For the first time since COVID, I am finally back in my beloved Italy, this time for three weeks. The first stop was Rome for one night to eat at La Matriciana, my favorite restaurant in the Eternal City. I had emailed Fabio, one of the owners a few weeks earlier to reserve a table. My first visit there in 2007 had secured a place in my heart with its traditional style, simplicity, and excellent food.
It was a Monday night, and the place was busy — with happy diners enjoying their companions and the food and wine.
I ate simply: first, a dish of clams and mussels, followed by perfectly-made Mezze Meniche alla Gricia, a short pasta raised to heavenly heights with guanciale (hog jowels).
A half bottle of Frascati and a small taste of Amaro completed the meal just right. After a 1/2 block walk to my hotel, I was ready for a good sleep after the transcontinental journey. Amazingly, I was able to get up at 5 AM to get a cab to the airport for my flight to Puglia.
Take a trip with me (culinarily of course) to Morocco. We’re going to make a classical Moroccan eggplant dish. In the process we will take a brief detour to a fascinating part of the wine country in both France and Spain, Côtes Catalanes, where we will pick up the appropriate wine for this meal.
I love full-bodied vegetarian meals. These areas in Morocco, southern France and Spain have many great examples. Tonight’s recipe is a Moroccan eggplant and olive tagine adapted from the Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons. I made one or two adjustments, and I was very happy with the results.
Here’s the recipe:
The recipe called for 6 plum tomatoes, but the ones I had were fairly large, so I decided to go the just 4. That was just right. The other adjustment was to replace the chickpeas with almost a cup of Rancho Gordo mixed beans I made and froze a couple of weeks ago. Definitely an improvement.
Finally, I chose not to make one of the recommended grains to accompany the dish. Instead, I sliced several pieces of Seven Stars bakery olive loaf — which went perfectly.
in the sautéusecloseupmortar and pestle to grind the cumin seed
I also LOVE finding just the right wine to go with the meal. While the tagine was slowly simmering, I went into the wine cellar to choose the wine. My brain was rich with images of Moroccan spices on my palette (cinnamon, paprika, cumin), and I soon came up with this French wine from the Languedoc — je cherche le ciel — “I search for the Sun”. It was the perfect match!
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that it’s quite unusual for me to prepare a dinner which only required opening a box of pasta, opening a bottle of wine, and serving dinner in 12 minutes. Nonetheless, that’s the story tonight. Naturally, my choice was not a box of Ronzoni macaroni. The pasta involved is called Tartufissima; it’s tagliatelle with truffles, which I bought at Eataly in Boston.
It took four or five minutes to boil the pasta in salted water, and I heated up a tablespoon of butter in a pan and left it warm on the stove, then added the cooked pasta to the butter, plus some grated Parmigiano cheese, and served it for dinner. A few glugs of Ligurian olive oil helped it all slide down smoothly, The wine was, of course not an ordinary wine; it was a 20-year-old Refosco from Venezia Giulia. It was an amazingly good wine, and one that had been lounging in my cellar for many years.
It took just 88 grams of dried pasta, a little butter, salt, and pepper, and two glasses of wine for the perfect dinner. Quick and easy does not HAVE to be anything less than delicious.
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m at loose ends. The obvious choice is to go into the refrigerator and mess around with the variety of leftovers I find. In addition, I chose a quart container of broth, auspiciously labeled “Bean Water”, which I could use to reconstitute some mushrooms. Part of what I had to choose from came from activities a week or two ago in which I was making chestnut flour pasta. I found a small package of that flour in my pasta material, and even though it was probably twelve years old, the flour was perfectly good, surprisingly. I had made some dishes with fettuccine from that flour, and more recently, I made tonnarelli.
In the refrigerator today, I found the tonnarelli leftovers, which included a small amount of porcini mushrooms that had been reconstituted, and some beet greens as well. The bean water got used with a tablespoon of butter to boil two kinds of mushrooms, some oyster mushrooms, which had dried out a bit in the refrigerator, and some dried black trumpet mushrooms, which I had purchased a few years ago. Both of them soaked up the bean water with gusto, and when added to the leftover pasta, made an excellent lunch. To brighten the dish, I added some blanched chicory, a slightly bitter vegetable from Puglia which balanced the flavors, offsetting the richness of the chestnuts and mushrooms.
After considerable thought, I decided that the pasta dish was rich enough that it needed a fairly full-bodied Italian red wine. The selection was a Barbera del Sannio, one of Nick Mucci’s iconic wines from Campania. It was, indeed, the right choice.
Fourteen years ago I created a recipe that has been a great success over the years. Here’s the original:
Tonight, amidst pouring rain outside, I made it again for dinner. The dish I made was close to the original. It did not have the benefit of Moroccan eggplant jam, and we had no small tomatoes We did have sun-dried tomatoes, so I substituted those. Instead of the roasted vegetable stock, I substituted a watered-down, rich mushroom broth, made and frozen a couple of weeks ago. And I set a resolution to make the eggplant jam one day in the near future. Accompanied by a Lugana from the Lake Garda region of Italy, it was every bit as good as the original.
My take-aways from the experience were twofold: (1) Vialone Nano is the best risotto rice, and (2) mozzarella in risotto is every bit as good as Parmigiano or Pecorino, and it’s a nice change of pace. Another benefit is that the mozzarella will help me make Arancini tomorrow, because the rice kernels will hold together better.
Often I make a meal from a combination of small leftovers. Some of these combinations are highly unusual, but I seem to have a sense of how the final dish will come out well — even though it would not appear so on first glance. Such was the case today for my lunch.
I’m reasonably confident that no one else on the planet made this dish today. Ingredients:
leftover homemade Chestnut Tagliatelle with Asparagus
leftover sautéed Lion’s Mane Mushrooms
cooked Ranch Gordo Ayocote Blanco Beans
mild Portuguese Chorizo
cooked Beet Greens
white wine from Cyprus, made from Xynisteri grapes
I just put them all in a pot with some water, heated it up and served the meal — weird, obscure, and delicious.
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I’m not used to thinking about Spring during February. We may have a few days with a warm spell, but that won’t last long in New England. However, global warming may be changing that. A few days ago I was browsing in the Gustiamo website, looking for recipes featuring Vialone Nano, my other favorite rice for making risotto (Carnaroli is the usual preference). I came across this “Spring Risotto” and thought I might make it for dinner soon.
I had seen a similar recipe a week before, and it included wild mushrooms (morels). Since we had nice fresh asparagus and shiitake and Lion’s Mane mushrooms — but no spinach, I adapted recipes to make my own version. The result was outstanding! And photogenic. I was so pleased with the quality of the Vialone Nano that I am ready to make it my first choice for a while. The smaller grains take longer to absorb the liquids, but they are great when done.
This newly-recommended Verdicchio was an excellent match.
Sometimes the most spectacular meals arrive without any fanfare at all. Such was the case tonight. My wife had prepared a rice and black beans casserole last night for dinner. It was very good. It was with just those two elements and breadcrumbs, tomato, probably some onion. I was planning on having the leftovers tonight for supper, given that we were on different schedules this evening for meetings. I warmed up the casserole under the broiler, and that worked fine as the first course.
However, I had two other fortunate circumstances that combined to make a really great meal. One is that I removed an old French wine from the wine cellar. It was a 1998 Bernard Chave Crozes-Hermitage. I had taken it out of the cellar so it could come up to room temperature and be available for a meal. The other thing I had done yesterday was to buy some fish. And I decided I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, so I bought scallops, which I like but are expensive, and I planned to buy just a small quantity, about a pound, of monkfish.
Well, the monkfish got delivered to me at the store, and the price on their price sheet was $16/pound. But they charged me $18/pound, which was more than I was willing to pay. I pointed out the error; they were willing to re-price and repackage the food. Then I said I really don’t need a whole pound, how about just one fillet, which turned out to be a little over half a pound. Thus, they repackaged that, priced it at $16 a pound, and so for $8 and change, I was able to make a fish second course for tonight. The recipe I chose was monkfish with caper butter from NY Times/Florence Fabricant. It was terrific. Simple, flavorful, easy to do, and produced outstanding results.
The capers were not as salty as I expected. The remedy was also delightful: a few sprinkles of Slovenian fine sea salt.
I’ve often written about how Ingredients shape the decision about what to make for dinner. Such was the case with this dinner on Thursday night. I had been shopping at Idylwilde last week and bought just a few slices of Speck, a cured and smoked ham (similar to Prosciutto) from the Tyrol region in Italy. After reviewing several recipes online, I settled on this simple pasta dish as a point of departure.
With this as a guide, I chose to add several more ingredients that I was eager to use before they went bad, They included baby artichokes, a small piece of a fennel bulb, red cabbage, and some Radicchio di Treviso. I had a bag of spinach in this category, too, but I cooked that and saved for another day. While the pasta was cooking, I blanched each of these for about 3-4 minutes, and then I sautéed them in butter and olive oil, adding cream a little at a time, until it was all nice and tender.
I loved the bright rich colors that emerged. When the pasta was ready, it went into the skillet with the vegetable sauce and was thoroughly mixed to merge the flavors. The last steps were to sprinkle a few chopped Taggiasche olives and grated Parmesan cheese on top. The wine was also unusual and very good. It was a 2020 Vespolina Colline Novaresi by Francesco Brigatti in Alto Piemonte.
Eclectic and delicious. I would rate it as “best meal of the month”, I think. Even my wife liked it.
This post does not really have a theme. I searched through memorable food events in late January to mid-February, and I decided on this corny title, since the photos seem attractive enough that I will want to remember them.
I write these posts as much for myself as for my loyal followers. The Blog gives me a handy reference of dishes I enjoyed, and it documents enough about how they were created to be useful when I want to repeat any.
Tinned fish is always available for an easy and delicious lunch. Here’s one with Portuguese Ventresca tuna in an open-faced sandwich on my pan-fried sourdough bread.
Crispy Mushroom Technique
I had some good oyster mushrooms from Fat Moon Mushroom Farm, and I recently learned a good way to make crispy roasted mushrooms. After tearing the mushrooms vertically into smaller strips, I tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper. Then I dusted them lightly with potato starch and roasted them at 400° F. Turning them once or twice and watching carefully so they were not overdone.
roasting oyster mushrooms dusted with potato starch
Octopus from New Deal Fish Market
I had excellent luck at my fish market. I was there to replenish my supply of frozen e-z peel shrimp in 2-lb. bags and to buy fresh swordfish and hake for dinners that week. They also had a very attractive 2.5 lb. octopus. Since they sell it by the tentacle, it had just six legs left, which was just the right amount for me. Using the usual preparation, I braised it in its own juices in a 200° F. oven for about 5 hours, then marinated it overnight in a citrus olive oil bath. It turned out to be the most tender octopus I ever made.
grilled octopus with white bean purée
“Crab Cakes” Made from Lion’s Mane Mushrooms
Another gustatory delight from Fat Moon was made with Lion’s Mane mushrooms. I bought a grow-block from Fat Moon and watered it regularly for 2 weeks. The yield was 2.5 lbs. of perfect mushrooms. Tearing the mushrooms into small pieces approximating the crab meat obtained from crab claws, I made this dish for the third time — again with fine results.
Sole Fillets Wrapped in Pancetta with Rapini
Continuing the seafood theme, one night I made a dinner with fillets of sole, stuffed with sautéed chopped mushrooms, and wrapped in Pancetta. Accompaniment was a vegetable I love and my wife won’t eat — Rapini, or Broccoli Rabe. The wine was Vadio, a white wine from Portugal. It was new to me, and it was delicious.
sole wrapped in Pancettasautéed mushroom filling for the soleblanched rapini before sautéing
Risotto with Shrimp and Vegetables
Cianfotta
For a change of pace, Cianfotta — a marvelous vegetable stew from Naples — really hit the spot. The wine was Ligurian, a Rossese from Punta Crena, one of my favorites.
recipe calls for white beans, but I had none, so I used chickpeas
Vegetables for Breakfast
We close on a vegetable note: hummus on grilled sourdough with tomato and radishes. No wine for breakfast!
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