Kevin72

Nathan and Divina: D'oh! That would have been an excellend resource, I can't believe I didn't think of it. I was also going to check out Italian Wine Merchants, where Mario stores alot of the salumi he makes for his restaurants. But I just lost interest and went out and bought a 2.25 lb slab of bacon from my butcher here in downtown Dallas. I blanched it to remove some of the smoky flavor as some cookbook authors have directed, and then re-rubbed it with sugar, juniper, rosemary, and black pepper and will let it sit a few days to give it an additional flavor boost. Let's see how it works out! Hathor: Along the lines of what Divina pointed out, I've been curious about what you do. I at first thought you were on vacation there but I realize I must not have been paying attention. I'm assuming you're in a cooking school then?

Whoah, Plotkin never even mentioned that one!

For what it's worth, I did and they still don't. But the place looks great; the staff and owners were fairly beaming with pride about it. Took another out of town guest there and they greatly enjoyed it as well.

Ah, look at that Cinque Terre bottle! What were the greens!

That's a fair assessment. In fact I always forget her exacting demands on authentic ingredients until I reread her--I usually skip over the parts where she says that $40 for a bottle of olive oil isn't unreasonable. You should read one of Fred Plotkin's books! Still, you look at where we are today in the U.S. with the ready availability of radicchio, fennel, arugula, blood oranges, cardoons . . . things that just 10 years ago would have gotten you perplexed looks from produce sellers had you asked for them. I can't help but think Hazan played a small part in that, having implored readers for 30 years now to seek these out and demand them. And certainly she played a key role in changing people's perceptions of what Italian food is. Not that you implied this of course, just rambling. Also you made a good point on the gaps in the Culinaria book. Ingredients are listed but not used, or used but not listed, or just given in vague descriptions (vinegar, for instance, with no indication whether to use white or red) and there are presumptions on the familiarity of cooking terms and techniques. They repeatedly direct you to "joint" a cut of meat or bird, and I can only presume it means to take it apart at the joints, which to me seems to produce too many pieces--do you "joint" a wing and wind up with three pieces? If I do cook from Culinaria: Italy, more often than not I use their recipe as a general guide and improvise from there. But they are great to look at, aren't they?

Oh and Sam (slkinsey), if you ever read this, I really, really wanted to do Rome right and order guanciale from Salumeria Biellese. But when I called they told me that they would only ship it in increments of 5 lbs or more, which probably would have brought the total bill to the $50-$60 range, which I just couldn't justify. So I'll just have to chuck authenticity in this case and "settle" for the artisinal slab bacon from a butcher in downtown Dallas.

Well damn, Alberto, I guess that was the more obvious choice, wasn't it? I should have given you two chances . . . April will be the lusty, gutsy cooking of Rome. I won't even go through the pretense of saying Lazio, Rome's surrounding region. Italy's capital city is such a culinary titan in its own right that you could cook recipes from there for three months or more and not repeat yourself. It's my third favorite regional Italian cuisine and almost always influences my cooking in Spring, particularly Easter. In fact the Easter meal I listed above is much more Roman than anything--while lamb would be the secondo of choice of course, porchetta is eaten here, as it is in much of Central Italy. And fennel and artichokes, two of my favorite vegetables, are consumed with gusto in Rome, probably one of the reasons I identify with it so strongly. As I mentioned on the Top 5 Meals on my trip to Rome and Puglia thread , Rome is a great trattoria town, serving honest, simple food. It has either originated or at least popularized a number of Italian classic dishes: fettuccini alfredo, spaghetti alla carbonara, bucatini all'Amatriciana, carciofi (artichokes) alla guidea and Romana, saltimbocca . . . the list goes on. So I've got a lot to fit in! The main references I will be using besides my recent trip there: Mario Batali's excellent and expansive treatment of the region on Molto Mario (Rome appears to have influenced not only obviously Lupa but Babbo as well), and David Dowden's cookbook, Cooking the Roman Way. This is probably my second favorite cookbook on a specific region in Italy, I highly recommend it. I have seen but not really looked much into Rome at Home, another cookbook that unfortunately came out right around the same time as Dowden's. And of course anyone is welcome to share their cooking, travel and eating experiences in Rome or Lazio, as well as must-have or must-cook dishes.

I went over this past weekend and I have to say I was underwhelmed. It just seems like they offer more volume of their same stuff, or at least where I was looking (produce and seafood). CM still offers a greater variety of both, so that's where I'll stay. And scratch my comment above in regards to them using the Harry's concept here. Guess it would look too similar to CM.

All over. First noticed it in Venice, then our hotel in Rome did it regularly. When we saw the carton it sealed the deal.

>Laughs ominously< C'mon, it's only a couple more days until April! And, it shouldn't be TOO hard to figure out if you've seen my other posting activity here of late . . .

I have a question that I meant to put in the observations on my Top 5 thread . . . what's the deal with the milk used in cafe latte? When we went the first time I thought it was just a fluke, that that particular hotel had let the milk go bad, but this time we had cafe latte almost every morning and it always tasted slightly curdled. We even saw a package "latte per cafe" at one place and it, too, had that "off" flavor. Any insights?

What kind of pasta maker is it? Is it an electric mixer and extruder, or is it just the press? Alot of Southern Italian recipes like orecchiette and cavatelli use only water and durum or semolina flour, but then they don't require a machine to roll them out: you just cut off pieces and then shape them with your fingers.

Roasting a chicken or other large bird. Never comes out dry, even the breast meat.

Thanks, Reseek! Plotkin is pretty much it for books dedicated exlcusively to Liguria, though Adam recommends upthread the book devoted to the cooking of both the Italian and French rivieras. He does a great job giving a cross-section of this area's cuisine, if a little exacting at times. The octopus we get here is, I'm pretty sure, previously frozen. Got this batch at an Asian market, though sometimes it's at Central Market, a gourmet-type grocery store here in Dallas. I even bought a whole tentacle from a large one and tried it last summer. The cooking method is similar to what I've seen elsewhere: cook it until fork-tender in water with a little vinegar in it. I always throw in a cork and now I can't remember if Plotkin specifically called for it or not.

Thanks for sharing it with us, and please don't let the updates end when you head back to the U.S.

Driving to and from Austin this weekend, I was reminded of another great thread, Chefrodrigo's Texas Gluttony Thread, a road trip across the Texas Hill Country eating at famous barbecue places. Goes into history and Texas Barbecue tradition, and of course knee-quivering pics.

Stuff them into fish or chicken. You can even save the whole stalk and its fronds and use it as a brush to sop on a marinade on items on the grill.

Wrapping up Liguria. Recent meals: Savory Artichoke and Spinach torta Like foccaccie, Ligurians seem really into savory tortas. Usually they involve some sort of green like spinach, chard, or borage (which I have yet to see anywhere), and ricotta or its tangier cousin, prescinseua cheese. We were visiting family over the weekend, and on Saturday night I made my traditional Easter dinner. The dishes are from all over the map, so it wasn't strictly Ligurian, except for one item. Appetizer was a tweaking of a standard canape since the '70's, asparagus wrapped with prosciutto and creamy cheese. The primo was the aforementioned Ligurian-inspired item, Torta Pasqualina, another savory torta, again with prescinseua and spinach, but now including finely minced salami. Also, you make little "wells" in the filling and pour in a raw egg, then cover it with the pastry and bake. The eggs set and look like hard-boiled eggs as it cooks. Instead of making the dough as I had for the artichoke torta, I used phyllo dough. For the main we had "porchettina", stuffed and grilled pork tenderloins. The stuffing was sausage, garlic, fennel greens, and rosemary. You lucky, lucky bastards in Italy get to buy your pork loins with the skin and fat still on them (not to mention real, whole porchetta of course!), which would just never fly here in the U.S. The contorni were two grilled items, artichokes and fennel. The artichokes are halved, the choke is scooped out, then slathered with olive oil, garlic, and parsley and placed on a grill, leaf-side down, and cook until the heart can be easily pierced by a fork. By now the outer layer of leaves will have blackened, you just peel those off and then go to town. The fennel was blanched first, then grilled. While they cooked I spooned a sauce of reduced orange juice, olive oil, garlic, and chilies over them, then added more right off the grill. For dessert we had strawberry tiramisu. As always with dessert, no pictures. I seem to never get pictures of dessert. Is that because desserts usually involve a higher level of presentation that I don't feel that I can reach, or is it because by now the meal is several hours and a few bottles of wine in, and I always forget? Last night was probably the last meal for Liguria, with leftovers and my wife taking a turn at the stove the rest of the week. Antipasti were the region's famous stuffed mussels More tweaking on my part from the original recipe, which calls for cooking half the mussels, then chopping them fine and mixing them with a stuffing of mortadella, breadcrumbs, garlic, and parmigiano. Then you pry open the other half of the mussels and spoon this mixture in and cook these until they opened. I just did them all and re-stuffed the empty shells, then baked them over tomato sauce until the filling set. Note the filling ingredients: here is what I was talking about when I said that Ligurian had many tell-tale ingredients separating it from Southern cuisine, which Marlena di Blasi erroneously (in my opinion, of course) tried to pair this region with. And yes, there's cheese in a seafood recipe in Italy! It's not such a steadfast law as I had been lead to believe. Frequently stuffed seafood items have cheese in them. Where the no cheese and seafood rule really seems to hold fast is in pasta dishes. Speaking of pasta, the primo was conchiglie with octopus sauce. For the secondo, it was calamari in zimino: squid braised with chickpeas and swiss chard. Ha, no dessert so no pics! So that's it for Liguria. I liked its delicacy and reliance on vegetables, it was a good counterpoint to the richer cuisines of Friuli Venezia Giulia and the Veneto from January and February, and a nice way to welcome in Spring and warmer weather. Plotkin trumpets Liguria as commonly acknowledged as being one of the three great cuisines of Italy (Emilia Romagna and Friuli Venezia Giulia are the other two) and I'm a little reluctant to agree to that extent, though please don't take that to mean I don't like Ligurian cuisine. I was surprised to notice how influential it has been on American cuisine, particularly the Mediterranean cooking boom of the late '80's and early '90's, and it is easy to see why.

Did you wind up making it? How'd it go?

Say, would making gnocchi or dumplings or even a stubby pasta work with mashed chestnuts, flour, and egg? Has anybody done this or seen a recipe?

Yes, the standard trofie listed are made from whole wheat, these were a chestnut variation. Plotkin calls to mix whole wheat and chestnut flours but that sounded way too heavy. There's also a chestnut gnocchi that I shudder to think about trying now. Plotkin gives a much shorter cooking time: just until they float, which is maybe 2 minutes, I wonder if cooking them even longer as you suggest, or with egg, would have helped the texture at least. I want to like chestnut flour stuff, I really do, but I just keep coming up blank when I try it, with the exception of some chestnut flour crepes.

Well, what a good idea to turn this into a thread where we can all share! I think a good starting point for eating adventerous is, conveniently, Rome, home of the fifth cut. When we went there I was determined to try at least some of the delicacies tripe and sweetbreads at the least. As I said on my Top 5 thread, I did make a beeline for tripe the first time I saw it on the menu, and it was a long, doubt-filled wait for them to bring it out. Tripe is of such quality here in Dallas that the entire restaurant smells of it if it's offered. But I was relieved to find it pretty enjoyable. I didn't see sweetbreads on any of the menus. I am morbidly curious about pajata, a Roman dish of calves' intestines and rigatoni in a spicy sauce. Maybe with enough wine in me I'd try horse. Over on Adam's thread they talk about porcupine being a regional delicacy, as well as nutria salami.

I always loved the mystery basket shows when she had to cook with ingredients her staff picked for her. She'd lay waste to that kitchen!

Alberto nailed it. Lots of the pasta dishes are vegetarian, and you'll probably run across the fava puree a few times. If you eat at Tempo Perso and have the antipasti spread, note how many vegetarian selections there were. Likewise if you go to Il Frantoio, they will be accomodating of vegetarians: the wife in the British couple we met was vegetarian and they made an eggplant parmigiano dish for her. The rest of the meal was seafood and vegetables.

Sounds like you're getting alot more time in Puglia than we did, so now I'm even more jealous.