Kevin72

That meal looks great! Was that skin or a fatcap on the porchetta, and does it always come with it on or did you have to special request it?

Oh, those churros . . .

Hathor: Cardoons are a stalky vegetable in the same family as the artichoke. They look like fat, silvery celery. Very mild taste. You have to peel their fibrous outer layer on the stalk, then cook them for 30-45 minutes in simmering water to soften them. Frequently they are battered and fried or baked with bechamel. When I was in Italy, when we saw people's gardens it and kale or cabbage were the only things growing as it was late October by then.

I wonder if it's a perception thing and part of the error I made that Samuel pointed out. Italians (and Europeans?) seem a little more lax about the degree of curing before something is edible. Mario Batali often relates how when he was in Italy they would eat sausage that's only been hanging a couple of weeks and was still very raw and soft-tasting, but the Italians would always explain it as "cured" anyways. So bacon is cured but my (erroneous) perception is that it's not really "cured" until it's mostly dry and rigid, like prosciutto or pancetta. Now the question I had after reading what Samuel pointed out is, is American bacon cured enough to where it's edible? And I get queasy just thinking about trying to find out--there's my American hangup again!

Valentine's Day! Part of what got me thinking about doing this yearlong endeavour is that when I make our Valentine's dinner, I'm inevitably inspired by Venetian dishes, which in turn kind of influences the whole month of February. This dinner was a lineup of dishes from years past; I used to tinker and try to do a different menu each year but some dishes just had to become fixtures. Aperitivo: Blood orange and prosecco. Antipasto: Scallop gratin Primo I: Crab and cardoon soup Primo II: Valentine's "ravioli" Secondo: Shrimp with ginger, paprika, and prosecco Dolce: Banana-ricotta gelato Not sure if there is a formal name for the aperitivo. I only recently learned that Bellini can only refer to a white peach and prosecco cocktail. If you use strawberry in place of the peach, it's called a rossini, and if you use pureed grapes (really outstanding), it's a tiziano. I always associate scallops with Venetian food. Regrettably where I live we can only get them shucked and not in the shell with that beautiful orange roe attached like I had many places in Venice. The gratin was simply scallops dusted with breadcrumbs, parsley, coarse sea salt and moistened with a few drops of white wine, then thrown under the broiled for only a couple minutes, then finished with lemon juice as it comes out. (The pink piece of paper in this picture is the menu!) The soup is a tinkering on a recipe in the da Fiore cookbook. The Valetine's ravioli are essentially casonsei "inside out"--instead of stuffing a regular pasta with beet puree, the beets are mixed in with the dough to turn it pinkish red. It's inspired by Michele Scicolone's comprehensive book Italian Holiday Food; I think she even suggested casonsei is a color-appropriate pasta for Valentine's. Sauced with butter, scallions, and poppyseeds. The shrimp is another much-tinkered with dish that I originally cooked with langoustines (scampi) on a special order from the store a few years ago. Sear shrimp on one side in a hot saute pan with garlic and ginger (like Friuli, ginger is a not-uncommon flavor element in Venetian cooking). Then dust the whole thing with parsley, paprika, and prosecco and throw in a full-blast oven for 10 minutes, remove and squeeze lemon over. I think I may do orange next time instead. Dessert was banana-ricotta gelato, a dish I've been making for my wife as long as we've been together, based originally on a recipe from Cucina Italia magazine. I can't even remember what it started out as except there was bananas and ricotta in it; I think it was zabaglione. At any rate it has mutated over the years and finally I got it decadently right when we got our gelato maker. The bananas on top in the picture are sauteed in butter, rum, and brown sugar and then poured over before serving.

Yeah, I was going to note that it smelled like some sort of marketing ploy. Oh well, whatever gets pancetta more readily available!

Bacon and pancetta are both from the same cut of meat: the belly. Bacon is most often smoked but not cured. Pancetta is cured, and occasionally, on top of that, smoked.

Well, it seems one of the elements they've kept intact from the Japan version is that the judges rip the IC a new one during tasting and then give him the win anyways. Does Mario ever lose his cool? Last night when he was asking for the toasted coconut and one of his chefs told him he had thrown it out it didn't seem to phase him. And then him casually strolling over to the ingredient table and humming something when there were just a few minutes left?

Read Cook's Tour at some point to and you see how he reconciles KC with this series, particularly his bashing of FoodTV.

For lunch on Sunday I did a tribute to Cantina do Mori, the famous Venice wine bar that's been around longer than my country. It is standing room only except for maybe three or four bar stools, and above you swing ancient, dusty wine bottles. Classic place to go for cichetti (I can never get the spelling right, sorry) the various antipasti served around the Veneto region in a similar vein as tapas or mezze. We wandered in at the tail end of the lunch rush, and in the span of ten minutes we went from relegated to the back, pressed against the wall, to being among maybe six people there. Left to right: Aged Asiago Cheese, Baccala "Mantecato" on grilled polenta (but at do Mori it was a sandwich ("tramezzino"), and marinated artichokes. Baccala mantecato is baccala cooked slowly with onions and garlic (some recipes call for celery and/or anchovies as well) until it is nearly collapsing. Then you "pound" it (that's what mantecare means, I believe) by stirring it vigorously or pureeing it in a food processor (guilty) when pouring in milk or cream and olive oil. The artichokes were from De Blasi's Regional Foods of Northern Italy cookbook and she says it is based on do Mori (in fact it was her cookbook where I first read about and decided to go to do Mori). But when we went they served the entire base of the artichoke intead of the baby 'chokes I used. In the vein of the stocafisso/baccala discussion upthread, I'm wondering if stocafisso is much stronger in flavor then? At do Mori it was punch-you-in-the-face fishy; in fact I think the bar guy hesitated when he saw this turisto ordering it. I had mantecato in Tuscany on the same trip and it was much milder, more like what I made yesterday, though I think part of the reason is that it was undoubtedly made with lots of cream. To add to our homecoming heartache, the night we came back home we were flipping through channels on TV and Smart Travels with Rudy Maxa was profiling Venice, of course, and when we tuned in he was standing in do Mori!

Trip sounds good, Hathor. I'm not much for crowds and as cool as Venice sounds during Carnevale, the thought of it makes me a little twitchy. When we went it was late October so a lot of the tourist crowds had died down, and it was cool enough to where the canals weren't as . . . "ripe" as they are in the warmer months. I did plenty of research after hearing some not-too-glowing reviews of the place from those who had been and I really think we lucked out and got to enjoy the city to the fullest. We also explored alot of the less tourist-intensive areas, like the northern perimeter along the Miserchordia canal and the eastern part of the city. We also had great meals there, much against the general perception that Venice is rife with tourist trap places to eat. Just took alot of digging and in one case, blind luck.

I was debtating doing a potato variation on frico for that meal but with the gnocchi added in there I felt it may have been to heavy. Thanks for the wine recommendation!

Superbowl food and its leftovers kept me off-track for the week, so Friday was the first excursion back in. Antipasto: Mussels da Fiore Primo: Gnocchi di zucca Secondo: Rottolo of tilapia Contorno: Blood orange and cardoon salad I'm a bit more familiar and comfortable with the cooking of the Veneto than I was with FVG so I do a bit more improvisation when cooking in this region. The mussels dish, though, is directly from the da Fiore cookbook. Mussels are steamed with basil, tomatoes, and brandy. A quick word on the da Fiore cookbook: it is beautiful; nearly every recipe has a picture accompaniment. It doesn't of course get into the cooking of the Veneto as a whole but does give an excellent picture of what is great and unique about Venetian cooking. Regrettably we did not go when we went to Venice, though browsing the Venice restaurants thread, it appears it has become outrageously expensive. The gnocchi were made from butternut squash and were very wet--I wound up adding twice the flour as normal. Mario Batali made them on his show and sauced them with butter and julienned radicchio. I opted instead for a chocolate and cinnamon sauce he made on another episode for Carnevale Gnocchi as a little nod to Lent beginning. The secondo of tilapia was rolled around a stuffing of tomatoes, breadcrumbs, lemon zest, and poached shrimp. Baked in the oven and finished with prosecco, which gave the sauce a nearly floral taste. Tilapia isn't traditionally Venetian, and it's not particularly well-looked on here in the States, but I like its delicacy. No pics of the salad but it was arugala tossed with blood oranges and cardoons. Blood oranges have really taken off here in the past few years: just a few years ago when you got them they were oranges that had faint pink color or the occasional red blotches in their flesh. Now they are full-on, gushing deep red and readily available at standard grocery stores. Cardoons, while not as popular, finally made their way to Dallas a few years back and I'm still tinkering with how to cook them right. Normally I under-cook them and they wind up to fibrous, this time I'd almost say they were overcooked and a little bland.

1) Strain the duck fat and freeze it to be extra sure, though I don't think refrigerating it is bad. Use the fat as you would any other cooking fat, potatoes are particularly good sauteed in duck fat. 2) Coincidentally, Vin Santo goes really well with duck! Use it in place of marsala in sweet or savory recipes. Have you tried it just as a little after-dinner drink? Works better in smaller doses IMO. 3) I'm not so familiar with the alchemy of cooking metals and enamels, though and enameled pan shouldn't react to wine; in fact to my understanding, that's what it's there for is to prevent a reaction. 4) Broil the chops or roast them in a very, very hot oven, or grill them to get that brown crust. This is again getting into the chemistry territory but to me, 48 hours seems awful long for a brine. 5) Throw it out. There was a "wormy fish" thread here a while ago.

As you guessed, one reason is that the heat from the item may warm up other foods, particularly raw foods like poultry or eggs into the danger zone (temps when they are prone to harmful bacteria growth). Likewise, stock and broth are ostensibly prone to bacteria growth so putting them still-warm in the fridge to cool would keep them too long in the "danger zone ". You are supposed to cool the stock off as quickly as possible. On an episode of Good Eats, Alton froze several ziploc baggies filled with water and submerged them in the stock and placed the pot into a sink filled with icewater.

And, Hathor, we WILL get a write-up of the trip on this board, right?

Any variation on slowly cooking down a seasonal vegetable in olive oil, garlic, and chilies, and finished with mint and pecorino (thanks to Faith Willinger for this one). Don't blanch it first! Just cook it completely in the oil, with maybe a splash here and there of the pasta cooking water to speed it along. Broccoli, cauliflower, winter squash are all great and different-tasting variations.

En saor. Any variety of fish can be used, the most common being sardines or sole. Dust the fish with flour and brown it in oil. Meanwhile cook down some red onions in olive oil, then add pine nuts and currants or raisins. Pour in red wine vinegar and some sugar and reduce to a still-runny consistency and then spoon over the fish and let sit for several hours before serving. This a dish particularly popular also during the Festival of the Redemption or Redeemer in July, when they celebrate the end of the plague in Venice.

Hmm, maybe they should investigate those all-cereal restaurants next?

There were several episodes in Russia. Look out for the one where he goes to the woman's apartment and she cooks the fish casserole(?) for him and leaves. Classic Bourdain. FoodTV just didn't know what they had.

Hmm. Hopefully this doesn't discount my endeavor any in your eyes, but I think I'll go without stocafisso then. Besides, by the time I order it and reconstitute it, the month would be over!

Thanks for the resource tip Dale. You're making it hard for me to take shortcuts! Do you find stocafisso to be dramatically different in flavor from baccala?

I'm at a loss why my pics are suddenly so blurry. At any rate, the inaugural meal was risotto with radicchio, sausage, and beans. Halfway between a soup and a risotto the first night, subsequently it's been more solid.

I did it once when I made too much. The freezing separated out some of the liquid and there was an icy layer on top but otherwise it was ok.

This is hysterical. Shades of Kitchen Confidential. Looks like they were living way beyond the means of what an all rice pudding restaurant would provide and that's what alerted them, huh?