Quasi L'estate

About a year and a half ago, I went to Italy with my grandparents. Lake Garda – Gardasee –, at the edge of the Dolomites, is about a four hour drive south-east of their house in Bavaria, where I was visiting, and Monika suggested it would make a nice excursion. Y’know, just pop down to Italy for the weekend, like you do. Not a suggestion I’m apt to turn down. So we did, and it was indeed a lovely weekend. I discovered I’m terrible at windsurfing – Garda’s apparently a mecca for it, with reliable winds off the mountains, but I spent more time in the lake righting my board than upright on it, and kudos to my instructor for his patience with that. I got caught on the summit of Monte Baldo in a thunderhail storm, and made it to shelter soaked through, muddy, and barefoot – slippery wet sandals are slippery – just as the deluge let up. (Did I mention this was August?) And on our last day there, Monika decided we should drive out to Valpolicella to find a vineyard and taste/buy some wines. After a lot of winding down dirt roads through rows of vines, we found a guy who said he’d let us into his winery, just let him drive home and get the key to open the place up. So we had our own private tasting, except he poured us nearly full glasses instead of tastes, and the wine was delicious, and Monika bought a case. Driving back to Torbole, where we were staying, it got to be around dinner time, so we stopped at a hotel on the mountainside to eat. I ordered a pasta dish with roasted tomatoes, sausage, and sage. It was phenomenal.

Skip ahead to January, in the depths of a Philly winter. I have in my fridge a jar of roasted tomatoes preserved in olive oil that my mother made last summer, when the garden was popping out tomatoes faster than they could possibly be eaten, and a box of really good pasta in the pantry. Time to recreate the Valpolicella dish. It’s not quite the same as August in the Dolomites, but damned if it doesn’t brighten up a grey East Coast afternoon.

Valpolicella Roasted Tomato-Sausage Pasta

2 links Italian pork sausage

Roasted tomatoes, roughly chopped**

Fresh sage, chopped

Garlic, minced

Olive oil

Salt & pepper

Grated Romano cheese

Good-quality short pasta, like cavatelli or orecchietti

1) Heat a bit of olive oil in a pan. Crumble in the insides of the sausage, and brown.

2) Meanwhile, set some pasta water to boil. Cook the pasta to al dente while sauteeing other things.

3) Add the chopped tomatoes and garlic. Sautee until soft & fragrant. Add the sage, and cook a minute more. Put in a good dose of cheese, then salt & pepper to taste.

4) Add the cooked pasta and a splash of its water to the pan and toss everything to combine. Serve with more grated cheese, olive oil for drizzling, and Italian wine.

Stuff in a pan, before it becomes stuff on pasta.

**Roasted Tomatoes, or Summer in a Jar

Basically just follow Smitten Kitchen’s recipe:

In August, when there’s more tomatoes than you know what to do with, slice a pile of plum, cherry, or normal (not gigantic heirloom) tomatoes in half. Set them on a baking sheet and sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a bit of oregano or marjoram. Add a few whole smashed garlic cloves. Drizzle the whole thing with olive oil. Bake at ~225 for about three hours, until things get all caramelizedy around the edges. Store in a jar in the fridge, with olive oil high enough to cover everything.

If you didn’t plan ahead, or used up all of your tomatoes already, or whatever, you can use store-bought jars of tomatoes in oil  or sun-dried tomatoes soaked a for a bit in hot water to soften.

Artichokes + Garlic + Pasta = Love

So it's been what, 5 months since I last posted here? My bad. In that stretch I've finished, defended, and submitted a dissertation, moved to Philly, and started teaching linguistics to precocious undergrads at my alma mater. It's been busy as hell, and as part of my dissertation recovery program I've been studiously avoiding writing anything longer than the answer key to the latest homework. But it's a Saturday and I'm kinda caught up on classes and this pasta is ridiculously good, so let me hereby declare this latest blogging sabbatical over. (Attn. any of my students who might be reading this: That was a performative. And yes, it will be on the quiz.)

Back before the madness that was this summer, on the last night of our super-secret trip to Italy in March, N. and I got dinner at a little restaurant in Bologna that we found on TripAdvisor. It was far too slick for its own good, and I was skeptical, but we were there and hungry, so we ordered a spaghetti al diavolo and a fettuccine al carciofi to split. The spicy spaghetti was quite good. We fought over the fettuccine.

Since getting back I've made it myself twice, and I can tell you this: it can either be the biggest pain in the ass pasta you've ever made, or it can be easy as hell and taste as good. I'm adapting my instructions here from Marcella Hazan, and while I have all the love and respect in the world for Marcella, I will say this about her version of the recipe: it's insane. And not in the fun, look at this crazy elaborate birthday cake that's a lot of work but comes out awesome kind of way (cough, cough). More in the totally unnecessary, will have you cursing her and your knives and artichokes and pasta til you say screw it and just order pizza kind of way. You can, if you want, buy fresh whole artichokes, trim, clean,  chop, and par-cook them, and proceed from there, as Marcella suggests. Or you can get a nice can or frozen bag of artichoke quarters or hearts, and save yourself the time and headache. I suspect you know which route I advocate.

A note on canned or jarred artichokes, however: make sure you get the ones packed in salt water, not vinegar. You'll probably have better luck with this in cans rather than jars. Rinse them well before chopping so they're not obscenely salty. Better still are frozen ones, which obviate the need for rinsing and (I think) taste a mite fresher. At Whole Foods I had the choice between quarters or hearts - hearts will be more tender; quarters will have a bit more chew. Dealer's choice here. I've tried both, both iterations were hits.

So without further ado:

Crazy easy, crazy good, post-dissertation pasta with artichokes
2 cans/1bag artichoke pieces
garlic
lemon juice
parsley
grated Romano cheese
S&P
olive oil
1lb pasta

1) Rinse the artichokes well if they're canned. Chop into pretty small pieces. Toss into a pan with some olive oil, saute for about 10 minutes over medium heat.

2) Mince/crush garlic to taste (3 cloves for my garlic-loving self), add to the pan, saute a few minutes more.

3) Add a good bit of lemon juice, a lot of parsley, and some cheese. Stir, then add salt & pepper to taste (careful of the salt if using caned chokes). Cook about a minute, then turn off the heat.

4) Cook the pasta.

5) Add a splash of the pasta water to the artichoke mixture, then toss in the pasta. Serve with more cheese, parsley, and a drizzle of fresh olive oil. I served it at a dinner party alongside a tomato/cucumber salad from my mother's garden, good bread, a peach/plum/rosemary galette, and some truly outstanding muffaletta meatballs that the inimitable A.P. may soon share the recipe for if we're lucky. Buon appetito. 

Love my Goat

Okay so that's actually the name of a wine I used to love in college but now find more or less undrinkable, but anyway. A few months ago I bought myself the 'Jerusalem' cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi, and it is wonderful. It's an absolutely gorgeous book - gives Alford & Duguid a run for their money in the Beautiful Local Photography category (and if you don't know Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's cookbooks put down your computer now and run to the nearest bookstore - sorry, who am I kidding, Amazon - and buy ALL OF THEM.). Despite drooling over pretty much the whole thing, I've only made a few recipes so far. I promise I'll post about the falafel and babaganoush project soon (early word: I think I screwed up the falafel since they were a little dry, but despite the slight moisture problems everything was insanely delicious), but I'm here today to tell you about the rather long-windedly named Conchiglie with Yogurt, Peas, and Chile.

Well, that and goats. And sheep, which frankly I prefer. You probably already know that I've got issues with milk, which tends to make my body hate me in various ways, despite the fact that cheese ranks just after cured pork products in my list of Best Things Ever In The World. Cured pork products being #1. This nudibranch might be #3, and avocados are probably #4. But I digress.

I recently had lunch with a friend of mine (at a pizza place, appropriately enough, but which was so worth it), who used to have a milk allergy, and he pointed out that if you're allergic to cow's milk sheep and goat's milk products should be just fine, since, being from a different animal, they contain different proteins. This a) makes perfect sense, and b) kind of blew my mind, because OMG I CAN EAT THAT CHEESE AND NOT HATE MYSELF LATER. (Disclaimer: I may or may not have an actual milk allergy. If I do it's certainly not the dangerous kind, otherwise I wouldn't have been at a pizza place. It may just be a sensitivity, maybe combined with some lactose intolerance; all I know is I'm physically a much happier person when I don't eat dairy in ways I won't get into here. Some people do have life-threateningly severe milk allergies and my heart goes out to them and please take them seriously in restaurants 'cause it's a real thing. But I'm not one of them, so sometimes I decide that creme brulee is worth the consequences and eat it anyway. Also Blogger wants to auto-correct brulee to Breugel, which is an interesting mental picture but no.)

Goat yogurt + basil + peas = sauce

For the lactose-intolerant crowd, more good news on goat. According to to an internet food blog I like called My New Roots, goat milk also has less lactose than cow's milk, is more easily digestible, and otherwise way healthier that cow's milk. (Full story here: http://mynewroots.org/site/2008/05/goat-is-the-new-cow-2/). (Disclaimer: Getting nutritional science from a blog is always a sketchy proposition, so please go look up the actual science somewhere other than Wikipedia before you believe me. But make her amazing Raw Brownies first.) Same goes for sheep, though maybe to a lesser extent. Still, most goat cheese tastes to me kind of like licking a goat (not that I'd know first hand), while sheep's cheese is just plain delicious. To each his own.

Sizzling garlic & chile

So back to the conchiglie: I was at the local Co-op, which is kind of hippy-ish, and saw they had both goat yogurt, which I figured would make a good breakfast, and sheep-and-goat feta, which I love feta. (The non-cow dairy downside: probably twice as expensive as the bovine equivalent.) I quickly discovered I was wrong about goat yogurt being good for breakfast, at least this brand: it was way too strongly goaty for the granola I put on top. So I opened 'Jerusalem', since the Middle East has a strong record of using yogurt in cooking, and found this. Long story short, it was delicious and easy, and it didn't make my body hate me, and you should make it. The End.

Sadly, the tomatoes were a later discovery.

Shells with Yogurt & Peas 
Adapted from 'Jerusalem' by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi

One tip: This makes a lot of pasta, and while it's still pretty delicious reheated - I was happily eating leftovers for a week - the pasta tends to get a little soft and the sauce loses its texture, so I recommend serving it somewhere it's got a decent chance of getting finished. You'll notice there are actual measurements here; that's 'cause it originally came from a real cookbook. Feel free to just eyeball them, like I did.

1 1/4 cups thick (Greek) yogurt from the ungulate of your choice
1/3 cup olive oil
3 cloves garlic, crushed or minced
1 cup peas (thawed if frozen)
1/2 lb pasta (shells, or not.)
1 tsp hot pepper or chile flakes
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 cup chopped basil
1 cup chopped mint (way less if dried)
4 oz crumbled feta
salt & pepper
1 cup cherry tomatoes, sliced into halves

1) In a mini-food processor, mix the yogurt, 4 tbsp oil, 1/2 cup peas, and basil. Go until you get a nice minty-green sauce without too many chunks. If it's too thick, add more oil.

2) Start the pasta. Let it boil til al dente. Drain.

3) Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a pan. Add the chile, paprika, and garlic. Saute til the garlic is fragrant but don't let it brown more than a little.

4) Put the yogurt sauce in a large-ish serving bowl. Stir in the pasta a little at a time (supposedly if you do it all at once the sauce will separate; I didn't check). Add the peas, feta, mint, tomatoes, garlic in oil, and S&P to taste (the recipe says 1/2 tsp of each; I found it undersalted but that will depend on your yogurt, feta, and tastebuds). Stir it all together. Garnish with a sprig of mint and more chile to taste.

What I ate yesterday

I'm unemployed. It's cold out. I'm bored. Hence, I cook. In an effort to keep track of some of the more delicious things I've made (let's be honest, who reads this thing but me?) here's the first in a series of tasty things I've made.


Iranian Pasta

Probably not Iranian at all, but vaguely Middle-Eastern, and "Iranian Pasta" sounds good. You don't like it, get your own blog.

2 cloves garlic
1 small onion
1/3 pound lamb
garam masala*
half a zucchini
half an eggplant
half a cucumber
plain yogurt
feta cheese
1/2 box of spaghetti or any other pasta
cayenne pepper to taste

1) Chop the onion and garlic very fine and saute for a minute in olive oil. Add the lamb, a generous amount of garam masala, and some salt. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the lamb is no longer pink. urn off the heat and let sit until you've finished everything else.

2) While the lamb is cooking, put the pasta on to boil.

3) Also while the lamb is cooking, slice the eggplant thin, salt it, and set it aside. Slice the zucchini thin, salt it, and grill it. I used a George Foreman oiled with olive oil; a real grill or probably even a hot skillet or toaster oven would work. When the zucchini's done, grill the eggplant the same way. Chop it all up into chunks.

4) Peel the cucumber and chop it into small pieces.

5) When the pasta's tender, drain it and put it in the serving bowl. Add a few dollops of plain yogurt, a handful of feta, the veggies, and the lamb. Mix it all up until the pasta's coated with the sauce. If you want more sauce, add more yogurt. Add cayenne and salt to taste.


*Garam masala is (roughly):
1 tbsp cardamom seeds
1 2-inch stick cinnamon
1 tsp cumin seeds
3/4 tsp black peppercorns
1/4 of a nutmeg
1 tsp cloves

Grind it all together in a (clean!!) coffee grinder until smooth. Or just buy a packet at the store.