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!
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.
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