Kevin72

It was a brisk 93F the day I made it. That would indeed have been the correct impulse. I bought a jar several years back and used it (actually on a version of that baked pear on the previous page) and it had a very pronounced, gamey flavor. Don't know why, but when you tasted it, there was no two ways about it: tasted like goat cheese or wild game. My wife, then, didn't like it at all, and so it has sat, unused, in our cupboards ever since. When she's being difficult I threaten to make something with it. Final edit: So what I did use was some organic, unfiltered, Texas wildflower honey. Supposed to help with allergies, which are pretty bad for me this time of year.

*weeps* But hey, our local market got them in this past weekend too! And only $54 a pound!

I love lamb; lamb shanks or shoulder braised with white wine, rosemary, and garlic is probably #3 on my list of Reasons Why Kevin Can't Be A Vegetarian. Finally managed to turn my wife around on it this past year but I still have to be fairly aggressive and trim away a good portion of the fat when I make it.

I was worried about that too; some recipes direct you to soak the bread in vinegar, not water. I decided to go the water route for the bread, and while I did add much more than the standard dose of vinegar to the salad than normal, the bread "mush" really goes a long way to cancelling it out. I can't find silvery thing you're referring to; there are scallions in the salad, and some of the cukes were sliced pretty thin, so maybe one of them is catching the light weird . . . ? Edit: I think I see it now. Didn't catch the "bottom of the picture" part. That's just the bowl catching the light.

Good episode. I like the ones where Tony comes to grips with Americana: the New Jersey ep, the Mall of America episode on the FTV show, etc. Almost made me want to go. Almost.

Brand new Maytag double oven, wall-mounted, had it on most of Sunday to bake bread and I was soaked through my shirt cooking dinner that night.

Those look rather yellow, and I know that several traditional Piemontese recipes for agnolotti use an all egg yolk dough, so that's something to consider. 3 yolks=1 egg. Letting the pasta dry out a little before you cut it seems counterintuitive to me. It would seem that it would lead to the sheets drying out too much to be able to stick, and you'd run the risk of the filling soaking into the dough, making it soggy, and sticking to the board.

And into the trash it goes! Got through about 2/3rds of it and then just decided I was eating it just to spite the results. Plus there was always that unpleasant second, as I was biting in to break off a piece, of which was going to give first: my teeth or the cake.

Earlier I mentioned that my wife didn’t want one of her dishes for Saturday dinner in a picture as it wasn’t photogenic enough. I however have no such compunction about my own dishes. Last night we had panzanella, the bread salad of Tuscany. Soak bread in water, shred it up, toss with tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, and onion, toss with vinegar and olive oil. Obviously, it tastes much, much better than it looks. Dessert was neci (leftover from last week, not a new batch, thank God!) with ricotta, honey, and walnuts, the more traditional way of serving neci.

Not quite out of the woods yet as far as bad luck goes. I made more bread this weekend: a whole wheat version (actually 1/3rd wheat) with rosemary, raisins, and walnuts, a variation on a Easter Bread version in Michele Sciocolone’s Italian Holiday Cooking. Not too shabby, but all the goodies gravitated to the center of the bread and weren’t as evenly distributed as I’d have liked. But I also made another loaf of Tuscan saltless, exactly as I had done the previous batch, and it didn’t rise nearly as much and came out of the oven very heavy and dense.

Sunday night’s meal began with gemelli with arugula pesto. We had a similar dish in Florence and really liked it; the arugla shined through perfectly. Can’t remember where I first heard about this variant on pesto before we went to Italy. My version: walnuts, several handfuls of arugula, fresh pecorino, olive oil, and a clove of garlic. More pecorino over the top. We continued with pollo alla diavola, so named because it’s “hot as the devil”. This is another dish that has many variants. Some recipes use chili pepper flakes for the heat, others use chili oil, and others just use lots of pepper. The version I’m using these days uses black pepper and chili oil, along with rosemary and mustard. Not sure where I picked up the mustard angle, though Mario Batali I think has used it in a version he’s made. A common method to cook this is “under a brick”, which means to remove the backbone and splay it open over a grill, then lay bricks (or in my case, a cast-iron skillet with bricks in it) atop to flatten in out and allow for more even cooking. Normally I’m not a fan of grilled (as opposed to spit-roasted) chicken: when the skin gets a little char on it I find it takes on an unpleasant, metallic taste. This time, with a much larger grill at my disposal, I thought I’d have a very low side to put the chicken over, heat the other side really hot and scatter more grape vine cuttings and rosemary over the flame, and cook it more or less indirectly and get lots of smokey flavors in there. . . . Dammit. So even under the low flame, the skin got charred and I lost a good chunk of it (and the seasoning) stuck to the grill grates. It was moist and juicy though, and there was a nice little tickle from the chili oil, but no really nice, big, smokey flavor like I’ve gotten with the fiorentina earlier this month or even the ribs from Umbria. I’m starting to lose faith in the grill part of this equation, though I like the flattening part. I may just switch to a really hot oven next time.

Proof my wife can hold her own: Saturday she took a turn at the stove. Started the meal with a warm salad of shrimp and crab with a raspberry/chipotle dressing. The main was grilled marinated salmon and roasted sweet potatoes. She begged me not to take a pic since it wasn’t so photogenic. We then finished with bread pudding and I must say it was roundly excellent, better than the routine winner for "best of" bread pudding in Dallas, which is far too boozy in my opinion.

Gah! We’re back up to 90F again! At least the humidity is down, and it’s amazing how much more “pleasant” these temps seem than the 98+ we got most of September. Normally, the dish I made Friday night is another way to celebrate cooler weather and having all the windows open: grilled sausage with baked polenta and pepperonata. This is one of those not-necessarily-from-Tuscany-but-it-sure-seems-like-it meals. I roast the peppers for pepperonata to give it a little more complexity. The sausages got a little crispy from the grill.

Great thread, very insightful. Hard to believe that that was only four days' worth of food and eating. Much as I like where I work, I get insanely jealous when I see where they've sent you next and that on top of all that you get to take off a week here and there! I'm shocked at the amount of cepes/porcini/boletus mushrooms were there. How seasonal!

I've heard of the Mueller's before, what's their story? Where are they? And didn't you just violate the no sauce rule?

It even has powdered sugar on it . . . it sounds so weird at first of course, but knowing Sicily I'm sure it worked to a mind-blowing degree. Great writeup, great photos, great job. And you artfully strung it along to keep us in suspense!

Heh, but no, I can't imagine that happening during my favorite cooking time of the year. Just odd happenstance I guess. I've had other bad runs before at other times of the year.

What a neat sounding place. I definitely need to try to get there next time I'm in town.

edited to add question: I am no mushroom expert, but the ones on the right look like porcini to me? what are they? ← They are trumpet or trumpet royale mushrooms. Good, firm texture when pan-seared and when grilled they have that nice custardy texture in the center that porcini get. But they lack, almost entirely, that depth of woodsy flavor that porcini and chaunterelle have.

Thanks again, Chufi! I had, sadly, been mentally preparing myself for this experience all day at work yesterday. So I just kept at it. But I did start getting exasperated. Last year at almost exactly this same time I had another run of really bad luck in the kitchen. I think I talked about it a bit on the "I will never again . . . " thread. If memory serves, I spilled half a pot of stock all over the just-mopped kitchen floor, and in the time it took me to take care of that the pasta sheets I had rolled out for the evening's dinner dried out completely and broke apart trying to cut them. I went on a cooking "sabbatical" for about three weeks afterwards and let my wife take a spin at the stove. It did me alot of good, but I certainly wouldn't consider such a thing this year, particularly during one of my favorite regions to cook from!

Man, I'm really having a run of bad luck after this weekend. I need to get back on track with something that won't frustrate me so easily, that I never screw up--hey, I'll make crepes! Yes, no better way to cap off a frustrating weekend of cooking than by taking my culinary kryptonite for a spin. I decided to do chestnut crepes, aka neci. First challenge is the whole chestnut angle. Given my previous experience with chestnut flour, I was leary of trying it again. I went to the store and stole a taste from the bin and sure enough, it had that smokey, then bitter, aftertaste that I just didn't want to chance. So instead I bought a can of chestnut puree, mixed it with milk, eggs, and a dash of flour. I heated the pan up, spooned some of the batter in . . . and it stayed in the same shape of the spoon. Okay, that didn't work. Thin out the batter with milk then and try again. It spread beautifully this time but stuck to the pan. Crap! Not enough eggs in the batter I guess. Add more eggs. Now it sets up right but still tears very easily. Maybe add more flour? Too thick again! More milk . . . ah, just right, and it only took four crepes and 30 more minutes of tinkering to get it there. The meal I made Monday night is based on a dream I had about our honeymoon about a month before we left. It was a very vivid dream where we landed in Rome, then had to take a train from Rome to Venice, our first destination on the honeymoon. On the way, we stopped overnight in a little mountain town in Tuscany and ate at a trattoria. No menus, we just sat down and immediately were handed two sizzling skewers of porcini mushrooms right off the grill. Then we had neci, layered with ham and pecorino toscano. I woke up before we got to eat any of it, though . . . So, the mushrooms. No fresh porcini, so I just used a mix of other exotics: shitake, bluefoot chaunterelle (I think), and trumpet. Marinate in olive oil, salt, and rosemary, then toss on a grill. The crepes: Actually, barring the disastrous start, the meal turned out pretty good. The only drawback was that after all that tinkering with the batter . . . all together now . . . you couldn't really taste the chestnut flavor anymore. Still, given that previous crepe cooking experiences have had me hurling the batter into the sink and stomping out of the kitchen in disgust, I was pleased.

Would the honey/sugar mix getting too hot have also contributed? Thanks for the tips. That sounds about right that it baked too long.

It's sort of a hybrid of the recipe in Culinaria: Italy and a loose recollection of a version cooked on Cucina Toscana, a favorite cooking show hosted by Damien Mandola and Johnny Carraba (of Carraba's restaurants--it's still a good show though!), two Houston-ites who've founded quite an Italian restaurant empire between their extended families. Their version had raisins and figs in it; the prunes were my substitution. And I didn't have the candied zests on hand nor could I find it anywhere, so I used fresh. Okay flavor, a little bitter, certainly not that dense chewy goodness of the real deal. One of my bigger disappointments of late.

Is the kind that's coarsely chopped by hand? And is it made of beef?

Thanks! Glad it was a hit. I'm just hacked 'cuz I was looking forward to the weekend of cooking all week and so many of those dishes didn't quite turn out as good as I knew they could be.