Kevin72

Walked right past this on the Barnes & Noble Clearance Rack for $5.98 this weekend. >yoink!< Also recently grabbed her Veneto book which I mentioned on my cooking thread when I did that region.

I went on a cooking break and let my wife cook for three weeks last fall; combination of burnout and a bad luck streak. It helped alot to re-energize.

Like Memo above, I like it with pear, walnut, and blue cheese Also: Orange or Blood orange slices, arugula, and balsamic dressing Arugula, shavings of young pecorino or manchego, olive oil, lots of black pepper, and lemon juice It's really good as a base for grilled fish in the summer.

You're going to Friuli? Awesome! See how it compares to what I wrote about in my thread, I recall you seemed pretty interested in that cuisine.

That's funny you mention how the fat and gristle work their way into a proper scotaditto, Hathor. When I had them in Rome in fact I remember that the only thing I'd change about them is that they were too gristly (probably a shoulder shop cut) and would remake them using loin chops instead.

It's a definite pain to be sure. Cut the top third of the artichoke off and pry out the prickly, purple leaves (you may neead to run a paring knife around/under them), then scoop out the choke. A grapefruit spoon works well for this. Then stuff the cavity. It took me a few tries to get it right, and you need to have relatively fresh, heavy-for-their-size artichokes: old, dry ones are brittle and tend to split or crack getting them out. Try to find the kind of artichokes that have rounded tips without the needles: they hold up better. That recipe doesn't even mention scooping out the choke and purple inner leaves: quite an oversight on their part. Also, when cutting off the stems, trim them of the dark green outer skin down to their whitish core, finely mince them and mix them back in with the stuffing. The stem has the same flavor as the heart. As to the bitter chokes in the risotto: all I can guess is that some of their dark green outer skin wasn't trimmed away enough.

Please keep this going Michael, I had meant to comment on the following post sooner. We got a chocolate version with lots of orange zest in San Gimagnano and snacked off of that for the remainder of the trip. They are potent little gut-bombs: just one sliver filled you up. Oddly enough I hated and still hate licorice flavor; my Easter basket was always filled with leftover black jellybeans when I was done. But I love fennel and sambucca and ouzo and all that anise stuff! I've heard that castagnaccio is an acquired taste and doesn't always make for the best first eating. I was tempted to try it when we were in Verona but then decided against it. My wife who struggles with chestnuts more than I do was intrigued by it as well. If we're in Tuscany at the right time of year, though, I'll try snapping it up. Again, like the organization and particularly the dry bits of wit sprinkled throughout. Edited for not getting the quote thingie working right this morning.

Actually I'm more interested in doing guanciale. As with any curing meat (unless someone can correct me on this) it almost seems like you need a separate fridge to suspend the meat in and let air-dry. I suppose I could arrange the meat on a wire rack over a tray and let it drain off that way, but it still requires quite a bit of room that I don't have. Plus if it does somehow go bad I'd want to minimize the damage. The bacon I got was of really great quality, very nearly that dry-cured consistency that most Italian salumi have. Unfortunately blanching it reconstituted it somewhat, so I traded the texture for getting rid of the smoke. When I re-rubbed it with the spices I had let it sit for 4 days and it discharged an amazing amount of liquid. I removed all the rub then and wrapped it in paper towels and have been using it since. Yay, controversy at last! I know I've seen elsewhere someone say that "true" Amatriciani doesn't have onions and, especially, garlic but I don't have a definitive resource off the top of my head. On a side note, I will say that when I had tomato sauce in both Rome and Puglia, it was just straight up passato (sp?), a puree of whole tomatoes, no aromatics or herbs in there at all. Sometimes it worked (in fact the Amatriciani I had in Rome was done this way) but other times it was just too tomato-y: I mentioned earlier the beef rolls that were sauced last minute with this passato. Also, one of the pastas we had in Puglia was sauced with passato and it was overwhelming. Funny as it sounds, onions and garlic seem to add something else like a lightness or zip to the sauce. "Alla Romana" seems to be a broad and fairly abitrary term, and has nothing to do with local ingredients, so there's no use trying to penetrate its meaning attached to a dish with "foreign" ingredients like Marsala. Any time I start getting hung up on that terminology, I shrug and think, "hey, it's ROME!" and move on. Thanks everyone for the input! Alberto just might have to get a credit in my bibliography if he keeps this up!

Dammit, how'd I switch back to calling him David Dowden again? It's Downie! David Downie, author of Cooking the Roman Way.

I thought that was a Tuscany only thing . . . ? Is it Piemonte, or just where you are? I've wanted to do a saltless Tuscan loaf but I just can't bring myself to it yet. Didn't know that about the U.S. market pasta. So I'd assume that any imported pasta has to be treated with vitamins to come into the country? Well, I'm with you on this one, make room on that soapbox. Probably some hangup leftover from WWII ala iodized salt. Maybe de Cecco qualifies as "slow food" because of the drying time of the pasta, or do they use the bronze dies to extrude? It's a good brand, regardless. *Furiously takes notes for an unspecified later use.* I'm on a dialup too. It does take forever. All I can offer is to shrink the pictures as much as possible (I go down to about 140k) before loading them.

Well, you gotta show him who's boss, that's all there is to it. I won't say more since I don't want a "Dissing France on the Italy Board" thread started, but it's an effort.

Actually, the chicken dried out a little. Well, you busted me on the chicken/veal thing. But both Culinaria: Italy and Mario Batali (whom I got the recipe from) use marsala for the cooking liquid. Dowden's version though is like the one you posted. I went back and forth on which one to do.

Both. Yeah, we all agreed we could put away plates of this stuff. My wife and I bickered over the one 'choke when we ordered it in Rome. Next night we got two to cut down on the squabbling. What's the way they're supposed to be cut? These were just some Frenched lamb chops from >coughcough*Costco*cough<. I started trimming fat off them to cut down on the lamb-y flavor my wife doesn't like and then realized that was challenging their integrity. They got a little floppy and ungainly. Hey, what did you think of the fennel fest I did with the shrimp and bass?

What happened to them exactly? Did they just fall apart trying to stuff them? You'd need to look for dried canelloni tubes that specifically say on the package that they don't require boiling first if you want to do it like your friend does for lasagne. Otherwise I'd consider making the pasta sheets or crepes by hand and then roll them around the filling.

Thanks for the encouragement!

I make a milk-braised pork dish and the best part is the curdled sauce at the end. Did you try it, was it really off? It may not be much to look at but it captures the meat essences and the sweetness of the milk together. Maybe pass the sauce through a strainer to get it to look a little better?

Not to sidetrack, but is this also why the artichokes this year are still so pricey? I paid $12 for 4 of them the other day.

No you're right, it is made in New York I believe. But that might as well be in Puglia from here (Dallas), particularly since it's so perishable. Dallas does have the Mozarella Company, which gained quite a bit of fame in culinary circles for a while, so maybe I can drop a bug in their ear, hmm . . . ← Well, I want royalties. Guess what I saw at Central Market today? And from Mozarella Co., no less? Didn't buy it: my wife's going out of town this week and me alone in the house with a one-pound ball of cream-filled cheese is not a good idea.

I'm interested in a cookbook on Umbria as well. And I'm going to look into the Sicily cookbook now since that's another region I want a cookbook on!

Continuing to slap Roman traditions in the face, for Sunday brunch I made "fake tripe" alla Romana. Tripe available here in the U.S. is noticeably pungent and organ-y, and even if my wife would have gone for making it, I don't think I'd want the hassle of scrubbing and blanching it, not to mention the smell it would leave. So I based this off a "fake tripe" dish Mario Batali made using thin fritatte cut up into ribbons. I mixed braised pork shoulder in with the eggs to give them a meatier depth. The whole reason I wanted to cook the dish even so heavily modified was just as a vehicle for the spicy tomato and mint sauce and blankets of pecorino cheese, which would even make the average high schooler's sneakers taste good. Format note: I try to do all the entries at once. Is it preferable to keep them in one long entry or break them up? Long entries keep the number of pages down and tend to keep one month's worth of cooking on a page, but may make for monotonous reading, which is why I've started breaking them up into multiple entries.

Saturday's meal was a recreation of some of the dishes we had at La Campana, Rome's oldest continuous restaurant, which we ate at on our first night in Italy and is discussed in my Top 5 meals thread. Antipasto: Fried artichokes Primo: Bucatini all'Amatriciani Secondo: Lamb chops "scotaditti" Contorno: Green beans with mint Dolce: Cherry tart The antipasto is a loose translation of carciofi alla giudea, the famous fried artichokes of the Jewish Ghetto, Trastevere. In the traditional version, baby or large artichokes are trimmed only of their tough outer leaves and then fried whole in olive oil. Like french fries, they are fried twice: the first at a low temperature to cook them through, then finished at a higher temp to brown and crisp them. As they cook they are pressed against the bottom and sides of the pan to spread their inner leaves out, so that they wind up looking like a fried flower when served. I modified this dish because of the poor quality of artichokes available in Texas. They are usually a little more dried out and so crack and split easily, and American artichokes have the large, copious choke to clean out, which further endangers their structure. To make it a little easier I trim and halve them, scoop out the chokes, then sliver them and fry them that way. You loose the aesthetic appeal of the real dish but retain that golden, crunchy, delicious flavor. Bucatini all'Amatriciani is my second or third favorite pasta dish (neck and neck with linguine with clams), and the first thing that springs to mind when I think of Roman cooking. This is probably the reason I wanted to get guanciale since when I tried it in Rome it gave the dish a meatier depth of flavor. Standing in for the guanciale was the bacon I discussed upthread, and while that "meaty" flavor was missing from the sauce, I must admit I like the faint smoky flavor it gives up in return. Further affronting tradition, I use onions and garlic, two no-no's according to Dowden's research on the dish. In fact according to Dowden, 1the version I've made is Pasta all'arrabiatta, since Amatriciani sauce can only be made with guanciale, and any other cured pork makes it arrabiatta style. For the secondo we had lamb "scotaditti", usually served right off the grill, and are named thus because they look so good you burn your fingers grabbing them right away. At La Campana I think they were pan-seared, and may have even had a flour coating on them. To protect them on the grill I wrapped them in pancetta, which melted nicely into the lamb. My wife admitted after this that she is now a lamb convert, so Resolution #1 that I mentioned way back is a success! For the contorno it was another variation of green vegetables slowly braised in olive oil and a trace amount of water and then finished with mint, this time green beans. Dessert was a cherry tart. I've finally conquered my pastry fears and can make a pretty good pastry dough (thanks to Carol Field's book The Italian Baker). But I still can't get a damned lattice to save my life. It's either too thin, or falls apart trying to put it on, or the filling absorbs it.

Friday was another Roman seafood feast. Appetizer was bruschetta with spicy shrimp, mint, and fennel. This is thoroughly bastardized from the true Roman dish that Mario Batali orignally made: scampi with nepitella. Nepitella is a wild mint favored by the Romans. Batali says that it tastes like a cross between mint and fennel (fronds), but most other resources I've read say it's more like mint and oregano or marjoram. Dowden offers using pennyroyal as the best substitute; they are in the same family. I tried growing pennyroyal last spring and it never got big enough to harvest, then withered in the summer heat. Scampi, aka langoustines, look like shrimp crossed with lobsters or pink crawfish. Central Market here in Dallas carried them for a short time right when they opened but then discontinued them when they predictably didn't sell well. I only got to try them once and of course now regret not snapping them up every time I saw them. Shrimp >sigh< had to stand in their place. The secondo was striped bass with clams, tomato, olive, and fennel seeds.

Earlier last week I made penne carbonara, another classic Roman trattoria dish: pasta that is dressed with cured pork (bacon in this case) and an emulsion of raw eggs, ample black pepper, and parmigiano and pecorino cheese. The heat from the pasta cooks the eggs. One of the first threads I remember luring me to eGullet was the "Spaghetti Carbonara" thread (too lazy to look up the URL, sorry) discussing among other things, the dish's origin. As I said earlier, Dowden has a number of interesting sidebars on certain dishes, and in the case of carbonara, he does explore its somewhat acrimonious origins. He dismisses the popular myth that it was created for or by American GIs in WWII and goes with the theory that it originated with the charcoal-makers, who would venture into the forests outside Rome for weeks at a time, tending the long, slow fires necessary to turn wood into charcoal. They needed to bring with them food that wouldn't go bad, hence the cured meat and cheeses, and they probably brought chickens too for eggs and ultimately meat. This does beg the issue of them bringing along a large pot and enough pasta to live off which seems impractical, but the history has a romantic appeal to it. The secondo was saltimbocca alla Romana: chicken breast wrapped around prosciutto and sage, braised with marsala and mushrooms.

Didn't see this way back when. No, it went from the box to the cold oven and warmed up from there. I remember being really paranoid about any moisture getting on them and re-read all the wash instructions carefully. Both blew up as soon as I put the pizza on them, and the pizzas were fresh-made, not frozen or in any way cold.

Hey, that's why I go there too! Umm, on topic, I've seen Ghiradelli even at regular grocery stores in the DFW area.