I was shopping at Trader Joe’s last week, and I stumbled on a new and attractive box of dried pasta, Italian-made Organic Lemon Torchietti.
It was appealing enough to buy it and try it the next night. I had also purchased a small bag of Meyer Lemons there. I love them because they are less acidic, taste great, and have deep orangey-yellow skin for zesting. I read a Meyer Lemon Sauce recipe on the internet. It was too complicated for this pasta, but I did use Meyer lemon zest and juice, one chopped shallot, plus unsalted butter, as part of the sauce.
Unlike my usual extravaganzas, this meal involved boiling the pasta, placing it in a bowl with frozen green peas and some leftover broccoli rabe, adding Meyer lemon flavorings, grated Pecorino cheese, and a splash of olive oil. It was easy, colorful and delicious. I can definitely recommend this pasta.
Another very Italian dish in this mini-series is Pasta alla Gricia. The name rolls tripplingly off the tongue in Italian, less so in English as “pasta gray”. I was led to research and then make this dish because of “guanciale” (cured pork jowl). I had finally tried guanciale properly about a month ago, when making an authentic version of Pasta Amatricana, and I decided I really do like it at least as much as pancetta.
Usually when I cook, I start with a recipe, either something I’ve made before, or a new one I want to try. Yesterday was different. I decided to create a new risotto dish from some items I had in mind, thinking that they might make an especially good meal in combination together. The specific ingredients were:
zucchini – I had 3 available, but one in particular was beginning to shrivel and had to be used immediately
leeks – I had two large ones and two small segments, so I grabbed the small ones to use
shrimp – We always have a bag of EZ-Peel small shrimp in the freezer. They are frozen individually, so it’s easy to defrost precisely the number I want. I decided on 8 for a balanced dish with the vegetables, BUT when I left the kitchen for a few minutes, the other chef (my wife) decided that was too skimpy, so she doubled the quantity while I wasn’t looking.
morel mushrooms – shopping Sunday at Eataly Boston, I found some gorgeous fresh mushrooms (chanterelles and morels). Since I had never cooked morels, I bought just two of them, to give them a try with this dish.
I had an image in my mind of a umami-rich bowl of rice cooked gently over an extended time period with these ingredients, all merged together with the broth and the fats of risotto. Remarkably, it worked.
You’ll notice a few whole shrimp on top, which is how I dealt with the surfeit of shrimp which came my way suddenly.
Here are all the details, should you be tempted to try it. It was one of the best risotti I ever had.
If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I would be in Campania, Italy, along the Amalfi Coast. Since that’s a pipe dream at the moment, I decided instead to make myself what I imagine would be a creative Southern Italian lunch. In fact, this entry will be the first of four successive food and wine posts with an Italian flavor, starting with the most recent (today).
It begins with a single salt-packed anchovy from Cetara. It was removed from the briny jar, carefully rinsed and de-salted, made into two small fillets, and then placed gently in a skillet with olive oil and hot pepper flakes, on a very low flame. After about 5 minutes in the warm oil, the anchovy dissolved, and it provided a flavorful base for the dish. Mostly made from leftovers, here were the ingredients.
The rapini, (a/k/a) broccoli rabe, had been trimmed, blanched, and chopped a few days ago, when I was using the rapini blanching liquid to make a light broth for risotto. The torchietti was a new find, at Trader Joe’s last week during a shopping trip. Roasted garlic? Cooked in the oven last week and preserved in olive oil. Salami and Castelvetrano olives? Bought yesteday at Eataly Boston. Plum tomato? About to go bad, sitting on the kitchen counter, so it had to be quickly blanched, skinned and seeded for whatever was looking for a little acid. And the Falanghina was a wine from the Mucci brothers, imported from one of their producers in Campania, purchased yesterday at Social Wines. The olive oil was from Sardinia, a full flavored recent vintage from Gustiamo, a favorite supplier of all things Italian.
It came together beautifully, and I finished all in three portions for my lunch.
When I find that I have a handsome eggplant and attractive zucchini, I am moved to make Ikarian Springtime Soufiko, a marvelous (as well as quick and easy) vegan dish for dinner. Technically, it might be Spring here, but we just had 6 inches of fresh snow today, and this dish never disappoints.
Here is the basic recipe:
As with most recipes, I considered this to be a guideline, not prescription. We had no butternut squash, but I added leeks, grape tomatoes, and yellow summer squash instead. I also had 5 large scallops available, so I pan-seared them in a very hot skillet with coarse Sicilian sea salt, as a side dish. One of the intriguing aspects of this dish is the way the vegetables stew in their own juices at the start of the process, before any olive oil is added to sautée. The vegetables cut up were large enough to require my 7.5-qt. Le Creuset Bouillabaisse pot, which performed the job beautifully.
Another fortuitous aspect of the dinner was that I had a bottle of a Greek Xinomavro wine, ideal for cooking and drinking with our Soufiko.
Today was a great day for cooking. I had one activity on my calendar — my weekly Body Movement training session — and the rest of the time was available for culinary adventures.
It was my turn to make dinner. I wrestled the previous night with what to make, since pasta and rice dishes were off the list, according to my wife. Finally, I asked the ingredients question — what do we have that we need to use, and do we have other foods that are well-matched? That was the breakthrough, at about 4 AM. The key ingredients were a 1 lb. package of fresh spinach that we had for several days, to be paired with Feta cheese, which we had in abundance.
With that issued settled and planned for quick assembly in the late afternoon, I went on to freelance with some other foods that interested me. There were 3.
a Peasant Bread Sandwich loaf — a variation of Ali Stafford’s popular Peasant Bread
Sweet Onions with Curry and Parsley Coulis — a dish by Alain Passard from Food & Wine, July, 2001.
The bread went smoothly, taking only 4.5 hours elapsed time from start to finish. The dough rose nicely in the Utility Room, near the furnace, and ideal warm environment. I put the loaf pan in the oven at 1:00 PM, so I had to ask my wife to take it out of the oven when ready, since I was still working on my body mobility, balance, and strength. The fresh bread was very handy for part of our lunch.
Next item to pull together was the Coulis. After a quick trip to our greengrocer for Peruvian sweet onions and more parsley, I was ready to cook.
For the gnocchi dish, the spinach preparation required several washings and careful removal of dead leaves and thick stems. That was the most time-consuming and fidgety part of the whole process, but it was well worth the trouble. I had enough frozen gnocchi from a meal a few months ago, so I did not have to open a new package. To my amazement, I did find the pink peppercorns in one of my spice drawers, so I did not have to cut any corners to deliver an authentic version of the recipe.
The last step was almost trivial, slicing the tomatoes, arranging them on two plates, and adding seasonings to mine (my wife likes them unadorned).
The final event was colorful and delicious, accompanied gracefully by a natural Spanish orange wine, made with the Garnatxa Blanca grape.
Who would put together a dinner featuring these ingredients? You guessed it.
Beluga Lentils with Black Mushrooms and Mirepoix — note: the green beans was a last-minute add.
Roasted Leeks with Beet Horseradish Cream
This lovely California Carignane/Grenache blend was perfect with the earthiness of the Black Lentils.
Coda
Since this is an eclectic post anyway, I will take this opportunity to share two more photos. They are two examples of recent cooking that came out better than I had hoped, and they don’t fit anywhere else…
This was a mostly vegetarian Paella with Shrimp highlights. I cooked most of it outside in a covered gas grill, trying to get the rice a bit crispy.
Another of my beet salads, this time with Cannellini beans, Radicchio di Treviso, raw red onions, sweet peppers, and watermelon radish.
We made a superb vegetable soup that was symbolic of the wintry weather recently. Actually, my wife created the soup. My role was much smaller: just preparing the Cavolo Nero and the Cannellini Beans, and adding a little color with slow-roasted grape tomatoes.
For a first course I put together a sort of a la carte Beet Salad. This permitted my wife to choose the accompaniments she likes, and avoids the spicier stuff that I prefer.
Using the steamed beets as the foundation, the accessories included:
goat cheese
toasted walnuts
beet greens
pistachios
slow-roasted grape tomatoes
grated lemon zest
olive oil
bittersweet Basque vinegar
and the piece de resistance — Holy Schmitt’s Beet Flavored Horseradish Sauce
Here’s a close-up…
I think next time I should add some crystallized ginger. What do you think?
New England winter weather can be pretty bleak at times, so when my wife is able to show off her skills with blossoming flowers this time of year, it is a special treat. Here are two examples of brilliant colors from plants she brings back to life, year in and year out — Orchids and Amaryllis.
My breakfasts are fairly simple. I usually toast or pan-fry a slice or two of my sourdough bread and then smear some Trader Joe’s organic hummus on it. With a few sprinkles of Lebanese Za’atar, the toast is complete. I wash it all down, along with supplements and medication, with a glass of juice or a fruit smoothie. The final touch every morning is a single shot of fresh-brewed espresso (ristretto).
For variety I sometimes mix a batch of whipped cheeses (Feta and almond milk Ricotta) as an alternative to the hummus. At other times I make white bean purée to spread on the bread, adding chopped greens such as Swiss Chard, Spinach or Cavolo Nero.
One day recently I felt like making one piece each of these alternative toppings. Since I wanted to use up some Peruvian Piquillo Peppers, I added them to the whipped Feta cheese spread — for both taste and color. When I took my photo of the breakfast plate, I was suddenly struck by the configuration.
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