Category — Good Eats

Last week, Charles and I spent a few days in Rome, then headed to Abruzzo.  Here is my Roman favorite dish his trip, the Spaghettoni alla Carbonara at Roscioli.  The bits of guanciale were chunkier than usual and had been fried until crisp around the edges.  The sauce was perfectly made, with just eggs and cheese and lots of black pepper.  Perfection!

In Abruzzo, we stayed in the area known as the Costiera dei Trabocchi where we were the guests of the Cantina Frentana winery.  Trabocchi are wooden platforms built for fishermen that are now used as restaurants.  For a better look at them, see my blog on the i-Italy website.  Not surprisingly, the star attraction in this area is very fresh seafood.

Of course, there was lots of great pasta, too, both fresh and dried.  The town of Fara San Martino is the home of several major pasta companies, including De Cecco, Del Verde and Giuseppe Cocco.

The last one above had tiny little lamb meatballs tangled in spaghetti alla chitarra, fresh pasta made on a chitarra, a wooden frame strung with thin wires used to cut sheets of fresh pasta into long square spaghetti.

Cheese, of course, was only served on pasta with meat sauce.  A plate of long, skinny fresh green chilies was passed with every pasta.

Tender little tarts filled with chocolate and grape preserves were a tasty dessert on at least two occasions.

Throughout our stay, we drank wonderful wines of the region from Cantina Frentana.

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?

Joel Peterson, the owner of Ravenswood Winery, has been called both a vino-revolutionary and the godfather of zinfandel.  That may be, but it doesn’t give you any idea of how knowledgeable he is, or that he is a delightful dining companion.  You may already have guessed that he makes a superb line of California zinfandels.  Joel was in town last week and together with some other writers, I had a chance to chat with him and taste his new vintages over lunch at A Voce in the Time Warner Center.  As far as I’m concerned, there is no better way to taste a wine than to accompany it with food, and A Voce turned out to be the perfect choice.

Joel organized the tasting in 3 flights.  We began with the lightest wine, the Dickerson Zinfandel, named for the vineyard where the grapes are grown.   This wine is made from 100% zinfandel grapes.  As soon as I lifted my glass, I noticed the aroma — like a big bowl of fresh ripe raspberries. It was a perfect way to the start the tasting and went great with the first course, crisp fried cassoncini, little turnovers filled with crescenza, a creamy cheese, and swiss chard, plus tender sliced prosciutto and stracchino, a soft cheese best known as the stuffing in burrata, and fresh fava beans.  Then we moved on to the Big River Zinfandel, also 100% zinfandel, which had a more subtle fruit aroma and concentrated flavor.  The third wine in the flight was the Belloni Zinfandel made from a blend of grapes.  Joel described the aroma as dark fruit like plums, which was true, and boysenberry, but since I ‘m not sure I know what boysenberry smells like I’ll have to take his word for that.

Joel made it clear that he wants to avoid what he called the “3 sins of Zin”:   high alcohol, high sugar, and too much oak.  With the next course we  drank Barricia Zinfandel fom the vineyard of the same name, made with 76% zinfandel grapes blended with petite sirah.  This wine was more complex than the first three with a better balance.  The Old Hill Zinfandel, so called because the vines are thought to be the oldest in Sonoma, went great with my pasta, Sagne alla Amatriciana.  Sagne is a wide fresh pasta ribbon and in this version it was sauced with a smooth tomato sauce flecked with smokey bacon and fresh marjoram.   The wine tasted of dark cherries with a rich leathery quality.  The bacon, tomatoes and spicy pecorino cheese on the tender pasta matched up with the wine beautifully.  The Teldeschi Zinfandel was particularly interesting to me.  Joel said that the blend of 4 grape varieties — zinfandel, petite sirah, Carignane and Alicante Bouschet — used were originally planted by Italian immigrants and this wine was a favorite with traditional grape growing families.

We ended with two more wines.  According to Joel,  the ICON Mixed Blacks was the wine that should have been and would have been made in California if it had not been for Prohibition.   The blend of grapes is the same as the above Teldeschi, but the proportion of zinfandel is much lower — 37% for ICON as opposed to the 75% in the Teldeschi.  That’s why the ICON cannot be called a zinfandel on the label.  To go with the wine, I had grilled quail glazed with fig reduction resting on a bed of fregula, tiny Sardinian pasta similar to couscous.  This was outstanding and the flavors of the fig glaze and grilled meat were an ideal match with the robust flavors of the ICON and the final wine of the day, the Pickberry Red.  This is a Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon blend that shows promise, and will really come into its own with a few years of aging.

Salvo Montalbano is the leading character in a series of Italian mystery novels written by Andrea Camilleri.  Salvo is a decent and humane man with a fiercely independent streak who happens to be a police commissioner in Sicily.    He fights corruption, solves crimes, has girlfriend problems, and never fails to enjoy a good meal.   Normally I’m not much of mystery reader, but the series is well written and the characters are appealing.  The books capture a real feeling of life in Sicily.  The highlight for me though is the opportunity to experience Sicilian food vicariously with Montalbano.  You can bet that no matter how grim or perplexing the crime, Montalbano will sit down to a good meal and a bottle of wine either at his beachside home, prepared by his faithful housekeeper Adelina, or at some truckstop or trattoria on the way to or from the crime scene.

Recently, my friend Diane Darrow picked up a copy of  I Segreti della Tavola di Montalbano–Le Ricette di Andrea Camilleri (The Secrets of Montalbano’s Table — The Recipes of Andrea Camilleri)  by Stefania Campo.  Diane is a great home cook and the author, along with her husband Italian wine expert Tom Maresca, of several Italian cookbooks.  Undaunted by the lack of detailed info in the recipes, Tom and Diane decided to undertake a Sicilian dinner Montalbano-style and Charles and I were delighted to attend.

The meal began with Adelina’s Caponata from Excursion to Tindari.  The flavors of the eggplant, onions and celery were balanced though it had less tomato than I am accustomed to and was topped with crunchy toasted almonds.  Altogether delicious.  Next came the Pasta col Ragu Siciliana (also from Excursion to Tindari), which was as good as it looks.  The ragu was made with sirloin that Diane and Tom had ground themselves and the pasta was topped with caciocavallo, a classic Sicilian cheese.  Our main course was a dramatic ‘mpanata di maiale, from The Wings of the Sphinx, a baked drum of bread dough stuffed with sauteed sausages, potatoes, olives and cauliflower.  Diane accompanied it with roasted red peppers, the ideal complement.

Tom selected the wines for the dinner.  Though we started with a magnum of French Champagne, at the table there were three Sicilian reds:  Don Antonio from Morgante, and the Rosso del Soprano and Faro from Palari, which we all enjoyed.

Little dark chocolate cakes with orange sauce (sformatino di cioccolato amaro con salsa all’arancia) from The Snack Thief were a nice finish to our memorable Montalbano dinner.  Salvo is a lucky character to eat this well in every book, and we too felt lucky to share it with Diane and Tom.

You can read more about this dinner and Diane’s kitchen adventures at http://dianescookbooks.wordpress.com/2011/05/31/a-sicilian-meal-for-montalbano/.

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.

I had the best time yesterday.  Some friends from the Clavesana Winery in Piedmont in Northern Italy were in town, and we decided to have a few people in to taste some of their wines.   There were 4 variations on Dolcetto, red wines made from the local dolcetto variety of grapes.  These wines go with a wide variety of foods and are well priced.  Problem was, I had had a really busy week and not much time to prepare.  So Charles and I decided to keep it simple.

First we had an assortment of salumi.  There was coppa made from pork shoulder; lardo and pancetta, both made from the belly; and hard and soft salami.   Then we had an assortment of Piemontese cheeses, including 2 kinds of robiola–one with 3 milks: goat, sheep and cow–and the other with 2 milks: sheep and cow.  Both were creamy and mushroomy with a soft texture like brie.  There was Testun made from cow and goat’s milk and aged in the must (the squeezed out grapes) used to make Barolo wine; Braciuk, similar to Testun but not as aged and made only from cow’s milk; Castelmagno DOP a firm, sharp cow’s milk cheese; Bra Duro Stravecchio, an “extra-old” cow’s milk cheese aged a minimum of 1 year;  and Toma Piemonte, an unpasteurized cow’s milk cheese aged 60 days.

Some fresh fava beans in the shell went great with the sharp cheeses, plus we had breadsticks, bread and a platter of fresh fruit and raw vegetables.  I cooked only one thing: a homestyle pan pizza, a recipe from my book Pizza Anyway You Slice It. It’s a good pizza for a party because it makes a large pie, tastes good hot or cold, and cuts into neat slices so it’s easy to eat.  In fact, I just reheated some in the toaster oven for lunch today. It crisped up nicely and still tasted great.

The pizzas were a big hit and everybody loved trying the different cheeses, salumi with the wine.  The improbably named D’OH (long story, but makes sense when they explain it) was the lightest, a very easy to drink red that we will enjoy with summer meals like grilled tuna.  Then there was the Dolcetto di Dogliani 2009, which was  a bit richer — a perfect wine with roast chicken.  Il Clou, with more body still, would be good grilled sausages or chops.  Finally there was the 174 Dolcetto di Dogliani, a wine made with grapes from a single vineyard.  This wine has big flavors and will only improve with age.

For dessert, we had Nocciolina, a crackly-topped hazelnut sponge cake that Anna had managed to carry to New York intact all the way from Piedmont.  The region is famous for its superb hazelnuts and the simple, nutty cake was a delicious treat with a cup of coffee.

Thanks to Anna, Tessa, Mario and Marinella for taking time out from their busy travel schedule to visit us.  As they say in Piedmont,