Dgourmac's Blog

One of the cornerstones of my cooking for the past 30 years has been Marcella Hazan.  Her first two cookbooks provided many of the fundamentals I’ve used ever since in extracting the essential goodness of wholesome, fresh food.  Yes, I had a jumpstart on that process from Margaret and Franco Romagnoli in the mid 1970’s, with their TV show, cookbook and Boston restaurant.  And yes, I was influenced (as many of us were) by Julia Child (another Bostonian) even before that.  But today the core of my approach is still based on Marcella.

Well, much to my surprise and delight, this past weekend our friend, Laura, invited me over for a marvelous vegan supper at her house, and she prepared three stunning vegetable dishes from Marcella’s Italian Kitchen cookbook, a book I’ve owned for almost 20 years, but one I have just rediscovered, thanks to that meal.  That was the inspiration for tonight’s supper — on my own — as I prepare for two more classes later this week.

The dinner was not complicated:

• my own multigrain Tartine bread, toasted, with black bean puree and roasted red pepper puree, made a few days ago
• Carote e Belga, slowly-browned carrots and endive/radicchio
• Zucchine alla Salvia e Vino Bianco (sautéed zucchini with sage and white wine)

Fortunately, I had the components all ready for the bruschetta, and I enjoyed the deliberate and colorful process of making the two vegetable dishes over the next hour and a half, so I am happy to share these with you.

Not content to follow directions to the letter, I decided to shell some of the fresh fava beans I had bought at the market, for a little contrast to the sweetness of the carrots and the zucchini.  I blanched them and added to each dish.  I picked some fresh sage in the garden, and then sliced the leaves thinly, along with the garlic.  Great dish, with the white wine to finish the zucchini sticks in the pan.  I used a Laura Aschero Pigato as a starter, then finished with Paolo Bea’s amazing 2010 Santa Chiara from Umbria, an orange colored wine with overtones of Seville orange flavors, fresh and charming.

Almost a week has gone by since the last farmer’s market, and it was time to use up last week’s purchases.  Last night our friend, Laura, had made a spectacular vegan meal for me with a collection of dishes, mostly from Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen cookbook.  I’ve had the cookbook for many years, but she was able to find a number of marvelous recipes I hadn’t seen before.  So last night, I just ate, instead of cooked, except for the fact that my CrockPot was busy making a collard green dish with the collards from the market last week.  They were easily the prettiest I had ever seen.

The basic recipe was easy, and since I know almost nothing about cooking collards, I was open to suggestions.  I made a few adaptations.  If I am to vary from a vegan diet, it will be for pancetta, not bacon, so I had two small slices of pancetta from the freezer, diced for this dish.  Second, I read that the broth from collard greens is very nutritious, so I used that instead of the stock.  Finally, I had some very tasty seitan chorizo from the natural foods market, so I added that into the recipe, and I cooked it all in my new $11 CrockPot from Amazon.com.

The first course was some whole grain bread I made recently, topped with black bean puree from earlier in the week, made in the CrockPot, and Cavolo Nero, or Lacinato Kale, which had been boiled and puréed.  A few thin slices of red onion went on top of the grilled bread.  The collards were pretty spicy, both from the chorizo and a little of the Puglia red pepper paste I had added to the mixture, not to mention the jalapeños in the base recipe..  So I needed a red wine with body and strength to stand up to the collards.  A Laplace Madiran, imported by my friends, the Hurleys, filled the bill nicely.

Since I had some time to screw around and had just been to the market for resupplying the kitchen, I also roasted some grilling peppers and two Portobello mushrooms — just for the helluva it.  The grilling peppers were easy to obtain the soft meat from and puree, and the mushrooms are ready for tomorrow, when I want to use them.  You can see from the photos that umami won’t be a problem.

This afternoon was my first class teaching this semester.  It went well, so I came home, energized for some cooking experimentation.  Yesterday afternoon I stopped by to see Michael and Laura.  They had picked some fresh stinging nettles for me, and I was happy to share a bottle of Villa Creek Willow Creek Cuvée with them, so it was a very fair deal.  Last night I picked off the leaves (wearing rubber gloves, of course) and boiled them, saving the liquid for nettle tea and putting the leaves in the refrigerator overnight.

In my research last night, I found a recipe for Nettle Gnudi, sort of an inside-out ravioli, reminiscent of one of my favorite dishes of all time, Anna Klinger’s Malfatti.  So this evening I adapted the Gnudi recipe for a vegan, substituting my homemade cashew cheese for the ricotta, and using Anna’s technique of swirling the dumpling with flour in a small wine glass.  Here is the result, on a plate, with a bit of Pesto Rosso from a jar — tomatoes, basil, pine nuts, and olive oil.  Molto bene!

The process was pretty easy.  I put the pre-cooked nettles in a small food processor bowl, and chopped fine, with salt and some garlic powder.  Then I added enough of the cashew cheese to make a slightly damp mixture.  I added about 3/4 cup of all-purpose flour and mixed it so some of the moisture was absorbed, then I scooped out a heaping tablespoon of the mixture, and dumped it in a small white wine glass with a teaspoon of flour.  Rotating the glass rapidly in my hand formed a fairly firm dumpling, which I dropped carefully on a plate and repeated the process.

I brought a small saucepan full of water to a simmer, salted it well, and poached the dumplings in the water for about 3-4 minutes.  They start to float in a minute or two, and the additional few minutes seem to cook them sufficiently.  I removed them from the saucepan and placed in a small skillet with some sauce — I used the Pesto Rosso, but any of a number of sauces will work well, simple tomato sauce, olive oil and/or butter with fried sage leaves, etc.  Finally, after sautéing for a few minutes to color the Gnudi lightly, I served then with some pan-roasted parsnips I had prepared the night before, when rescuing a wilting and lonesome parsnip from an ignominious fate.  Serve with a bottle of Coda di Volpe, a stunning, unctuous Campanian white wine made from the grape of the same name.  Another find from my guide Marc Etlin, now stocked in my local general store.  Even better is the fact that it is very reasonably priced to boot.

I’m still benefitting from the farmer’s market bounty of Saturday.  Today’s lunch was a Beet Salad, made of roasted golden and red beets, chopped red onion, fresh arugula from the garden, some chopped young mustard greens, chunks of roasted red Greek peppers, and several dollops of my cashew cheese, topped with chopped pistachios.

I served it happily alongside half an avocado (which Barbara left me), both dressed with a vinaigrette featuring both red wine and sherry vinegar.  The wine was a Pacher Hof Kerner from the Alto Adige, imported by Jan D’Amore.  It was good, but I thought the Vadiaperti Coda di Volpe would work even better; however, that would wait until dinner: Linguine with chopped garlic, parsley, Calabrian hot peppers, and Sicilian Colatura.  Fortunately, I was there for both meals.  Salut!

Yesterday I stopped at the fish market for my semi-weekly B-12 dosage.  Last night I prepared one of my favorite tapas dishes: mejillones a la vinagreta, from Penelope Casas’ Tapas cookbook.

Since it requires marinating the mussels overnight, it was an opportunity to invite friends over for dinner tonight.  See my email message below.

“Mejillones a la Vinegreta…or in Spanish, Mussels in a Vinaigrette.

Tomorrow night for supper, I am planning a culinary injection of B-12 into my diet.  I’ve already prepared one of my favorite tapas, the dish listed above.  It requires the steamed mussels to sit overnight in the savory vinaigrette, so it will ready to go in an instant tomorrow.  If either or both of you can figure out a way to come over and share it with me (there are almost two dozen mussels, and Barbara won’t touch them), you are most welcome.  Naturally, I have several other ideas of how to complete the meal, and the wine choices will be up to the standards to which you have become accustomed.”

Only Michael was available, so he came over (bringing a bag of freshly-picked stinging nettles, I might add), and joined us for the full repast:

If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you will have already seen much of this meal — Leftovers ‘R Us.

I did do a little cooking and inventing.  For lunch I made a soup of Turkish red lentils with garlic, crushed coriander seed, and spinach, finished with cumin and Maras pepper.  I decide it would also be a fitting intro to this meal.

Second, was a way to use 6 large white button mushrooms I had purchased earlier in the week — Mushroom Stuffed Mushrooms.  An Italian antipasto, it is made with a mixture of the mushroom stems finely chopped, along with diced shallot and chopped dried and rehydrated porcini.  The filling is cooked with the porcini liquid and white wine, then topped with fine homemade bread crumbs and baked until tender and browned.

Finally, was the pasta course.  In previous summers I had made some homemade pasta with haricots verts and tapenade from an Alice Waters pasta cookbook.  Today’s riff on that theme took advantage of a new ingredient: sprouted rye berries.  Where the f…k do you get those?  Well, I sometimes make a homemade Rejuvelac to add to my morning smoothie and to use in making cashew cheese.  A fresh batch was completed this morning, so rather than put the sprouted rye berries in the refrigerator, only to discard them 10 days hence (after putting a few on peanut butter sandwiches), I decided to use them in cooking.  I sautéed half an onion in 1/4 cup of olive oil, then added the rye berries and salt and pepper.  They tasted good, so I decided to use them in the pasta dish.

When mixed with the steamed haricots verts and Kalamata olive paste, along with the spaghetti made from chestnut flour, I had an unusual and successful pasta dish.  As you can see from the menu, we had two wines: a 2005 Herri Mina — a Basque white from Petit and Gros Manseng grapes from the French side of the Pyrenees, and a 2008 Aglianico from Polvanera in Puglia, of which I’ve written in glowing terms before.

Not bad for mostly leftovers.

It’s June, and it’s hot.  Only 88° F. today, down from 95° yesterday.  But it’s Sunday, and as always, lunch is a favorite meal.  This time, it was inspired again by dinner at Cava in Portsmouth last night, an excellent tapas and wine bar.

Here is the short and sweet summary.  I took out my two favorite grill pans and proceeded to use them for an assortment of vegetables, some fresh, some leftover.  In succession I made a tapas plate with:

• a few grilled asparagus
• a couple of eggplant slices, grilled
• three pieces of plump red Greek roasted peppers
• baby golden beets (steamed yesterday, finished on the grill with oil, salt and lemon )
• freshly picked arugula from my raised-bed garden
• reheated broccoli rabe, crisped slightly in the pan
• a leftover block of tofu, marinated in olive oil and hoisin sauce, then grilled

I also toasted a half of a pita bread, to scoop up some of the hummus I made a couple of days ago, and served it all with a 2012 Villa Creek Rose (70% Grenache, 30% Mourvèdre).  A few small cubes of Greek feta cheese completed the plate, part of the almost-vegan ethic.