Kevin72

Thanks for the info on Puglia's great bread products, Franci! Pugliese cooking is a sentimental favorite of mine and I hope we do your cuisine right this month . . .

There's actually, coincidentally, a Sicilian recipe for birds that feed on figs . . . My tree's not all that big, really. Last year it put out nothing, but then we didn't move in until August, so maybe production's about to slow down. I do have an ongoing feud with a tenacious squirrel right now; he holds his ground and gives me an earful when he sees me taking his figs! Now when I got out there, he's even taken a big bite out of all the ripest figs and then left the rest . . . I was pretty proud of my tree and its output, then last week we were on a walk and I spotted in front of us a fig that was almost the size of a peach. I looked up and there was this monstrous tree in someone's back yard, sagging under the weight of its figs, all of them golfball sized or bigger . . .

I'm glad you're making that; it was really good and somehow doesn't seem so out of place in the hot weather months.

Also, let’s go ahead and open the polls for Q4 of cooking: October through December. For those new to this process, pick three Italian regions you’d like us to cover, one for each of these months. Regions left to pick from: Trentino Alto-Adige The Veneto Emilia-Romagna Tuscany Umbria Le Marche Abruzzo Molize Basilicata Calabria Then send me a PM with your votes. At the start of September (when we will cover Campania), I’ll announce the regions with the most votes for being the next three we cover. I’d also like to bring the following issue up for discussion: I say that some of these remaining regions could be combined. Not to slight their own cuisines or anything, but there just isn’t much literature out there on, say, Basilicata or Molise or Le Marche, and I think it would be difficult to sustain a month’s worth of cooking for all of us for these regions. So maybe combine, as I did last year, Basilicata and Calabria, Umbria and Le Marche, and Molise and Abruzzo? E-R, Tuscany, and the Veneto are heavyweights in their own right and will need the full month of cooking to explore. Again, this is not meant as a slight on those regions or as a dismissal of their cuisine, just a recognition of limited availability of resources we can use. Also, obviously, we’ll run the year out with regions leftover, regardless of if we combine or not. So at the start of October, let’s also get a discussion going on wanting to see this region-by-region treatment through beyond the new year.

In August, we will cover the cooking and cuisine of Puglia (aka Apulia), the heel of the boot. I became fascinated early on with this region; something about its bare bones style appealed to me: dishes are what they are, with sparse use of herbs or spices to gussy them up. This culminated in a wonderful trip there in March 2005 that didn’t disappoint, most especially the whitewashed city of Ostuni, atop a hill overlooking the ocean. It's still unkown and off the beaten path, but seems to be on the cusp of being "discovered"; I'm curious what the next 10 years or so will bring. Pugliese cuisine relies heavily on its local vegetables and wild greens. It is a heavyweight in olive oil, wine, and wheat production: #1 in oil for all of Italy, routinely in the top three wine producers, and it provides much of the durum wheat for the dried pasta in the South. Pane Pugliese and Pane di Altamura are both breads famed in Italy and beyond. As they were extensively occupied by both the Spanish and the Greeks, Pugliese cuisine draws from both of these cultures as well: lots of rice dishes and casseroles are to be found. Like Piemonte on the diametrically opposed corner of the peninsula, Puglia has a noted antipasto culture. Osteria del Tempo Perso in Ostuni usually parades out six or more at the start of a meal. Other places we saw walking around the town only served antipasti. Lots of fried dishes of course, but also many interesting pickled items, and a number of antipasti that just emphasize the local vegetables. Seafood, of course, is a specialty of a region bounded on three sides by water, but curiously, when we were traveling there, once inland we found seafood hard to come by. We asked the proprietor of Il Frantoio, a wonderful B&B just 2-3 miles outside of Ostuni if they served any seafood and he looked perplexed: since they weren’t on the sea (but you could see and hear it from where we were talking), why would they have seafood? But at any rate, they have a wealth of delicious seafood soups and stews which change in each town you visit, and make ample use of the bivalves which naturally grow in beds in the gulf of Taranto. Two most famous dishes of the region: orecchiette pasta topped with bitter greens and ‘ncappriatta, a confoundingly simple, homey dish of dried favas cooked in water until they fall apart (nothing else!), served with bitter greens, fried peppers, and lampascioni, a bitter bulb that is typically pickled. Everyone should try to make this this month, but definitely try to track down the peeled dried favas (yellowish or green in color) and not the brown kind with the peel on, or they will require more time to cook and may not even fall apart entirely. Cookbook references for this region are, regrettably, limited outside of regional surveys. Amazon turns up only the following cookbooks: Italian Country Cooking: Recipes from Umbria & Apulia by Susanna Gelmetti and Robert Budwig Flavors of Puglia by Nancy Harmon Jenkins There was also a book called Honey From A Weed that I recall from my earlier searches, but now it doesn’t turn up on Amazon. Jenkins’ book is very good, though, and can be faulted only for being too short. Also, Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s book The Italian Country Table has a number of Pugliese recipes, and this cookbook did spark my early-on interest in the region. That’s it. I’m a little worried about this month, coming on the heels of elaborate and exotic Sicily, and that its more austere, Spartan cooking may suffer in comparison for some. But hey, it’s August, it’s unbelievably hot almost everywhere, and what better kind of cooking to try out than one so simple and straightforward to showcase summer's bounty?

Sunday night's meal began with "cutlets" of fennel and eggplant, breaded and fried, then, hot out of the oil, doused with orange: Interesting play off each other. This was based on Mario's eggplant cutlets recipe, and I happened to have some fennel sitting around, so I used that as well. I almost liked it more than the eggplant. Last year, after I had finished Sicily, a recipe was brought to my attention that I regretted not getting a chance to try, and vowed this time out that I would get to it. It was a recipe posted by Paula Wolfert on Chef Zadi's blog: (click here). Actually, it was a bastardized version: I don't have any of the couscous equipment, and so made the sauce brothier than normal and then put the couscous directly into it to cook. Very exotic, highly flavorful. The almond/garlic paste swirled in at the end of cooking reminded me of the Ligurian dishes I really liked and added a whole new element. The cinnamon was a very faint flavor that really made the dish more homey and comforting. Too, I almost wonder if some roasted peppers in there would be a good addition. To drink with the meal: Not too shabby; not as good as last week's trio of reds for my dinner party, but it complemented the meal well and normally I do fall into the "no red wine with fish" camp. I think the spices helped mediate the two. Dessert was a honey sponge cake from Schiavelli's Many Beautiful Things cookbook, topped with a fig compote, the figs again coming from our tree in the backyard (wheee!). I'm not setting a good example for next month, I fear: I had bought ingredients for a final Sicilian meal but won't get to it until tomorrow night. Apologies to Puglia for stealing a day.

I understand that it's supposed to last, but after three weeks of snacking on it, preserved or no, I'm kinda done. There's just the two of us, and my wife only ate it when I served it, so she doesn't reach for it out of hand. But, for future reference, is it something that needs to be jarred? Or can it last in tupperware?

Whoah. Those are all great suggestions, thanks! I particularly like the sound of the chickpea salad.

My ongoing problem with caponata is that it makes a ton, no matter how much I try to scale it back, and it's not necessarily something I got back to again and again. I'm probably going to wind up throwing out what's left of ours after precariously snacking on it at work over the past couple weeks. But maybe you can use it to top some grilled fish? Isn't that what de Blasi used it for in one of her recipes (though cocoa and fish, hmmm).

Fun, fascinating thread. I love watching the buildup to plating and all the equipment and prep used. But I now think much, much less of my own DP skills . . .

Holy crap, Elie! Good stuff, too, Judith! Love the split between the couscous and the ragu. Guess I'm only going to fit one or maybe two more meals in this month. Where the hell did the time go?

Pan sear them with olive oil, then toss with butter and fresh fettucine. You could do some sort playful "lobster n lobster" kind of thing where you cook them with lobster; maybe poach them together in butter?

Anthony Bourdain's Nasty Bits has a rather tasty dismemberment of the Raw Foods movement, followed by a rant in the postscript at the end of the book. It may not defeat any of her points, but it'd be a good cathartic read for you.

Did the waitstaff warn you about it or did your dining companions? Seems weird that the staff at the restaurant would know to warn people about something being to salty when the easier fix would just be to, ah, make it less salty . . . I'm just leery about crowds at pizza joints since up here in Dallas there's STILL an hour and a half wait on any given night it seems to get into Fireside Pies.

Well, I still want us to do an outing there together to pick that menu apart . . .

Glad you finally went and moreover that it was so good. My ongoing quandary is in coming to Houston on the weekend and having to fight the weekend crowds to get in there. Sounds like they're still out of control there, then?

I dunno what to tell you, except that as we all know there's certain things out there that we are cursed to be unable to make, no matter how simple they are. I've tried three separate cannoli recipes (Batali's, the one in Sweet Sicily, and the one in Italian Holiday Cooking) none of which turned out. Maybe it is the tubes; they were cribbed from some bargain bin at our Italian deli. I seem to be dancing around one of my bad luck streaks after this past weekend, so I'm reluctant to try them again.

Breadcrumbs on the outside only; most of the filling was potato. I have noticed but never received a satisfactory answer to the cheese-n-fish quandary myself. It does seem like some of the more "delicate" or lighter, younger cheeses are occasionally matched with fish, especially if the fish is strong in flavor. When used as a stuffing, it's rarely a significant amount, more just a flavor enhancer. I still say it seems mostly true of pasta dishes and shellfish that you don't want cheese in there.

Makes up for the summer weather in Texas? ← At this point I'd need a Jennifer Connelly tree to make up for this summer's weather.

My wife's birthday meal was this weekend. Each year, she'll pick an ingredient, invariably seafood, and then I make an entire meal using that ingredient. This year was tuna. We started with tuna "polpettini"; tuna with potatoes, ricotta salata, green onion, and normal ricotta, rolled in breadcrumbs and fried. They are then finished with a spicy tomato sauce: Then, a tuna pizza-type thing. I rubbed a tuna steak with ground coriander and star anise and seared it. The pizza dough had green onions in it. I baked the dough separate, then topped it with arugula, the sliced tuna, and some of the leftover almond olive pesto from the previous night. For a pasta, penne with spicy zucchini and canned tuna: Finally, cribbing from Franci's glorious involtini, but with far less appealing results: In the stuffing I used bread crumbs, slivers of onion, fresh figs from our tree out back, and pistachios.

I dove back into Sicilian cooking this weekend, starting with a dinner party Saturday night. We began with a cocktail that has mutated over time from Mario's generic recipe of seasonal fruit with sweet vermouth: he recommended watermelon at one point and I tried it. Since then, I've started augmenting it with vodka and lime juice, and now, to give it that extra exotic Sicilian kick, rosewater. Antipasto I: Fried Zucchini Sticks of baby zucchini are twice-fried, then topped with sugar, of all things. The second antipasto, which I didn't get a picture of, was the same Pan Fried Cheese I did last year. I also forgot to dust it in flour before I seared it off, so it was a little more messy. Not quite as . . . stimulating as last year's. Primo was pasta norma, which a number of people have already discussed, so I won't go too much more into it: But I love it. The nearly meaty eggplant, the sweet basil off of the spicy tomato sauce, and then the ricotta salata is what sends it home for me. For the main, it was Mario's grilled lamb. A leg of lamb is marinated overnight with a mint paste, grilled, then served with a dipping "pesto" of green olives, almonds, chilies, and orange juice. I forgot (again, maybe that cocktail was a little stronger than I intended?) to get a more appealing pic of it right off the grill. So, you get a pic of a platter of chopped up meat instead: You can see the pesto in the very upper right hand corner. I had planned on getting the meat to 100F internal, then tossing it in my oven on the keep warm setting (145 F, the perfect temp for medium rare lamb) but it took forever to warm up internally and I guess once I did get it in the oven, there was quite a bit of carryover cooking to be done. So I found it a little drier than I wanted, but everyone else liked it. I was quite pleased to see a faint smoke ring on the inside of the meat though! Served with it was a simple arugula and lemon salad. To drink with the meal, a sampler of three Sicilian reds that are pretty easy to come by here: I liked the middle one the best, but they all had a nice, jammy, intense fruit flavor. Dessert was a gelato sampler: Yucky pic. They were pistachio, nutella, and cinnamon ricotta. Three interesting things played out in each gelato. The hands-down fave was the nutella, but it has never completely frozen and melts almost immediately at room temp. The cinnamon ricotta, by contrast, is rock-hard and grainy. I've made it before and it was a highlight; not sure what's going on here. And the pistachio, normally also a favorite and it tasted great on its own, but alongside the other two, it lost alot of its sweetness and almost tasted more salty than anything.

Amazing stuff as always, everyone! Foodman, I'm both glad and jealous your cannoli turned out so well. Andrew, both of those stuffed pasta pie dishes look incredible . . . I can't believe you did a fish AND a meat course afterwards! Your poor, lucky guests!

I am absolutely shocked that my wife loves this dish as much as I do. But you can't argue with it. When I made it one time with fresh sardines, I was a little queased out with it as well . . . the innards were all pretty stubborn to get out and I really had to, urgh, dig in there to lodge them out.

So, what quality do you think the meat lends to the dish?

How were the staff? Any hard-sell tactics like what the original DO article talked about? Did you overhear any talk of "deep root" and "restaurant stash" wines?