Pontormo

I thought it might be handy to link some of zuppe, brodette, etc. that have been documented on this regional forum thus far, especially during the year-long regional cooking threads of 2005 and 2006. It might be useful to browse should someone wish to make an Italian soup after pondering options. For example, in January this year, Judith began an elegant multi-coursed meal from Piemonte with agnolotti in brodo, accompanied by home-made grissini.

Gray skies in fall call for soup, too, so I am bumping this thread up. Having prepared an Umbrian dish with freshly shelled beans from the market, I combined remainders with the rest of the beans and their broth and made a soup with additional onion, carrots, celery, an orange pepper, chicken stock and the last of the last tomato sauce I had a chance to make before the season ended. One of the rinds of Locatelli pecorino in the freezer made its way into the pot, too along with parsley, a bay leaf and a pinch of cayenne. And while it may not be the slightly nutty, but soft brown farro, pearled barley is a fine substitute; I just cooked it separately and added only what I needed for a serving since it would otherwise soak up all of the liquid and turn leftovers into salad. * * * Another reason I am bumping up this thread will become obvious in just a second.

Leave her alone. I knew what she meant, so did you. The difficulty of finding an alternative indicates that one may not prove necessary, though "chewy" comes to mind. "Crisp" means firm and suggests the dark outer layer ought to flake off a bit with each bite as opposed to being a thick impenetrable surface or spongy. It says a little more than "chewy" does and therefore is superior. From Bob Brooks: "Is there a truly great baguette to be had in L.A.?" And: See? Bob likes "crisp" and sees "chewy" as an undesirable quality.

You may be more wistful about your past than your hero, Diane, but you certainly have more in common with Michael Chabon than Pittsburgh.

It is a GREAT photo, yes! He's not at all angry, just amused....and too busy to go to a bookstore to take a peep. I use his brilliant yellow potatoes to make your patatas a la Riojana and tortilla. The recent growth in farmers markets goes hand-in-hand with the increasing profile and virtues of wonderful restaurants in our city, including yours of course. I know what you have done to help the development of the FRESHFARM market in Penn Quarter. While a love of prosciutto may have thrown me into the arms of Spanish food, I have to say (again) that the spinach tapa at Jaleo is one of my favorite dishes. I especially like the way you use fruits as well as vegetables in savory tapas. I am not sure how much you ask farmers to grow produce you can't find in other places. However, Heinz, for example, grows experimental crops that he doesn't bring to the market unless asked. After searching for cardoons without any success, I mentioned my quest to him. This Sunday he's bringing a second bunch to Dupont Circle just for me. For a home cook not used to this kind of direct relationship to farmers, this kind of personal response is special.

Thank you for saying this! By the way, Heinz Thomet, the bearded Swiss farmer at Dupont Circle on Sundays, was VERY surprised to learn that his picture prefaces the chapter on potatoes in your cookbook. Minor question: Why do you specify Idaho potatoes instead of waxier varieties in your recipes?

My scribe was in charge of cutting, pasting and reformatting one of your very long entries into a Word document while I was out on the veranda dictating in between sips of champaigne.

I am pleased to report that I'm still with you, fully alert, motor skills intact. * * * Judith, it is quite the thing to see your foreign beans after shelling what turned out to be a little over a pound of my own. Yours are prettier, I must say. Mine had less color though it was nonetheless hard to throw such jewels into a pot to watch the mottled pattern disappear. Judy Rodgers says that some kinds of beans, such as cranberry/borlotti, etc. turn the cooking liquid an unattractive grey and one way to prevent that is to parboil them first. Elizabeth Schneider has a substantial entry on what are also called Horticultural Beans; she says nothing about toxicity or parboiling as far as I can recall.

M: 7 tapa-desserts due in 7 days. "Tapa" indicates small dish vs. an authentic Spanish tapa. S: Ha! I'll go further and match those sweet tapas to each dish in a 7-course meal. So, Seven-course meal: 1) Amuse: Crab, Chorizo & grapefruit. 2) App: Pasta, peas, prawns. 3) Soup: Winter squash, seaweed & ginger. 4) Salad: Clueless still. [Pontormo says salad goes after main course] 5) Main: Duck, parsnips, cherry. 6) Official Dessert: Chocolate [Pontormo: Cheese instead] 7) 7-part Tapa-Dessert Now is this clear? (Continued below) Pontormo would take the pasta out of #2 since it's a first-course, not an app. or antipasto [the Italian word lets you know it would be paradoxical] and she'd choose between pasta or soup, adding a fish course directly before the duck. Easier solution: The pasta should follow the soup course if a preference for two first courses (primi) are retained. Call the soup the app. This would mean you'd have a total of 6 courses. CONTINUED: THIS THE SEVENTH COURSE, CONSISTING OF SEVEN TAPA-DESSERTS TAPAS a) Amuse Tapa: grapefruit to reflect ingredient in the meal's amuse-bouche b) App Tapa: tuilles are supposed to mirror pasta, kiwis, peas, pink cookie, prawns. [This, I don't know about. Too much, too.] c) Soup Tapa: squash-echo, I guess. d) Salad tapa: lady apples from WF, so should have apples in salad. e) Main Tapa: Duck Pastry or Herb Tapa f) Dessert Tapa: Chocolate but like Mette's. I think this should be cheese. g) Final Tapas: This is a surprise, most likely indicating who's to be challenged.

Tonight's dinner was inspired by Kevin as well as Judith. I found della Croce's recipe online by the way, though my substitution of tender, young turnip greens and radish tops did not provide the bitter edge or texture since they both were rather soft. The second contorno meant that I had to keep the sausage simple since it used up the last plum tomatoes I bought at the market a few weeks ago. Judy Rodgers supplies instructions for cooking fresh shell beans and publishes a recipe she calls Tuscan that is actually quite a bit like the one you'll find at the bottom of this entry on harvest time in Umbria, the noticeable difference between recipes for borlotti stewed briefly in a quick tomato sauce being the lack of the bundle of assertive herbs Rodgers adds. It makes sense that this kind of cucina povera would be shared by two regions so close to one another. However, it's interesting that a brief search online associates borlotti with Northern Italy and of course, Rome. The bean eaters of Florence inspire a lot of recipes featuring cannellini (exclusively) on Tuscan sites while thanks to Castelluccia, Umbrian web pages list dishes with lentils. This was the first time I had eaten freshly shelled beans. They seemed creamier than reconstituted dried beans. Incidentally, one of their British names is "quail beans", for reasons similar to the use of "bird's egg" in West Virginia. While evoking Judith's lovely dinner, I'd trade a handful readily for some of that crispy skin.

I'd keep the salad simple given the complexity of everything else. Would suggest butterleaf with a little finely microplane-grated Gruyere (nutty) and a shallot dressing (Spanish sherry vinegar), spooning in some of the duck fat sort of like what Pepin does when he roasts a chicken. Were the duck not the next course, I would have suggested Romaine, celery (surprisingly good here; I am NOT a fan of raw celery), roasted walnuts and Gorgonzola for something to acknowledge cooler season. But then I saw your question about strawberry-colored cookies. Sable is the term I think you're looking for. Wait for Ling [& wouldn't you know she's reading as I correct a typo!] to pipe up with recipe since I only know Dorie Greenspan's famous chocolate WPC's (see thread on her new book). Beet juice dyes EVERYTHING a lovely pink. So, why not make a salad of arugula or watercress and endive with roasted beets and toasted walnuts? This week I've been eating watercress, beets & roughly grated radishes (farmers market stand is selling ones the size of turnips that are good!) which complement the spicy edge of watercress, but are a little sweeter and thus complement the beets. Then, you could use the beet juice in your cookies Then, of course, there's finely shaved fennel which goes well with oranges and/or black cured olives and thin red onion rings soaked first for around 15-30 minutes. Fennel alone with shaved Parm, lemon and olive oil. Another, perhaps classier nod to fall would be celeriac which the French serve in long strands (processed how ), with a light cream dressing. As for tuilles, I've only made almond ones which I think I'd prefer and probably got my recipe from an issue of *Gourmet*. I like hazelnuts when chocolate's involved. BTW: Not to distract you from kiwis which I am all for especially given your Aussie guests and roots, but when at WF see if they have exotic, pricy little jars of Sicilian pistachio paste. I still haven't opened mine, but it's lovely stuff and is prized for lining shells for fruit tarts (kiwi, green on green) and filling cookies. Might be good with tuilles.

Well, it looks like k8memphis may also be supplying you with this reference. Also go down to the regional forum on Southern Foodways where there are at least two threads devoted to Edna Lewis.

Glorious, Judith. You make me want to own a loden coat, don a pair of wide-wale camel corduroys, and with Burberry scarf around my neck, plunge into the woods. Till then, I may have to pair my local beans with sausage instead of those perfectly browned birds. Klary had a disappointing experience with truffle-paste recently which she reported in the Dinner thread. Were her purchase made at your local festival, I imagine the experience would have been different. I had heard that truffle-infused oils are not worth the money; Henry Lo & Ling seem blissful about truffle salt and the butter D'Artagnan makes.

I learned to make frittate over low heat so that the eggs set slowly whereas Jose Andres instructs you to make tortillas over extremely high heat, quickly. Generally, they are thicker than tortillas. No one told me they shouldn't be filled; they are as earlier posts on this old thread indicate, great vehicles for using tasty bits of leftovers as is the case with other Italian dishes such as stuffed pastas or risotto. Once the eggs seem just about set, the frittata is flipped, using the from pan to plate and back into pan method also used for tortillas. Here is a link to Malawry's photographic documentation of making a potato-chip tortilla. I say something about tortillas vs. frittatas later in the same thread after I prepared a classic potato tortilla, i.e. using thinly sliced fresh potatoes. No flour is added to the flour mixture. Dario, the word "tortilla" is also used to refer to a flat bread popular in Mexican cuisine that is made with either cornmeal or wheat flour, water, salt and either lard or vegetable oil. *Appunto! Bravo or Brava, depending.

Thanks, Kevin. I intend to have the same accident since the crust looks good!

Check out the links to the recipes Docsconz supplies at the bottom of his introduction to Jose Andres who is the featured guest in this week's Spotlight Conversation. Your new purchase is pimenton which Whole Foods has just started to carry in sweet, bittersweet and hot flavors. If you haven't looked at a copy of the cookbook Tapas, do. Pimento appears as an ingredient throughout the text. Earlier publications that introduce Spanish food to English-speaking home cooks may not specify pimenton since it was not widely available when they were written. They may still prove a source for inspiration since you can substitute the real thing whenever recipes call for paprika.

Kevin: That really is quite a feast! Could you say a little more about the potatoes and greens since I don't have JdC's book and I can't quite figure out what happened before they were plated? As for the home-rolled pasta, ahh! One of the few culinary memories I have from short trips taken down to Umbria was in Orvieto where I had my first picci, lightly sauced and slightly piccante. Judith: Exactly what I wanted to see: some of the things your neighbors and friends are preparing quickly and simply. That sandwich and the flat bread look great. Thanks for everything else, especially the reports of foraging and chestnuts. Yes, I do think farro is a lot like barley, though I don't know if it soaks up quite as much liquid. Once acquired, my only problem with cardoons was in the quality, due in part to the fact that it was an experimental crop, but also because of the time of year it was harvested in a climate that doesn't resemble Italy's as much as Northern California's does. From what I understand, this is a better time of year. I wrote about sformati in the Piemonte thread, prepared after consulting Batali's recipe for flans made with cardoons. (In his first book, he mentioned that his wife grows them.) Alice Waters serves cardoons with artichokes in a no-frills salad at Chez Panisse (Docsconz posted a picture in his report of a meal at the restaurant). You showed us a gorgeous artichoke here or in your recent blog.

See my first post (#6) and the link to Michael Ruhlman's article (NTY, April 2006), first mentioned by Russ Parsons and linked by Bethala. Here's a critical early paragraph: I cannot over-emphasize how much Haute Cuisine and the culture of restaurants raises ambivalence for anyone whose family history or identity is tied to class. Let's say you are African-American and you achieve stature as a chef, earning a reputation for intelligent creativity and enough to purchase a vacation home and contribute as much as your spouse to sending your three children to top-ranking colleges. You may no longer be lifting heavy carcasses to butcher or sweating in a busy, hot kitchen, but you are providing a service to an elite clientele including many who dine out at restaurants as expensive as yours on a regular basis. Some of the doctors among them continue to work long, physically demanding hours as does the NBA star, or ballerina dating Tobey Maguire who tells her just how uncomfortable that Spiderman costume was. Yet most have not performed hard manual labor in their professional lives. When you sit down with your staff, you are not all dressed like your restaurant's patrons when they attend board meetings. If your own parents fulfilled the American Dream, your career would simply be one more success story to add to the annual Christmas Letter. However, if a rise in social standing retains a powerful hold on living memory, or if there are distinguishing degrees of educational, professional and/or financial status within your family and circle of friends, then there may be tension, especially if they cannot afford to dine at your restaurant. By virtue of your success, you identify with your patrons. However, you also identify with your family, the people you grew up with, and perhaps the members of your staff who may lack your ambition, training and talent, but just like their jobs. It's too soon for the situation to be any different only four decades after the Civil Rights Act and, what, only a decade or so after being a chef started to become sexy in American popular culture. It was not an arbitrary decision to make Cliff Huxtable an OB/GYN and Clair, a lawyer.

Shalmanese: Any papers due this week? First, I am so delighted to see you were tapped. This thread might be called 21/7. Just a couple of ideas for now: Another way to go: sweet pasta. There are quite a few Sicilian ones done with nests of angel-hair strands, deep-fried, coated in honey, etc. I am sure there are more in different regions. What about dried seaweed layers or wrap with the squash? In Mantua, squash rind is made into a kind of sweet/hot pickle called mostarda. * * * And what's your supply of duck eggs like in responding to the main course? I'm also thinking of gfron1's light, decorative meaty wafer in imagining what you might do with sweetened, crispy duck skin

Mette: I may be the one who inspired the sorbet--or at least I said it would be interesting to replicate the foamy cap on beer. I was convinced that the marshmallow was to produce the foam. What a lovely surprise! So intricate. Really am quite impressed by the three interacting components. Now, would you kindly coat that chocolate bar in dark chocolate, please?

Yick, Klary! (In case you all are wondering, I PM'ed Klary about the porcini thread earlier.) * * * Okay, I am not giving up with asking market-based questions. Brought some FRESH borlotti home today; would you believe their relative is called "Bird's Egg Beans' in West Virginia where mine were grown? Unfortunately, a number turn out to be a bit green since they picked too early, probably as a precautionary measure since the temperatures dropped last night to near-freezing temperatures and a lot of crops were lost . I don't have much, but was wondering if Judith or someone else with Italian experience knows if there is anything special done with the fresh beans that is different from what is done with them when they're dried. Second, my cardoon source is going to bring a batch to market just for me. I am hoping at this time of year, they'll be better. So, Judith , what's up with your adventures with them?

Good choice! I long to go to Siciliy more than ever after we cooked our way through the region. Check out that thread ("Cooking and Cuisine of Sicily") if you haven't yet. Many of us loved Clifford Wright's book that focuses on Arab-based cuisine. (FYI: Author joined eG some time ago; there's a thread devoted to that book, too.) We discussed other good introductions to the food, including books by Simeti & Lanza. Also see Albiston's report of his two weeks in Southern Italy, the second spent in Sicily. There are more excellent threads here, too. Blood oranges may still be around, the season ending in March. Tiny transparent new-born shrimp (I forget the name) should be on tables in restaurants. I don't know how much you know about Monreale and Palermo, but I recommend going beyond the stuff guidebooks provide by picking up a slim, heavily illustrated & lively (honest) PB by the authority & scholar Thomas F. Mathews, Byzantium. From Antiquity to the Renaissance. It will put the mosaics in a larger context (beyond Sicilian shores) and provide some background on Islamic culture--or earlier periods of multi-culturalism. * * * That said, Bologna is great in fall and the dead of winter. Ditto re Parma , Cremona and even Modena. Venice should be a different trip all on its own, possibly with Padua and Ravenna thrown in as day trips. During rainy seasons, the city can be damp, freezing and oppressive. I spent a week there when it poured every single day. It was still Venice, ma...

I sympathesize with your point about selection, Kevin. I am a fan of J d C, nonetheless, going back to her joint publication with Evan Kleinman. As for slim pickings, that is the nature of Chronicle's series which is heavy on atmospheric pictures, designed in part, for the tourist-cook who wishes to replicate some of her/his memories. I have one of the publisher's books on insalate which I thumb through when I find myself in a salad rut. The decision to go slim on the volume may also respond to a popular Italian series of PB cookbooks on regional cuisine--put out by La Sera (Milan's newspaper) if I'm not mistaken.

FRESH sardines in Scotland? Or is this a Northern European version because of the use of a different kind of fish? (And uh I trust a pecker is um a picker?)

Yum! I had asked about something Umbrian to do with winter squash (buttercup, in my case, which is quite similar to turban). This looks perfect, though I must say the roasted peppers are calling out to me, too. J d Croce calls them Umbrian? The mint is distinctive. Just checked online library catalogs. JO's book is on order. Anything about the flavors or recipe you haven't divulged that I ought to know to make it tonight?