Dgourmac's Blog

Interestingly, Barbara and I were both thinking about a layered potato vegetable dish for dinner.  Fortunately, while I was thinking, she was creating and cooking.  It came out wonderful.  Two eggs and a bit of cheese, and we were vegetarian instead of vegan tonight.  Here is the recipe in two parts (each side of the recipe card):

It takes quite awhile to prep and then bake, so we were starved when it was ready to eat.  Fortunately, it was well worth the wait.

The wine was another gem from Jan D’Amore, a delicious, natural wine from Ancarani, a 2011 Centesimino, another of those little-known but superb grape varieties I love so much in Italy.

I had actually opened the wine last night, to go with a pasta dish I made.  It was a relatively simple but satisfying dish.  I sautéed in sequence garlic, onions and leeks, Cremini and Portobello mushroom chunks, carrots and zucchini batons, celery batons, some leftover Controne white beans, and a little plum tomato to pull it all together.  Then I cooked some high quality penne rigate while the sauce simmered.  Finally, I tossed the cooked pasta into the saucepan, added 1/2 cup of the pasta water and simmered two more minutes.  The woodsy mushroom-tomato-vegetable sauce was complemented perfectly by the Centesimino.

Barbara said she wanted Polenta last night, so I made a version that we really liked, featuring a savory sauce I just invented.

The polenta part was relatively easy: 1 cup of medium stone-ground Italian cornmeal and three cups of liquid (2 cups water, 1 cup Rice Dream — rice milk).  Bring water, and rice milk to a boil, add some salt, slowly drizzle the cornmeal into the pot, and stir constantly while it simmers, at least 15 minutes — or longer — until it is smooth and creamy.  If you are feeling in a not-so-vegan mood, add 3/4 cup of fresh Asiago cheese, cut in cubes, and about 1/4 cup of grated Parmesan cheese, stirring into the polenta until it melts.

Wash a bunch of baby spinach and wilt it in a covered hot skillet with 1-2 Tbs. olive oil.  Cool and coarsely chop the spinach.

The fun part was the sauce.  We had some sliced sweet onions left over from pizza on Sunday, so I sautéed them in olive oil until tender and lightly browned.  Next I added a roasted, peeled red pepper (Greek, pre-packaged), chopped up and mixed with the onion.  When those flavors were well-blended, I cut up a flavorful tomato (Kumato brand is a good one this time of year), and cooked that until dissolved with the onion and pepper.  Now for the secret ingredient: red onion jam from Calabria.  These are made from small red onions that grow in Tropea, Calabria, and carry the special IGP status.  I had purchased a small jar recently, and I thought they would perk up the sauce.  Zing!

The final dish was assembled in a pasta bowl.

I decided to go with a white wine and selected a Loire Valley natural wine, a 2011 Mineral+ from Frantz Saumon, from organically grown fruit in Montlouis — pure Chenin Blanc and quite stunning.

I liked the sauce so much, I decided to replicate it again tonight for a quick dinner tonight, this time with Swiss Chard and the leftover spinach, atop gnocchi.  The wine was also Calabrian, Jan D’Amore’s 2003 Polpicello from Odoardi.

One sure sign that Springtime has arrived in New England is the emergence of our pizza oven from the icy grip of Winter’s snowdrifts.

Pizza Oven — April 6

Pizza Oven — February 18

Today was sunny weather and warmish for this time of year: mid to upper 50’s F.  And so it was a perfect time to shovel out the old ashes and crank up the pizza oven for just the two of us.  One dough recipes makes enough for four or five pizzas.  We each made and ate one, then made and froze three others for future consumption.

I actually started the fire in the oven at about 12:30, knowing Barbara needed dinner well before 6 PM.  Normally, it takes 2 hours for the oven to get up to temperature (900+º).  However, today it took significantly longer, probably because we had such a long, cold and wet winter.  I believe that those conditions cause the first fire of the season to put much of its early BTUs into evaporating the moisture in the oven (as opposed to heating the wood and then the firebrick).  Anyway, by 3:15 PM I was ready to start cooking.

Usually, when we do pizza, we are cooking for 4 to 8 people, and we offer an array of 8-10 toppings plus homemade tomato sauce.  Today, it was just the two of us, and we proceeded with “simple” as our mantra.  Sauce was a jar of Dave’s Heirloom Tomato Sauce, supplemented by part of a can of our usual Lavalle organic Italian tomatoes.  Cheese: just mozzarella, already shredded and in the bag.  Toppings: sliced onion, zucchini, garlic slivers — with only the garlic needing any pre-cooking.  Last minute additions were slices of eggplant which I roasted in the pizza oven (only takes about 5 minutes), a couple of mini peppers which I had already prepared yesterday — oh, yes, and one experiment.  Late this week, in my craving for supplemental B-12, I bought a few littleneck clams at the fish market.  So in the short time before cooking the pizzas, I placed 5 of the clams in a small copper Bourgeat gratin dish, drizzled on a little olive oil, leftover Prosecco, two peeled garlic cloves, and ground black pepper.  The clams popped open in about three minutes, and the clam juice mixed with the wine and oil, to give me a flavorful shot of sweet and briny excitement, wherever I used it.  I ate the clams outside, as soon as they were cool enough to handle, and I tossed the empty shells into the brush, for really long-term composting.

Here are what some of the results looked like:

ready to go in

Fresh from the oven – eggplant, onions, artichoke hearts, garlic, and cheese

Barbara’s with zucchini and onion

eggplant, peppers, and onion

The wine was one I opened the night before, a 2008 Primitivo from Guttarolo in Puglia.  It is the most luscious, balanced, elegantly fruity Primitivo I had ever had.

Guttarilo 2008 Primitivo