Kevin72

Thanks for the clarification, Alberto.

Sunday's meal was an "alla Romana" extravaganza to show how broad that term is. Antipasto: Carciofi alla Romana Primo: Gnocchi alla Romana Secondo: Pollo alla Romana My absolute favorite vegetable is the artichoke, even from back in my childhood when my mom would serve it with a butter/lemon sauce to dip the leaves in. It took me forever to conceptualize the Italian way of mercilessly trimming all the leaves and tough outer skin away, leaving basically the heart, stem, and tender inner bracts to eat. And I can't believe how incredible it tasted with mint; why it's not more widely-known here in the U.S. is a mystery. So this is that standard artichoke and mint combo, Carciofi alla Romana, where the aggressively trimmed artichokes are braised upside-down with garlic, mint and white wine. I got to use the "carciofi mix" of dried herbs I bought from the famous spice seller in Campo do Fiore. When I met him one of the first things he did was proudly show me the sidebar about him in Downie's book, which I of course had and excitedly told him about. Here's an observation I forgot to add in my Top 5 thread: despite hearing repeatedly how fond of mint the Romans are, I detected none of it in any of the cooking I had there. I'd imagine that, as Alberto pointed out when I made the same observation about the lack of chilies in the dishes I had, it must be reserved for home cooking. Gnocchi alla Romana are a semolina-based dumpling. As with polenta, you pour semolina into simmering liquid (milk), cook until it thickens, then pour onto a tray or flat surface and let it set. Then you cut out little circles of the semolina and line them in a baking dish, top with grated pecorino and parmigiano cheese and butter, and bake/broil until the topping is browned and bubbly. The semolina layer gets creamy and custard-like while the topping gets caramelized and crunchy and they play well off of each other. I have to wonder though why even go through the added step of cutting out the shapes when the whole thing "melts" together again when you cook it. Why not just pour it into a pan, let it set, top it and cook it off? Pollo alla romana is chicken braised with peppers, tomato sauce, and bacon/pancetta. Traditionally the peppers are roasted and peeled before they are added, but I do the Marcella Hazan technique of peeling the peppers and adding them raw. Actually I wasn't much of a pepper fan until I learned this technique which leaves them pleasantly sweet.

Saturday's dinner: Primo: Capellini aglio, olio, e peperoncino Secondo: Roasted fish with scallions, peas, edamame, and mint Contorno: Braised broccoflower, aka Romanesco Broccoli Dolce: Salad of strawberries, canteloupe, mint, and balsamic vinegar The pasta dish is famous across Italy and probably knows no specific regional boundary, but I love it when paired with a seafood secondo. In my opinion (learned from Diane Darrow and Tom Maresca's books), the thinner the pasta, the better: each strands fully absorbs the flavor of the garlicky, spicy olive oil condimento. It's not all that different from the spaghetti with artichokes and fennel above, only now the base flavors of garlic and chilies take center stage. My wife says she could eat this every day and I agree. Marcella Hazan implies that it's a favorite hangover cure. For the secondo, I roasted two fish I bought at a seafood market near my parents' place in Houston. The market is run by a father and son-in-law from Croatia, and they're pretty hardcore as far as seafood markets go. You get to pick out your own mussels, clams or oyters from an ice bin and box them up yourself, then take them up to be weighed. Also they sell WHOLE fish as opposed to fillets, something I am continually dismayed to see at even well-thought-of fish markets in Texas. This particular day they had a fish that they called in Croatian burata or borata or something like that; I never caught the full pronunciation. They were very proud to have it and went into length explaining how doted upon it is up and down the Adriatic coast. I talked with them for a while about that area and won points from them for asking about red mullet, which they said they can never get people to buy here so they just don't carry it. But they were impressed I knew what it was! So I seared the fish off in a very hot roasting pan over a grill, flipped them, then poured white wine over along with scallions, peas, edamame, and mint. I'm pretty sure these are the same as or similar to Italian orate, (sea bream?), and I have never seen it at any other seafood market here in Texas. I really liked the fish. If anyone can confirm what these are (didn't get a pic of them raw, sorry) let me know. The contorno was braised broccoflower. Also that day, we went to a new farmers market and I was really excited to see the broccoflower there, which looked almost exactly like the kind I saw in Italy. Starting in Tuscany on south, the standard technique for cooking vegetables seems to be to slowly braise them in olive oil, garlic, and sometimes chilies, then finish with an herb. I got this technique from Mario Batali, who in turn attributes it to Faith Willinger, and I'd say that this is probably the best and most important technique I've learned from them both. For dessert it was a simple salad of macerated strawberries and canteloupe, finished with mint and balsamic vinegar. Rome trivia: the U.S. canteloupe actually gets its name from similar melons grown outside of Rome, "canta lupa" (sp?), "singing wolf", named after the mythical she-wolf Lupa who suckled Romulus and Remus. The U.S. canteloupe is closer to the muskmelon though ( but I'm hazy on the specifics and that reference). I've introduced my parents to the pleasures of Frascati which we drank with the meal.

Earlier last week I made one of my absolute favorite pasta dishes, and yet another must-have spring dish, spaghetti with fennel and artichokes. The fennel is slowly caramelized with garlic and chilies, then you add slivered baby or large artichokes and cook the whole thing down with some of the salted water for the pasta. Finish with mint, fennel fronds, and pecorino. The slow cooking of the vegetables gives them a sweet flavor, which is amplified by the mint and pecorino. Also made an attempted approximation of puntarelle salad using slivered Belgian endive as directed by Marcella Hazan in Marcella Cucina. Puntarelle is a member of the chicory family, and one interesting feature of the salad is that when the stalks are trimmed and put in ice water they curl up a little, giving the salad a distinctive look. One of my regrets from being in Rome is that I ran out of time before I got to try this salad. Puntarelle is only just starting to make inroads in the U.S., (at the usual suspects, NY and California), so it's probably 3-5 years before I see it here in Dallas, if ever. What made the salad was the peppery garlic nd anchovy dressing which gave it a good, lusty kick. The endive was a bit innocuous in flavor though: next time I'd throw in slivered radicchio or raw dandelion greens to give it the bitter edge the real deal is reputedly famous for.

Correction: The author of Cooking the Roman Way is David Downie, not Dowden.

I'd suspect the answer lies in either industrial, rapid freezing or treatment with some sort of bleach (sulfur dioxide) to preserve color, at least in the raw state. Acidulated water may help but then wouldn't you have a problem with the extra water in the potatoes making them mushy?

The favas should be in soon; it did seem like they started later this year. Yeah, the soybeans are the same as the frozen, shucked edamame. Truth be told I don't know anyone who likes lima beans so that's why I went with the edamame. They don't have that pleasant little bitter, vegetal kick that favas do. If you get busted by the authenticity police I'll disavow all knowledge! Thanks for the new thread title, Alberto!

Ah-ah-ah Hathor! None of this! You start your own thread like we all want! And you'll never shake the tourist trapping if you don't start calling soccer football! That bitter peppers dish sounds interesting. And I too have noticed how light eggplant parmigiano is when done right.

Maybe if I pretend real, real hard, this lo-fat yogurt will taste like mortadella mousse . . .

Well, hell, get him to post a picture, too, so I can really kick my appetite into overdrive!

Nothing so specific as a recipe, just how did it look? Was it just whipped mousse on top of garganelli, or tossed with it to form a coating? I'm really bad at visualizing things based on verbal descriptions.

That's quite commonly the case. I've had many friends who swear they hate fish but love sushi (and many now do like fish, also). I used to not like fish so much either but developing a love for sushi was a key first step to coming around on it. You mentioned not liking cod . . . it's not the salt or air-dried cod that you've had, is it? That has a much stronger flavor than the fresh kind.

That's really unfortunate that they won't make that last step. Still, food-wise we were as pleased as ever. We're now 5 for 5 in taking a guest there and having them rave about the food. I had the lamb chops (a very generous portion of 5) and their roasted pepper feta, what my wife and I call "crack on pita".

Alberto: Can you walk me through the garganelli with mortadella mousse? It sounds intriguing but I just can't picture how it would be served. Wouldn't the heat of the pasta cause the mousse to separate?

Yep, if it's readily available here in Dallas it must be happening, or as you pointed out, "happened" in NY two years ago. Let the countdown for its appearance on the endangered list begin . . .

What an amazing writeup, vinobiondo, and that's your first post?! With you restaurant dining dossier you'll more than hold you're own around here. Allow me to be the first to welcome you to eGullet.

And now I agree with carswell. Is rabbit under the same restrictions, and/or do you have any problem cooking or eating it?

But isn't scoring discrepancies and controversial wins part of the IC lore? How many episodes of ICJ were there where the Iron Chef got ripped apart by the judges and still won? Wasn't there even an episode where Morimoto made what one judge called 'the worst dish I've ever had' and still pulled out a victory? Yet with all that said I was still fuming when Batali lost, especially in creativity, on Sunday night!

Monday night was a meal that's a testament to simplicity: la vignarola, casserole/soup of spring vegetables. Get as many different spring vegetables as you can lay your hands on (I had in mine spring onions, fennel, peas, soybeans standing in for favas, asparagus, Napa cabbage, and purple baby artichokes which I was giddy to see my store carrying for the first time). Saute them in layers in olive oil, add water and simmer for about twenty minutes, finish with mint, lemon zest and juice, and fruity olive oil, and you're done. I should note that my recipe differs from other recipes for vignarola I've seen that do call for each item to be cooked separately (and also usually have potato and cured pork like pancetta or prosciutto). There's a similar recipe in Sicily called fritedda and in that version you do cook everything together, so I guess this is a combination of the two. The vignarola was ladled over bruschetta made from a homemade loaf of pane Genzano from Jeffrey Steingarten's book It Must've Been Something I Ate. It's a monstrous beast of a bread from a three-page recipe that I only very loosely followed--I can never figure out all the different folds and shaping you're supposed to do. But I was well pleased with the result.

I'm going to add my voice to the growing crowd of people who want a Hathor thread.

That might be problematic to use duck breasts since they tend to get dry when you braise them.

Man, that's amazing Hathor. As I sit here dreading a call from my new manager, I feel nothing but jealousy. You might have to make room for a sous, like it or not!

Well at least it's only four hours for you. I posted this after finishing a bowl of oatmeal and found myself wondering why I was so hungry all of the sudden . . .

Sunday night was a mix of dishes normally served around Easter in Rome. To welcome the time change, and a spectacular day, we had our first meal out on the patio. The primo was papardelle with asparagus and basil-ricotta sauce. It's a tweak of a pasta dish listed in Dowden's Cooking the Roman Way; in that book it's penne, asparagus, and plain ricotta. I still had basil on the mind from Liguria, so I pureed it with ricotta, parmigiano, and pecorino in a blender with some of the pasta cooking water. The Monday after Easter, Pasquetta, is traditionally a big picnic day, and one popular dish is agnello en brodetto, lamb (usually leftover or the unused cuts from the previous night) braised and then finished with raw eggs and cheese getting vigorously beaten into the pan juices. The residual heat from the pan cooks the eggs and the sauce thickens. The contorno was soybeans done "fava style": tossed with cured pork and scallions. Soybeans aren't traditional to Italy of course but I used them instead of the task of buying 5 pounds of favas and shucking them twice. I was pretty nervous about the main dish since I'm trying to win my wife over on eating lamb. Plus you have to be careful with the eggs in the sauce: too hot and you get scrambled eggs, and what would it taste like, anyways? And mint? But it worked quite well, the mint really added a good zip to the heavy braised flavor, and we had to stop eating the sauce left in the dish or we wouldn't have had any for the leftover meat! My only complaint is that the lamb came out a little dry, which shouldn't have been the case since it was from the leg, and braised, right? Don't know what happened there.

Saturday's meal was a recreation of Trattoria Cadorna, the #2 restaurant on my Top Five thread (link on previous page). The antipasto and dessert were different, though. The antipasto was fennel glazed with sambucca, a double whammy of anise flavor from Mario Batali's Roman shows. Blanch some fennel bulbs for 8-10 minutes, remove and shock in an ice bath. Then slice them or just halve them and sear them in a very hot pan with olive oil until they are caramelizing. Add garlic, anchovies, and chilies and cook just until fragrant, then a healthy shot of sambucca (stand back!). Cook it to a syrupy glaze and serve. Sweet, pungent from the anchovies, and spicy all at once. The primo was the much sought-after (for me, at least) Thursday meal tradition, gnocchi, tossed with spicy tomato sauce and pecorino. One of the great things about eating in Rome is that they are still very much attached to serving certain dishes only on specific days of the week. I got a cross look from a waiter one night when I tried ordering pasta e ceci on Wednesday, when it is offered only on Tuesdays (I got pasta e borlotti instead, no complaints!). Since my wife and I love gnocchi they will definitely make their way onto the menu a few times this month, but unfortunately my wife works late on Thursdays so we'll have to bend the rules a little. The secondo and contorno were grilled sausage patties and spicy braised broccoli. Dessert was tiramisu: Culinaria: Italy relates that the regional origin of tiramisu is a topic of controversy among Italians: Piemonte, the Veneto, Rome, and Tuscany all lay claim to having invented it. Drank Frascati which we bought in Italy with the meal, along with a Frascati bought in the U.S. Unfortunately there was little difference between the two. When I had it in Italy it had a grappa-like finish, lacking the alcohol punch of course. It was an older (2003) bottle, something I neglected to pay attention to when buying it; I hear that the more recently it was produced, the fruitier it tastes. All photos by Besich Studios, 2005