Thanks to a superb recipe from Italicious, as adapted from Jamie Oliver, we had an excellent dinner tonight. It featured the Roasted/Braised Fennel dish, plus leftover wild and sprouted brown rice pancakes, grilled tofu, Cavolo Nero, and a kick-ass Umbrian red wine. Go to Italicious for the recipe.
The grilled tofu was a leftover from Saturday night’s dinner, using a peanut marinade. To freshen it up a bit, I aded a teaspoonful of the best Ligurian pesto to each tofu cube.
Periodically, I find little packages in my pantry that contain marvelous ingredients. Last weekend, I found one containing giant white Corona dried beans, so I proceeded to soak them overnight (close to 24 hours) and then cook them slowly in my recently-acquired terra cotta beanpot for at least two hours. They were very good tasting, rich and meaty, and still capable of more flavors if I could cook them long enough to get creamy.
Searching my cookbooks, I came across The Country Cooking of Greece, by Diane Kochilas, where I was able to research the origins of these large beans (Macedonia, Thrace) and to come up with a couple of possible recipes. The one I liked best (Giant Beans with Sorrel) looked promising, but I was not in possession of any sorrel, nor did I have enough leeks for the variation suggested, so I invented my own version.
The dish proceeded simply enough. Preheat the oven to 350º F. Sauté the onions, garlic, and green garlic until tender. The ideal pot for this is a heavy clay one with a good cover, which fortunately we have because we bought it from a potter many years ago. Just when the garlic starts to color, add the white wine and cook until it has mostly evaporated. Add the cooked beans, Swiss Chard and tomatoes, salt and pepper, and the Maras (or Aleppo) pepper. Cayenne can work here instead, if you prefer. Bring to a steady simmer, cover, and put in the oven for 1.5 to 2 hours, until the beans are smooth and creamy, and the vegetables have melded together. You may need to add a little liquid if it gets too dry, but I found that the tomatoes and their juices (along with a tight pot cover) kept everything nice and moist. It was delicious.
I was eager to try a Greek red wine with this dish. Fortunately, Social Wines had provided me with one for just such a purpose, 2009 Red Stag, and it matched nicely.
Lunch The Next Day
A dish this good deserves to be served a few times, so the following day, I steamed a head of escarole, chopped it up, mixed it into the bean/tomato stew, and served it with an older Calabrian white wine that I re-discovered in the cellar, underneath newer acquisitions. It was a 2007 Cirò Bianco, rich and mature enough to handle the dish nicely. I only wish I were those things, too.
Primo Piatto a Few Days Later
Although the bean stew was finished, I did save some of the cooked beans for other purposes, so the last in this string of dishes was a lunch plate the other day:
Final Disclosure
Now that I’ve fully-developed the Greek theme around the Gigande beans, I have to tell you that the Corona beans I used turned out to be distributed by the importer Ritrovo, and they are actually from the Abruzzo region in Italy. Which only goes to reinforce the notion of fine Mediterranean cooking, the interplay of different cuisines, and the degree to which ingredients tend to travel. And they were damned good.
Some of the most fun I have cooking comes from inventing pasta dishes with satisfying sauces. Tonight’s dinner was one of those. I decided to create a mushroom-based vegetable sauce, with a decidedly woodsy flavor, and it worked out beautifully.
The key ingredients were the mushrooms (Shitake and Cremini), fresh Mexican asparagus, and a half of a large bulb of fennel, cut in medium dice. The sauce was enriched by onion, leeks and tomatoes, plus some herbs and white wine. The pasta was from Sfoglini, a Brooklyn, NY-based firm who make delicious and distinctive dried pastas. I had purchased mine from Food 52’s Provisions, but I now am able to buy it in the Boston area, too.
Here is the recipe.
The key to this dish is the long, slow braising of the mushrooms, onions and vegetables in the sauce. Don’t rush it, let the flavors develop while the pasta is cooking.
I started with the remainder of the Argiolas 2006 Costamolino from Sardinia, a good fit, and finished with Laura Aschero’s Pigato. A medium-bodied Italian red wine would also work.
I was getting a bit stale in the recipe department, until I found some inspiration from Food52 today. The triggers were a Miso-Maple Roasted Vegetable dish, and a Grilled Peanut Tofu. The meal was pretty simple:
It was colorful, flavorful, and satisfying — and a welcome break from the routine. For wine, I first finished the rest of the wonderful bottle of Linne Calodo 2011 Nemesis, then opened a 2011 Harrington Charbono. The latter was not quite as superb a match as I expected with the grilled dinner elements. Perhaps the peanut butter was a bit sweet and rich for it. Live and learn.
The penultimate comfort food for me on a cold February Sunday is Pasta e Fagioli. I was inspired by a Food52 recipe, although as I began to follow it, I found it to be confusing. So I will give you my take on it, which fortunately, came out great. Even Barbara liked it.
It really does help having some top-notch beans already prepared in the refrigerator, but it can be done with beans from a can with little loss of fidelity. Warning: this version is what I would call “quasi-vegan”:
Start a sauté pan with about 1 Tbs. of olive oil. Add the pancetta and cook until lightly browned and a little crisp. Add the onion and garlic and cook until tender and translucent (whatever that means). Add the celery, and cook for 2 minutes. Add the broth and simmer for five minutes. Boil a pot of salted water and precook the pasta for about 10 minutes (al dente).
In a bowl, mash about 1/3 of the cooked beans. Then add them and the other whole beans, along with the chopped tomatoes and dried oregano to the pot with the broth and aromatics. Finally, add the cooked pasta and simmer all together for about 10 minutes. Add a little pasta water if the sauce is too thick. The consistency you want is halfway between a thick soup and a pasta sauce. Garnish with chopped parsley and/or grated parmesan cheese. (I used neither.) Serve with a glass of Li Veli Passamante Negroamaro.
No photos, sorry, I was too eager to consume it. Later, after lunch, I was enthralled in my research to find that Bugialli had 20 pages of pasta e fagioli to begin his book on Pasta, so I have a number of new recipes to try. Some have tomato, others do not. Some are with dried pasta, others are fresh. And the one that intrigues me most contains lentils and 4 different kinds of dried beans. It is Calabrian, and it will be in my future.
The great comedian, Sid Caesar, died this week at 91. He was a comic genius and a great entertainer, but he went through some very difficult personal challenges over many years. Having survived those troubled times, he had this to say to us, an insight worth sharing:
Hipstamatic is a pretty cool app for my iPhone. I’ve used it now for several years. In the past week they released a new HipstaPak named Sochi, and I loved the deep, saturated tones, so I added it to my phone. Often the inaugural photos I try out with these new “films” are taken while I am otherwise occupied, and I thought I’d share this one with you just for fun. The artistic value is higher when it makes an otherwise-dull subject look more interesting, and Sochi seems to perform well here. No medals yet.
You’ve heard me rave a few times recently about a marvelous, simple mushroom consommé from the cookbook Unplugged Kitchen, by Viana Laplace. Well, I made it again tonight, and it is so straightforward and gratifying, I thought I should provide a few more details.
I almost always use 3-4 mushroom varieties. Quantities can easily be adjusted. This version used about 3/4 of a package (5-6 oz.) of Cremini mushrooms, about 4 oz. of Shitakes (stems removed), and two medium sized Portobello caps. These were sliced (not too thinly), tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, spread on roasting trays, and roasted at 425 º F. until lightly browned. In the meantime I took a handful of the best dried Italian porcini and soaked them in 12 oz. of warm water for 1/2 hour.
When the mushrooms were ready, I placed the cooked ones in a small soup pot. The porcini were drained, with the liquid reserved, then chopped and added to the pot with their liquid. I added another 3-4 cups of spring water to the pot, brought it to a boil, and then simmered — uncovered — for an hour and a half, until the liquid was reasonably concentrated. You can just feel the rich flavor in the photo below.
I strained out the mushrooms and saved them in a dish for later use in the salad, enhanced with a little lemon juice, olive oil and salt. I poured the broth through a fine strainer into a Pyrex 2-cup measuring bowl and saved it until ready for dinner. It is quickly reheated (microwave or small saucepan, as you prefer), then poured into porcelain espresso cups and served.
All of this, of course, was motivated by my wine selection for the evening. It was a bottle of Linne Calodo 2011 Nemesis, just released last Fall. It’s a stunning blend of Syrah, Mourvedre, and Grenache, and it just calls out for the richness of this dish.
This all went with a superb salad that Barbara put together, a fine ending for a day which included plowing another 10″ of snow and ice from the driveway, and having our wood-burning stove and flue pipes cleaned for the rest of the winter. Oh, yes, and I graded a few papers and Barbara did some quilting along the way.
Unlike my high school days, I am no longer a big football fan. Nor do I watch TV. But part of the American culture celebrates the Superbowl with enthusiasm, and for me it was an opportunity to invite our friend, Michael, over for dinner and to watch the game together. As you already know, the game doesn’t need any further commentary, so I will give a brief description of the meal. Barbara ate with us, although she repaired to the Downton Abbey episode, in lieu of the Game.
It was an easy supper: a tapas plate first, followed by a simple pasta, with a well-executed zucchini-eggplant-tomato sauce.
A few elements of the tapas/antipasto were notable. One was my non-vegan foray for the week, a slice or two of Ibérico jamon (Fermin) from Spain. It is one of the most delicious pork products in the world, and it is so expensive that the taste I want fits nicely into the weight and caloric value that I permit for animal protein on these rare occasions.
Another was the small cubes of golden beets, steamed, drizzled with olive oil, and a few nuggets of Kala Namak salt, an amazing finishing salt of volcanic origin from India. It is absolutely stunning with beets.
Finally, there were the crisply-fried pieces of Maitake mushroom, another texture and flavor to stimulate the palate, as well as a purée of Controne beans, which spreads nicely on my homemade multigrain bread, grilled — of course.
The wine was a southern Italian red, probably Aglianico, but I honestly don’t remember.
I was particularly attracted to a small poster I saw recently on Facebook:
It purports to be a quote from Marcella, but I can’t verify that, although it is consistent with her observations throughout her cookbooks. Not long after seeing this, the idea was strongly reinforced when we had a chance to participate in a Progressive Dinner event among members of our congregation. The dinners were planned to be made featuring the cookbook Jerusalem, by Ottolenghi and Tamimi. Each of the hosts were joined by three other couples, and they prepared dishes from a set of recipes in the book. After the meal, everyone gathered at the home of one of our member families for dessert and coffee.
Being mostly vegan, we decided that the best way to participate was to host our own vegetarian/vegan dinner in the spirit (if not the letter) of that cookbook, and to share it with those members who preferred to be meat/fish/dairy free.
As I read through their book, I found that Marcella’s quote was alive and well at the core of Jerusalem’s authors’ philosophy, too. I attach a few selections below from the Introduction to give you a feel for their points of view, as well as a few excerpts from another of my favorites, Claudia Roden.
Now we needed to construct our menu. As I explained to our guests,
We are also using the opportunity to integrate the philosophies of Ottolenghi, Marcella Hazan, and Claudia Roden, and the food traditions of Jerusalem, Italy, and Spain, because they marry so well and speak to the history of the Jewish people and food, especially with Sephardic history and instincts.
Here is what we came up with for the menu:
The story should end triumphantly right here. But unfortunately, that’s not how life works. As I finished the final moments of baking the Rice and Chickpeas dish (after soaking the Italian dried chickpeas overnight, then simmering them to succulent perfection before incorporating them with the rice and currants in the cazuela), we were just moments away from the arrival of our guests. As I confidently removed the cazuela from the hot oven, I accidentally banged it against the edge of the granite countertop. It immediately cracked in many pieces, spilling rice, chickpeas, currants, garlic, and pottery shards inside the oven and on the kitchen floor. Much of the debris fell into the crack between the open oven door and the oven frame.
It was a total loss. And a horrible mess. While I was yelling, “Oh, my God, OMG” over and over, Barbara came in, swept up most of the mess, and immediately began cooking another batch, using canned chickpeas, and a METAL sauteuse. I spent my time trying to remove chickpeas from the crack under the oven door.
People arrived, pitched in to help, the substitute dish came out fine (not quite as good, but marvelous under the circumstances), and the evening was a success. Sometimes it’s good to he humbled, but happy. Buon appetito.
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