Rabbit Pie

So, as I mentioned earlier, our friend Katie has been visiting for the month of December.  Anyway, her first reaction to the butchers in Mercato Sant Ambrogio went something along the lines of "Bunnies!  Must make rabbit pie!"  Which we put off doing for a while, for various reasons involving bistecca, pheasant and small, tied up packages of meat.  And impending Christmas dinner.  Christmas being past (and her flight back to California imminent) we finally got around to the rabbit pie.

Adventures with panettone

While we're in Italy, I have been on a mission to attempt making all sorts of traditional Italian dishes--especially baked goods. Most of our experiments have actually ended up involving pasta (as you may have gathered from previous posts), but there has been some branching out to things like schiacciata con uva. Naturally last year at Christmas time we had to attempt panettone (in spite of the small size of our kitchen). The first task, of course, was to find a recipe. Google will pop up all kinds of things when you search for Panettone, but I wanted to make sure I used a good and "authentic" recipe, so I asked Antonella at Buca del vino for advice (as we usually do when experimenting with Italian food). Marco said making panettone would be impossible (obviously, I had to interpret this response as a challenge), but Antonella sent me to A casa di ross, an Italian food blog full of many excellent recipes--both traditional and non.

The once and future ravioli

The best ravioli we have made so far, out of many good raviolis, started with leftovers.  You see, we had some friends over on the spur of the moment a few days ago after singing (because we wanted to hang out but felt rather too broke to go out) which lead to cooking more or less everything in the fridge.  Which wasn't much.

The upshot was that the next afternoon we had a yogurt container full of cold sauteed random stuff which needed to feel useful.  Specifically; kale, radicchio, fennel bulb, and onion that had been cooked with some chiang kai vinigar and a little bit of sesame oil.  If you haven't tried it (which I sort of assume is the case) the mixture is somewhat sweet, lightly bitter, fruity and has a faint oxidative character (from the vinegar).  For its insertion in the ravioli it was minced and then mixed with ricotta.  To make it work I felt it needed fairly agressivly savory sauce to balance the fruitiness of the filling.  We actually made this two times in a row, this is the second version of the sauce:

Take a small handful of dried porcinis and put them in a cup of hot water for at least 20-30 min.  Mince three or so shallots and cube 3 slices of salami toscano (I had wanted to use pancetta or guanciale at first, but we hadn't been to the market again since clearing out the fridge for our impromptu dinner, so the salami got used.  Then it got used again because it worked well).  When the porcinis are getting soft start the shallots sauteing.  Add the salami after a min. or two, then mince the porcini and add them, along with some of the liquid they have been soaking in.  Keep on adding a bit of the porcini broth every couple of minuets to form a lightly thick brown sauce.  While all this has been going on cook the ravioli, erring a little on the underdone side.  Once drained, add them to the sauce with a bit more porcini broth and cook for another min. or two before serving.

Bistecca!

Florence is currently covered by a thick blanket of snow, but before it started falling and after the months of pouring rain that made up most of this fall we had a few beautiful, cold, clear days which we used to introduce our friend Katie to Bistecca alla Fiorentina.

Bistecca is a huge steak, usually a kilo or more, cut something like a T-bone or porterhouse from  Chianina oxen.  Which is probably important, because three out of three of the best steaks I have ever had have been Bistecca alla Fiorentina.  My opinion may not be that significant, given my level of steak consumption, but it can be a seriously amazing piece of meat.

The preparation is exceedingly simple:  Take your thick to very thick steak (ideally 3 fingers, but it depends on the spacing of the ribs, so it can vary quite a bit.  These ones were closer to 2 fingers thick) and rub it with a split garlic clove and a bit of fresh rosemary.  Let it get up to room temperature on the counter.  It tastes best cooked over charcoal, but can be done in a pan too.  If you're using charcoal get your coals white hot, spread them and move your rack to an inch or two above the coals -- you want the steak to cook fast and hot.  Cook for 3-5 min. on each side, until browned.  After each side has cooked sprinkle liberally with sea salt and cracked pepper (fresh rosemary optional).  If you are cooking it on the stove use a heavy (cast iron) frying pan, a little bit of butter and get it very hot.  It should end up completely raw in the middle, browned on the outside and cooked through the first 1/4 of its width or so on each side.  If rare meat bothers you, this is not the steak for you.  We had this for lunch with some sauteed broccoli rabe and a good Chianti Classico.

Thanksgiving in December

As Lauren previously mentioned, we were out of town for Thanksgiving itself, but felt the need to make The Dinner anyway.  We did this last year at a friends' house and, well, there were challenges.  Not with the friends, they were great, but with acquiring the more American ingredients.  Cranberries are not only not to be found here, but are also completely unknown and, when introduced, are usually taken for some other frutti di bosco (wild berry) unless their origin and general way of life is explained in exhaustive detail.  Turkey isn't a problem (the butchers seem like they've all figured out the whole thanksgiving thing) but sweet potatoes are.  As in, we couldn't find them at all last year and we really looked.

So, having just been in the states, we bought cranberries and Lauren made and canned 8 pints of sauce which we packed into our checked luggage, being unsure about it's import legality but fairly confident that the immigration folks in the Florence airport wouldn't much care.  We also brought back some Alaskan smoked salmon and Tillamook Cheddar (sharp) that my mother brought us from Seattle to start things off with.  I wanted to showcase those partially out of regional pride and partially because Italians really appreciate regional cuisine.  We had been planning to make rosemary crackers but, due to a lack of oven space coupled with a certain degree of forgetfulness, instead had the antipasta with some of Lauren's herb bread (made the day before in full accordance with the plan).  We also had chicken liver crostini (which are very fiorentini) brought by our next door neighbors/landlords and some peperoncino jam which they went to get immediately after tasting the cheddar.

Pre-post Thanksgiving leftovers

What, you ask, are pre-post Thanksgiving leftovers? Having decided that we didn't get quite enough turkey and cranberries while in the States for real Thanksgiving, and being of the general opinion that non-Americans should experience the tastiness that is Thanksgiving, we decided to invite some friends over for a post-Thanksgiving Thanksgiving dinner when we got back to Italy. And as often happens when one goes to the market, we ended up with a bit too much food--including a rather large piece of zucca (unspecified form of winter squash).

The plan for this lovely piece of squash was pumpkin pie, so I stuck it in the oven to roast. But when I pulled it out and mashed it up, I had way more than the required 2 cups of pumpkin. What to do with the extra? The obvious solution was clearly to make zucca ravioli, and so after removing the amount for the pie, I mixed in spices and a pinch of salt to create the ravioli filling and went back to making the pie.

The pie pan we had available for use wasn't all that big though, and so not surprisingly, when I went to pour the "pumpkin" custard into the crust there was a not-insignificant bit that wouldn't fit. Being short on pie tins, we decided the best use for this bit of extra squash was to turn it into a sort of pumpkin creme brule.

For the ravioli, I didn't bother to follow any sort of

precise recipe. Really, they can be a fairly flexible sort of thing, so here's a gist that can be used as a point of departure:

Roast or steam a piece of winter squash. When soft, remove the skin (if you didn't peal it before cooking) and pureè until smooth. To the squash mixture add salt and spices to taste (pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, a bit of ground cloves, or whatever else suits your fancy). Roll out pasta dough (which I made using my usual eggless recipe), fill and form ravioli accordingly. Cook and serve with brown butter and sage sauce.

The pumpkin pie I made using a combination of two recipes from Gourmet magazine. The first, for a carmel pumpkin pie, was what I used to make the filling. The second, for pumpkin tart with anise seed crust was what I used for the crust (irrelevant for the creme brule

but tasty nonetheless). To turn the extra filling into creme brule, I buttered a baking dish (well, in this case, pot with metal handles) and filled with with the custard. I then placed the dish in a water bath and baked it until it was firm. Once firm, we pulled it out of the oven, sprinkled it with brown sugar, and put it back in the oven on broil to crisp up the top. The end result wasn't quite like creme brule done the proper way (with a blow torch), but it was quite good anyway and certainly an acceptable jury-rigging method for when flame throwers are unavailable.

Food before traveling: Nettles

I'm writing this from Philadelphia, where we're temporarily parked before heading up to NY for thanksgiving and the return trip to Florence.  We'll be gone for 10 days all told, so we did a good job cleaning out the fridge of all perishables in the meals preceding our departure.  We were so successful at it, in fact, that there was essentially nothing left to eat for our last day in town.  Which is why I found myself gathering nettles in the hills south of Florence last Tuesday.
Now, I associate nettle greens with spring.  I love spring, but as a season it taunts you -- after being starved of fresh green vegetables whose names don't begin with kale all winter long the world is suddenly full of green growing things, but the green growing things in your garden are probably 10 weeks from being ready to pick.  Where I was growing up fresh new nettles were one of the first green plants that were ready to eat early in the year.  So I was rather surprised to see them poking through the unseasonable snow last fall when we first got to Italy. 

Ragu: the Porcini Strike Back

As I mentioned, we came into a serious wealth of porcinis recently (and a duck).  While the first night of porcini called for a simple saute with pasta, the need to end a large number of mushrooms on a Sunday lead inevitably to ragu.  Now, when we got here, I really didn't get what the big deal about ragu was.  I mean, everyone gets excited about it, smacks their lips with relish, cooks for hours and you get a basic red sauce with some meat in it?  Its like, midwest housewife cooking from the 1950's with better PR.  Which touches on a couple of points:  First, the best cooking for Italians is categorically that which one's grandmother either did or might have done.  The food here?  Good.  Inventive?  Since the war, not so much.  Second point?  I might be dismissing 1950's housewives (or at least Italian grandmothers) a bit to quickly.  (but I don't know, wasn't there, might not visit even if I could).  Turns out that the whole ragu thing -- take good but not super interesting ingredients, cook for a very long time -- actually produces.  Because Lauren has been itching to make chocolate pasta inspired by no recipes) for weeks we had the ragu over chocolate pici.  With a seared duck breast and some sauteed broccoli rabe.

Fall in Florence—Schiacciata con uva

A few weeks ago—right at the start of grape harvest—one of our friends showed up at choir rehearsal with a large basket of grapes from the trellis on her back terrace. They sat patiently in the corner during rehearsal, me eying them from time to time hoping there was a chance we might get to nibble on a few before going home. Naturally when the singing was done and the chairs being put away, a small group gathered around the grapes, and being curious as to why exactly it was they showed up in the first place, I wandered over to inquire as to their purpose. “They’re for making schiacciata con uva,” I’m told. “Ooh!” I say, enthusiastically. I had just been thinking about attempting this grape foccaccia concoction that is a typical and well loved Florentine fall dessert, available only around harvest time because according to the Tuscans it must be made with wine grapes. “Do you want to try making some?” asks one of our friends. “Here, take a bunch home.” Yay! And so I became one of the lucky people sent home with a large bag of freshly picked wine grapes.

Brown, brown is the color of my true love's hair

  And lunch yesterday.  And today.  And dinner tonight.

We were at Mercato San Ambrogio Saturday, getting some food for the first time in a week, with the intention of only picking up a few things so as not to overload the refrigerator before heading back to the states next week.  But we thought we might get some meat and since duck was the same price as chicken got a duck.  Then we were offered a really good price on some porcini's, but only if we would buy a kilo.  Added together with the riccotta al forno Lauren got excited about, apples and a small pile of green and crunchy things the walk home ended up being pretty hard on the arms.  Plus, we had a pile of porcinis which needed to be eaten. 

Fettunta

No, the amazingly green liquid in the water bottle isn't some kind of bad St. Patty's day joke out of season (I realize it comes out a tad brown in the picture, but in real life it looks shockingly neon-green). It is olive oil. New olive oil to be precise. And it turns out the distinction is important. The Italians are very excited about their new olive oil--now that it is olive harvest every weekend there is at least one olive oil festival to be found, possibly paired with chestnuts and vin novello--and if you try some, you'll see why. Newly pressed olive oil of the extra virgin variety is extremely flavorful. In Tuscany, where the oil is known for its spicy, peppery notes, new olive oil has a particularly nice spicy, fresh bite to it.

We have been thinking about olive season the last few weeks and have been hoping to be able to do some olive picking ourselves (so as to paid in freshly pressed olive oil). Unfortunately we haven't had a chance to do any harvest work yet. But, our landlord has (apparently his sister has a small orchard), and last weekend he gave us this water bottle (frizzante, if you're curious) filled with new oil from olives he himself had picked. Perhaps we will still have the opportunity to create some oil of our own, but in the mean time this is amazing stuff!

Now, you may be asking yourself, what does one do with fresh olive oil? Clearly it would be a pity to waste it all on cooking where the heat will take away much of its wonderful fresh goodness. Well, in Tuscany you make what to Americans seems like a rather odd concoction: fettunta. It may seem strange, but honestly it is really very good.

Red Pepper Cream Sauce

...with fresh pasta (of course).  This was a "what do we have in the fridge" meal.  I know, the idea is to go to the market every day, which I sometimes did when we lived across town near Mercato Sant'Ambrogio, but the one near us at Porta Romana is much smaller and more expensive, so we usually do a big run to Sant'Ambrogio once a week (better and cheaper trumps walking further) and augment it with stops to the lady selling produce out of her piaggio truck (can you call it a truck if it has 3 wheels and is the size of a large refrigerator?) at the base of our hill.

We had a pepper left.  And a lemon which had missed its purpose in life.  I wanted to get at the sweetness of the red pepper (we bought it to roast on the grill but this one got left over) so I sauteed it on a fairly high flame with olive oil, garlic and pancetta cut into thick matchsticks until the pepper started to get soft, then added cooking cream (which is somewhere in between heavy cream and butter, moving towards the butter side of the force) and a bit of paprika to intensify the pepper effect.  Zested the lemon and added the zest near the end of cooking.  I don't always remember this step, but after the pasta had cooked it got added to the sauce to really soak up the flavors.

Pumpkin (zucca) tart

When we first arrived in Florence last October, we experienced the fortunate misfortune of having a fair bit of confusion with our apartment rental. Under the false impression that one must have an address to apply for an Italian visa, we frantically arranged lodging for ourselves via the internet days before submitting our visa applications. Breathing a sigh of relief, we left our passports and all kinds of paper work with the Italian consulate in Portland (OR) towards the end of August, and figured we were pretty much all set. But approximately 2 days before departure, I received an apologetic e-mail from the rental agency explaining that there had been a small mix-up with dates and the apartment we reserved for the year wouldn’t be available until early November (a problem because we were due to arrive on October 5). In compensation for our inconvenience, they kindly offered us a bigger place in a more central location for our first month at the same price we were to pay for our original apartment. Not having much other choice and figuring the pictures they sent looked pretty good, we agreed to the change. Typically, though, all was not settled. The next morning, I was greeted by another apologetic e-mail saying that new apartment wasn’t available after all, but they had another even bigger place that was even close to our eventual apartment and thus would make moving simple. This place, they warned, might be a tad noisy because it was near the train tracks, but it was nevertheless very nice and worth much more than we would be paying for it. With some help from google maps, we discovered in dismay that the “near” the train tracks meant literally overlooking the train tracks and Campo di Marte, one of Florence’s major train stations. Attractive is not exactly the word one would use to describe the location (at least not based on photos from google street view), and to someone who is not a sound sleeper (me), train noise all night didn’t sound very appealing at all. So this time we wrote back asking if they had anything else.

Experimental Studies in Brown: Chestnut Crepes with Coffee-Sausage Gravy

The experimental part was not the coffee gravy -- we've been doing that occasionally for the better part of a year, ever since we discovered that bechamel with coffee works (quite well, really).  The experimental bit was the chestnut flour that Lauren decided we needed to buy at the Coop (one of the 2 large supermarkets in Florence) yesterday.  Like, I imagine, most Americans, I've never used chestnut flour before.  I know some of the things Italian's use it for, but while they look quite pretty most of the ones I've tried taste rather less so.  Not that my tasting has been that extensive, but the point is that we had almost no idea what to do with the stuff.  Which is why we tried crepes -- ok, we tried pasta first, but with only a 1/4 cup of flour added to our normal 00/semiola mix.  It turns out that chestnut flour works fairly well for crepes (and didn't seem to make a huge difference for the pasta).  The texture is a bit different from wheat or buckwheat, but not too far into the rubbery and they end up having a nice light sweetness.  They also went very well with the sausage and coffee gravy.

Porcini Ravioli

It now feels well and truly like summer has fled, which is a little sad, but mostly happy, because it's not ragingly hot anymore and most of the German tourists have gone home (to be replaced by American undergrads, to be sure, but still).   Also, porcinis are now in season!  Which means a lot of good things, but about 2 weeks ago it meant porcini ravioli.  Our first experiment with making fresh pasta was actually with a porcini/champignon/truffle filled tortelloni Lauren and her classmate Emily made for their adviser, so these have a bit of happy history for us.

Fresh Pasta

We’ve been making fresh pasta with some regularity for the last year or so, spurred on at first by Carlalberto Relli of le piantagioni del caffe asking us to make a savory coffee dinner last winter (we’ll share our savory coffee discoveries at some point, but not just now) and continued because fresh pasta is both better and cheaper than dried pasta.  Yes, here in Italy, where good cheap pasta can be had for €0.78 a kilo.  We can get type 00 flour for about €0.29 a kilo, so the math works out well.  Plus, Lauren finds it intriguing (not that I don't as well, it's just that the actual making of the pasta itself seems to fall on the baking side of our cooking/baking division of labor).  Since the pasta dough and all will end up being pretty integral to a lot of things I thought I'd start out by describing how we (and I mostly mean Lauren) go about making it.

We almost never make egg pasta, partially because we developed our expertise while experimenting with coffee pastas (where you need the coffee to form a large part of the liquid and thus don't use egg) but mostly because eggs aren't really necessary and add extra expense and ingredients to the pasta.  For the first year or so we rolled out the dough with an empty wine bottle, cut the sfoglia (the uncut flat sheet of pasta dough) with a knife and then rolled them out again (if doing linguine or filled pasta's) or pinched and rolled the pieces into pici (pici is a hand formed pasta from around Sienna that looks a bit like spaghetti the size of a dinner straw).  Dust the pasta lightly with flour and let it dry for a while, then cook.  Over the summer we got ourselves a little hand cranked pasta machine (a Marcato Atlas 150 if it matters) which dramatically speeds up the process of rolling out the sfoglias and cutting fettuccine or spaghetti (which is what it came with -- you can get other cutting dies but we haven't yet).  The hard bit is getting the cooking time just right -- start with 2 min. and experiment.  We've found that extra (more than 5 min.) drying time makes it easier to get decent al dente results.

Recipe

For each cup or so of flour (feeds 2) add about tablespoon of olive oil and around a 1/4 cup of water.  Kneed it together until the dough is smooth but not at all sticky.  Cover and let it rest for 10 min. or so, then roll it out and cut.  Dust it with flour and let it dry for between 15 min. and 2 hours.  Bring a large pot of water to boil, add salt (Italians, or at least Tuscans, add salt in extremely generous proportions to everything except bread and that certainly includes pasta water) and cook pasta for 2 min. or until it tastes done. 

Not Cooking, the birthday edition

Today is my birthday (32) which has become one of the many yearly excuses to get slightly better food than we would otherwise.  Dinner will be more in the way of the full deal (bistecca fiorentina, ravioli di zucca, chianti classico, other tasty stuff) but for lunch we got figs (which Lauren adores) and some things to go with them.  We had been thinking of goat cheese, something on the softer/fresher line, but the goat lady who occasionally shows up at San Ambrogio wasn't there so we asked our normal cheese/olive/everything-not-vegetable folks what cheese they thought would be best with figs.  To our surprise the answer turns out to be salami toscano (or finocchiona, or some of the other many kinds of salami).  We got some relatively fresh pecorino anyway, since we already had finocchiona that we picked up from the Dario Cecchini macelleria during the vino al vino festival in Panzano a few days ago.  We had the three of those with some wild flower honey and hazelnuts that have been sitting around waiting for a good excuse.  Now, wildflower honey sounds like about the most boring honey available, and in the states it is only second to clover honey in that regard, but essentially all the honey in Italy is more flavorful and interesting than that which is available back home and this one went especially well with the cheese.  The slight bitterness of the honey was just right for the faint sheepy funk from the pecorino.  I have no idea why honey is more interesting here, so if you know please tell me.  Because one should always have mimosas when (insert occasion here) (and because we visited Treviso a couple of months ago) we topped off lunch with a bottle of La Gioiosa Prosecco DOC Treviso (€4.60) and fresh squeezed orange juice.  For the record a €5 bottle of prosecco, while not especially competing with €30 bottles of champagne, is actually a thing of some quality, as opposed to almost anything one might find in the states for much under $18.