Kevin72

I made them last month for the Tuscany thread (click here). I think they were much larger in size than the real deal is supposed to be, and then I baked them with tomato sauce after parboiling them. I also probably added too much flour; the dough is so fragile I get nervous! Drain your ricotta well, get the spinach squeezed very dry and that should go a long way to ensuring a less liquid dough.

Looking good, Wendy! Are you going to try and recreate any meals from your wonderful trip? How'd the ragu go, Mr. Big? I keep forgetting Marcella's version only uses beef; I also use pork and pancetta in mine. And yes, when I cooked a ragu version with tomato paste, the sauce as a whole stayed brown (both times I had ragu in Bologna it was this same color, also). The paste I guess just adds more to the caramelization and sweetness.

What lovely photos, Shaya. As always, you have a wonderful talent for your arrangements. I'm curious, is there wine or something in the dough? It seems darker than normal in two of the shots. And Klary, amazing lasagne! I've noticed the larger than normal amount of flour, too, when making spinach dough. First time I made it was for a dinner party and I almost had a nervous breakdown since it was so sticky and loose still. Oof, bad memories. But I love how austere the Bolognese lasagne is. I still love a good, groaning, cheesey "Southern style" lasagne also, but this is a good counterpoint. As for the mortdella, it's a synthetic casing I'm sure. In fact, isn't even the standard size mortadella still too big to use animal casing on? What's even more impressive about that size of mortdella is that it's boar! That's one empty forest somewhere!

Not celebrating early, just kicking off the Holiday gorging season.

I noticed the small yield the first few times I made it myself as well; it is perfectly suited for a single batch of pasta. So pretty soon I started making super batches to freeze whenever I made it. Which brings me to the point now where there's numerous containers of indeterminate origin of different batches of ragu in my freezer . . . I'm not sure if it was discussed on my thread or the Italian Ragu thread offshoot, but I go with the Marcella Hazan version that uses canned tomato, not tomato paste. While most other recipes do call for the paste, I like the interplay the whole tomatoes give. And again, after so many hours of cooking, they completely collapse into the sauce, and there's much less proportion of tomato to meat.

It's a Mario Batali recipe from his Italian Holiday cookbook. I make no claims on authenticity on this recipe (or for that matter, anything I make these days ).

Much as I love Emilia-Romagna cooking, for the Holidays there's certain dishes from Campania I've been making over the years that have become tradition and it just wouldn't be right not to make them. One dish I make to start up the feasting season is gatto, the savory potato "cake" that is, yes, a take off from the French gateaux (sp?). Mashed potatoes and ricotta are mixed together with salami and eggs, then layered with mozzarella cheese and finally baked. It's usually offered as a festive, feast-meal contorno, but I think there's so much going on it deserves to be the main, with maybe a tart salad on the side (that is, if you manage to restrain yourself better than we did and not go back for seconds instead of the salad!) Edit: Forgot about the gatto discussion on page 3 of the thread. Sorry for the redundancies.

Here's an abrupt and inexplicable about face. So, for Friday's meal I was going to make balsamic-glazed chicken. I didn't want the production of a pasta or risotto primo and fell back on soup, and for some reason, the Emilia-Romagna version of onion soup, la cipollata, sounded really appealing. I don't recall if there's a recipe in Splendid Table; I went with the version Mario's made on his shows. I started the soup the night before and used several different kinds of onions and their kin: leeks, spring onions, and plain yellow onions. After and hour of cooking in butter and a little bit of lard they had collapsed but weren't to the caramelizing stage. It was already after 10 pm at this point and I didn't want to wait up for them to turn brown, nor did I want to try to start them up again the next morning. So, into a 220 F oven overnight. The next morning I awoke to the smell of those caramelized onions and was pleased with the overnight results. Poured in some white wine, cooked it off, then milk, and cooked it off as well. Now, here again, I needed to leave for work and I hadn't even added the broth yet. So, I tossed in the frozen block of homemade broth and put it back in the oven again to cook all day. When I pulled into the garage that night, I could smell the soup from outside. I was instantly ravenous (hey, even I won't deny that onions still at least smell good when they cook!). Pulled the pot out of the oven; everything had cooked down and concentrated. I put it on the back burner on the lowest possible heat to cook down even some more while I made the rest of dinner. The end result was something like ragu Bolognese, as my wife astutely put it: another synergistic dish that had transformed into something more than the some of its parts. I'd imagine that those of you who made Genovese and liked it when we did Campania will be able to relate. The touch I like in this dish, also, is the emulsion of eggs and soft pecornio that gets stirred in at the last minute, making it even more decadent and softening some of the sharper onion edges: So, given that writeup, you can see that it was pretty much the star of the show that night. Didn't help that I botched the balsamic glazed chicken, normally one of my standbys. Even though I though I had seasoned the hell out of it, it still came out kinda flabby and bland tasting. As a contorno, mashed potatoes "alla Montegrappa DaNello"; a great little place in Bologna that we went to and had several revelatory dishes at. Their mashed potatoes were very thin and creamy, but also plumped with ample olive oil which really added a new twist. I tried it unsuccessfully this time and the potatoes were still too lumpy with too much liquid used to thin them out. Eh.

Way to go, Elie! I love that mountain bread as well. So much going on in it. Wonderful use and combination of dishes; loved the touch of using the rabbit innards to make bruschetta topping. I take it those were just for you, though? As for the bomba, when I made it last year I augmented it with a second filling of peas, ham, and mushrooms in a bechamel kinda sauce. That made it a little wetter and counteracted some of the rice. But making the layer of rice thinner may just make the whole thing collapse; I think you need all that to make it hold up.

Glad the pear worked out! That episode of MM, with the lasagne (including a treatise on Ragu Bolognese) is one of my favorites of his. I'm not even remotely schooled on the protein percentages and such with AP vs. 00 flour, but I do think the flour is at least part of the textural difference you got. There is something extra that 00 adds. You could also try, as some authors suggest, cutting the AP with cake flour, like maybe 60-40 AP to cake flour, and see how it turns out.

Great topic! I'm adding OD to my wishlist then after all the praise here. For my part, I'd say Heat is one of the best food or cooking literature books I've read since Kitchen Confidential. Couldn't put it down and I'm very eager to reread it soon.

Baked penne. Er, obviously, I guess. Other than one restaurant in Dallas that makes its own salumi, I've not had mortadella with the same rougher texture and meaty, porky flavor like in Italy. All typical stuff I get tastes too much like baloney.

I think she means beef; it seems that "brasato" would be the equivalent of our term "pot roast" where the meat used is understood. And it's not that I hate brasato, per se, just that all the versions I try keep winding up tasting the same, no matter what's in them. And I have bad luck finding a good braising cut of beef. I still did love the Piemonte version I made in January, however.

Hey, where's the chilies sprinkled on top? Looks good! Maybe I should be scouring her book for easier recipes instead of all these heavyweights . . .

Italian Country Table is a lot of fun as well and spreads to other regions beyond just E-R. I especially like that it goes to the lesser-known corners of Italy: Trentino, and I first really got into Puglia's cooking through this book. I like it alot.

You won't regret it. We could turn this into just a year of cooking from that book.

I'd make all effort to track down the Splendid Table book. There's an abundance of festive dishes in there (including many variations on the tortellini pie). For the vegetarian guest, I'm thinking of the aforementioned sweet-n-sour onions (they are fantastic, even for a non-onion dish lover like me), the asparagus and hazelnut salad, and some kind of tortelloni, either with squash or just ricotta.

Yeah, this is really a great month to match up with Emilia-Romagna. Many elaborate and festive dishes to choose from that are also pretty unique as well. I have made the capon recipe or at least used it as a basis before for a Holiday party and it's really good. And yes, capon is worth tracking down over turkey, in my opinion at least: a richer meat that isn't as bland as turkey sometimes can be.

So, it needs to be entirely vegetarian? Do you have Kasper's book?

Oh man I'm dying to see how this turns out. Please do step by step photos. That's been an ambition of mine for a while but I haven't been able to find a pig skin source. There's a sentence I've never used before. As for the pork dish, I don't like the abundance of onion in Mario's recipe and stick to a version that Marcella Hazan offered. Except I load mine up with carrots and two cloves of garlic to get the sauce tasting even more sweet (and that unappealing orange color).

As I've said, and I'm sure everyone's in the same boat, it's hard to fit in meals this month. We've only got a set number of weekends we're in town and I want to cook at least one E-R meal a week. Saturday's first meal in the region was unfortunately more an "inspired by" than a true reading of regional standards. But anyways: Risotto with apple: For the main, a favorite of mine: pork braised in milk. In the background is Klary's beloved garlic cabbage.

Thanks as always for the support and encouragement everyone. But the success of these threads is due as much to everyone's contributions as anything else, and I did want to keep everyone interested. All right, so we'll move onwards. Rather than do voting though, with just so few regions left, here's my proposal for the rest: January: Trentino Alto-Adige February: Veneto March: Le Marche (heh) April: Abruzzo-Molise May: Basilicata and Calabria (Either one combo thread or two simultaneous threads) I think that's it? Any I left out?

. . . Although, I'll be splitting this month, unfortunately, with Campania, since this time of year I always dig out Christmas dishes from this region, including of course the Feast of the Fishes. Yeah, I know E-Rians cook their own feast, but I'd be facing a revolt if I deviated from the traditional menu this year. On to housekeeping: there seems to have been dwindling participation the past few months (poor Tuscany ), so the question is: is there interest in continuing the project into the new year? There's I think 6 or 7 regions left, though a couple (Abruzzo and Molise, Basilicata and Calabria) should probably be combined. That leaves the Veneto, Trentino Alto-Adige, Le Marche (holy crap there was a cookbook just published on this region in October!). I don't want to weigh down what I hope will be an active thread with housekeeping issues. If someone knows how to do a group PM conversation, maybe we should take it there and I'll just keep adding people to the conversation who are interested.

I hate to cop out here or revel in my own past glories(?), but every intro I've tinkered with writing for my favorite cooking region wound up sounding like last year's intro or trying to hard not to sound like last year's intro. So, with minor tinkering, I'm just putting up last year's: This is my favorite regional cuisine of Italy. The sheer volume and depth of artisanal food products and that so many “classic” recipes originated or are perfected here is simply staggering. Parmigiano Reggiano, Aceto Balsamico, Prosciutto di Parma, lasagna Bolognese, tortellini, cotechino, zampone, rich, luscious egg pastas . . . need I go on? It is a cuisine unto itself. Just about any introduction to this region in Italian cookbooks points out everything I noted above, mentions that Italians from all over the peninsula regularly hold it in the highest regard--second only to their mothers’ cooking of course--and then the author themselves adds a testament to the greatness of this cuisine. Waverly Root devotes 103 pages of Foods of Italy just to Emilia-Romagna, most of it just listing the unique dishes in each province and capital or twists on the traditional dishes (frankly, it gets tedious). Only Fred Plotkin, who, while acknowledging it is one of the best cuisines of Italy, offers a complaint: that what keeps it from truly rising above the rest is having great wine to match the food (a fair point, but not enough to hold it back in my opinion, especially when you have Tuscany just to the south, the Veneto just to the north). Then there’s the fact that Marcella Hazan, and, to a lesser extent, Mario Batali, really carved out my understanding of Italian cooking during my formative period of learning, and both are extensively influenced by Emilia-Romagna. As if I need any greater authority than Marcella Hazan for reference for this month, but really, we can’t talk about this region without mentioning the very best Italian regional cookbook out there, Lynne Rosetto Kasper’s The Splendid Table: The Cooking of Emilia Romagna. This has it all: regional histories, folklore, stories about dishes, profiles of notable restaurants and chefs in the region, personal anecdotes, and a bewildering volume of recipes. There’s a whole chapter just on variations of ragu, and many recipes of the Renaissance, which profited Emilia-Romagna greatly and lay the foundation for its elaborate cooking traditions. And yet, for as good as I say this book is, it’s that much better. Every time I read it I find all sorts of things I’d forgotten. I’d need one month just to make my way through all the standards of the cuisine and then another to do more unknown, interesting-sounding dishes. Nobody who likes Italian cooking should be without this book. This, then, was the region I first chose when we decided to go to Italy for our honeymoon. Though, after our planning, we had the Veneto and Tuscany in there as well, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I’d have liked there. Our stay was pretty much restricted to Bologna, the epicenter of Emilia-Romagna cuisine. Here’s what I wrote about Bologna when we came back from the trip: The first night there we played “restaurant lottery” and just wandered into the first place that looked good (and it was a tough choice!). Just some anonymous trattoria-style place with the hostess/waitress/owner sitting in a corner peeling chestnuts and popping them in her mouth (we compared chestnut peeling scars!). Every table had “riservado” on it, but we were eating at the Americano hour of 8 and when we left at 10, the first few Italians had just come in. How do you guys do it? Food was great, simple, honest, straightforward, right out of any Bolognese cookbook. Ate lunch at Tamburini, ate crepes with nutella for a snack, went to a piadineria, ate another lunch at Diana (we weren’t dressed for it and the service responded accordingly), and out last dinner there was at Montegrappa DaNello, fantastic. Our one foray outside of Bologna was to Villa Gaidello, a farmstead halfway between Bologna and Modena, for a night’s stay and a seven-course meal of E-R standards that still makes me misty-eyed just thinking about it. Emilia-Romagna is a cooking and feasting with a passion for the very best way to do a dish, no matter what the cost, wallet or waistline.

They made a mean negroni for me when I was there. And for once I didn't get a double take or a "what's that?" from the bartender when I requested it.