But not the usual stuff. My wife makes superb composed salads, and then matches them with a simple, elegant, and delicious tomato soup, as shown below. The soup was a Marcella Hazan recipe, with just tomatoes and butter. These were well-matched with a biodynamic Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.
You already know I love mushrooms. Here’s a dish with Oyster Mushrooms from Fat Moon and sautéed Shiitakes, served with thinly-sliced and baked zucchini, summer squash, and tomato gratin.
Best of all was the wine selection: a Cabernet Franc from Friuli, compliments of Gemma Iannoni and I Clivi wines. It was terrific and unexpected!
So far, January has been a marvelous month for cooking. One of the best dishes was inspired by the food blog, Lemons + Anchovies. It was a vegetarian paella dish, and it called for all of the ingredients I had available. Even better, it suggested using the spiralizer to cut the butternut squash and beets, reinvigorating a tool I had not used in some time.
Here is their recipe: https://lemonsandanchovies.com/2018/10/vegetable-paella-with-shiitake-bacon/
It was pretty easy to make, and it was fun making a parasol from the chunk of butternut squash I had leftover from the previous week. The colors were marvelous.
The final dish was delicious, although more high heat on the pan to crisp up the socarrat at the end would be advisable next time.
In 1984 Joyce Goldstein launched one of my favorite restaurants, Square One, in San Francisco. That was a decade when I was frequently in the Bay Area, for both business and pleasure, and I enjoyed her cooking and the style of her place as often as possible. (To get a flavor of the Chef and her philosophies, you can peruse this article from the Christian Science Monitor, written in 1990.)
Since those golden days, Joyce has written a number of excellent cookbooks. One of those is Italian Slow and Savory, a tribute to slow cooking which brings out the rich, full flavors of Italy. Today’s post is about Le Virtu, the Farro and Bean Soup from Abruzzo which I made for dinner last night.
I followed this recipe pretty closely, and it seemed to work out well.
The wine recommendation was a Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, naturally. Fortunately, the biodynamic 2019 bottle by Cirelli, which I got from Eataly NYC last Fall, fit the bill perfectly.
The warm, rich colors and flavors of this Sunday night soup provided a comforting contrast to the six inches of snow and bright, cold sunshine Friday and Saturday.
the meadow at sunset
While we’re wrapping up last year and reveling in our favorite carbohydrates, I thought I would offer the Pasta Year in Review via a 2:47-minute video with Vivaldi for audio accompaniment.
It was a good year for Pasta, and I hope that 2022 will be even better.
If my notes are complete, I baked sourdough bread 17 times last year; that’s 34 loaves. A few days before New Year, I decided to go out in a blaze of glory, and also do some compare and contrast with different recipes, as a way to learn and improve my technique. Here is the 2021 Bread Log.
It’s interesting to note that for the first 9 months of the year, I made Tartine-style breads. Then, for some reason not obvious to me at the time, I switched to Ken Forkish formulations and techniques — similar, but not identical. The last breads of the year were two of Ken Forkish’s recipes: Field Blend #1 (a hybrid bread with 1/2 tsp. of added yeast, along with the levain), and Overnight Country Brown (pure levain, no added yeast, providing a slower, longer dough development).
I renamed the Field Blend version as #1.1, to denote my alteration which added rye and spelt flours to replace some of the bread flour. I find that the combination of spelt and rye flours in a 2:1 ratio adds extensibility to the dough, making it easier and more productive to stretch the dough for better gluten development.
I usually freeze one full loaf from each recipe, and then freeze about half of the bread I expect to use less frequently, as well. In this case I liked the Field Blend better, so I cut up some of the Country Brown and froze the other half of it. It’s still an attractive bread, though, and it contains a good deal more whole wheat flour for flavor and health.
My first day of the new year turned out to be a fine day for revised approaches to favorite dishes. The surprise was that they were anchored by a rosé from Corsica.
For lunch I decided to select a jar of tuna fish from deep storage. I’ve been using tins of Luças Portuguese Ventresca Tuna as my primary source for tuna salads, but since the jar had been in storage for a long time, I figured it was time to bring it out.
The tuna looked very good, so I set about assembling the other elements to make lunch:
The savory nature of this dish seemed to call for a rosé. With a quick trip to the wine cooler, I was able to locate a Corsican rosé, a 2020 Clos San Qulico from Patrimonio, which I found a few monts ago at Winestone, a great boutique wine shop in Brookline.
In keeping with the unorthodox selection of the tuna, I studied the origins of that jar and the chickpeas. The tuna had a legitimate Italian title. “Tonnino”, so I was surprised to find that its origin was Costa Rica. Nevertheless, it was real Ventresca and quite delicious.
The chickpeas were organic, and sourced in Italy. I had previously tried this brand (Jovial) at Whole Foods, and I found them to be as good or better than anything I could make from dried chickpeas.
I tossed all the ingredients together, filled my salad plate, and poured some wine. Life is good!
Dinner time was just a few hours later. After discussing a variety of alternatives (including several, well-worn leftovers), we settled on a baked vegetables and rice dish, inspired by Spanish cooking from the past. The impetus for the dish was a large eggplant which needed to be used, and it was also an opportunity to clean the refrigerator — with several small portions of a plethora of vegetables. Here’s what the final components were:
These elements were all mixed together in a large bowl and then baked/roasted in a cazuela in a 425° F. oven until the breadcrumbs and cheese were lightly browned and crisp, finishing with a short blast under the broiler. The Corsican wine was every bit as good with this dish, as well.
Once in a great while, I don’t write about food. Instead, I offer you a few photos which summarize the mood at home as we end the holiday weekend, and play with my Hipstamatic app on the iPhone.
Now that tonnarelli has been firmly established as one of the most favored shapes in my pasta repertoire, I want to share with you two recent dishes. The first was very simple; pasta made with sautéed julienned vegetables — zucchini, carrot, and parsnip. Accompaniment was a large plate of salad, with mixed greens from Small Farm (including mizuna, mustard greens, and arugula) plus radicchios from Eataly (Castelfranco and Treviso).
The next version was focused on using up leftovers, specifically braised red cabbage (still…) and mini peppers, roasted with balsamic vinegar.
The wine was a real departure from all of the usual suspects. It was a 2021 Birichino Carignan from old vines in Lodi, California. The wine was made in the style of a Beaujolais nouveau, and it was delicious. You can read from the label more about the name the winemakers gave it.
Once of the most unusual recipes I found this year was Biba Caggiano’s Green Tea Tonnarelli with Shrimp and Candies Cherry Tomatoes. The recipe was from Biba’s Italy, a cookbook of hers I bought 15 years ago but which I started to really appreciate only in the past few months.
Her simple instructions about making tonnarelli were very clear. The revelation was that you should roll the pasta dough considerably thicker than one would do for ravioli or fettuccine. I used only the first three of six settings on my pasta rolling machine, and they came out looking seriously professional.
The candied cherry tomatoes was another unusual method — cooked in a 250° F. oven for 3 hours. And most unusual was the incorporation of green tea powder into the flour mix for the dough. It was fragrant but very subtle. Perhaps the tea was too old or stale, but the taste was very good.
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