Here’s a new one for your repertoire: Fregula (or Fregola) with Shrimp and Tomatoes. It is colorful, delicious, and made with an unusual pasta. I’ve cooked this pasta a few times previously but knew very little about it, except that it was from Sardinia.
For fun, I decided to use some AI tools to see what I could learn about Fregula. Here’s what I found out from a quick search using Google’s Bard, about its history and the different spellings of the name.
Now for the food and wine part; here’s the recipe I liked best of the three I found online:
It was pretty straightforward, no surprises. The process of adding broth in stages was very reminiscent of making risotto, and it was important to cook it long enough so that the pasta was tender. The best choice for wine would have been a Vermentino from Sardinia. Since that was not available, I chose a Jurançon wine made with the Gros Manseng grape, which went pretty well with the dish.
The last topic is where to find Fregula, if you plan to use it. For reference, I can recommend either of these two brands available on Amazon:
However, I was able to get an artisan version from Pastaio Via Corta, made by Danielle Glantz in Gloucester, MA. It was excellent, so if you can order some of that, it is worth comparing to the more commercial brands.
My first visit to Friuli in northeastern Italy was in 2015. It was guided by food and wine attractions, of course. Two of my wine importer friends — Jan and Gemma — connected me with Edi and Kristian Keber and with Ferdinando Zanusso, respectively, and I had marvelous visits with all of them. Ferdinando in particular became a good friend, and he visited with us a few times in Massachusetts.
One of Ferdinando’s was one of the most amazing wines I ever tasted. It was a 2001 i Clivi Brazan, a white wine which had been resting with the lees for 140 months before bottling. Ferdinando did it as an experiment, and it was spectacularly successful.
While I was in Friuli we had some special meals, and I was eager to learn more about that region as a result. Here we are 9 years later, and I want to share with you a Frittata we had for dinner tonight, inspired by the food and wine of Friuli.
Other Goodies This Week
This was a productive week for cooking. The highlights included:
an unassuming but delicious vegan dish from the Punjab in India, Village style Carrots with Potatoes and Peas
another batch of sourdough breads, this time an 80/20 mix of white/whole grain flours
a colorful salad made by my wife
two legs of octopus for lunch and dinner
pasta with spinach, garlic, and olive oil from Union Square Cookbook
fried breads with toppings for breakfast
Potatoes, Carrots, and PeasSalad with Oranges, Avocado, Mango, Radicchio, Scallions, Pomegranate, and Pestooctopus for lunch
Traditional Japanese Lunch. The first week of the new year has been one triumph over another in the culinary department. It began with an authentic Japanese lunch on New Year’s Day, prepared entirely by the wife of a colleague. It was amazing!
Sourdough Bread. January 2nd was not too soon for another year of making bread. This time I departed from my favorite formulas, and I made two loaves with less whole grain flour — 90% white bread and 10% Yecora Rojo whole wheat. They fit my mood at the time.
Fried bread is always a winner. Here is one slice of sourdough topped with my wife’s Ratatouille, next to a piece of my seeded rye bread with a coarse bean purée and pickled onions.
Mussels – Brittany-Style. One of best things to do with a crispy-crusted white bread is to sop up the juices from a batch of mussels, steamed as they would be in France
A good bottle of Muscadet is “derigueur” (and delicieuse)Recipe from David Tanis
Homemade Tagliatelle and Caramelized Onions. It has been a while since I made pasta from scratch, so I was eager to start that again. Ingredients: flour, egg, and salt. The flour choices were simple: from Gustiamo, 72 grams of Maiorca Sicilian ‘double-zero’ style flour and 50 grams of Semola Rimacinata Sicilian all-purpose style flour. I decided to use one whole egg and one egg yolk to mix in with the flours. We had some lovely pullet eggs, and they were small enough to be just right with these flour amounts.
homemade tagliatelle
For once I had plenty of time for cooking, so I made caramelized onions, which takes about an hour of slow cooking in the sauteuse. Another long process, in parallel, was the roasting of cherry tomatoes. The package I had purchased recently looked pretty, but as is often the case this time of year, was short on flavor and not at all sweet. Slow-roasting improves them, so I set the oven to 250° F. and let cook for about 2 hours. About 1/2 cup of tomato Passata would help the ingredients blend together. The final addition was zucchini, cut into medium dice. The cooked pasta was added to the vegetables, enhanced with some pasta water, and freshly-grated Pecorino.
As usual, we have some leftovers for the next day or two.
Spanish Mussels Vinaigrette. The rest of the mussels were done a couple of days later, using a lovely recipe from Penelope Casas, one of the great writers about Spanish food. This dish lasted me two more days as a lunch and an appetizer. It is also one of the most attractive meals I’ve ever made.
Two-legged Octopus with Roasted Tardivo. Did you ever have a meal that tasted great but was a total disaster visually? I just made one of those.
My last meal for this post was unusual in several ways. I had purchased two legs of an octopus at New Deal Fish market on Wednesday, so I wanted to use them last night. Using a variation on Chef John’s Spanish braised octopus, I cooked the legs in about an hour and a half. Instead of the overnight bath in olive oil and citrus that I usually use to finish my octopus, I did a shortcut with just Meyer lemon juice, sea salt, and Maras pepper. The colors were more muted than usual, but not too bad.
Octopus pairs so well with potatoes that I parboiled and then roasted a handful of fingerling potatoes, The ones I had we a purple variety, and they were quite dark after roasting. The final element that ended up tasting the best and looked the least attractive was a head of Radicchio Tardivo, an obscure variety that I found at Eataly Boston and was eager to try.
Radicchio TardivoRecipe from SAVEUR magazine
These all came together in a wonderful supper. Unfortunately, you can see it but not taste it. The final touch was the wine, a 2016 Nero di Troia.
The last two weeks of the year did not produce any major stories to add to this blog. There were a few photos of highlights that I captured and wanted to share with you, so they are collected below.
Peasant Bread from Alexandra’s Kitchen, but first time in a loaf panMy favorite Greek baked vegetable dishOur very first garden (1972) produced this harvest. Just found the original film slide in a cabinet.Last Octopus of 2023New favorite Cannonau from Sardinia to go with octopusand a favorite Portuguese red wine for octopus and many other dishesAntipasti Board as part of a great Christmas dinner at a friend’s homeBelle du Jour Oysters were outstanding, from Sven FishMuscadet with the oystersFound another gem in the old photos box. It seems that I always loved white shoes/sneakers.Housecleaning swept away jars of dried beans on the windowsill. I cooked some of the beans and had this salad.Wife made year-end Ratatouille. I made Bruschetta with it, adding pickled onions and capers.…accompanied by a delicious Dolcetto d’Alba.Dec. 31 dinner featuring Bok Choy, Fennel, Mushrooms, Onions, and Sesame Seeds
My first serious cooking (30 years ago or more) was French cuisine. Julia Child, of course, was a major influence, but my favorite style was captured by Patricia Wells and her cookbook, Bistro Cooking. I was looking for something different from our current selections, and I found it with her Lentil Soup with Pork Sausages.
I used this recipe as a guideline, and added our own touches based on availability and preferences. First of all, we had plain pork sausage — not smoked — so that choice was easy. Next, I had to modify the quantity of lentils; 500 grams would last us for 9 months. Cutting the amount to 240 grams was sufficient for several leftover opportunities. Also, although Patricia Wells waxes enthusiastically about her French green lentilles du Puy, we had none of those. We did have outstanding brown lentils from Umbria, which I like a lot, so that switch was made without a problem. Finally, you will see from the handwritten notes that we had made this recipe before, and we chose to add plum tomatoes, which was repeated for this version, too. Another twist: we added the sliced, cooked sausage to the whole soup and simmered it for another 20 minutes to blend the flavors and concentrate the soup. It was a rich, warm comfort food, perfect for a day of heavy rains and flood warnings.
This dinner also provided an opportunity to have my favorite dessert — Prunes in Red Wine Sauce. Bistro Cooking obliged again!
This dish is always excellent, but what made it a spectacular success tonight was that I went to my wine cellar and brought up a 2014 Aydie Madiran, silky smooth and full bodied, a blend of Tannat and Cabernet Franc. The wine was superb drinking while I was cooking, the next glass accompanied the soup nicely, and it was outstanding with the prunes. You can see from the photo that I paid $14.99 for the bottle eight years ago, but it tasted like $50 tonight.
To make the dinner complete I made a green salad for my wife, with added touches like pistachios and Castelvetrano olives for good measure. I much prefer bitter lettuces, like radicchio, so that’s what I made for my own side dish.
Some of my favorite meals are elegant in their simplicity. It’s not that I plan it that way, but sometimes it just seems to work out. Here are some examples from last week.
The sauce (1/2 the jar) was simply poured into a skillet and heated. The mushrooms were slightly more complicated. I trimmed them, tore larger pieces in thirds vertically, tossed them in olive oil, salt, and fresh ground black pepper. and then dusted them in potato starch (you can use cornstarch if you prefer) to make them crispy. They were roasted in a preheated 400° F. oven in 15 minutes, turned over once or twice to brown evenly.
Cooked the spaghetti in well-salted water, drained when al dente into a bowl, and added with a light touch the sauce and mushrooms, tossed it all together and served with a lovely red wine from Val d’Aoste in the north of Italy.
Gnocchi with Spinach and Passata, Side Order of Cauliflower with Mustard-Lemon Butter
The Passata and the wine were back again for a return engagement. Very few ingredients, carefully prepared, and dinner was a delight.
Golden Russet Potato Gratin
We had an abundance of russet potatoes for the upcoming latke party, so I took two of the extras to try out this gratin for supper. With onions and some turkey stock (leftover from Thanksgiving), and some excellent cheese (I used Fontina instead of Gruyère), we had a rich and satisfying meal, accompanied by a lovely Portuguese rosé.
For some unknown reason meals we make after Thanksgiving tend to be very rich in flavor. color and intensity. Here are three examples this year, along with some of the side dishes.
Purée of Gaeta Olives and Whipped Almond Milk Ricotta
Radicchio, Spinach, Tokyo Bekana Cabbage Salad with Ricotta Salata
Rigatoni with Mushrooms, Leek, and Artichokes
Prosciutto Bruschetta on Sourdough with Radicchio Salad Underneath
Squid in Red Wine Sauce with Rice, Beans, and Vegetables
This Birichino California wine, a blend of Carignan and Grenache, is fabulous with squid. The wine is named Scylla, from the Greek legend of Scylla and Charybdis.
Thanks to my friend, Jan, I made sure to visit Scilla (as it’s spelled in Calabria) in 2016. Here is my photo of this marvelous sea creature at the high point of the village, with Sicily and the Strait of Messina in the background.
Until recently I used to be intimidated about making Paella. It seemed complex because there are usually a great many ingredients, it calls for a special pan, it usually makes much more than we can eat, and I always worry about undercooking the rice. The other night I created one that solved all those problems, and now I am more confident when making this dish.
I was in the mood for Paella. Normally, I would have used one of our frozen homemade vegetable stocks for the broth. However, I had a bunch of frozen shrimp shells in the freezer, and I stumbled across an intriguing paella recipe using those shells, so I made the broth first. It was rich, savory, and absolutely delicious.
The next step was assembling the vegetables I wanted to use. This is always a superb opportunity to employ leftovers of all sorts: 1/2 zucchini, a few sautéed mushrooms, a small carrot, and some frozen corn kernels from this summer. I defrosted and shelled 10 EZ-peel shrimp, measured about a cup of Calasparra rice, chopped some red onions and sweet red pepper, and saved 2 cups of the tomato-shrimp shell broth. Now we are ready to cook.
Preheated the oven to 425° F. Using my small (12-inch) paella steel pan, I sautéed the onions and peppers until tender, then added the other vegetables to cook quickly. The next step was adding all the rice and cooking it for a few minutes until well-coated with olive oil and moisture from the vegetables. I cut up half the shrimp and added them to the pan. Finally, I added all the broth at once, turned up the heat to high to get the liquid boiling, and then put the paella pan in the oven (uncovered) to cook for about 20 minutes.
I sliced the few remaining shrimp lengthwise and added them to the pan at about 18 minutes. The only was I know to ensure the rice is cooked enough is to taste it. At the 20-minute mark it was mostly-done, with just a little chalkiness, so I figured it would finish cooking during the last step. Taking the pan out of the oven, I covered it with aluminum foil and left it on top of the stove for another 20 minutes. The rice continues to steam during that time, and it is just the right texture when we are ready to eat.
A 2017 Safra,. a Spanish Garnacha, was a very good match for the wine.
Okay, I admit it. I concoct some pretty weird salads. I search out — or stumble upon — exotic ingredients and put them together in a way that I think will be successful. This post will share with you today’s lunch, and I will use it as an example to suggest how you might be able to create your own unusual salads.
The impetus was created by one of my favorite local farmers, Small Farm, in Stow, MA. Their large tunnels provide a much longer growing season, and they are open this week on Friday and Saturday for their CSA customers, as well as occasional buyers like me. Here’s the quote from Farmer Karl:
“These cold, sunny days make me appreciate the magic that’s happening in our high tunnels. It’s 34 F outside and a balmy 60 F and vibrant green in our unheated high tunnels! Tomorrow we’ll be harvesting fresh spinach, fennel, scallions, radishes, mizuna mix, kale, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, and more for you under a clear sky. We’ve moved our winter wash station into the sunny greenhouse, and humans and plants alike are soaking up every hour of sunlight we can get as we near solstice.”
Listed below are the ingredients for today’s salad. The table also shows a variety of alternative ingredients you can choose, either because you prefer them or can’t get the ones listed.
And, of course, here are the photos of what I made. I later realized that I forgot to put scallions and/or diced red onions, but I would include them next time. Another note: the Beet and the Daikon Radish were prepared in a fine julienne cut, using a special mandoline cutter.
A perfect complement to the dish was a Sicilian Rosato, Gurrieri’s blend of Nero d’Avola and Frappato, from Mucci Imports.
One of my new favorite pasta dishes is Pasta alla Gricia. I made this for myself tonight. I think it’s the perfect Italian pre-Thanksgiving antidote to the traditional meal tomorrow. The best article I have read on the topic is a post on Serious Eats, written by a chef with the un-Italian name of Sasha Marx.
To paraphrase an old hero of mine, the inimitable Yogi Berra, 90% of success is the right ingredients, and the other half is my culinary skill. This dish requires Guanciale, pork cheeks or hog jowls as they are commonly known. On a previous trip to Eataly Boston, I bought a small package and found them to be superb. Here’s what they look like:
This dish can be made with Spaghetti or Rigatoni. I chose Rigatoni tonight, and I was very fortunate to have a package of artisan-made Rigatoni from Pastaio Via Corta in Gloucester, MA. It made a world of difference.
The recipe was not difficult, but the technique was intriguing. The combination of rendered fat from the guanciale, the rich, starchy pasta water, and the grated Pecorino from Basilicata (I find Pecorino Romano too sharp for my taste) blended beautifully to coat the pasta.
The pasta was excellent, but it needed a little accompaniment, so I warmed up leftover braised eggplant, tomato and chickpeas, which added color, flavor, and the magic of vegetables to offset the degradations of unadulterated pork fat.
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