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kanljung

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Everything posted by kanljung

  1. I'd like to second the Moro offerings. I find that their recipes always works very well. Another book that I highly recommend is A Mediterranean Feast bu Clifford Wright. In addition to a lot of good recipes, this book provides an excellent read on the historical development of the cuisines around the Mediterranean sea and also contains a lot of good recipes.
  2. Thanks Johnny! BTW, how do you sauce these veg based agnolotti? A simple herbed butter (like in Piemonte) or something else?
  3. Haha. Let me know which one you would like. Or all of them if you want. -Chef Johnny ← Celery root, please. I like this root vegetable a lot, so its always interesting with new ways to use it. .
  4. Serve it with potato gnocchi. Or maybe that's too similar to pasta?
  5. I'd recommend the following english language books: Since you're going to Catalonia, there is of course "Catalan Cuisine: Europe's Last Great Culinary Secret" by Colman Andrews, which I haven't got myself, but I've heard good things about. Based on what I've read in Saveur that was written by him (e.g an article about Barcelona), it should be good. For a broad overview of Spanish Regional Cooking, I would recommend "The Food of Spain and Portugal: A Regional Celebration" by Elisabeth Luard. For each region there is a short introduction about the distinguishing characteristics of the region and how this has been influenced by history, climate and geography. Then follows a couple of dishes from the region (usually a couple each of starters, entrees and dessert).
  6. There is a recipe in 50 Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi. It's been a long time since I made it, but as far as I can recall, the result was great.
  7. I googled a bit and found several sites (e.g. this one) that explained that arbanelle is the cylindrical glass jars that is used for preserving the anchovies in slat. The jars are then sealed with a thin slate stone.
  8. Flat pancetta goes under the name of pancetta tesa . My impression is that it's prevalent in at least Tuscany and Umbria.
  9. Not pretty? I think it looks excellent, as does your whole menu. We traditionally have lamb at least once during easter and this year it will of course have a Rome/Lazio theme. I am currently trying to decide on either of the above ones from Molto Italiano and I leaned towards the Abbachio all Romano until I saw this. Did you find any suckling lamb and did you use the leg or the shoulder? I guess I will have a hard time to find suckling lamb myself, so I will have to settle for ordinary lamb. I did a Pollo alla romano the other day, no pictures this time. I used a recipe from Mario Batali, this time taken from the Food Network site. Although it was a quite good, nurturing dish it wasn't that spectacular. It might have had something to do with the heavy cold I had at the time but it wasn't as good as other chicken/bell pepper combos I've made in the past.
  10. I had planned to get this book for this month. It turned out that Amazon UK couldn't deliver it so I ended up ordering Mario Batali's Molto Italiano instead. After all praise he's received in this forum, I was very curious on how a book by him would be. The book really lived up to my expectations and appropriately enough it contains a lot of the Roman "classics". I started out exploring this book with a meal consisting of saltimbocca alla romana, broccoli slowly braised in white way (apparently a roman way of doing things). To have some starch to go with this a made a torta alla patate from the book which may not be a really Roman thing but it was very good anyway. Mario's recipe for saltimbocca were different from other ones I've seen earlier on a couple of points. Firstly, the way he uses butter instead of oil and secondly the way the flattened cutlets are folded. The results: Unfortunately the saltimbocca sauce split in the last moment as my son had dragged his chair dangerously near the stove.
  11. For those living in europe (not including Italy of course ) there is Savoria in UK. If I remember it correctly, it is run by the people who ran the UK part of Esperya. The products are shipped from Italy. I've not tried it myself yet, though.
  12. Last month I didn't come to around to cook anything from Friuli Venezia-Giulia but I'll hope to contribute a little bit more this month. Lets start this month with a real classic: Pasta Carbonara. Pasta Carbonara have previously been discussed here. This is a dish that I often make for a quick lunch or after work dinner. This is really good simple comfort food. Guanciale is unfortunately impossible to find here and it is also rather hard to find any good pancetta that's good for cooking. I usually substitute with bacon but this time I used a brined pork belly. Of course I don't include any cream in my carbonara. To lighten up the egg yolks I add 1 egg white to every 2 egg yolks. Simple real comfort food as always.
  13. Yes, it's caraway that's in aquavit. Cumin is called "spiskummin" in swedish. The most common use for caraway in Sweden (apart from aquavit) is for breads.
  14. I also made riso alla pilota this weekend, I didn't go fot the col puntel version though. I based my version on this recipe together with Alberto's description upthread. I substituted the salamelle mantovese with some fresh italian sausages from my a Italian deli. These are made in-store and is as close as you get to homemade ones. Unforunately, I didn't read Alberto's advice to add some cinnamon or nutmeg until after I made this dinner. Nevertheless, I think it was an excellent great tasting dish and really simple to make. I'll agree with Alberto that this is comfort food. I'll definitely will make this more times. The next time I'll probably make my own salamelle forcemeat as well. For dessert I made a Semifreddo al torrone which is basically a parfait. This recipe is from Cremona where torrone supposedly features a lot. It consists of broken up torrone, egg custard, beaten egg whites and beaten double cream. All this is folded together and put in the freezer for three hours. I haven't got any picture of this, since all my photos were strangely out of focus.
  15. Thanks for the info, Alberto. This makes it close enough to my substitute of choice: A really good fresh italian sausage made in-house by one of the italian delis here in Gothenburg. The main difference is that is made with white wine instead of red.
  16. Nathan, your food looks execellent as always! The recipe on the site I linked to above calls for a fresh Mantuan pork sausage called salamelle. What are the distinguishing features of this sausage? I guess I'll have to substitute this with some other fresh italian sausage. The "col puntel" version sounds even more interesting. How are the ribs seasoned? Is the sausage left out from the riso alla pilota in this version? My cremonese cookbook also features several gnocchi dishes, one particularly interesting dish features a duck and mushroom sauce. It's a petty that my wife isn't fond of gnocchi.
  17. One interesting take on risotto is the Risotto alla pilota from Mantua. In this risotto the rice is boiled in water first and then sauteed together with fresh mantuan sausages. When I was looking for more info about this dish, I found a site with info about Mantua together with recipes. It is available in both english and italian. Besides this risotto, I'll cook something from Ricette di Osterie Della Lombardia, which despite its name only covers the province of Cremona.
  18. Mike, Please have a look at my post in the A Year Of Italian Cooking, Part 2 thread, for my (limited) experience of Italian language cookbooks. Also have a look at this post by Alberto who has much greater knowledge about cookbooks in italian than I do.
  19. A couple of suggestions and views on Italian language cookbooks from Alberto (albiston) may be found here. I started out with the help of a dictionary myself, after I had bought some Italian cookbooks in Milano. It worked but it was a slow process. It was this that prompted me to start learning Italian. Even after that I find it hard to correctly translate some things, such as the names of different cuts of meat. The series is published by the italian publisher Newton & Compton and is called Quest'Italia (This is Italy) and isn't limited to just cookbooks. Pradelli is the author of several of the regional cookbook volumes, but there are other authors as well, for instance Ada Boni. I've only got one book in this series, La Cucina Sarda by A M Pradelli. I've not cooked from this book as much as I've would like yet, so I'm not able to give much of a review. All I can say is that it contains a lot of recipes as well as some genearal info. The recipes are all rather tersely written. I'll probably get more books from this series in the future. I've also got a couple of books in the Slow Food recipe collection series. These are collection of recipes from different Osterie (Inns) from different regions in Italy. The quality of the recipes varies since the sources of the recipes varies. Sometimes important steps may be skipped or only mentioned briefly, so you'll have to "read between the lines". All in all, I think it is a rather OK series, despite its shortcomings. Some of the books cover a whole region while other only covers a sub-region or province. For Lombardia, I have the Ricette delle Osterie di Lombardia, Cremona e il suo territorio by Marino Marini. As the title suggest this book only covers the cooking of the province of Cremona. The other sources of information on the Lombardy region that I have are all in Swedish and they are from a time when there wasn't that much Italian ingredients available in Sweden, so they rely heavily on substitutions. The problem with these substitutions is that the original ingredient isn't mentioned. I've been eyeing Anna Del Conte's Gastronomy of Italy in my local bookstore sometime ago, but regrettably I didn't buy it. Edited to add name of Italian publisher and to correct link to albiston's post
  20. I think it looks pretty as well as delicious! The issue of substituting barolo has popped up a number of times during this month. I would also substitute Barolo in any recipe that contains it. You could probably use any full bodied redwine as a sub. If you would want to stay true to the region, barbera is a good substitution, which I've also used from time to time. Another wine you could use is an "ordinary" nebbiolo from the Langhe region which could be had for the same price as a cheap barbera. These are wines that are made from grapes grown in vineyards that doesn't belong to the DOCG regions of Barolo or Barbaresco. In fact, many of the recipes in my book of recipes from the osterie of Langhe calls for just nebbiolo instead of barolo.
  21. Thank for the tip Hathor! It really seems to be a handy way speeding up the agnolotti making. I was thinking of piping individual dots but in the end decided to form small dots with my fingers. I would never thought of piping a continous thread.
  22. I also agree that we should stay in the north for the winter and thus my vote is on Lombardy. As opposed to Piemonte, my knowledge on the food of Lombardy is not that deep. It would be interesting to do some research and explore that region a bit more.
  23. Parmesan cheese helped a long way. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit when I say that they were bland, they were bland only when compared to expectations and ones I've tasted before. All the meaty goodness that went into the filling didn't really cut through. I tried some cold leftovers as nibbles later in the evening and they were actually quite good as such!
  24. The braised lamb looks really tasty, I'm glad I've had lunch! I can relate to what you are saying about these northern italina braises. I love these braises but you don't get much variation between them and can't have them too often. Basically it is just the cut of meat and the contorni that changes. Lombardy is yet another region that seem to have similar tasting dishes. The fonduta also looks excellent. In Piemonte, fonduta is also used as a sauce for potato gnocchi and in risottos.
  25. Foodman, all of your dishes looks really tasty! I did agnolotti del "plin" this sunday. I had some wonderful agnolotti at the Osteria dell'Arco in Alba a couple of years ago and now was the time to have a try on these small meat-stuffed ravioli. Agnolotti comes with many different types of filling, but most contains some combinations of leftover brasised or roasted meats. Most common are combinations of roasted veal and pork shoulder, sometimes sausage meat, rabbit or even chicken are also used. The meats are complemented with cabbage, kale or spinach. In the rice growing regions of piemonte, rice may also added to the stuffing. The pasta dough is often rich on eggs, but not as rich as tajarin. I based my agnolotti on a recipe in Ricette di Osterie di Langa edited by Armando Gambera. Pasta dough I used 500g of strong flour, three whole eggs and 7 egg yolks. I used a variety of free-range eggs that are extra "golden" yellow. Stuffing I used some left-over veal roast saved in the freezer and then I braised a half pork shank and a samll cut of brisket in a little chicken stock and some red wine (not piemontese, I'm afraid). I then pulsed the cold meat together with some spinach in the food processor. Parmeggiano Reggiano cheese and eggs were then added. Making the agnolotti It was some time since I made my own filled pasta, so I felt a little bit rusty. The dough was very strong and elastic which felt promising. Agnolotti del "plin" should be rather smallish. The instructions says that filling of a hazelnut's size should be placed a centimeter apart. Mine were larger than a hazelnut and maybe two centimeters apart. Still, they were the smallest sized filled pasta I've made so far. After I've assembled enough agnolotti for a dinner for me, my wife and our son I still had a lot of filling and pasta dough left and postponed the pastamaking and started to cook them. The result There are basically two way to serve agnolotti, either with some melted sage infused butter or with the left over sauce from the braising/roasting (sugo d'arrosto) and then of course some parmesan cheese sprinkled on top. I decided to test the the latter, since I usually make sage infused butter for filled pasta. I think this was a mistake since the sauce from the roasting was a little to thin to coat the pasta in a good way. Tha agnolotti were ok, but nothing like those we had in piemonte. They tasted a little bit bland and again I think this would've been remedied by using the sage butter instead of the sugo. Also they were a bit larger than the piemontese version. As both SWISS_CHEF and kevin72 already have remarked on, it is really hard to get that yellow colour. After dinner I opted for the easy route with the rest of the pasta dough and made some tajarin out of it. They turned out rather good, no pictures on those though.
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