Kevin72

Jasper's Experience. Took some more out-of-town guests to Zorba's last night and they loved it. I had lamb chops and they came with these peas that had me just rhapsodic. I can't remember the last time I got veggies at a place that weren't an afterthought and here they were very distinctively seasoned. Even my pea-not-liker wife lit up when she tried them. And, we split the check!

Tuesday night, a “light” soup to come down off the previous days of heavy eating. This was the Neapolitan Zuppa di Sante, “health soup”, so named for the homemade broth, the protein of the meatballs, the stracciatella of eggs and cheese beaten in before serving, and the leafy escarole. Wednesday night was, good lord, another seafood meal. Now I have to use up all that baccala I left behind! We started with Aqua d’Ananas, a pineapple cocktail from Mario Batali’s Holiday Food cookbook: Batali’s writings have introduced me to the pleasures of pureed seasonal fruit mixed with sweet vermouth, as done here with pineapple, and I did last summer with watermelon (a must try). We then had a primo of scialatielli, a pasta specialty of the Amalfi coast. The dough is mixed with pureed basil, rolled out thicker than standard pasta sheets (setting 4 of 6 on my machine) then cut on the horizontal as opposed to vertically to make short, stubby shapes. It was topped with a spicy shrimp and tomato sauce. Despite the fact that mixing and rolling out the pasta filled my kitchen with the summery aroma of basil, and that the smell then got all over my hands, it did not carry through in the final dish. I’d make it with parsley next time, then augment with fresh torn basil at the end. Otherwise, though, a nice, unusual and very textured dish. Now, THIS is a proper fish fry! The baccala batter is soda water mixed with flour. I thoroughly dried the baccala out of its soak and coated it well, then slipped it into the oil. The coating thankfully didn’t blast right off as it had done on Christmas Eve. It was then topped with a lemon and mint “compote” of lemon, sugar, and water cooked down in a pan to make a syrupy consistency. But, argggh! The baccala hadn’t soaked enough and was still a little unpleasantly salty and firm. This was a day and a half soak; I had soaked another piece from this same package for two days for the pasta I made a couple weeks ago and it was too soft and lost almost all its flavor. Guess it just wasn’t meant to be this year. This may be an item that gets jettisoned in subsequent years; too hard to make properly for a crowd, anyways.

Thanks Pontormo! What's extra frustrating about the disapointment is that I always knock fried food out of the park when I make it at home. My mom thinks it's too much of a fuss, messy, and smelly. Everytime I've done it for them at their place it's been leaden, greasy food that does indeed smell up the house. So this year, with my Dad's new grill with a burner attachment, I thought I had it locked up. And here, again, I was unable to make my case on how good it can be.

I think they were pretty picked clean from the Holidays and the unexpected media coverage which seemed to really boost interest for them. Normally, they're really good at restocking: I went back the weekend after my first visit for the cotechino and they were fully replenished. I would guess that they just are having troubles getting back into the groove.

Vincent Schiavelli, RIP Schiavelli was the author of the book Many Beautiful Things which was indispensible during my month of Sicilian cooking. Not just a great cookbook, but a sweet, sad account of reconnecting with his ancestry in Polizzi Generosa in Sicily. He'll be missed.

Ricotta, pecorino, parm, black pepper, and parsley or chives, I don't remember now which. I know, I know, "cheese and fish". But there is a recipe for Crostini Napoletani in Mario's Holiday Food book involving anchovies and ricotta whic this is a modification of. And I've read a couple of times that it's acceptable with such a mild cheese (ricotta) to go with such a strong fish.

Great idea! Highlights: York Street in Dallas (went twice), Besso in Houston, and Hugo's in Houston on Friday night. I always forget how great Hugo's can be and this time may have been one of the best. Also, eating at the barbecue temples of Kreutz's and Smitty's. Affordable: Zorba's (Plano) is always a perennial fave, and we've recently gotten much more into Thai thanks to Richard Kilgore, so I can't go more than a few weeks without a jaunt over to Jasmine in Plano as well. Biggest Disappointments: Dragonfly in Dallas and Jasper's in Plano.

The lobster for the pasta are cooked in a pot with half a bottle of white wine, water, bay leaves, celery, parsley stems, and some plum tomatoes. Once they turn red, get them out of the pot, shock them in an ice bath, then get the meat out of the shells. Toss the shells back in the pot and cook them a while longer. I then strained the broth and reduced it to half the total volume. The base for the pasta was garlic, chilies, and parlsey, then 1/2 cup of tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes. Then about 2 cups of the lobster broth, which was then reduced away to nearly nothing. I tossed the pasta in the pan with the sauce, another ladle of broth, and the juices from the lobster meat, then off the heat added the meat and parsley. The pasta takes on a very buttery consistency from the reduced lobster flavor and it is one of my favorite pastas. The spicey kick really sends it into orbit. The shrimp are indeed, just a shrimp version of the Venetian recipe. Though I just now realized I forgot the currants and pine nuts. So it was red onion, celery, and then nearly equal parts red wine vinegar and sugar reduced to a syrup. I didn't fry in olive oil; I had bought an enormous jug of it for this evening but forgot that, too, in the packing rush. So it was just vegetable oil augmented with a little olive oil. Edit: The squid were actually "oven braised" due to a lack of stovetop space. I went an hour and ten minutes at 350.

Ah, what the hell. Here’s our Christmas dinner, though there isn’t anything even approaching Neapolitan about it. A “pantry canapé” of tuna, capers, and artichokes pureed with mayonnaise. Spread on crackers, then top with either pickles or roasted peppers. The primo, gnocchi with blue cheese, was a recent after I got a potato press for Christmas a few years back and then whipped them up for that night’s dinner, instantly adding a new tradition: The main was filet mignon with a mushroom/red wine deminglace, a savory spinach custard (as I previously mentioned, it comes from Pamela Sheldon Johns’ book Parmigiano), and mom’s stewed red cabbage, “Verona style”, which she actually picked up after talking to the cook at a restaurant in Verona they enjoyed.

Christmas Eve and La Vigilia, the meal I have come to look forward to making all year long. The menu: Cocktail: Pomegranate Cosmopolitans Antipasti: Marinated Anchovies Shrimp en Saor Stuffed and Broiled Smelts Clams Aragonate, Arigenate, Oregante, depending on whom you ask Primo: Spaghetti with Lobster Secondi: Stuffed Braised Squid Fried Cod Contorno: Braised Rapini When I was a kid (okay, fourteen or fifteen), we were living next door to an Italian family. One year on Christmas Eve, my family was sitting around to our “traditional” dinner of a cheese and cracker plate followed by a choice of either Onion Soup or Clam Chowder, and we got to talking about traditions. My mom then related how the family next door was eating a huge seafood feast, like five or six dishes, and among them were fried squid, mussel soup, and stewed eels. I didn’t even know you could eat these things, much less that they were part of the Italian repertoire! I was horrified and yet deeply fascinated all at once. Surely it was just “their” tradition, right? But how did they come by such weird things to eat? Mom answered that Italians everywhere always ate a huge seafood meal on Christmas Eve, that there had to be seafood in everything they ate, and that it was usually four or more courses. I glanced next door through their window and saw the four of them just sitting down to their dinner. I found myself privately wishing I was there to try some of this exotic stuff. My culinary world got a little larger that night, but at the same time my own family’s traditional Christmas Eve dinner seemed a little smaller by comparison. I think my fascination with Italian food can be traced to that one incident. Cooking a Vigilia meal is always a chance to recapture that moment, a culmination of years of fascination and admiration for Italian food and culture. Over the past few years, I’ve been culling together an assortment of Vigilia dishes, and last year rolled out a full-on seven course meal for my wife’s family. After we explained it to my mom, she at last couldn’t resist and asked us to do the same this year. I scoured Dallas for various frozen and preserved seafood items, my Mom called the seafood shop near them I’ve discussed previously and ordered, then called back almost daily to confirm, the rest of the items. Cooking took most of the day Christmas Eve and would've taken even longer without my mom helping out and my wife taking the pics. Of course, we can’t have drama with so much going on: about an hour outside of Dallas on our way down to Houston, I suddenly, horribly remembered that I’d forgotten to pack the baccala which I’d so laboriously tracked down. We spent all day Friday dashing from one place to the next, and in a rare case of not wanting the traditional item, the only version I was able to find was the flat, boardlike, authentic product that would need three to four days of soaking, not the 24 hours I had to work with. So I fell back on regular cod. I battered it using a soda water and flour combo that normally goes on the baccala, heated a couple of inches of oil in a large cast iron pot on the outside grill, and set about trying to fry it. Complete disaster, from start to finish. I guess I hadn’t dried the fish well before dipping it in the batter, as the batter almost immediately slipped off, the cod fell apart, and then sank to the bottom of the pot, where it promptly stuck. We fished some out and used what we could, but the real deal, the sine qua non of a Vigilia feast, baccala, was lacking at the table this year. Everything else, though, was great. I’m always pleased at the shrimp en saor recipe, a modification of the Venetian sfogi en saor. The spaghetti with lobster is, I believe, the hands-down hit of the evening and we capably polished off the whole bowl. The clams, too, were a solid hit. Everyone was pleasantly surprised by the smelts and the marinated anchovies. I was in a bad mood about the cod when the secondi were served, and so didn’t pay much attention to the calamari, other than that it seemed a little underseasoned. We went for a nice stroll afterwards, looked at neighborhood lights, then came back to a cookie platter. Here, nearly twenty years after I had first heard of it, I think I had finally reached that seafood feast meal.

Last night was another seafood-themed meal setting the stage for the big feast on Christmas Eve. All of these items were from Batali's Holiday Food cookbook. We started with two marinated fish: one was marinated anchovies, the other was fried, marinated bluefish. The anchovies are a favorite of mine and I pretty much make them for my benefit alone. For the first time this year I tried using salt-packed anchovies instead of fresh ones or sardines (or one year, and to very poor results, smelt). They worked quite well. Fillet the anchovies, then marinate them for 12 hours in white wine vinegar. Drain, then submerge in olive oil and scatter oregano, garlic, and chilies over the top. The bluefish is a substitution for the traditionally used eel. Flour and fry the fish, then make a vinegar "syrup" out of red wine vinegar, sugar, mint, garlic, and chilies. Pour this over the still-warm fillets. For the primo, it was the non-seafood gnocchi alla sorrentina. Gnocchi are tossed in a spicey tomato sauce with ample basil and mozzarella. Arthur Schwartz's recipe has the interesting touch of baking them, which I considered but backed off from due to time constraints. Finally it was shrimp in "aqua pazza" shrimp in crazy water, so named because originally the recipe included sea water, which only a man crazy with thirst would try to drink. In addition to the sea water--now just tap water mixed with salt--you have an aromatic base of fennel, onion, and chilies, and then the whole is simmered with more crushed tomatoes and white wine.

I've never heard of boiling it before; I'd think it would get too tough or lose too much flavor. What specifically weren't you happy with? Do you like it when you've had it elsewhere? The kind I get here is partially reconstituted, or at least not nearly the board-like consistency that I've heard the old product has. A two-day soak is probably even too much for it; it seemed a bit bland.

While you're right it may not be entirely authentic, there's something to be said about such go-for-broke excess. Where the calzones full-sized or mintatures?

It seems like the de rigeur filling in Campanian cooking. I'd imagine it would even be a good vegetable dish without the ricotta. I always forget how good it is until I make it. I've also used feta instead of ricotta before and liked it even better.

Lots of ugly bachelor cooking this weekend. My dinner Sunday night: spaghetti with baccala. The baccala is simmered in a condimento of standard Southern Italian flavor elements: red onion, chilies, currants, pine nuts, capers, and olives. The olives I used were Gaeta, and they almost completely dissolved into the sauce, turning it a rather unappealing blackish-purple color. Also, some more not-entirely-Neapolitan cookie making. In the foreground are lemon drops from the dessert book Sweet Sicily by Victoria Granof. Off to the side were my first attempt at biscotti, one with almonds and chocolate chips, the other with anise seed. In the background are mustaciolli, which are traditional to Naples and Campania, but I used the variation from Calabria I did back in August. These had ground almonds, honey, espresso, and chocolate in addition to the spices that both versions share: clove, cinnamon, orange zest, and nutmeg. I did try to do them in the Neapolitan tradition of cutting them into diamond shapes, but botched it horribly. They looked okay going into the oven but then got lumpy in the heat of the oven, and when I went to scoop them off the baking sheet, they also got a little more twisted and irregular in shape. And that too-liquid icing didn't help, either. Ugh.

A couple days in advance should get you in.

Great review. Good seafood places are hard to come by, so you have to pounce when you find them.

Last night we had some deep-fried calzones. You read that right. Somehow, they found a way to make calzones even better. These were a version typically served around Christmas, stuffed with escarole, anchovies, garlic, chilies, capers, pecorino, and ricotta. Normally you also add pine nuts and currants but I like the savory, spicy onslaught you get with just the other ingredients. Schwartz gives a similar recipe but "just" as a normal baked, butter-enriched pie. In a case of good timing, the movie Goodfellas started on HBO just when we sat down to eat. Another movie full of great food scenes that influenced my early cooking: I tried, many times, to sliver garlic so thin “it would liquefy in a pan with just a little oil”. My wife’s heading out of town to spend an early Christmas weekend with her family, so it’s bachelor food and leftovers for me. How selfish of her to disrupt all this cooking I have to do yet!

I agree, though PN's looks incredible. When I made my Napoletani Ragu I found it a little too thin and wound up reducing it. It picked up a darker color but I liked the intensity of flavor. In fact the darker, "almost black" part seems to be part of some tradition or another since one of my cookbooks calls this sort of braise "in the Black".

All right, Hathor and I are working something up for the next resolution. PM me if you're interested in taking part. It doesn't require a yearlong commitment, but you may be doing some legwork at some point.

Thanks for the compliments! The larger braciolona is based on a recipe from Batali's Holiday Food and based more on what I had on-hand than anything else. That pizza sounds incredible. I'd heard of the technique before but decided to do it in the oven because a) my wife isn't so big on raw prosciutto and b) my oven doesn't get as hot as real kind, so it wouldn't get the pizza hot enough to wilt the prosciutto right into it out of the oven.

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these: Monday night we did a collection of Neapolitan antipasti: In the foreground is “winter Caprese”, versions of which appear in both Mario Batali’s new cookbook Molto Italiano and Erica de Mane’s Flavors of Southern Italy. Lacking the ingredients indicated in their recipes, I simply slivered some sundried tomatoes, then sprinkled them over mozzarella and added shredded basil, then spritzed the whole with olive oil. Certainly no substitute for juicy, almost spicy height-of-summer tomatoes and mozzarella but this was an interesting variation and certainly something more Italian-style restaurants should consider doing here instead of cottony hothouse tomatoes out of season. Next in the center up are crostini Napoletani, crostini topped with “ricotta” (the homemade, not-really-ricotta kind) and minced anchovies, then broiled until sizzling. In the yellow serving dish are meatballs with lemons and capers from Naples at Table using pork instead of the veal directed in the recipe. Finally in the blue bowl in the back is insalata rinforzo, a salad of pickled cauliflower, carrots, and peppers. Served during Christmastime, the idea is to keep “reinforcing” it with subsequent leftovers from whatever other vegetable dish you make each night and then dousing it with more vinegar to preserve it.

Sunday night’s meal was one of the previously mentioned all-seafood Vigilia “teasers”. For a cocktail we had tangerine, Campari, and soda from Mario’s Holiday Food cookbook, something I’ve really grown attached to during the Christmas season. Our antipasto was calamari alla Luciana: Normally, this is cooked with octopus but I haven’t been able to track any down here in Dallas lately. So instead I used calamari heads/tentacles. Braise calamari with crushed tomatoes, chilies, and garlic. The calamari throws off enough liquid to account for the remaining liquid to cook in; apparently, according to Schwartz, there’s even a saying in Italian about an octopus cooking in its own juices, akin to the English proverb “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it”. To mop up the juices, I made a couple loaves of bread with finely minced roasted peppers added to the dough, giving it an orange-ish hue. The primo was a repeat of a pasta meal made way back last winter when I did the Veneto: linguine alle vongole. This time, chilies added a little punch to the dish instead of the ample ground black pepper I used back then. I said it then and I’ll say it now: one of my all-time favorite pastas. Once I read Schwartz’s rhapsodic writings on the dish as a Neapolitan mainstay I knew I had to dig it out one more time. The secondo were grilled skewers of monkfish and peppers, marinated in lemon juice and oil before cooking and then, off the grill, doused with a second marinade of olive oil, fresh chilies, mint, and limoncello. Dessert was another batch of sweets for the holidays: struffoli, little fried puffs of dough that are doused in citrus-scented honey while still hot out of the oil. That's one whole recipe's batch by the way. I looked at three different recipes and all gave similar ingredient measurements. I guess it's good that they didn't last beyond the meal; I find they get too stale and dried out even after 24 hours sitting out.

Our Sunday jaunt to Jimmy’s: We also had lunch there while we waited for noon to come and be able to buy wine: My wife had a spicy sausage (left); I had Italian beef (right). The owner was there and beaming with pride but also seemed worn out. He said that they had their best day of business ever on Saturday and were practically turning people away at the door. The local news has been very supportive of the re-opening and has done a number of stories on it; he said that the Dallas Morning News had done three stories just in the past week! This was only phase one of the reconstruction; he said that a Phase Two is coming sometime in the spring and includes the aforementioned wine room. As it is, they’ve already amply expanded their wine selection, and it remains Italian only. Also in the next phase will be better lighting; currently they have a few overhead lights but he hadn’t accounted for needing more with the expanded space. It’s a huge improvement over the original (“Not something I’d ever want to go through again”, the owner admitted), which was originally small, cramped, and only about half of its space was dedicated to Italian foods; the rest was a standard convenience store. Now the split is maybe 70-30 or more in favor of Italian. Having gone for the first time now in over a year, I’m a little frustrated at seeing all these different products that would have been of great use to me for my yearlong Italian cooking project. Here’s the haul for the Holidays though: No cotechino yet; he said that it’s on order and should be coming in soon. Guess I’ll just *have* to go back and check on it next week.

In the December 8-14 Issue of the Dallas Observer's Dish column (newstand version only, not available online), Mark Stuertz reports that Jimmy's is auctioning off a batch of their Sicilian Pasta sauce on e-Bay to commemorate the reopening of the store. Proceeds benefit the St. Vincent de Paul society.