and the yogurt will tenderize it. Cook for another 20 minutes, or until the meat is nearly done. Then, add some cornstarch to thicken the sauce, and add some more yogurt to make a nice smooth cream that will taste of meat juices and spicy sauce. Turn off the heat about 30 seconds after you added the yogurt (four tablespoons), otherwise this will melt.
Serve combined with the vegetables on a side, with some good bread.

Pollo con cavolo cinese, miele e arachidi (chicken with bok choi, honey and peanuts)
Wash the bock choi and cut it into pieces. Finely slice an onion and saute it with some olive oil, and add the bok choi to it. Add salt and pepper and cover the pan.
While the vegetables are cooking, cut some boneless and skinless chicken thighs into bite-size pieces. Add to the vegetables. Add a little more salt and some red curry paste if you want this dish to be spicy (I do. :) ). Saute for a while under high heat until the chicken is white and cooked from the outside. Then, stir in some yogurt. At this point, I tasted the sauce: it was good, but a bit bitter. The bok choi is much more bitter than all the other types of vegetables that I tried so far.. so, I decided that I would add some honey to compensate. I added about two tablespoons of honey (for about one pound of vegetables and one pound of meat). After this, the sauce was not bitter anymore. It was actually very good. :)
Let cook for about twenty minutes, or until the chicken is done. Taste and add salt, pepper, honey and/or red pepper according to your desires. :)
Serve on top of steamed/boiled rice, and sprinkle some chopped peanuts on top.
The result was very good. Lucas could not taste the honey in it, which I guess is good, because it compensated the bitterness of the bok choi without overwhelming its taste. :)