Kevin72

In Passion for Piedmont, Matt Kramer relates that there are basically only two fresh pastas traditional to Piemonte: tajarin and agnolotti, and that the locals there are content with just the two to eat almost daily. Friday night I decided to try out tajarin, a ribbon pasta that is a dialectization of tagliatelle. Never ones to be outdone in richness by Emilia-Romagna, in Piemonte the tradition is to make their fresh pasta with egg yolks instead of eggs. This results in a richer, more supple dough. 12 yolks for 3 cups of flour went into this batch: The height of Piemontese elegance is then sauce the tajarin with melted butter, parmigiano, and mounds of shaved white truffle. I considered, briefly, trying it with fresh black truffle, but when I went to our local market, they were exponentially more expensive than they have been in the past: $700/lb! Instead, I fell back on using a jar of robiola cream sauce with ground truffles, another souvenir my parents bought for me on their trip to Italy: If this is Italy’s equivalent of Kraft cheese spread in a jar, please don’t tell me. So I mixed about half the jar of the cheese with melted butter and Parmigiano, then tossed the pasta in: Excellent. The robiola with truffles kicked up a powerful, garlicky aroma (so powerful, in fact, that I’m quite sure that some garlic of some kind or another was used to augment the truffle flavor). It took quite a bit of willpower not to prevent leftovers. As for the pasta itself, well, like Swiss_Chef, and as you can see in the photo above, for all the egg yolks that went into the pasta it didn’t turn out that bright, vibrant golden yellow that the true product reputedly has. I used organic egg yolks, an organish-yellow color even, and it just didn’t carry through.

Great writeup Hathor! You covered just about anything I'd want to say and more. Pontormo, I'm using Kramer's book for my main reference. I like it quite a bit as well. The veal patties with grated apples caught my eye too! I'm guessing the reason chicken and beef broths are interchangeable is because Italian cooking calls for you to use meat as opposed to bones (though, as I write, this, there's a pot of duck and chicken carcasses simmering away for this month's stock needs). The flavor is a little more delicate, though that's not the right word, compared to French stocks.

We were there fairly early in the evening: 7:30 reservation, I think, so we were out at 9:30-10:00. Seemed very subdued. Deep Ellum's not quite the hopping spot it used to be.

I've seen it called at least five different things between three stores I find it at here in Dallas: black kale, Tuscan kale, cavolo nero, lacinto kale, dinosaur kale.

This is off to a great start! I'm almost inclined not to cook and just sit back and watch everyone else's contributions! And frying it sounds like a good idea.

Hopefully, that's not what Balic has on backorder . . .

Puree some of the walnuts with some of the cream to make a paste? Add chives in the sauce?

I'm considering a version of that myself in the coming weeks. Too bad the weather won't cooperate though. There's a similar version I've seen with a splash of red wine in each bowl that sound particularly good.

Mozzarella cheese. The "ends" get cut (generously) off the ball and I gobble 'em up without thinking. Prosciutto or any other cured meat, too: I probably should start buying extra to account for the slices I can't help but eat.

Perfect. Thanks Megan!

Dammit, dammit, dammit! I was at my parent's house for 4 days and Christmas and believe it or not I had thought to try and get the recipe but then got sidetracked.

Great! Though I must admit that most of this idea came from Hathor's suggestions in my old thread, and, seeing how fun Chufi's Dutch Cooking thread is, I figured I'd see how this would go.

To get this month rolling, and as a bridge from the other thread, we can stick with Piemonte and Val d'Aosta, so if you know of a dish from those regions and want to cook it, please share. Regional cookbooks to use, regardless of what region we are in: Culinaria: Italy The Foods of Italy: Region by Region, by Claudia Roden Italian Regional Cooking, by Ada Boni The Food of Italy, by Waverly Root Regional Foods of Northern Italy, by Marlena di Blasi For a Piemonte-specific cookbook, you have A Passion for Piedmont by Matt Kramer. To chose the next region, my thinking was that at the beginning of the month before, we look at the regions left, and then over the course of the month, we vote and decide what we will cover. The deadline is the last day of the month before. So, for example, we have all of January to chose the next region we will be cooking from in February. Here are the regions of Italy: Lombardia The Veneto Trentino Alto-Adige Friuli Venezia-Giulia Emilia-Romagna Liguria Tuscany Umbria Le Marche Abruzzo Lazio Campania Molise Puglia Basilicata Calabria Sicily Sardinia I'll try to find a regional map of Italy and post it, but if anyone has one handy, please share. I submit that double-headers on lesser-known/travelled regions should be allowable, i.e., a Calabria/Basilicata twofer. More than two a month though may get a bit crowded, and picking two non-neighboring regions may make it a little too jarring, so no Molise/Trentino combos.

Let's give this one a spin. After some PM conversations with interested members, I'm changing my own ideas around a bit on how it should go. We can always discuss it further and modify it along the way of course. My thinking is this: this will be an open, collaborative thread. No one has to commit to cooking in just this style for the whole year. We'll decide by popular vote the next region we want to cover, then if you make a meal or dish from or inspired by that region, post it. Use any resources you want: cookbooks, living or traveling there, ancestry from that area, my original thread, etc. I won't be as active and involved this year as I was last; after this month, we're starting a diet, and, not that Italian food isn't diet-friendly, but when you want to cook as close to regional traditions as possible, and are raised on American-sized portions, it's awfully hard. I may cook a couple of items from that region a month and share, particularly if it's one I didn't get to previously. So, thoughts?

It'll be as good as everyone else makes it! I would say that Italians are fiercely "micro-regional" (see the Ragu thread ). But there are plenty of collections of 'Italian cuisine' - written by Italians. Given the shuffling of borders on in N-E of Italy, I wonder how you would define the food on on side of the line as 'Italian' and the food on the other as 'other'. ← This, I think, would make a great thread in its own right, as certainly the Italy natives on the board would have much more to contribute than I do. However much I know about Italian, I know that much less about other European cooking styles and customs, so I'm fairly tentative on what differentiates it from surrounding regions. Trentino-Alto-Adige, a fairly recent addition to Italy, has now twice been described as too "Germanic" or "Austrian" in two cookbooks. Marlena de Blasi is one author and I think the other was Waverly Root.

It almost sounds contrarian: most authors abhor freezing fresh pasta and go out of their way to advise you not to do so. I do as a matter of convenience. I've not noticed a difference, better or worse, with frozen pasta but maybe having it ground into me for so long by so many, I prefer making and eating it that day.

You know me too well. Witness the equally botched re-attempt shortly after we got back. I still have one fillet left to try something on. Thanks! I did actually think of you after both of the baccala dishes didn't work out. I usually serve the shrimp the day I make them. Not to be too self-congratulatory, but this is my favorite of the saor preparations; I find the rich shrimp flesh is a perfect counterpoint with the tart vinegar marinade. Sorry for the delay in getting the recipe to you; maybe give it a spin on Superbowl Sunday . . . .? Well, I guess the close-out gets delayed at least one more month. I'll be down a proper wrapup at the end of January then, and will get to your question at that time, Nathan. Thank you all for the kind words and encouragement.

I’m not through beating this horse yet! As I speculated at the beginning of the year, I am extending the project by one additional month to incorporate a final twofer: the rich, noble cooking of Piemonte, and a brief, one or two-meal foray into neighboring Val d’Aosta. When planning out the year, this was the region that I really cringed to leave out. Per ECR’s direction, I have indeed tracked down A Passion for Piedmont by Matt Kramer and have found sufficient inspiration to fill the month with. Furthermore, the Christmas load also brought me two more regional cookbooks: Claudia Roden's The Food of Italy: Region by Region and Ada Boni's Italian Regional Cooking. This will also serve as a bridge to the new thread, a more collaborative effort, I hope, wherein anyone is invited to share a dish. I will be starting that one in the next few days.

Campania comes to an end with our New Year’s Day brunch. We started with some very tasty Bloody Marys from Batali’s Holiday Food to clear the fog from the night before: Then, it was eggs in purgatory: eggs poached over a spicy tomato sauce. I couldn’t resist some Tex-Mex urges and omit the olives and capers in the traditional recipe, add in some bacon for a good layer of grease to coat the alcohol-abused stomach with, and then Cholulah, a spicy chili condiment similar to Tobasco with a wooden knob for a top. The eggs are then poached over this sauce: New Year’s Day dinner has evolved over time into cotechino with lentils (actually I guess this should be served the night before), and so here we are, full circle, to where the year began. .

Fittingly, 2006 marks the beginning of my 10th year of true, full-on cooking as a hobby/obsession. I had tried some cooking in college, but for the most part, that is best left unmentioned. This phase of interest in cooking was kicked off by the 1996 film Big Night by Stanley Tucci. I had always gravitated to Italian cooking in previous exploits but really didn’t have a firm grasp on it and thought that it was mostly variations on pasta with tomato sauce. Then I saw Big Night, and was introduced to risotto, porchetta, crostini . . . things I had never heard of. I couldn’t shake that movie afterwards. That was when Mom pulled out for me her copy of Marcella Hazan’s Classic Italian Cook Book and I was off! I read it, cover to cover, twice, and spent the next two years cooking almost exclusively from that source. Sunday nights became my cooking night and I would take over the kitchen for the afternoon with one ambitious experiment or another. The signature scene in Big Night is, of course, the making and then the serving of Timpano, an elaborate affair of tube pasta, meatballs, sausage, tomato sauce, eggs, and ham that is then wrapped in pastry and baked in a large pot of the same name. When I saw this in the theaters, the audience as one moaned simultaneously when they cut and lifted a piece out. A study was later done that showed a sharp spike in local Italian restaurants after the movie would let out. Timpano has over time become the traditional dish I serve on New Year’s Eve, something at last to look forward to on a night this homebody has rarely enjoyed in the past. Some shortcuts though: I use phyllo instead of pastry. I did try a pastry variation a couple years ago but didn’t like it; it was too thick and distracted from the rest of the ingredients. No béchamel: I find it too heavy and use mozzarella instead for a binding layer and mix the whole with eggs to keep it in one piece. No whole hardboiled boiled eggs, those go in Torta Pasqualina. Finally, for ease of serving, it’s baked in a springform pan instead of a drumlike pot: it kept sticking and falling apart when I tried it that way in the first few iterations of this dish. For all the elaborate meals done lately, this is a pretty straightforward dinner, with an appetizer and dessert bookending the main event. We actually watched Big Night with some guests beforehand to really set the mood. Mid-Afternoon Snack: Bruschetta “da Zaccaria”: Shrimp simmered with garlic, chilies, and then finished with limoncello. The briny flavor of the shrimp, the sweet, citrusy glaze of limoncello, and the jolt of chilies running through the whole thing makes for a memorable antipasto. We had some friends of my wife’s in town for the New Year’s and I had made this once before for one of them. She mentioned how much she liked it when we were out the night before, and so this was added as a last-minute addition. Cocktail: Champagne, tangerine juice, limoncello, and bitters. Ugh, looks like Sunkist in wine goblets. We've broken all of our champagne flutes. Antipasto: Calzoncielli; pockets of leavened dough folded over a filling of ricotta, mozzarella, and anchovies. Apparently, the Dutch aren't the only ones who like fried things on New Year's Eve! The four of us, spurred on by cocktails, polished off the whole platter. The Timpano: Dessert: Sanguinaccio, traditionally a sweetened blood pudding which Mario Batali converts into a densely chocolate dessert in Holiday Food.

1. Sunday Lunch at Il Frantoio—Ostuni, Italy (03/06): A three-hour extravaganza of arch-Pugliese specialties, dishes, and wines, overseen and explained by Armando Belastrazzi, the proprietor of this hotel/farmstead just outside of Ostuni. 2. Osteria del’ Tempo Perso—Ostuni, Italy (03/05): Eaten the night before we headed off to Il Frantoio, this meal kicked off a great 24 hours of eating. The standard offering of nine antipasti were almost enough to wipe us out, but we kept on and enjoyed orecchiette with seafood and ‘ncapriatta, a puree of dried fava beans with various condiments. 3. Babbo—New York (10/22): Sensing a theme here? I was a little worried going in, not only with a bunch of Italy restaurants to compare this with, but also that Mario Batali has been such an influence on my own cooking that I would be underwhelmed. Pure arrogance on my part, of course. Impeccably done; even the most elementary dish of the evening (clams in a tomato and chile broth) had such pure, crystal-clear flavors that I was just left in awe. Plus the joys of discovering and liking lamb’s tongue, sweet breads, and squab livers. 4. Hugo’s—Houston (12/23): While I’ll freely admit to a hometown bias, I think Houston, always a great eating town, has evolved by leaps and bounds into one of the better dining destinations in the U.S. This restaurant, serving Mexican and in particular Oaxacan standards, is always a fave. I had roast suckling pig wrapped in a banana leaf, served with pickled onions, crumbly Mexican cheese, and a basket of tortillas to wrap the meat in. Sloppy and sublime. 5. York Street—Dallas (07/01 and 11/25): This place had caught my eye a number of times, including on the eG Texas board, and didn’t disappoint. It’s a very small place, seasonal menu, top-quality ingredients used simply but expertly. 6. Trattoria Cadorna—Rome (03/03): I went to Rome looking for a quintessential trattoria experience, complete with carafes of wine, a daily menu of local favorites (on this day, Thursday, it was potato gnocchi with spicy tomato sauce that I was after) and found it here in a crowded, loud place just a block up from out hotel. That it was a total fluke caused by the torrents of rain we were getting that night, limiting our desire to be out very long, made it that much better. 7. Kreuz and Smitty’s Barbecue—Lockhart, TX (06/25): The town of Lockhart in Texas, about 40 miles outside of Austin, has three of its best barbecue joints. This is Central Texas, Czech-style barbecue that places minimal emphasis on sides and sauce and you get the meat wrapped in butcher paper, which promptly gets transparent from the grease. I went for a double-header to compare the two: Smitty’s, the original, gets better atmosphere as you walk in right by the pit. Kreuz, the offshoot, had better food, but both made for a memorable experience that has my mouth watering as I write this. Coincidentally, this is also the #1 for Most Full I’ve Been All Year. 8. Lombardi’s—New York: (10/23) Painstaking research (mostly on eG) for the best pizza in NYC led me here and I was blown away. 9. The Green Room—Dallas (12/30) A last minute entry bumps the previous holder (Besso in Houston) off the list. A new chef has taken the reins to one of our traditionally favorite “splurge” restaurants in Dallas, and I was a little worried going in; these things are rarely handled well here. But almost every dish was done as well as it possibly could be, with wine perfectly matched for each course. 10. Nameless Osteria in Ostuni, Italy (03/06): I was too loopy from the rough local wine to remember the name. But it’s a sunk-down, cavern-like room, a roaring fireplace keeping the whole place toasty, and an open word-burning oven in the back, with two women dressed in traditional (?) contadina outfits making bruschetta, a casserole of bitter greens, or soup. This gets in the top 10 for sentimental reasons, a memorable time, a unique experience. We went into town with a couple from Britain that were staying at Il Frantoio and had a good time sharing each other’s company.

I'm adding last night's meal at The Green Room in Dallas to my "best" list.

We have some friends in from out of town for New Year’s and my wife convinced me to give The Green Room a spin for them. I was reluctant; with Marc Cassel gone, I figured that its distinctive flair would be lost or muted at best. But, with now nearly a year gone by since his departure, I hoped that maybe the kinks would have been ironed out. We arrived and found an overwhelmed reservation desk, not a good sign. Posted on the stairway up to the rooftop bar is a glassed in case with Marc Cassel’s chef’s coat along with his sous chef’s, Suzan Friez, along with a signed menu from their last night there. So at least it looks like the parting was amicable. We did the Feed Me/Wine me without even looking at the menus (though there was one posted outside and I perused it briefly). Executive Chef Colleen O’Hare has now taken the reins at The Green Room. According to their website,, she had previously worked there under Cassel, then went over to York Street and Sharon Hage, who became a great influence. Appetizers (we ate and shared amongst ourselves): salmon cakes, mussels with champagne and chili broth, quail, and baked brie. The quail was my favorite and may have been the best-done, most flavorful dish all night. My mussels, though, were equally good—this is one of the restaurant’s signature dishes after all. And, there was an obscene amount of them for just one person. I didn’t have any, but apparently the salmon cakes were underseasoned. Salads: Two Texas bibb lettuce salads, a chopped bacon and blue cheese salad, and mine was a baby romaine salad with pomegranate dressing and goat cheese. I took this off my wife’s hands; even though she had specified she didn’t want goat cheese at the outset of the meal, it was still served to her. Probably the only service hiccup that night, and, truthfully, it has happened to us previously when I got served something with coconut, the one thing I hate and specify not to serve me. Salads were, back in the Cassel days, a pleasant surprise if not even a standout when the rest of the meal disappointed. We didn’t share so much of our salads this time; I tried the one I gave to my wife and found it underwhelming, but mine was clean-the-plate good. Mains: Roast pork chop (looked like a tenderloin), diver scallops with risotto, branzino (Mediterranean Sea Bass) with couscous, and venison. One thing I always liked about Green Room was that they had the stones to serve their pork medium rare, allowing for a much more fully flavored meat. That hasn’t fallen out of favor and the table unanimously agreed that my pork dish with pan-roasted potatoes, green tomato relish, and a pancetta jus was the best dish of the four mains. It was perfect. Kudos, too, for serving venison, and I found that to be excellent as well. Desserts: Crème brulee, chocolate cheesecake, cappuccino mousse, and key lime pie. All were good, but seemed very rote in their conceptualization and execution. I recognized some of the servers from before and service was quite good. The wines, as always, were well-matched with each course. In the Cassel Days, Green Room offered a frustratingly unreliable experience. When he was on site and cooking, you could tell: everything just hummed and the dishes they made for Feed Me/Wine Me were mind-blowing (I still remember fondly raw oysters served with a savory fennel gelato). When he wasn’t there, the food was a little more unreliable: either good if a little straightforward, or overly ambitious and not well executed. While last night’s meal lacked the mindbending qualities of the top meals we’ve had there, everything was solidly prepared. Everyone agreed that only the salmon cakes and one of the salads were subpar. This was even a better experience than dining at Cassel’s new outpost, Dragonfly at Hotel ZaZa, so it looks like Green Room has been able to successfully weather the storm of so prominent a figure departing, and Chef O’Hare is off to a great start. We’ll be back.

What are some other traditional Dutch dishes for the Holidays? Anything normally served on New Years' Eve/Day?

Exactly - boiling water does it every time. Just used it to clean hardened molasses-gingerbread mixture from my stove. ← I was about to throw out one of my pans that had some scorched residue on the inside until I fortuitously read this thread. I tried it and poof! it was gone. Thanks!