It’s been a warm October in New England, with more great produce from our local farmers. My wife and I have each enjoyed cooking during this time of plenty.
Zucchini and Mushroom Frittata and a Shrimp Dish on the side
Picking the Rest of the Basil on our Plant, then Chopping Garlic for Pesto
Finished pesto in a freezer bag
My wife’s best meal this month was a risotto with pancetta and green peas.
Flounder Wrapped in Prosciutto
I’ve been enjoying fish a lot recently. Flounder fillets wrapped in prosciutto and served with sweet potatoes, broccolini, caponata, and cabbage was a colorful dish and well-matched with a French Chablis.
I do sometimes invent recipes, but I read, borrow, and adapt a great many others. Tonight’s dinner is owed almost entirely to three very good cooks. The meal was made of two relatively simple dishes:
Scallops with Curried Onions and Lime
Fregole Sarde with Zucchini and Parmesan
Geographically, this meal starts in Portland, Maine, where our very good friend, Pat, introduced us to the cookbook, MEZCLA, by Ixta Belfrage. Pat had made a dinner for us featuring several recipes from this book, so I bought a copy as soon as I got home. I copied several recipes that looked good to me and put them in my online recipe file. Tonight I made the Scallops dish as a first course, although I must admit that I forgot the lime. Chalk it up to old age.
Scallops photo from the bookmy version tonightCloseup of mine
Here is a short bio about Ixta. You can see that her cooking brings the influences of Brazil, Italy, and Mexico, which is probably why I find the recipes so intriguing.
The main course comes directly from a cookbook author and blogger, Clotilde Dusoulier. I had discovered her blog, charmingly named Chocolate and Zucchini, very early in my food blogging days. Lively inventions from her Paris kitchen have been collected into my recipe files, and tonight, her Sardinian dish, Fregola Sarde with Zucchini and Parmesan got the call.
It tasted even better than it looks. I restrained myself and had only three helpings. A glass of Lugana was a nice match for both dishes.
As the summer winds down, we are enjoying a surfeit of great vegetables from local farms. One unexpected source was a former student who has been growing terrific veggies in a large plot in Belmont, not far from his home in Cambridge. He has been very generous with his gifts of fresh produce, including green beans, Japanese eggplant, cucumbers and cherry tomatoes.
Cucumber Tomato Feta Saladon Grilled Sourdough
Farro with Beans and Vegetables
Cannellini and Cranberry Bean Salad
Fusilli with Swiss Chard
The purpose of my recent trip to Gloucester was explore the wonders of Pastaio Via Corta and to meet the proprietor, Danielle Glantz. It was a very long ride, but well worth the trip! I bought three kinds of fresh pasta (this fusilli was one of them), one box of dried pasta, and a bunch of other goodies.
Butternut Squash with Tomatoes and Peas
This is now one of our regular risotti.
For our last trick, How to Cut a Bunch of Cherry Tomatoes Easily…
You may have noticed if you’ve followed this blog for a while that seafood has taken a prominent place in the foods I eat and write about. This post provides some short stories of recent adventures in my continuing search for the best seafood.
JT Farnum’s – Fried Clams
In July I read an article online from Boston.com about the best fried clam restaurants in Massachusetts. The top three were The Clam Box of Ipswich, Woodman’s of Essex, and JT Farnum’s. Since I was headed to Gloucester after that, Ipswich was out of the way. I had been to the famous Woodman’s several times before, so I decided to try JT Farnum’s, also in Essex. It was a good choice. I stopped for lunch and enjoyed a delicious plate of fried clams. The scenery behind the restaurant was a real bonus.
Two other restaurants provided excellent meals this month. Select Oyster Bar in Back Bay, Boston, was a good Monday evening/early-dinner/avoid-the-traffic spot to eat. After my usual selection of several oysters on the half shell and the Romanesco cauliflower salad with hazelnuts and aioli, I ordered the Blue crab salad with celery root remoulade. It was delicious and very rich, so I took most of it home and had it for lunch the next day. Superb.
Another Monday night and another restaurant; this time it was an old favorite — Il Capriccio, in Waltham. The occasion was reconnecting with an old friend and colleague over an extended, leisurely dinner. My seafood choice was the Octopus appetizer, and it was excellent, very tender.
Octopus also provided another form of finding my seafood. This example was in the form of a pre-cooked, frozen package of Spanish octopus. Usually, I cook my own, as you may know from previous posts, but this was from Sven Fish, a local supplier of good fresh fish, so I gave it a try. I made a few dishes on different days at home. It was convenient and not too expensive, but I felt it needed to be cooked longer to be tender enough for my taste. The Portuguese wine made with Castelão grapes redeemed the meal anyway.
I’ve been making sourdough breads for 13 years. They are a source of great gratification. I just reached a new milestone last week. After examining the Excel spreadsheets which hold my bread logs, I chose two recipes that I had ranked the best, and I duplicated them. They were even better than the original versions, so I want to establish them now as my “go-to” breads, the standards of what to bake unless I want to experiment.
The first one is made predominantly with white bread flour. I call it 80/20, because the 20% of non-white flours are a combination of whole wheat, rye, and spelt. It’s my favorite “white” bread. The 20% makes it more flavorful and interesting than any other white bread I know.
Here is the formula:
The second bread is my new standard whole-grain bread, one I feel achieves the right balance of rich flavors and textures that these healthy flours can produce. The key to this bread is Type 85 flour, made by Central Milling, a producer of outstanding flours from Utah for more than 150 years. Their description of it:
“This organic type 85 flour is a blend of hard red winter and hard red spring wheat that has been malted with organic malted barley. Designed for artisan bread baking, this flour replicates older milling techniques. The higher ash content increases the nutritional value of the flour without compromising its baking performance. Organic Type 85 Malted is not quite white flour and not quite whole grain.”
I learned about this flour when I discovered Maurizio Leo, an amazing baker who recently published a major book, The Perfect Loaf. You can learn a lot from his website of the same name. I now have three incredible tutors for making breads: Chad Robertson of Tartine Bakery, Ken Forkish of Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast fame, and Maurizio. I’ll have to live to 120 to take full advantage of all these insights, but we’ll take it one year at a time.
You might find it interesting to compare a slice of each bread, side-by-side. You’ll see the darker grain on the rich Type 85 loaf vs. the light color of the 80/20 bread. Both of these taste great when toasted, grilled, or sautéed in olive oil. They both go with a variety of cheeses, nut butters, hummus, white bean purée, slices of prosciutto, and bruschetta with all sorts of toppings.
I’ve been meaning to go to the restaurant Atlantico in Boston for a couple of years, but I was always discouraged because it is in a part of the city I rarely get to, and parking in that area seemed impossible. Fortunately, I had a breakthrough a week ago. It was a Wednesday, so after class was done at 12:30, I was free to go. Even better, unlike most Wednesdays, I was not in a hurry to get out of the city early, to avoid heavy traffic on the way home. Thunderstorms rolled in and out all day, but there was a break in the storms when I reached the restaurant, and I found street parking 1/2 block away.
Because of the storms and the late lunch hour (1:30 PM), the restaurant was literally empty, as the only other customer departed a few minutes after I arrived. The decor is attractive and engaging. The food, described as Iberian inspired seafood, is just what I like. I started with a plate of white and brown anchovies, artfully displayed and full of great flavor.
Next I ordered just two oysters on the half shell: one Island Creek and one Moon Shoal, both very good.
Last was the Calamar (squid), cooked perfectly and very tender without being flabby.
A glass of Gaintza Txakolina complemented it all beautifully.
My waiter, Walter, was cheerful, knowledgeable, and attendant to my explorations. Altogether it was an ideal lunch.
Back in May, I was browsing the website for Breadtopia, one of my primary suppliers for bread making, and I came across a recipe of theirs for a sourdough bread with olives and walnuts. Since it had been several years since I last made a similar loaf from the Tartine cookbook, I saved a copy of the recipe, thinking I might try it out this summer. I especially liked the idea that the recipe called for a good amount of Spelt flour, since my baking experiences with that grain have been very positive.
Yesterday was the day for me to make the dough. My starter was in good shape, since I’ve been feeding it regularly since my last sourdough on August 6th, so I measured out and milled 250 grams of sprouted spelt berries and proceeded to make the dough mixture, as written. The gluten development regimen specified in the recipe called for one new technique for me — laminating the dough for inserting the toppings (olives, toasted walnuts, and thyme). For those readers who may want to learn about that technique, I have included the Breadtopia video from their website.
The dough was placed in its banneton late yesterday afternoon, and it was refrigerated for 12 hours overnight. At 7 AM this morning I took it out of the refrigerator, and preheated the oven. This dough was stickier than the ones I normally make for sourdoughs, and it was sticking to the banneton. Fortunately, with some gentle prying by hand and shaking the basket, I was able to free the dough, to drop it on a square of parchment paper, score the bread, and place it in the Breadpot successfully.
The loaf baked out nicely as prescribed, and it needed 3-4 extra minutes, uncovered on the oven, to reach the target internal temperature of 205º F. The hardest part of the process was waiting for several hours for the loaf to cool completely, so I could slice it and eat it for lunch. By noon it was ready. I cut and toasted a few slices, topped with the best Italian sweet butter plus thinly-sliced Tuscan prosciutto, and accompanied by a glass of our son’s best Sangiovese, made from Cimarron Vineyard Arizona grapes in 2017. Mmmmmm. Great lunch!
The author of this imposing-sounding recipe was the late chef and cookbook writer, Biba Caggiano. You can find it in Biba’s Italy, one of the four cookbooks of hers that I use often. I did have the opportunity once to eat at her restaurant in Sacramento years ago, and she autographed this book for me when I bought it there. When you read the recipe below, you will learn how she came to know this dish.
The most unusual part of the recipe is the incorporation of Japanese green tea, in powdered form, into the dough mixture. I have a small package of premium Macha tea, which I used in my homemade pasta.
I cut the recipe in half, since there are only two of us. I used 2 eggs, 10 grams of green tea powder, about 1/2 lb. of cherry tomatoes (which were roasted a few days earlier and kept in olive oil in the refrigerator), 102 grams of “00” flour and 50 grams of semolina flour. The texture of the dough was perfect. Here is what the final dish looked like. Delicious.
Continuing on the theme of Salt Cod, today’s lunch provided a simple and delicious way to use leftover Brandade (or Brandada in Spain). I opened a package of Émoi Piquillo Peppers (yes, that’s emoji without the “j”) and spooned in some salt cod purée. These were placed in a lightly-oiled cazuela at 350° F. for 10 minutes, plated and consumed with a small glass of wine.
The final touch was supplied by a second cup of espresso for the day, in which I could dip the biscotti.
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