kellytree

Hathor - you are spot on about the location - it makes everyone a little more lovey dovey and portonovo is worth the visit.

I have to disagree on the Clandestino - sure it is the chic place to go but an 8 buck can of tuna (which they thoughtfully open at your table) and a couple slices of bread in a paper bag just doesn't work for me. The only reason I think they can get away with serving cans of tuna is because the owner is "fashion" so anything he does must be fashionble. Therefore if you go - skip the canned meats (even if they come from organically grown special whooptydoo Spanish waters) and go straight for the oysters. The owners of Il Saraghino are opening a new restaurant at the marina dorica (harbour) in Ancona next month. Apparently it will be a toned down version of Saraghino. I imagine that it will be great food. One more place to add (open from easter to October only) is ristorante Il Conerello just outside of Sirolo- certainly the best hand made pasta in the world. The menu is simple - tagliatelli or a stuffed pasta with either ragù or tomato sauce - second course is some type of grilled meat or something like rabbit alla cacciatora - salad and roasted tomatos. Wine is red or white (go for the red) - You order and your food is out in usually less than 10 minutes so great for hungry people. It is frequented by all types of people from the local volunteer fire department to internationally known fashionistas and stars.

dinner tonight - the star of the show is mushroom strudel . the rest is a big question mark? Perhaps a soup as a starter? perhaps mushroom strudel as a starter and then what?? Any ideas on a kickbutt co-star?

tortellini with chicken broth (actually for Sunday lunch)

The most common way in my part of town is to take black olives - put them in a big jar (one that holds around 5-7 lbs ) - throw in a couple handfuls of coarse salt - shake it around and leave it on the counter or wherever suits you. Shake it every day and pour out the water .... after a week or so you start to taste them - they are ready when they lose most of their bitterness. At this point some people add a few cloves of garlic - orange peel and wild fennel stalks and continue to mix and pour every few days and in the meanwhile start eating them. Others drain the olives and dry them off and then put them in glass jars with a clove of garlic - some orange peel and wild fennel stalks and then cover them with good olive oil. Other people cover them with crappy oil or a mix of good and crappy oil.

Perhaps this will help: http://www.babylon.com/definition/Nesselrode_pudding/English or this http://www.historicfood.com/Nesselrode%20P...ng%20Recipe.htm my first thought was it was something to do with stinging nettles but I guess not!

Recommendations by Mistinguett: Sep 19 2008, 01:51 AM : - Chios restaurant - I was told they have great "mici". I took a look at the menu and the cabbage rolls sound good, too. - Hanul Dacilor- excelent Romanian food -Str. Constantin Brancusi Nr. 86 A, ph.# 0723/280401 - website in Romanian only, unfortunately, but maybe the pictures help - Agape restaurant is a very casual, self-serve buffet kind of place, and I'm told they have great Hungarian food - str. Iuliu Maniu nr. 6 - Deja Vu - international, Ion Ghica Nr. 2 Apparently Cluj has a love for Italian (or something like it, I hear). This restaurant was highly recommended though, as very special and with the supreme argument that all Italian ex-pats eat there. So here it goes and I'll leave it up to you if you want to go for Italian food - Club Italia - 21 Decembrie 1989 nr. 152 Or, if you feel adventurous, you could have game (although they have a tamer menu also) at Hunter Prince. Bear paw? I hope you'll have a great week-end and I would love to hear from you (as I need to check on how accurate my sources are ) The only one of the above recommendations we went to was Agape ... unfortunately the self service buffet was closed and by that time it was getting late - the troops were getting cranky and hungry so my friends gave me that "if you pull out that damn book with all those restaurants/bars in it again you are dead meat" look Generally, the food was Ok. Nothing special and nothing to write home about. Having said this we only went to "regular" restaurants- nothing fancy. Day 1 Dinner was at the Maimuta Plangatoare (I'm told this means the Flying Monkey). A very casual, rather cosy place. wooden beams, brick-faced walls, locals ( I guess) hanging out..... The pork was better than the beef ( both of these they took a thinish slice of meat - cooked it somehow stuck some mushrooms(canned) and cheese on top and flipped it in half like an omelette. One of got a "traditional" dish which was called Gypsy style Beef (or Pork?) - basically the same piece of meat as above topped with gypsy sauce (ketchup and half cooked thick slices of onion) and a side of mashed potatos which were good. The wine tastes like half grape juice and half wine. Total cost for 4 : 60 US dollars (this includes 2 bottels of wine, coffee, and one or 2 desserts) Day 2 Lunch: We ended up going to a lame kebab joint.... due to cranky hungry friends that have no sense of adventure (read above). I had hummus and bread- it was good. The rest was generic. Day 2 Dinner: We were walking around town stopping at every bar on the way and then it started to pour down raining so we went to the "next restaurant we find" - It actually worked out good. The place is called Restaurantul Matei Corvin. I had a cumin soup - basically a clear broth with grated carrots and onions at the bottom and a good dose of cumin. It was actually very good. Someone had goulash - basically a tomato based chunky (very) veggie soup. The flavor was good. Someone had some sort of beef with a peppercorn/ mushroom sauce - the mushrooms were fresh / the sauce was one of those "just add water" types but at the end of the day edible. This came with a side of roasted potatos which were very good. I don't remember what the other person had. For dessert one guy had chesnut puree. Now this was very good- chesnut puree topped with whip cream. The food at this place was better - the price was the same. All in all it was pleasurable. Nothing emotional foodwise (except for maybe that chicken sandwich at the local little fast food joint after a night out drinking and dancing tasted pretty good) Cluj itself is a lot bigger than it looks on websites. People are friendly enough except for a lot of bartenders and trons who give you the idea that you are bugging them by coming in and making them actually have to do what they apparently are there to do.

A friend of mine brought me 2 big hot pepper plants over last night filled with lots of peppers so I will make tuna stuffed peppers this weekend with them. They are easy to make and everybody loves them. http://www.lelekelly.com/tunapeppers.htm

I am going the first weekend in October.... I have to go to the airport to drop someone off so I figured I might as well take a little weekend trip to the cheapest plane ticket destination (with the right hours) I could find.... 154 Euro for 4 people round-trip - not bad.

Another really "stupid" but quite smart idea is a big plate of carrots (quartered adn cut in half .. or however you like) with some sort of dipping sauce in the middle. It is usually the first thing to go. I mean who can resist a simple, clean raw colorful piece of carrot? A lot of times we also do the fruit kebab thing which is great because it requires no fork, spoon, plate ....

Any info on restaurants around Cluj?

The best way to get around the "is it sealed - will it kill me or not" situation is to "can" tomato sauce in beer bottles. You just have to make sure they are well capped (not a hard thing to do).

I just threw the whole head (2) in the pot . Like I said it grossed me out - the less I had to deal with it the better. Having said that - the other time I made it, a dear friend pulled out the brains (I wasn't paying attention so I don't know how it was done but I think they basically whacked the head in half and scooped them out... to be later fried and I swear on the head of my mother that by gosh they tasted just like fried clam bellies. I imagine that with you will have plenty of gelatin goop thanks to the snout and ears so it shouldn't be a problem.

Gross. eeww .. yuck. I had (read: couldn't bring myself to throwing away a perfectly good pig head) to make head cheese a couple times - eww gross ick. The neighbors loved it. Basically my recipe was boil the shit out of a couple pigs heads (Poor Pinky and Rosie freshly slaughtered in the front yard ) with as many spices/herbs ... carrots, onions, garlic, salt.... the whole nine yards after you have boiled the crap out of it (fyi about 4 hours and your whole house willl stink like pigs head so you may want to do it outside) , strain and pick all the meat off the head - it will fall off, chop into little cubes, add some olives, orange peel , and pistachios if you want. Take your pile of chopped up snout, ears, and all the rest (make sure it is still hot) and plop it in a special casing that is about 5 inches in diameter -- once full hang it for the night ... some goop will come out but most of it stays in. In the morning it is ready - you just have to wash the excess goop off the casing and slice. Nasty stuff but as I said, my neighbors LOVED it and my kids didn't think it was all that bad either.

I found the beer can up the chicken butt (by the way, is there a "nicer" way to call this method??) cooked on the grill method works great for tough chickens (guniea fowl, turkey).

my amore mio makes egglplant parm by frying the eggplant and then layers of tomato sauce, parmesan, mozzarella and very thin slices of MORTADELLA..... .. let me tell you this eggplant parm is the best I've ever had (and I don't even like mortadella!)

Update: THe butcher gave me a piece of "girello" heat up the oven to 250° C stuck some cloves of garlic in the hunk o' meat rubbed on some herbs and black pepper covered the whole thing in salt (grosso) stuck it in the oven for 15 minutes turned down the oven to 140 ° C left it in the oven for 28 minutes (7 min. per pound) took it out - cooled down - take off the salt pray ... we tried a slice last night - just to make sure --- damn good. and easy.

Thanks for your input..... I don't know if I want to make traditional rib roast (not because I am unsure but because I am an ignoramus on the matter) I will ask the butcher for a lombata .... now - considering this is Italy and getting what you want on the first try can be pretty hard sometimes - if the butcher gives me one of those "che cosà??????? " looks what's another way to say the same piece of meat... or something similar. How how shall I cook it if I can't do it salt? It will be served coldish , sliced very thin with my Danish friends famous sauce (basically tarter sauce) .... usually her Dad brings her a big ole roast beef from Denmark which I think they boil and then stick in the oven but Idunnoknow! FAVA - yes the first favas are out and about ... still little but delicious. We actually had our first lunch outside a couple weeks ago. Maybe I should ditch the roastbeef idea and go with something I know ... fava beans and pecorino!

I have come up with the brilliant idea of making roast beef for Easter - I am no big meat eater and my meat cooking skills are rather lacking. My idea is a blast from the past when I used to work at a little deli about 25 years ago and they would take a big slab of beef and cover it chunky salt and cook it for god knows how long - then chop off all the harden salt and boy oh boy was it good in roast beef sandwiches (which I never liked except the ones from this place) I suppose a 1 or 2 kg chuck of meat will be plenty - what cut of meat should I get? (in italian - also in english just as an extra tidbit of info Will the salt method work on a small piece of meat or will I end up with a big salty disaster?

ok - so I guess I shall keep it simple and use grilled ... Thanks for everyone's input.

Howdy. I am translating a menu from Italian to English. One of the dishes is "Entrecote ai ferri ..... generally it seems that ai ferri is translated as grilled but that just seems wrong to me ( but what do I know??) ai ferri should be when they just throw the meat in a very hot pan ... punto e basta... What is the correct term in English? Seared? --- what about alle piastra? One more thing - a lot of things, tagliolini for example are tagliolini in any language - do you think it is helpful or stupid to put in parenthesis (long thin strips of noodles) or do I just assume that EVERYONE knows what they are?

Are you saying it's too large to fit in your oven? There have been previous discussions (that I can't specifically recall at the moment) where it was suggested that the dark meat and the white meat be roasted for different lengths of time since one takes longer than the other. This would mean cutting the turkey up before cooking. Perhaps one or more of the previous posters who advocate this method of turkey roasting will chime in. Our Thanksgiving turkey has never been carved at the dining table. It's always pre-carved in the kitchen for ease of distribution. So cooking it cut up could work for you. ← Cutting it up was simply not an option ( the Italians have seen tons of films with the famed Thanksgiving dinner scene so my idea is to give them the "real" thing - even if most of the Thanksgiving celebrating population doesn't actually present a whole turkey at the dinner table) I fired up my brick oven up at 6pm - stuck (squished??) the bird in at 1am , went to bed and took it out this morning at 8am. It looks good and it looks like it is cooked so at least it has the "bella figura" going for it. Hopefully it really is cooked and nobody gets food poisoning (although if they do I will just blame it on their systems that don't know how to deal with "real" american food !! ) This turkey may have to move over to the tread "The best dish on the Thanksgiving table" Now, the sweet potatos, on the other hand, may get to stay right here in this thread. The italians are gonna hate 'em! And if they do I'll tell them that it could be worse- I could have made pumpkin pie for dessert.

we are still in the pre stage and I already feel like I've made a HUGE mistake. (living in Italy nobody knows the difference and even if they do BFD - I just tell them that in my family we ALWAYS celebrate Thanksgiving 10 or so days later) This is the first year I ordered a turkey. (previous years I have just bought a couple chickens) I asked my local butcher for a turkey. I picked it up today. I have 35 pounds of turkey. How the hell am I going to get that baby cooked?????

Bagel with cream cheese (I made the bagels yesterday)

This is what they are - like I said they are slight adaptions on the orginal recipe. - warm lentil sald with tomatos, feta, and a parsley/basil vinegrette - cod fish with garlic chips, fried zuchini strips, and cherry tomato confit - sponge cake with peppermint ice cream ( vanilla icecream with some crushed up old candy canes mixed in) and hot fudge sauce.