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Priscilla

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Posts posted by Priscilla

  1. All kinds of tomato sauce can be good, if made well, of couse. I was surprised when quite late in the U.S. Italian Food Frenzy Mario's basic tomato sauce included that carrot in there, like Italian-American gravies.

    Can't remember if any of Marcella's have carrot. She certainly uses carrot for mirepoix/sofrito bases, and as a veg on its own.

    An Italian chef who showed me the One True Way to Marinara (he never exactly said that, but it was understood) was disgusted by extra stuff in sauces. His marinara consisted of tomatoes or puree, peeled whole garlic clove, and way less basil than I would have used if I hadn't been following his instructions and wanting to report back honestly, salt, pepper (easy on the pepper), and olive oil. The garlic and basil were fished out before pureeing.

    (He was as hard-ass as Marcella.) I had already learned and happily employed making his sauce Marcella's genius point about watching for the oil to separate from the tomato. Now there's something a cook can use her whole life.

    It remains, to me, the ne plus ultra of marinaras. As his wife, who ran the front of the house, said during a Marinara conversation, "I think it is very nice if it is light -- it must be light." Not a way one would describe most tomato sauces of my acquaintance before this.

    I am trying to think of a Marcella dish that is NOT light. Is there one? Pork braised in milk wants to float up to the ceiling. Even meatballs... isn't this the book with the tiny meatballs baked w/rigatoni? Which manages to be as light and digestible as a leaf of lettuce.

    Erin, I love your connecting what ladies the world around create for people to eat with just a stovetop and a few local ingredients. I wish more people could see that it is all ONE cooking continuum.

    And I am SO making the sausage potato tomato dish. In Japanese supermarkets here we sometimes buy little sausages made with Kurobuta pork... might a coarsely-ground version of those work for the dish in Japan? I think Marcella suggests American breakfast-type sausages so that we don't fall for the fennel-seed juke.

  2. Bruce, Arnab's Aunt's Chicken Curry looks excellent. And all ingredients are usually to hand when one arrives home w/raw chicken, too. I am SO making that.

    Last evening Ivan cast-iron-panned stovetop and then oven nice NY strips, which he served w/sliced Russian heirloom Anna tomato from the fahncy tomato guy at the farmer's market, beautiful crenelated red and green, very good flavor and texture, arrayed atop salad mix from another vendor, dressed w/lemon-juice vinaigrette inspired by having watched a Tivo'd Jamie asparagus show. Ciabatta from the Japanese French baker.

  3. revisiting some of what else I've cooked from the book: The best best best chickpea soups -- the Pasta e Ceci on p.87 is so delicious, just an all-time favorite. Also the one w/pancetta and wild mushrooms on the previous page, so good.

    Only for Marcella would I PEEL EACH CHICKPEA. But of course it goes without saying but I say it anyway, she is (of course) right: The result is so superior the effort is beyond worthwhile. I always cook the beans from dried, rather than use canned as in the recipe, but I think she would be reasonable about that.

    This may be the recipe for this week!

    As for the pasta with rosemary and bacon...I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm a serial rosemary plant killer. When I walk by, rosemary plants shrink back and whisper, "murderer! murderer!" to each other behind their spiny little hands. Which is a shame, because the rest of my herbs are in good shape - my lemongrass plant is threatening to take over the living room as we speak.

    Hee, my venerable rosemary has been one of the very few plants that I have managed NOT to kill. I definitely think it's a fluke.

    I think another herb that suits bacon would be delicious, in the absence of rosemary.

    One of the ceci soups has gone on my docket for the week as well. It has been too long, and I am glad of the reminder.

    And wow Bruce, those wings! That page is getting one of my little Sponge Bob Post-It tabs right quick here.

  4. That sauce would be a delicious topping for a knife-and-fork bruschetta.

    Perusing my copy I was gobsmacked by something obvious, and important: Patate Maritate on p. 266. So important it long ago began to exist as a standalone for me -- I'd forgotten which book it came from.

    ONLY one of the best recipes ever ever ever. Can you get good mozz in Japan? I saw an artisanal mozz maker on Dotchi Cooking Showdown once...

    AND, (I just read) its source is Marcella's Mother's cleaning lady, just like the pickled eggplant you made up there, so -- excellent provenance.

    Revisiting some of what else I've cooked from the book: The best best best chickpea soups -- the Pasta e Ceci on p.87 is so delicious, just an all-time favorite. Also the one w/pancetta and wild mushrooms on the previous page, so good.

    Only for Marcella would I PEEL EACH CHICKPEA. But of course it goes without saying but I say it anyway, she is (of course) right: The result is so superior the effort is beyond worthwhile. I always cook the beans from dried, rather than use canned as in the recipe, but I think she would be reasonable about that.

    The pasta sauce of rosemary and bacon on p. 131 is one of those standbys for which the ingredients are always in stock and the result is always fantastic. In recent years Jamie Oliver has helped me make use of my profligate 20-year-old rosemary shrub, but Marcella was the big help with that when the plant was new.

    The apricot sorbetto on p. 323 has been our go-to apricot frozen concoction since very first trial... unpeeled apricots! Delicious.

  5. Usually, a person must be markedly less smart and interesting than Maggie is to be as widely beloved -- she embodies in my life a crucial counterexample to the tyranny of the mediocre.

    The other day, folding out of the dryer a newly-scored vintage pink kitchen towel I mused idly is this huck or some kind of small-gauge pique, came down on the side of pique, and then thought I would take up with Maggie in future correspondence the relative merits of the two weaves.

    If she wasn't too busy making paper from scratch before writing on it in iambic pentameter or hand-rolling a hem on a silk charmeuse evening gown or re-reading one of the classics because she couldn't swear 100% whether the allusion on p. 313 was Biblical or Greek. No rest for the unwicked.

  6. She sounds crazy scary and cool. The book is full of stern warnings. In the aubergine recipe, she warns not to refrigerate the cooked aubergine, but I totally did. Please don't tell.

    Crazy scary and cool perfectly sums up how I've always thought of Marcella, too. And this may be my favorite book of hers. Great project. Your use of the reserved eggplant skin is positively inspired.

    I've made the roselline many times... back in what we call The Marcella Years (for me, the 1980s) it was a major triumph. The day I found the one guy in the Italian grocery who would slice the Fontina thin enough, carefully layering paper between each slice for my ease in using later, well, that was a very good day. I remember serving it at a dinner party of all my professors from my master's program, nerve-wracking enough, but Marcella didn't let me down. The professors, not an especially charitable group, and not disposed to underestimating their own powers of discernment, were suitably impressed. And Ivan, nervous himself dressing the salad according to Marcella principles that night (and most other nights since), similarly benefited from her uncompromisingness.

    A collateral lesson from Marcella is how being married to a charming fusspot (don't tell Ivan I said that) sharpens one's cooking skills. A lot of her inspiration seems to come from Victor's high standards for proper care and feeding.

    And in re pork for veal -- somewhere in one of her books she orders vitello tonnato in a restaurant and finds that it is pork, not veal, with the tuna sauce, and the restaurateur says he prefers it and she admits it is possibly better. So there you go.

    I've used turkey and pork and chicken in all cutlet preparations, and continue to.

  7. As others have mentioned earlier in this thread, the Costco Balsamic vinegar is delicious!

    The Costco's in my area used to carry another brand of balsamic vinegar that came in a larger bottle. Then it disappeared and the Kirkland brand showed up for about the same price but in a smaller bottle. :hmmm:

    From that point forward I decided to buy my balsamic at Trader Joe's and I can't bring myself to buy the Kirkland brand. I guess I need therapy for holding a grudge agasint Kirlkland. :biggrin:

    The Kirkland brand I bought is a liter -- was there another larger than that? Maybe this is a reintroduction or something.

    But Toliver, don't cut off your nose to spite your face! It's good! And a liter is a LOT!

  8. As others have mentioned earlier in this thread, the Costco Balsamic vinegar is delicious!

    While in the store for the usual salmon fillet and printer cartridges, I bought it for the first time just last week, after all these years NOT buying it, and can now regret not doing so sooner. Very good product.

  9. Last evening very good Italian sausages from the butcher shop that made 'em served w/loads of caramelized onions, excellent Caprese salad w/CA water buffalo mozz, farmer's market tomatoes, basil from the garden. Ciabatta from the French-Japanese baker.

  10. Thank you, Erin... shao hsing I always have, as well as sake, God knows.

    It was your commendation of one of Harumi's books that got me to take a look at them, in fact. Her advance press, at least in the U.S. depicted her inaccurately as overly simplifying or diluting Japanese cooking, when in fact she is quite hard-nosed and trad, which is just how I like it.

    Interesting how cuisines as geographically separate as Vietnamese and Mexican use that Knorr chicken base similarly... I have also known a German very good home cook who used it in that way, as well as her beloved Maggi sauce, which some Asian home cooking does as well, I believe.

  11. Last evening, outside, after a day of semi-gloss painting, and including a neighbor guest who happened by during cocktail hour: NY steaks, delicious farmer's market Romaine and beefsteak tomato salade w/homemade blue-cheese dressing, ciabatta from the Japanese-French baker.

  12. I just got Harumi Kurihara's two English-language books. In them she occasionally calls for "Chinese soup paste," described as a mixture of pork and chicken bases.

    Is this a Japanese product or Chinese? Are there brands that are better than others?

    She seems to use it in small amounts as a seasoning as well as for actual soup broth, which put me in mind of Mexican cooks' adding a touch of granulated chicken base where one might not expect.

    Also: Shoshoku, which she says is Chinese rice wine... is this the same thing as Shao Hsing?

    Any info would be greatly appreciated; I am intrigued by several of her recipes already.

    (edited due to hasty button-pushing)

  13. Yum. Reading all the foregoing sure makes a person want a salad.

    I love our nearly daily salads, or salades as one might say if one has been, as I have, polluted by Sponge Bob's pronunciation.

    Meal accompanying salades are simple affairs dressed (carefully) in the bowl like Marcella Hazan advocated with olive oil of the moment and either vinegar of the moment or citrus if it suggests itself, do not stint on the s & p, esp. the s.

    Sometimes a more formal vinaigrette w/minced shallots and mustard, depending on what it's accompanying. Sometimes homemade creamy types, esp. "Coco's House Dressing," which is a buttermilk/mayonnaise/parmesan trip, again with certain mains.

    Greens vary acc. to what's at the farmer's market, but we strive to have a romaine and a soft variety prepped in the fridge at all times: Insta-Salad as it is called in our house. Insta-Salad, fresh and on the ready, is way greater than the sum of its parts.

  14. Last evening, the same thing that's been on the menu two or three times a week for weeks now, and no pall evinced, or even in sight: Wild sockeye on a very hot griddle, super crispy skin, very moist interior, landed atop fabulous farmer's market salad -- sometimes spring mix, sometimes romaine, or tender redleaf, or merveille de quatre saisons, dressed usually with olive oil-whatever vinegar appeals but occasionally honey-mustard or creamy teriyaki. Cold pink wine; varies, but has consistently been French, this summer. Ciabatta from the Japanese French baker, or in a pinch Lee's Viet baguette.

  15. Just caught up with the onion and the bbq eps... I love that beautiful keywound spit no matter its provenance. I agree that its finding was probably less romantic than Jamie's tongue-in-cheek flight of fancy might have suggested.

    From the onion show the shallot/blue cheese salad was just right. Salads w/a blue cheese component are habitual in our house and I will be doing his variation with the fine fat shallots from my fave farmer's market vendor right quick here.

  16. OK, I made the Tomato Gorgonzola pasta last night, which Pierogi brought to the topic in post #6.

    Just delicious. I had fresh, soft, Stella domestic gorgonzola, which I happen to like a lot, when it is fresh and soft. (This was from the Italian deli where one can get a wedge cut from the big wheel. This same cheese in supermarkets is often old, dry, yellow, ammoniac.) I used brass-die fusilli giganti from the pantry, and added a little grated Parmigiano Reggiano as well, as discussed in other posts regarding this preparation.

    I think adding a hit of Balsamic, a little cream, and a judiciously huge amount of gorgonzola to my regular marinara or other light tomato sauce could about duplicate the flavor profile. I like a recipe that gives me ideas like that.

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