Dgourmac's Blog

Gnocchetti

Posted on December 26, 2014 by dgourmac

One of my unique food finds in NY was a package of Gnocchetti Sardi, a pasta from Sardinia. I found it at BuonItalia and purchased the one which included the spinach and tomato pasta doughs.

I made up my own recipe, and it was excellent.

boil gnocchetti in salted water until al dente
dice carrot, onion and potato, and sauté them in olive oil in a large pan
in a separate pan, sauté chopped chanterelle, shiitake, and soaked dried porcini mushrooms; add crushed, dried Sicilian rosemary; add salt and pepper
when mushrooms are browned, add stock and boil off, then add white wine and reduce
chop and blanch a handful of kale leaves, about 3 minutes, depending on age, until just tender
combine sautéed vegetables, mushrooms, kale, and the gnocchetti in the sauté pan, add a handful of pitted, chopped Taggiasche olives, a little more olive oil, and sea salt (preferably from Ibiza), and cook two or three minutes until the flavors are well-blended.

Relish this beautiful and satisfying dish alone or with friends. Buon appetito!

Gnocchetti with Vegetables My Way

Sea salt we bought in Ibiza last month

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NYC December 2014: Food, Wine, Friends, and Sport Jackets

Posted on December 26, 2014 by dgourmac

Last week, as soon as classes were over and grading completed, I made one of my semi-annual New York visits. I rented an apartment on Airbnb for three nights, connected with a few good friends, explored for food and wine, and arranged to go to my favorite clothing store to replenish sport jackets which were wearing out.

I won’t drag you through the play-by-play description of each day, but I will show or tell you a few of the highlights:

dinner with Dan at Blossom, a terrific vegan restaurant on Ninth Avenue
walking along the High Line to Dan’s apartment in the evening
a late lunch at Rainbow Falafel, where I had a delicious fried eggplant sandwich on pita
my successful visit with Patrick, my haberdasher for at least 15 years
a short visit with Jan, at his new, larger office space, catching up on our activities over the past six months
dinner at AlMar in Jan’s building in DUMBO section of Brooklyn
picking up Alice Feiring’s holiday six-pack of specially selected natural wines
oodles of wonderful micro-greens at the Wednesday Union Square Greenmarket
a productive hour browsing through BuonItalia for a variety of delicious foodstuffs
lunch at Remi with Jeremy
walking eight miles in those three days, as I pursued my passions

Some of the visuals are shown below:

salad at AlMar

antipasti at Becco

olives at Becco

Blossom black-eyed pea cake with potatoes and chipotle aioli

Blossom mushroom “calamari”

AlMar Cavatelli Grano d’Arso with smoked mozzarella and green olives

walking the High Line in the evening

Rainbow Falafel – great sandwiches, clean and healthy

Patrick is the best

lunch at Remi

my entrée at Blossom, shared with Dan

Dan’s entrée at Blossom, shared with me

NYC food and wine cards

Feiring Line 6-Pack natural wines

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Methi Dal

Posted on December 25, 2014 by dgourmac

From Spain we move to India. We have an Indian market in a nearby town, and they recently have upgraded the store — cleaner design, better produce, nice selection. One afternoon I stopped in to browse and was pleased to find a fresh bunch of Methi (Fenugreek Leaves). I had used some once previously to add to our homemade chapati, but they were nowhere near as full and fresh as these.

A little research, stoked by my passion for legumes of all kinds, let me to make Methi Dal, using Red Lentils (Masoor Dal) and improvising with some of the vegetables in my refrigerator at the time. The recipe I started (using Toor Dal) with is no longer online, but below is a pdf version I made when I found it. And here is another simple version I found today, using red lentils. My own recipe is posted below, along with a few photos.

Methi Dal Recipe | Indian Methi Recipes | Chef In You

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Catching Up with Blogging…

Posted on December 25, 2014 by dgourmac

There are times when my day job inhibits my blogging, since I have fewer occasions to cook and even less time to photograph, organize and write. That’s my excuse for being offline over the past month.

I’ll begin with a simple supper in early December, a collaborative effort at that. Barbara made an incredibly delicious and colorful salad, and I prepared a Tortilla Española from Penelope Casas’ excellent book, The Foods & Wines of Spain. The book is over thirty years old, and I bought it used last year on Amazon. It’s a real classic and chock full of great recipes.

I didn’t make note of all the things in Barbara’s salad, but here are some of the highlights:

red leaf lettuce
endive
watercress
fresh orange sections
fresh raspberries
feta cheese
vinaigrette made with a raspberry infusion

The tortilla recipe is very straightforward, but it takes time, patience and superb ingredients (i.e. potatoes, olive oil, eggs, salt, onion). The recipe is below, and if you look in the upper left of the salad picture, you can see a wedge of the finished product.

For the wine I selected a red wine from the northern part of Puglia, Alberto Longo’s 2009 le Cruste, 100% Nero di Troia. Deep purple in color, rich and smooth in flavor, it completed the meal exactly as I had hoped.

One other colorful item graced our table that night: it was a red, black, and white glass bowl of intricate design and grace, fashioned by one of the glassblowers at MIT. I purchased it at the annual sale event and am happy to have it in the home.

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I am back again, this time with sour beer…

Posted on November 16, 2014 by dgourmac

Sorry to be offline for so long. Been busy with teaching, then a 12-day trip to Spain & Portugal, which I will write about later. Today’s post is about Sunday lunch, and a new libation which Aaron introduced to me: sour beer.

This is soup weather to me. Cold, damp, and gray. Last night I made a Ligurian garlic and greens soup from Zuppa!, an old Romagnoli’s cookbook. It featured lots of vegetables, including Savoy cabbage, Swiss chard or spinach, potatoes, turnips, peas, carrots, onion, celery — you know, the usual suspects — plus lots of garlic and parsley. For lunch today I reheated a bowl’s worth, after adding some cooked Controne white beans from Campania and several glugs of Ligurian olive oil. To accompany it, I tried my first sour beer, and I was delighted with the flavors, and how well it matched. The beer was Geisterzug (“Ghost Train”), under the label Freigeist, from Germany. It was described to me as sour and salty — but it is very much to my taste and much better than it sounds.

To accompany this meal. I actually had a very good small-batch corn tortilla, rolled up with a bit of guacamole, hummus, Jarlsberg cheese, and cavolo nero inside, along with a squeeze of fresh lime. At the same time I could look fondly at two new loaves of my whole wheat levain, baked this morning and cooling on the counter.

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Classic Mediterranean Supper….with New England Ingredients

Posted on October 1, 2014 by dgourmac

I came home from teaching today, weary from 2 1/4 hours of driving (construction and road repairs, plus several accidents), a long class, high pollen counts, and dreary weather. Barbara had a Quilt Guild meeting tonight, so I was on my own for dinner. Comfort food for me is classic Mediterranean, so I jumped right into it:

pan-roasted Padron and Shishito peppers, with Taggiasca olive oil
a slice of my whole wheat levain, warmed in hot olive oil from frying the peppers
roasted baby beets, sliced and topped with sautéed cashew mozzarella-style cheese and hot orange pepper purée
sautéed dandelion greens and arugula
several glasses of 2013 Argyros Asyrtiko white wine
Turkish black olives

And I feel very much better now. I am sorry the pictures are limited, but I was too hungry and wanted to eat right away. The beets were from Hungry Bear Farm in NH, roasted in a hot oven for about an hour; the dandelion greens were local and purchased in the Cambridge, MA, Whole Foods River Street market, and the peppers were from local farms, as well.

The Asyrtiko came from Santorini, via Winebow and Social Wines, where I went after class. Eileen had arranged to order Argyros wines for me. Unfortunately, the distributor sent the wrong Asyrtiko; Argyros makes three variations: (1) 100% stainless steel aging, (2) 20% oak barrels, 80 % stainless, and (3) all oak barrel aging. I wanted the middle one, which I found to be the most balanced and delicious in my tasting in Santorini. I took one for tonight of the simpler version, but sent the rest back to be replaced with the second variety.

The real surprise is the cashew mozzarella. When compared to creamy, fresh mozzarella as a cold cheese, it is awful. Amazingly, however, when broiled or sautéed, it turns rich and crispy and is sometimes better than real cheese. When paired with beets and the red pepper purée, it was a real winner.

Here are the pictures after the fact:

cashew-based mozzarella cheese

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Quick Trip to the Island and New Creations at Home

Posted on September 25, 2014 by dgourmac

It has been a good week. Last Friday I made an overnight trip to the island, to check in some guests at our summer home. It was a great excuse to visit my friend, Steve. That night he and I enjoyed some of his older wine from the cellar and had a fine dinner at Dune Restaurant. We were even able to bring our own bottle of wine, which worked out marvelously. The next morning we had a late snack of leftover farinata, Turkish olives, and more wine. Here are the particulars:

1993 Faiveley Latriciéres Chambertin (on the patio in the late afternoon)
2009 Perticaia Rosso – Sangiovese and Sagrantino from Umbria (at dinner)
2006 Groth Cabernet Sauvignon (part of a mid-morning snack)

Dinner at Dune was excellent, though a bit noisy. I had the beet salad and a seasonal vegetable risotto. Steve had the tuna tartare and the soft shelled crab atop a clam chowder. The Umbrian Rosso was great with everything.

Beet Salad

Tuna Tartare

Saturday afternoon I took the ferry and then drove back home, by way of Chestnut Hill and Urban Grape, where I met my friend David for a tasting with Gaetana Jacono, owner and winemaker at Valle Dell’Acate in Sicily. I had met her before at a tasting and dinner with another friend Steve, and I loved her Cerasuolo. This time my favorite was Il Moro, 100% Nero D’Avola.

As I browsed the shelves in the store, one other wine struck my fancy: a SATRAPEZO saperavi_2006 from Georgia. This country in the Caucasus has a wine-making tradition going back 6,000 years. It has been intriguing me recently, but I had never found a bottle in a wine store previously. This one caught my eye because it was 30% off. That usually means (a) a crappy wine, or (b) a wine no one knows about, or (c) both. In this case the correct answer is (b), fortunately. I had the Saperavi with a lunch, consisting of my homemade pickled beets and grilled Tuscan pane topped with a cashew mozzarella-like cheese I had made last weekend, along with a hot yellow grilling pepper purée, also from the weekend cooking activities. Quite to my surprise, the nut cheese (which was cold and rubbery when uncooked) turned out to be very tasty when broiled. It was all delicious.

The final invention for the week was tonight’s pasta for dinner. I was in a Ligurian sort of mood, and Barbara was off at the grandkids’ house for a couple of hours , so I was free to play around. Lots of pans, but a relatively simple dish:

dice an onion and sauté until quite tender, then add chopped garlic and cook longer
drain the onions and garlic, reserving the Taggiasca olive oil for subsequent steps.
meanwhile peel and boil 3-4 small white new potatoes until almost done; drain and cool, then cut once lengthwise and then crosswise into 1/4″ slices
start a large pasta pot of water to boil
cut 2 zucchini in half lengthwise, then cut into 1/4″ slices
sautée zucchini in olive oil on medium heat with fresh rosemary until very tender
add zucchini to reserved onion and garlic
clean and de-stem a small package of baby spinach
trim, wash and slice young dandelion leaves
use same sauté pan to cook spinach and dandelions together until just tender
add olive oil back into the pan, add potato slices and cook until they absorb some oil
now add the zucchini, onions and garlic, and chopped greens, along with some chopped pitted Kalamata olives
Add salt to the boiling pasta water, then cook about 200 g. of Tagliatelle al dente
reserve some pasta water and drain pasta, placing it in a large wide bowl
put the vegetables on top, toss the noodles, add olive oil, salt and pepper as needed
serve with a 2011 Bisson Marea Cinque Terre for Ligurian authenticity
ENJOY!

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Calabria, via Vino, Olio e Pepperoncino

Posted on September 17, 2014 by dgourmac

Some weekday pasta dishes are like old Italian houses. The main ingredients only need a few repairs, more stucco, and a fresh coat of paint to be charming. Such was supper tonight. I was a t school most of the day, and Barbara was off early this evening to her quilt guild meeting, so I was on my own. I decided to use the vegetables she had baked in a pasta-less lasagna dish previously described. It had eggplant, Swiss chard, grilled onions and eggplant slices, garlic and tomatoes, baked for some time. I pulled off and discarded the melted mozzarella, which was no longer appealing, chopped up the vegetables a bit, stirred in some red pepper purée made over the weekend from fresh grilling peppers, and warmed it for my sauce. To add a little zing, I chopped up one small Calabrian chili pepper stirred it into the sauce.

Next step was choosing a small amount of pasta (~120 g.), from several packages partly-used previously. The winner of this lottery was Pennone, an organic Pasta di Stigliano, in Basilicata, not far from Matera where we visited a few years ago. At this point, while the pasta was cooking in well-salted water, I was feeling transported to southern Italy. I decided to complete the trip with wine and olive oil from Calabria, specifically Odoardi Savuto and olive oil, imported by Jan D’Amore, to go with the hot pepper. It was great.

Finally, I wanted to show you just a few other treats garnered over the past week:

Spanish caper berries, marinated in olive oil with rosemary and fennel seed
an orange pepper purée that I made from roasted peppers that turned out to be hot
ground cherries, an unusual and delicious find in the farmers market

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Farmers Market Bounty

Posted on September 17, 2014 by dgourmac

The farmers market on Sunday is even better than the one on Saturday. I bought vegetables that looked good to me, brought them home, then figured out what to make after that. One meal was a simple pan-roasted corn risotto from Todd English. Great corn, very good Vialone Nano rice, and the remainder of our leftover caramelized onions.

Of course, I used a corn water broth instead of chicken stock, and less than 1/4 cup of cheese, in this case a Pecorino instead of Parmigiano. Our friend Laura joined us for dinner Saturday night for this meal. Li Veli Verdeca was the wine for this dish.

Sunday’s dinner was a bit different. As much as I love Italian cooking, there are times when I long for the comfort food of Greece. Long, slow cooking of vegetables, beans and grains, rich, thick olive oils, sumptuous dining — even without the lamb I used to enjoy.

Two years ago there was a fascinating article about the island of Ikaria in Greece, where the islanders live remarkably long and healthful lives, and it appears that diet has a great deal to do with it. We have a cookbook friends gave us a few years ago, The Country Cooking of Greece, and Sunday was a day when I leafed through it to find a dish in that style, using many of the ingredients from the market. What I found was Ikarian Soufico, which I used as the basis for Sunday supper.

I varied some of the ingredients — such as fewer zucchini (only had one), added diced Swiss chard ribs and sorrel — and I boiled instead of fried the potatoes and simmered the whole dish a lot longer than specified, but it was excellent.

The wine was marvelous, a 2011 Le Piane Maggiorina, from Piemonte. It’s made from Croatina, Uvarara, Vespolina and Nebbiolo grapes, and it is from the Colline Novaresi DOC region. Superb!

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Vegetarian Lunch, Farinata for Dinner

Posted on September 12, 2014 by dgourmac

I get my food inspirations from many places, chief among them are my cookbooks and food blogs on the Internet. The past couple of days represent a case in point.

Barbara is the arbiter of shelf and table space in the house, and I am limited to only five bookshelves in the living room (which is adjacent to our kitchen). This is, naturally, a severe restriction, but I live with it. One of the consequences is that I have other cookbooks in various stashes around the house (there are over 200 books in total, almost all of which I use each year). One such book is shown above, The Ligurian Kitchen. In an idle moment the other day downstairs in my office space, I saw the book and started browsing through it. Two recipes caught my eye almost immediately:

Of course, I had to make them both as soon as possible. The olive paste was first, earlier in the week, and it quickly became my favorite, even better than Lulu’s Provençal version. I used in in several meals, including my vegetarian lunch yesterday, which featured finely-diced Swiss Chard ribs, sautéed with onion, garlic, carrots, celery, garlic, and green beans, plus pan-fried slices of Halloumi cheese from Cyprus, and Tuscan pane with the olive paste on top. This all was served with a rosé of Ciliegiolo grapes from Collecapretta in Umbria, similar to but different than the wine from Bisson in Liguria in previous posts.

Now, I’m really excited, so I explore the topic of Farinata online at length. Farinata is a Ligurian thin cake made of chickpea flour. I had made “socca”, a thinner pancake-like version from Nice years ago, but was not crazy about it. Giannatempo’s recipe sounded better, and there was supporting evidence from a number of online sources, too. After collecting about a half dozen of these recipes, I settled on a hybrid approach, based on her recipe, this YouTube video, and one from my Rose Pistola cookbook:

Strangely, even though I have read this book cover-to-cover several times over the 15 years I’ve owned it, I never considered this recipe before. In any case I made Farinata for dinner last night — three different versions in terms of toppings, taking advantage of the caramelized onions Barbara had made last weekend when we had pizza. The results were all superb, although the one with Niçoise olives was a little too salty. They were served with a pasta-less version of layered vegetable lasagna, topped with mozzarella, which Barbara had made the other night. Wine choice was just right: the Kajanero again.

An added benefit for some people is that farinata is totally gluten-free, and it makes no sacrifices to flavor or texture, in my opinion.

Mangia bene, poco e spesso (Eat well, a little, and often.)

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