Category — Cooking Tips

Several people have asked me whether The Italian Slow Cooker: 125 Easy Recipes for the Electric Slow Cooker is available in an electronic version.  The answer is, yes, it is.   You can find it at this link: http://amzn.to/u0fRBm on Amazon or on this link at Barnes & Noble http://bit.ly/sEBYDn.  It takes only seconds to download, so you can be slow cooking real fast!

Check out www.cookstr.com on Wednesday, June 29.  I’m the featured “chef” (though I would say cook).  Cookstr is a great site for recipes and information about cooking, cookbooks and authors.  Wonder which recipe of mine they will feature?

For vegetable lovers like me, spring is the best time of year.  Look what I found at my local Whole Foods yesterday.

Fresh garbanzo beans, aka chick peas.  I had never seen them before, so I decided to taste one or two before doing anything else with them.  The soft fuzzy shell popped right open and the gorgeous pale green beans reminded me of popcorn.   They were crisp and sweet, something like fresh fava beans, but without that bitter edge.  I gave some to Charles and he agreed, so we ate some with a the sharp Castelmagno cheese that our friends from Piedmont had brought us last week.  That got us reminiscing about our trip to Piedmont last fall, and the next thing you know we were sipping Clavesana dolcetto as we polished off the cheese and beans.   I never had a chance to cook with them since the whole pile of beans disappeared.  Must get more.

My friend Elizabeth Hellman Minchilli is an author and writes one of my favorite blogs about living, eating and cooking in Rome.  You can find it at www.elizabethminchilliinrome.com.   Recently she wrote a post about getting over her fear of cooking stinging nettles, known as ortica in Italian.  Just the name is enough to scare you, and though I’ve eaten them often in Italy in ravioli and risotto, I have never cooked them because they are not easy to find here, unless you find them growing wild in your garden.  But they turned up at the Union Square Greenmarket the other day, and inspired by Elizabeth’s success, I bought a bunch.  Nettles have been used for millenia as both food and medicine, though of course I was more interested in the former.   There is a lot of good information about  nettles on Wildman Steve Brill’s website at www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/Nettle.html.  I don’t know if it was just this variety, but they did not seem to have any stingers.  Wear gloves and a long sleeve shirt when handling them.  Wash them well and pull the leaves off the stems.  Drop the leaves into boiling water, then use them as you would spinach or swiss chard.  The flavor is mild and grassy, though the texture is a bit rough.

Rocket arugula, sometimes called wild arugula, is pointy, crisper and nuttier tasting than the kind with rounded leaves.  My mom used to grow it in our Brooklyn garden long before it became a supermarket item.  I have always been a huge fan of arugula and happily at this time of year I can find big bunches of it at the Migliorini Farm stand at the Greenmarket.   I toss it into chicken soup, or pasta with tomato sauce.  My favorite and easiest way to enjoy it is in a salad tossed with extra virgin olive oil, a tiny bit of fresh lemon juice and slivers of Parmigiano Reggiano.  I don’t know why I was so surprised to find out how good arugula is for you.  I came across this post on nutritionist Dr. Janet Brill’s site http://www.drjanet.com/pages/2011/05/awesome-arugula I was delighted to read that arugula is in the cruciferous vegetable family and full of health benefits, but it’s unfortunate that the writer suggests eating it on a pizza to “make the medicine go down”.  I like it on pizza too, but it is hardly medicine!  I’d better be careful not to overdose.

This week, I did something a little different.  I sauteed the arugula in olive oil with garlic and a bit of hot pepper and piled it on some toasted bread.  We had that with roasted local asparagus and fried eggs.

All around the world, Pesto alla Genovese will be showcased on January 17 to mark the International Day of Italian Cuisines. Chefs who are members of itchefs-GVCI will prepare and serve this dish according to Italian culinary tradition to promote unity and signify authenticity of Italian products.  Each year since 2008, a different authentic Italian dish has been selected for this honor.

In anticipation of the event, an industry workshop was held at The Italian Culinary Academy on January 12.  Chef Cesare Casella, Dean of the Italian Culinary Academy and owner of the acclaimed Salumeria Rosi presented a series of seminars and tastings featuring authentic Italian products, some familiar, and some not.

The first was corzetti, a coin shaped pasta from Liguria.  Chef Andrea della Gatta talked about the history of this pasta as a poor man’s food while he prepared a sauce made with artichokes, zucchini, shrimp, tomato concasse, extra virgin olive oil and basil tossed with marjoram-flavored corzetti that had been imported from Genoa.  He pointed out that the dish was hardly poor man’s food any more since shrimp now cost about $35 a pound in Liguria.   Unfortunately, the corzetti, which were frozen, are not available in this country.

Next up were fish products from Typical Italian Fish Food, or TIFF, a company seeking to establish itself in the States.  TIFF produces fish “salumi” made with salmon, palamita — a kind of bluefish, and a type of small tuna called alletterati.  These are ground with spices to make salame, or dried and sliced like bottarga, or ground into a fine “flour” for tossing with pasta or seasoning salads.

Lou di Palo, or Di Palo Fine Foods presented the next items:  two very different extra virgin olive oils, one from Liguria and the other from Sicily, followed by lentils from Norcia, San Marzano Tomatoes, and Grana Padano, a fine aged cow’s milk cheese.  The cheese was tangy and creamy at the same time and would be featured the next day in the preparation of the Pesto alla Genovese.

Ferrarelle water both sparkling and still, a perfect palate cleanser, was next followed by a demo of kitchen appliances by DeLonghi, a 100-year old manufacturer headquartered in Treviso.  Their food processor has the unique ability to weight the foods added to the work bowl, a real boon to the cook especially when baking.

On January 13, Chef Della Gatta returned to the auditorium of the Italian Culinary Academy to demonstrate Pesto alla Genovese made the traditional way with a mortar and pestle.  It seemed an odd choice of a recipe to demonstrate at this time of year in icy New York, where the temperature outside hovered in the low twenties, but just the thought of a fragrant plate of pasta sauced with fresh emerald-green pesto was enough to get me thinking warm thoughts of sunshine and summer gardens.

For more information about Pesto alla Genovese and the traditional recipe go to www.itchefs-gvci.com.  For additional information about the Italian Culinary Academy visit www.ItalianCulinaryAcademy.com.

Spinach sandwiches were a favorite of mine when I was a kid.  My mom used to make them all the time and I still make them now, not just with spinach, but with all kinds of greens. What’s so special?  It’s the way the crispy bread — an essential element — soaks up the garlicky spinach juices and olive oil.  All you need is spinach (or escarole, or broccoli rabe — whatever).  Saute some garlic and a little hot pepper in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, add your greens and salt to taste.  Cover and simmer until tender.  That’s it!  Stuff the greens into a hunk of crisp Italian bread and don’t forget to spoon on the juices for a drippy and delicious sandwich.

Sometimes I vary my spinach sandwich by using toasted sliced bread and serving it open faced.  It’s really good with a poached or fried egg on top.  The garlic may be more than you want to face for a breakfast sandwich, but it makes a great brunch or lunch.  You can further gild the lily with a little grated Parmigiano-Reggiano sprinkled over the top.  Which brings me to my other favorite way to eat a spinach sandwich, skipping the eggs and topping the greens with a tangy cheese like Asiago, or a fresh pecorino, melted briefly under the broiler.

Saturday was cold and snowy — a perfect day for cooking.  Our friends from New Jersey were not going to make it through the storm to our home, so I was free to make whatever  I pleased, my favorite way to cook.  No recipes, no limits.

I took a survey of the contents of the refrigerator and found a large piece of Tufino, a semi-firm cheese made from a blend of cow and sheep’s milk studded with nuggets of black truffles.  We had enjoyed slicing and eating it, but now I decided to try it cooked and an omelet seemed like the perfect test.

Truffled Cow and Sheep's Milk Cheese from Le Marche

I whisked 2 eggs with a spoonful of milk and some salt and poured them into a hot skillet where a puddle of sweet butter was sizzling.  Once the eggs had firmed up a little, I placed a row of thinly sliced Tufino down the center and folded the two sides over the cheese.  A minute or so later, the cheese was oozing out the ends.  Tufino is a fine melter!  I rolled  the omelet onto the plate, buttered some ciabatta toast, and dug in.  Butter, eggs, cheese, truffles and crunch — who cares if it snows all day!

Lunchtime came and the Tufino was still on my mind.  I knew it would make a fantastic toasted sandwich, but maybe it needed something else.

I had just received a gift of several packages of pre-sliced Prosciutto di San Daniele.  The innovative packaging kept the perfectly sliced prosciutto tender and flavorful and easy to separate.  When opened, the sweet, mellow and meaty aroma of prosciutto filled the air.  I tasted a slice.  It melted in my mouth with a mild, nutty, and sweet salty flavor.  I had to make the sandwiches fast before I ate up the whole contents of the package of prosciutto.

I spread some white bread with softened butter on one side as my reliable old Happy Day Griddle Grill heated on the stove.  I sandwiched  the cheese and prosciutto between two slices of bread and placed them on the grill side with a heavy pot cover on top.  They were toasted and ready to flip in just a few minutes.  I turned them and gave them a a couple of minutes more until I saw the cheese beginning to seep out the sides.  A few pieces of giardiniera to garnish the plate, and we were ready to eat.   The panini tasted as good as they look, which is awfully good!   I could see serving them cut into quarters at a party with some chilled prosecco.

Prosciutto di San Daniele