Kevin72

Did I just add another item to your list of things Italians didn't invent on the previous page? Grazie! You mix it yourself and I'm really bad about proportions (hey, maybe I'm really becoming an Italian cook now!). She said the herbs should be dried, but I had all of those items growing out back and just went in and harvested. I just stripped the leaves off of a couple thick stalks of each, basically and then pulsed them together in a processor with the juniper berries. Rubbed the duck with it inside and out, and swirled the rest into the pan juices as I was reducing them. Smelled great, but alas, none of them carried through in the final dish.

Thanks! No, my parents were over, so it was us four. I think I might take the next week off from cooking and give my wife a turn at the stove! I was reading through Callen's book looking for an appetizer idea and ran across this recipe. I still had the marinated artichokes from when I did Rome and thought that this was a good excuse to use them up, so I pureed them with a hardboiled egg and some of the marinade oil. Callen's recipe calls for mayo. It isn't so stiff: you have to eat these in one bite pretty quickly after you pick them up. Actually, there's supposed to be breadcrumbs in there too, but I forgot to add them. Oh, and chill the salami (I thought it worked better than the prosciutto) before and chill the bundles after you make them so they hold up a little better. Glad you like that book. He's a great writer, and I had always felt bad about neglecting such a good book. One of the reasons to do this yearlong project was to give some of my unused cookbooks a spin, and it made me appreciate the book (and of course Liguria) all the more.

My birthday meal for myself was last night. Started with prosciutto rolled around more of the artichoke puree from the previous meal. For a primo I did a timbalo di crespelle, a festive Abruzzese dish. There's a pretty established crepe culture in Abruzzo, a holdover from French rule, according to Callen. This is a baked dish of crepes layered over a prgoression of fillings: bechamel, peas and ham, spinach and hardboiled eggs, and a pork and mushroom ragu. These crepes were the easiest I've ever done: I've noted earlier that I usually get through half the batch of batter before I start turning out good crepes after making them thick pancakes, or brittle, burnt wafers. These are almost entirely made of egg, and a lower proportion of flour, which I think aided their ease. The fillings are improvised but based on similar timbale recipes in Callen's book. The secondo was roasted duck with seven herbs. To leech out some of the excess fat, Callen's recipe calls for blanching the duck in boiling water for a few minutes, then setting it in the fridge overnight. If you do this, don't drape it with paper towels to absorb the moisture! As the fat congeals at the cooler temps, it glues itself to the paper towels. I went to take them off only to be horrified to see a thin film of the towel left behind on the skin, and so spent ten minutes laboriously scraping it off with a knife. The duck is stuffed with apples, onion, lemon, and ginger, and rubbed with the "seven herbs" (Callen neglects to give an exact proportional recipe and only describes it ) bay leaves, rosemary, oregano, marjoram, thyme, sage, and mint chopped together with juniper berries. Despite all the wild flavor elements, I found that very little of that worked its way into the flavor of the duck. I should note that I didn't sew the stuffed duck closed as directed, something I just can't bring myself to do. Nor did I cut the duck in half and toss it back into the oven for a few minutes to crisp the skin, also as directed. I'm reminded now of when my mom used to buy and roast ducks for "special occasions", and then we would lament the amazingly low yield of meat you'd get. The breast meat was moist and juicy, if a little bland, but the leg meat was stringy. I love duck, but I think I'm going to stick with braising it from now on. Contorno was "drunken cauliflower": cauliflower braised with white wine, fennel seeds, and a chili pepper. I threw in some kale as well. For dessert, we had another non-Abruzzese item, but I defy any Abruzzese not to like it: my Mom's rhubarb cake. This stuff has started fights, both witihin my family but even at lady's social events when my mom brings it and there's a mad scramble to get it. One year when my mom made it, my wife volunteered to her boss to bring her a slice and I was livid to have to give up a piece, and even more so when I saw the size of the slice my wife cut for her! I plead the Fifth on the blatant Reddi-Whip topping there. I throw myself at the mercy of the eGullet elite and beg them not to revoke my membership.

We finally got to go here Friday night, after wanting to check it out for a while, and then being doubly intrigued when Mark Cassell of the Green Room took the reins. Dragonfly is inside hotel ZaZa, a hipster-type hotel that is beginning plans to rapidly franchise itself out (our waiter revealed that it will be moving into the Hotel Warwick space in Houston), with Dragonfly restaurants in each as well. Cassell heads this kitchen and will eventually move to being executive chef for the entire Dragonfly “chain” when more are in place. Dragonfly’s décor is I guess casbah-like, as part of setting a Moroccan-fusion theme. Outside guests were sweltering at a lavish pool party, not helped by air misters that looked like they needed a few more kinks to work out, since thick clouds of mist were constantly billowing forth from them, only adding to the oppressive humidity (for Dallas) that night. If this is any indication, the standout of the night was the service, particularly Clayton, our waiter. Immensely knowledgeable, energetic, and engaging without being intrusively so. He was just very much on top of every need we’d have: he knew exactly how many bottles of what wine were available (“we only have one of those left, would you like to make another choice in case it’s been taken?”), when one of us strained to read something in the dim light of the room, a pocket flashlight immediately materialized. He enthusiastically provided the information I gave above regarding ZaZa and Dragonfly’s expansion plans, and seemed quite excited about having Mark and a large swath of his staff (we recognized a few former servers from Green Room as we were seated) aboard. Cassell is still finalizing his version of the menu, so most of the items currently on the menu are holdovers from the previous chef. There were, however, a number of Cassell’s own creations as off-menu items, and Clayton reeled off a bewildering array of them, almost as many as on the menu itself. In keeping with the décor, there is a definite Moroccan/North African theme to the food offered, with predictable Asian notes (seemingly de rigueur of a fusion place anymore) thrown in as well. I had the tuna tartare (on the menu), and a “fennel cured” pork loin special. My wife had the crispy calamari salad and lobster pasta, both on the menu items I believe. My mom had beetroot salad and the lamb tagine, and my dad had the Mediterranean salad and a chicken, boned out, rubbed with spices and rolled around a “boudin” of foie gras, and roasted. The tuna tartare was pretty good, with a smoky flavor (helped along by the slightly too-ample avocado) throughout. My wife’s calamari salad was the standout: fried rings of calamari, tatsoi and mizuna (sp?) greens tossed with a sweet, spicy soy dressing. My mom was disappointed in her beetroot salad, which was described as having cambozola, the best of both worlds between camembert and blue cheese, and one of her favorites, but was simply large crumbles of plain blue cheese instead, and they overwhelmed the other ingredients. Dad said his salad was nothing special either. The entrees were roundly disappointing. My pork was cooked just right but I’m not sure what “fennel cured” even means, since there was no flavor of it in the dish. There was too much of the cucumber sauce, it took up half the plate. The rice pilaf and five haricot vertes beans seemed an afterthought. My wife’s pasta, while generous with the lobster, was underseasoned and the sauce seemed a little gluey. The tagine, however, was a standout in the disappointment department. The lamb was tough, and the couscous was studded with bits of the salted cured lemons used in Moroccan cooking, but they tasted like little bits of Pinesol-cured leather when you bit into one. Finally, I’m going to hypothesize that this wasn’t even cooked in the tagine, but it was simply used as a serving vessel: the inside of the dish was immaculately clean and dry. Desserts (molten chocolate cake and rum ice cream, the crème brulee) were competent but certainly not memorable. As head Chef of the Green Room, Mark Cassell was able to expertly combine the elements of Asian, Southwestern, and Mexican cuisines, teasing out a single flavor or idea and making the dishes sing. At Dragonfly, I think he’s under pressure and out of his element in conforming to the Moroccan theme. He’s not quite there yet with the flavor combinations and incorporating them into his larger tapestry: again going back to the lamb, the dish had a prevailing, distracting sweetness to it and blast of cinnamon, both elements of Moroccan cooking, but should be used much more deftly or interwoven with other flavors to mute their effect. Likewise with my pork dish, its clear he was aiming for some sort of pork “shwarma” concept fused with Asian flavors, and was hampered further by an anise-cured pork dish already on the menu, so he has to work with fennel instead, which lost out in the larger flavor spectrum. His new menu will launch later this summer, and hopefully he’ll get the kinks out by then. Still, much as I have faith in his capabilities, this is an uphill battle: Moroccan is a complex cuisine, and to work it in to the fusion spectrum is even more so. Now throw in that this is to be a franchise concept duplicated elsewhere, and I worry that this may be the wrong direction for both him and the restaurant.

I saw the Italian name first and was thinking, "is that really rabbit and squid? Or is it just some variety of squid?" How very unusual. Thanks for the writeup. I regrettably know very little about Le Marche.

Thanks for the kind words, ludja! Hard to believe we're at the halfway point already. Even so, maybe it's the unseasonably hot weather so early in the summer, but I'm already chomping at the bit for fall and the regions I'll be doing then . . .

Welcome back! I thought the fennel gratin would bring you out! Well, I guess I used the wrong term with artisinal, but De Cecco is well-thought of, at least. Still on that soapbox from your visit?

Ha, that's happened to me when I've gone too! After two days of timid "per favore", "grazie", "mi dispiaci", I suddenly was able to reel off reservation instructions, order meals, give directions, etc. Great pics so far. We loved that part of Italy when we went, too, and would of course enjoy going back and really spending alot of time just in the Veneto and Friuli, which is pretty high on my "visit next" list.

Last night I made a couple of dishes that have been featured both on Molto Mario and in Memories of Abruzzo. To start, we had mussels with a saffron vinaigrette. Mussels are steamed open in white wine, shallots, thyme, and saffron. The mussels are fished out, the pan juices are reduced, and then off the heat you swirl in vinegar and olive oil and spoon it over the mussels. These could also be served chilled on the half-shell with the same sauce. Callen notes that while saffron does grow naturally in Abruzzo, it isn't used as extensively as in Sardinia, where it also grows. The main course was "potted" monkfish, which Callen says gets its name from the fact that it is cooked almost like a pot roast of beef, with peppers, red wine, bay leaves, and cloves. The monkfish stood up quite well to such a strongly-flavored sauce. To sop up the sauce from both dishes we ate Pane Barese, a recipe I had wanted to get to when cooking from Puglia but didn't. It is unusual because you steep bay leaves in the water that makes the bread to give it that flavor. The bread turned out great, one of my best loaves in a while, but didn't have much flavor of the bay leaves in it.

Tuesday was a good friend of ours' birthday and we had them over to celebrate. Antipasto: Baked scamorza; salami stuffed with creamed artichokes Primo: Maccheroni alla chitarra "ma non la chitarra" with ricotta salata Secondo: Pork caciatorre Contorno: Fennel gratin Dolce: "Lulus" For the appetizers, we had scamorza, a smoked fiore di latte cheese quite beloved in Abruzzo, which was doused with chili oil and wrapped in foil, then baked. This is modified from other antipasto recipes where it is seared on a grill over and open flame. I can't comprehend how that would possibly work or be worth the effort, and how you wouldn't wind up with a mass of melted cheese fondue oozing all over your charcoal, so I bake it instead. Unfortunately, I let it cook a little too long and it got rubbery, but that didn't stop us from picking the foil clean! When cooking from Abruzzo, and all points south from there, a necessary condimento is chili oil, aka olio santo. Take olive oil and slowly bring it up to heat with plenty of dried peperoncino chilies in it. To give it a little color I add paprika as well. This last batch I made is pretty fierce, just a few drops and it announces its presence. You can see some of it atop the baked scamorza in the pic below. Surrounding the scamorza are slices of salami rolled around a paste of marinated artichokes (leftover from when I made them for the Roman antipasto meal) pureed with hardboiled eggs. The primo was maccheroni alla chitarra, "ma non la chitarra", meaning I didn't use the standard cutting tool, a long board with strings that you lay the rolled out dough on top of and then pass a rolling pin over to cut the dough into ribbons. I was *this* close to buying an authentic chitarra on our trip to Puglia earlier this spring, but it was a bit cumbersome to lug around the rest of the trip with us, and my wife wisely pointed out that it would get used maybe once a year. Both Callen and Batali suggest that you roll out the dough a little thicker than normal on a pasta machine (or by hand, of course) and then cut it into fettuccini shapes. The condimento was a ragu of pancetta, celery, carrot, onion, and chilies pureed to a paste, then slowly cooked with tomato paste and white wine. It tasted like a cross between ragu bolognese and amatriciani sauce. Topped with ample amounts of coarsely grated ricotta salata. The main course (background in the pic below) was pork cacciatorre, modified from a lamb recipe in Callen's book Memories of Abruzzo. Quite unlike the standard cacciotore recipes which call for mushrooms or peppers. Large pieces of pork are braised with chilies, anchovies, vinegar, white wine and garlic, then at the end a paste of fennel fronds, parsley, anchovies, vinegar, and raw garlic is swirled into the pan juices. Intense and very flavorful. The contorno was a not-necessarily-Abruzzese gratin of baked fennel, pancetta, and bechamel (foreground). Dessert was also non-Abruzzese, the Sicilian pastry lulus. These are cream puffs with a nutella and whipped cream filling instead of custard. This is our friend's standard birthday dessert for the past couple years so we stuck with tradition.

My understanding is that it's almost as much sensation or texture as flavor. "Savory" is the nearest I can come to it. Kind a full mouth-feel, or a flavor that fills in the gaps between the other major flavors. Jeffery Steingarten's article "Why Doesn't Everybody in China Have a Headache?" in It Must've Been Something I Ate is a good exploration of umami and its role in MSG.

On the scallopini, you could always start them in butter and brown them, then finish them in the oven. Top them with slices of prosciutto and slivers of parm the last five minutes or so in the oven. Duck is served scallopini style (Mario Batali did a version where they are dredged in flour, browned, then finished with apricots or cherries and vin santo), but again you're dealing with lots of pans, getting the timing right on cooking them through, and that's alot o'duck to buy!

Ah, good point. Thanks. I just got used to it being part of the Cooking Block on Saturday afternoons.

>Pizza Party: some on the grill, some in the oven. Have big batches of the dough made up beforehand, everyone brings toppings and, ahem, rolls their own. >Gnocchi, as a number have suggested, are really fun and easy to make. >If you've got enough grill space, a grigliata mista, just different meats simply grilled and topped with lemon and olive oil. Do a couple of porterhouse steaks Fiorentina style (hell, you're all lawyers, right? ), pork chops or tenderloin, maybe stuffed leg of lamb. You can grill some vegetables, or with kitchen space freed up since the meat's all grilling, do some in there. >In keeping with your regional themes in past years (loved your Sicily meal, BTW), I highly recommend doing Rome this year. Get a hold of David Downie's Cooking the Roman Way and start planning a feast. Fettucine Alfredo and Bucatini all'Amatriciani are two crowd-pleasers. Plus you can incorporate gnocchi, a traditional Roman dish, into the meal as well. You can even do Roman gnocchi feast: do the potato gnocchi, then do semolina gnocchi alla romana, which are baked.

What, now you're going to tell me they didn't come up with sushi? Good distinctions though, there. I'm not as well-read on food history as you so thanks for the info!

Gah! Its fundraising month on our PBS station (Dallas) so it'll be at least 3 weeks before the normal schedule comes back.

Thanks Adam. Do you know how far back the dish goes, or what its ancestry is? I wonder if they come from the same sort of traditions. Romans were big on the pounded whole grains served any number of ways, so maybe that's how it travelled around.

Sunday night, we started with Abruzzo's famous "cardoon" soup. Taking a cue from Mario Batali though, I substituted artichokes, which are in the same family as cardoons, normally a winter crop. In addition to artichokes and a rich meat broth, the soup has small meatballs (I made them with pork and ground mortadella) and spinach, a personal touch. For the main we had cornish game hens stuffed with ricotta, prosciutto, nutmeg, parsley, and a touch of chili pepper. The contorno was mushrooms and zucchini.

Friday night I made a dish traditionally served at Easter: fiadone, a savory pie with a filling of scamorza (smoked fior di latte or mozzarella cheese) and ham, loosely bound together by eggs. My wife and I disagreed on the crust. Callen's recipe calls for leavening in the form of baking powder, which I was reluctant about but added anyways. As I feared, the crust came out too dry and nearly cookie-like (the sugar didn't help either). But my wife said that the crust was what made the dish. With the meal we had arugula salad with some spicy pan-seared chaunterelle mushrooms, and a macerated fruit salad for dessert.

June will be the "forte e gentile" cooking of Abruzzo. In cooking from Abruzzo on his show, Mario Batali pointed out that the descriptor "forte e gentile" (strong and kind) is often applied to the Abruzzese character, but was also a perfect descriptor of the cuisine as well. These two seemingly contrasting terms play out a number of ways in the Abruzzese cooking traditions. Abruzzo is commonly considered where Northern Italian cuisine meets Southern Italian cuisine, using the qualities of both. Also, Abruzzo has a wild contrast of geography: gentle, herb blanketed meadows, rocky beaches and coastline with a wealth of bivalves, and steep, staggering, snow-capped mountain heights. This contrast in geography translates to a contrast in the cooking styles and ingredients: subtle herbs from the meadow top seafood caught at the coastline, but then this condimento is used for polenta and finished with chilies to create a more robust, rib-sticking dish necessary for living in the mountains. Abruzzo combines the very best of pasta traditions as well: it is home to the Rustichella, Del Verde, and De Cecco pasta factories, three of what are considered the top brands of artisinal dried pasta in Italy. Yet even with so much top-quality dried pasta, the Abruzzese do not shy away from handmade pasta traditions: there is the region's unique maccheroni alla chitarra, sheets of semolina pasta that are rolled over a wired instrument that cuts the dough into square-shaped noodles. Finally, Abruzzo is home to the Scuola Alberghiera, a 400 year old hotel management and cooking school in Villa Santa Maria. Chefs from this school have been employed throughout the ages in Rome, Naples, and as far away as Russia, giving Abruzzo a reputation for turning out top-quality chefs. So here is another contrast: the refined, professional level cuisine of a cooking school 4 centuries old against the robust, rustic cuisine of isolated mountain villages making the most of their meager supplies through long, cold fierce winters. Chief reference besides the usual suspects (Batali, di Blasi, Culinara): Food and Memories of Abruzzo: Italy's Pastoral Land, by Anna Teresa Callen. This book is a little frustrating for me. While it is top-notch as a general or Italian cookbook and great recipe reference at 459 pages, as a sourcebook on Abruzzese cuisine it comes up short. I bought it wanting to know much more about this region that despite being well-thought of (both Marcella Hazan and Mario Batali give it nods) has relatively little cooking literature about it. And a pet peeve of mine is buying a book on one region and then having to wade through recipes from others, and recipes from Bologna, Naples, Rome, and Venice all turn up here. Still, her framing device for the cookbook: an autobiographical account of her upbringing in Abruzzo amongst her immediate and extended family, her travels elsewhere, and ultimate appreciation for and return to her homeland, makes for charming reading. As long as you go in looking at it more as a general Italian cookbook (despite what the title implies) and less as a specific regional treatise, it makes a good addition to your cookbook collection. Cooking, travel, eating experiences welcome to be shared, yada yada, you all know the drill.

Try to get some of the skin as well. You won't need much but it gives the soup a great porky flavor (perfect with cranberry beans) and viscosity. Is there prosciutto available with the bone in? I had thought the US wouldn't allow import of bone-in prosciutto . . .

This topic brings up lots of memories. Growing up, my dad, brother, and I were known for our "dessert wars", and my dad was a master tactician. My mom made cookies from scratch, and we all had our favorites. Only Dad, however, liked oatmeal, so he always had his stash untouched. He would eat out of everyone else's cookies and when they were gone, had the oatmeal all to himself. We also would bicker over Drumsticks, the frozen ice cream cones. There were enough in each pack for us to each have a certain amount, but we were each guilty of sneaking down and eating extra out of our allotment. And if Mom decided to have one, fights would break out over who's allotment it came out of. My brother had some friends over during one of these arguments and they were in awe and we hear about it to this day! I was home one time visiting from college and looking around for something to eat. Dad comes running into the kitchen and asks me what I'm doing. He starts up some transparent idle chat but it's obvious he's hiding something or nervous about something. Turns out Mom had made some cookies for my arrival that day, but Dad had hidden them and didn't want me to find them! Man, we sound terrible . . . Anyways, these days, my wife gets a little punchy if she thinks I'm giving away too much food after a dinner party. And heaven help her if we get ahold of mom's homemade cookies to bring back . . .

It's interesting to me how absent herbs are from the Pugliese repertoire, relative to other Southern cuisines. For example, no herbs at all in the Pugliese ciambotta. Mint, parsley, and oregano seem to be the big ones used most often.

I don't think any one man is meant to have that much pleasure.

Rhubarb is tart (if cooked with sugar) to sour (if served raw after being salted). I'd try the sweet variations first then move into savory if you like the flavor. Chop the stalks up and cook them to a compote with sugar, then use the compote to spread over toast or to top sponge cake. Birthday's coming up and my mom always makes a killer rhubarb cake . . .