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Hot zeppole on a cold winter’s day — how could I say no?  Charles and I went to Mia Dona yesterday to meet our old friends Rob and Linda for lunch and we had lots of catching up to do.  Between toasting the New Year and conversation, I ordered a creamy cauliflower soup topped with a dab of bright green arugula pesto — just what I was in the mood for.

Next came grilled mahimahi with artichokes drizzled with a lemony caper sauce served with olive oil crushed potatoes.  Meanwhile, Charles was just about swooning over the homemade cavatelli with meaty Sunday Ragu and a hefty chunk of pork brasciole.  Since my restaurant week lunch included dessert, I opted for the limoncello cheesecake.  Feelling pretty full,  I was happy to share it with everyone.   But the zeppole changed all that.

Donatella Arpaia, who owns Mia Dona, is an old friend and knows how much I love zeppole, and wouldn’t let us leave without some.

For me, zeppole are a reminder of Sunday nights when I was a kid. Since we always had the full on Italian American Sunday lunch experience with pasta, meat, vegetables, and usually pastry for dessert, we would typically skip dinner, or my mom would make us a little treat.   I always asked for zeppole.  Just before Ed Sullivan came on, she would fry up a big batch and drop them into a brown paper bag with cinnamon sugar.  Then she would shake the bag until the zeppole were completely coated. The bag would get all greasy and the doughnuts, because that is what they really are, would come out crunchy with sugar and spice. We’d eat them right away, fresh and hot and light as a feather, while we watched Topo Gigio or Senor Wences.

Anyway, the zeppole at Mia Dona were quite possibly even better than my mom’s.  We ate them so fast, I didn’t even get a chance to snap a picture! You will just have to go there yourself and try them.

Mia Dona is located on 58th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues.  They are open for lunch and dinner and the menu features the simple cooking of the Puglia region of Itay.

A few years ago in Rome, I noticed a restaurant with a small window in its facade.  In the window was a small brick alcove holding a large, round, greenish glass bottle filled with dried beans, water and herbs.  The alcove backed up to the restaurant’s woodburning oven, and every time I passed, I would stop to look in at the bottle and observe the beans simmering slowly, absorbing the liquid and becoming plump and rounded and filled with flavor.  It seemed like the ideal way to cook beans, but it made me unhappy to think that I could not duplicate it in my small apartment kitchen with a standard stove.  Or could I?  I had never owned a slow cooker, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like the piece of the equipment I needed to to turn out perfectly tender, flavorful beans like those I ate in Rome.  I could hardly wait to get home (well, almost!) to buy one.

Back in New York, I soon realized that slow cookers have as many devotees as they have people who own them and abandon them to a dusty back shelf.  The difference seemed to be that those who love them have discovered delicious recipes and used fresh ingredients to prepare easy and satisfying food, while others relied on packaged and canned products and did not take a few moments to prepare the ingredients before cooking.

I bought a cooker and began by making my first batch of Roman-style beans in it.  They came out just perfect — tender and creamy and infused with the flavor of the herbs and garlic I had added.   Then I tried meats — tough cuts like short ribs, veal and lamb shanks, pot roasts, and stew meat.  The results were fall-off-the-bone tender and savory. Even chicken turned out moist and juicy every time.  To say I was hooked on slow cooking was an understatement.  I made soups, pasta sauces, stews and vegetables. Then I tried grains like farro, barley and polenta and was delighted with the results and ease of preparation.  I also made seafood in the slow cooker and discovered that sturdy varieties like salmon and squid turn out beautifully.  My biggest surprise was how well the cooker handled delicate egg dishes like frittatas, and even desserts, especially creamycheesecakes and flourless chocolate cake.  The gentle, low heat cooked them perfectly.

I compiled 125 of my recipes into a book which is now available.  The name is The Italian Slow Cooker and it was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.  The book has a soft cover and lots of gorgeous color photos by Alan Richardson, one of the best food photographers.

Here is a recipe from the Italian Slow Cooker that I know you will enjoy.

COUNTRY STYLE PORK RIBS WITH TOMATOES AND PEPPERS

Meaty country style pork ribs are a great choice for the slow cooker.  They turn out moist and tender and never lack for flavor.  Here they are cooked in spicy sauce made with red bell peppers and tomato.  Serve it over polenta or mashed potatoes with zesty broccoli rabe cooked with garlic.

Serves 6

4 pounds country style pork ribs

Salt and freshly ground pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 medium onions, chopped

2 large garlic cloves, chopped

1/2 cup dry white wine

2 tablespoons tomato paste

1 cup tomato puree

1 teaspoon dried oregano

4 medium red bell peppers, seeded and cut into 1/2-inch slices

Pat the ribs dry and sprinkle them with salt and pepper to taste.  In a large skillet, heat the oil over medium heat.  Add as many of the ribs as will fit in the pan without touching.  Cook the meat, turning it occasionally, until nicely browned on all sides.  Place the browned ribs in the slow cooker.  Brown the remaining meat in the same way.

Add the onions and garlic to the skillet and cook 5 minutes, or until softened.  Stir in the wine and tomato paste and cook, scraping the bottom of the pan, until the liquid begins to simmer.  Stir in the tomato puree, oregano and salt and pepper to taste.  Remove from the heat.

Scatter the peppers over the pork in the slow cooker.  Pour on the sauce.  Cover and cook on low for 6 hours or until the meat is tender and coming away from the bones.  Discard any loose bones and skim off the fat.  Serve hot.

© Copyright 2010 The Italian Slow Cooker by Michele Scicolone

Grana Padano Pizza at Keste

While waiting in the dentist’s office last week, I had a chance to browse through some of the latest magazines.  Every one had an article about what to buy for last minute Christmas gifts.  They recommended everything from a paperweight (uh, no, thanks) to a whole wardrobe (doesn’t that take a lifetime of shopping?).  I don’t consider myself the most creative gift giver, but I didn’t like any of the ideas.  I can’t imagine anyone buying me a whole wardrobe and when it comes to paperweights, well, let’s just say I have enough!  Instead, I like to give gifts that I like to receive, things that I can eat or drink.  So here are my ideas for great gifts for last minute shoppers:

Averna — Not too sweet, not too bitter, this Sicilian digestivo has subtle flavors of herbs, chocolate and menthol.  Smooth and soothing after a holiday dinner and warming any time.

Panettone – Beautifully wrapped, it makes a perfect ready to give gift.  Ignore the cheap ones which may be made in places other than Italy.  Top producers include Le Tre Marie or Bauli and they are available at many retail shops.  Or you can order one by mail from my friends at Gustiamo.com.  For Christmas breakfast or brunch, I love sliced panetttone toasted, slathered with good butter or mascarpone, and served with a chilled moscato or Asti Spumante.

Prosecco — Sparkling white wine from the Veneto.  We serve it with appetizers or throughout the meal.  Great with fish and seafood for Christmas Eve dinner.  Good producers include Alice, Mionetto, Bisol and Nino Franco.

Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano — I use both for eating and grating.  Try Grana Padano shaved on a pizza with arugula and prosciutto, as I did recently at Keste.  Troppo buono!  Or serve with fresh pears and grapes, or nuts and dried fruit for dessert.   Both cheeses keep well in the refrigerator so I always have them handy.   Other cheese choices would include aged Montasio,  Piave or Asiago.

Kusmi Christmas Tea —  Of Russian origin, this 140-year old tea company is very popular in Paris, where I first discovered it.  The Christmas tea is a blend of black tea with vanilla, orange and spice scents and the beautiful tin makes it ideal for gift-giving.

Extra Virgin Olive Oil — Always in good taste and so useful.  If you are not sure which one to buy, go to a good store like Di Palo on Grand Street where you can sample a variety of oils before you buy.

Chestnut Honey — Drizzle some on gorgonzola, or on that toasted panettone.  Heavenly!  The best come from Piedmont and Umbria in Italy.

Coluccio DOP San Marzano Tomatoes – Something akin to a diamond bracelet for a cook like me, I use these tomatoes all the time.  They are meaty and full of flavor and make terrific ragu.

When in doubt, get a gift basket from D. Coluccio and Sons, Di Palo Selects, or Gustiamo.com.  There’s still time!

Struffoli, puffy little balls of fried dough drenched in honey, are the quintessential Christmas sweet in Naples and other places in Italy, especially the Central and Southern regions.  When I was a little girl in Brooklyn, other kids would be helping their mothers to make gingerbread and spritz cookies, but in our house, it was always struffoli.  Mom would start with a 5-pound bag of flour and a couple of dozen eggs.  She would mix and knead the ingredients together until a smooth dough formed.  Then the dough was left to rest under a clean kitchen towel and she would fill a big pot with oil.  Then we would start slicing, rolling and cutting the dough until little bits.

Rolling out struffoli

Once the oil was hot enough, she would carefully slip the pieces of dough into the hot oil, making sure all the while that we kids stayed far away from the hot pot.  But I loved to watch as the struffoli turned from little pillow shaped pellets into crisp, brown puffs.  When she judged them sufficiently browned, she would scoop out the puffs and drain them on paper towels.  They were eggy and toasty tasting, but they really wouldn’t be at their best until they were thoroughly drenched in good honey.  My mom didn’t think much of the supermarket brands, preferring instead to drive to a private home on Staten Island where the owner kept bees and gathered several different types of honey.  My mom would ask for a blend of the light and dark honeys for a perfectly mellow flavor.

After tossing the struffoli with the warm honey came the fun part — piling the sticky balls into heaps on platters and disposable pie plates to be given as gifts to friends and family. But before they could be given away, the struffoli needed to be decorated.  We used little multicolored confetti and by the time we kids were done with the task, there were sticky finger marks and confetti all over the kitchen table and floor.  Sometimes we added candied red and green cherries, or sliced almonds, or strips of candied orange and citron.  Of course, we couldn’t resist tasting them to make sure they were as good as last year’s.

The big platter would go on the sideboard where we could pick off a few whenever we passed by throughout the holiday season.  The pie plates were wrapped in cellophane and tied with ribbons to bring to friends and family.  Of course, they would give us plates of their own struffoli, but in my house, we all knew that mom’s were superior.  They were crisp and light and never dense and hard like others we had tasted.

A lot of Italian Americans have forgotten, or maybe they never knew, how to make struffoli, so I put them on the holiday entertaining menu I prepared at the cooking class I did at De Gustibus Cooking School at Macy’s on Thursday.  Sure enough, while I was getting ready for the class, I heard one of the assistants enter and exclaim, “Struffoli!  Hurray, we’re making struffoli!”  I felt just like a kid again, making struffoli with my mom.

Here’s my recipe for struffoli which I published in my book 1,000 Italian Recipes.  It makes a plateful, enough for 8 to 10.  If you want to make a big batch to give away, the recipe can easily be doubled.

STRUFFOLI

Makes 8 servings

1 cup all-purpose flour plus more for kneading the dough

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 large eggs, beaten

1/2 teaspoon grated lemon or orange zest

Vegetable oil for frying

1 cup honey (about 6 ounces)

Possible garnishes: multicolored sprinkles, chopped candied orange peel, citron or  cherries, toasted sliced almonds

1. In a large bowl, combine 1 cup flour and the salt. Add the eggs and lemon zest and stir until well blended.

2. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured board and knead until smooth, about 5 minutes. Add a little more flour if the dough seems sticky. Shape the dough into a ball. Cover the dough with an overturned bowl. Let the dough rest 30 minutes.

3. Cut the dough into 1/2-inch-thick slices. Roll one slice between your palms into a 1/2-inch-thick rope. Cut the rope into 1/2-inch nuggets. If the dough feels sticky, use a tiny bit of flour to dust the board or your hands. (Excess flour will cause the oil to foam up when you fry the struffoli.)

4. Line a tray with paper towels. Pour about 2 inches of oil into a wide heavy saucepan. Heat the oil to 370°F on a frying thermometer, or until a small bit of the dough dropped into the oil sizzles and turns brown in 1 minute.

5. Being careful not to splash the oil, slip just enough struffoli into the pan to fit without crowding. Cook, stirring once or twice with a slotted spoon, until the struffoli are crisp and evenly golden brown, 1 to 2 minutes. Remove the struffoli with a slotted spoon or skimmer and drain on paper towels. Repeat with the remaining dough.

6. When all of the struffoli are fried, gently heat the honey just to a simmer in a large shallow saucepan. Remove from the heat. Add the drained struffoli and toss well. Pile the struffoli onto a serving plate. Decorate with the multicolored sprinkles, candied fruits, or nuts.

7. To serve, break off a portion of the struffoli with two large spoons or a salad server.   Store covered with an overturned bowl at room temperature up to 3 days.

Copyright 2004 1,000 ITALIAN RECIPES by Michele Scicolone

If you have any questions or comments about this recipe, or others, I would love to hear from you at mailto:michelescicolone@gmail.com.

Red, White and Green Lasagne, Mortadella and Truffle Stuffed Pork, Slow Cooker Cheesecake and Struffoli plus 4 of Charles’ favorite Italian wines are on the menu for this Thursday’s class at De Gustibus at Macy’s starting at 5:30. Join us for a delicious evening of cooking, eating, drinking and fun.  Hope to see you there!  For more information, go to www.degustibusnyc.com.

“The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity than the discovery of a new star,” wrote the philosopher and cook, Brillat-Savarin. I hate to disagree, but for me it is the discovery of a new pasta.

While dried pastas don’t vary much in flavor, their contours and proportions determine how the sauce and pasta will go together and how the finished dish will taste.  A heavy, meaty ragu can turn thin, delicate pasta strands to mush while chunky rigatoni can overwhelm the flavor of a light, delicate sauce.  In addition to the shape, the ingredients, how the pasta is manufactured, and the drying method used are important, too.  And no matter how good the pasta is, it has to be cooked and served the right way.

Last week, a cellophane bag of Don Bruno fusilloni, or giant fusilli, arrived in a package from Roland Foods.  According to the label, Don Bruno pasta is made from 100% durum semolina from Puglia that is shaped with bronze dies for the best texture, then dried slowly under controlled heat and humidity for perfect “al dente” results.

While I have eaten corkscrew-shaped fusilli all my life, the giant Don Bruno fusilloni were new to me and looked like just the thing to go with the Macaroni with Tomatoes and Spicy Sausage I was planning to make.  The recipe is from The Bistro Laurent Tourondel Cookbook that I co-authored a couple of years ago with the famous chef.  It has mouth-watering recipes and gorgeous photos from Laurent’s BLT restaurants around the country.

A quick check of my refrigerator revealed 2 cups of my favorite canned Bella di San Marzano brand tomatoes and some sweet Italian sausages left from a recipe testing project, a package of Satur Farms wild arugula and an open bottle of white wine.  Laurent’s recipe calls for fresh tomatoes and hot sausages, but the canned tomatoes were a reasonable substitute and I could add some crushed red pepper to compensate for the mildness of the sausages, though I preferred not to.  The ridges and twists of the fusilloni seemed like they would be even better than the rigatoni Laurent called for.   I always have pecorino Romano and Parmigiano Reggiano on hand, so the rest was easy.

One of the questions I am asked most frequently is how to prevent pasta from sticking.  Here is my mantra–use a big pot with plenty of boiling water and salt; stir often; don’t overcook; drain, sauce and serve immediately.  Here is how I do it:

I started the sauce and put up a 6-quart pot filled with 5 quarts of water on high heat.  When it came to a rolling boil, in went the fusilloni and a generous amount of coarse salt.  Stirring the pasta frequently, I finished making the sauce just as the pasta became tender yet firm to the bite — in short, al dente. Don’t rely on package cooking times and taste it to be sure.  Allow a little for the residual cooking that occurs between the time you remove the pasta from the heat and start eating.  Remember — when the pasta is ready, it is is not the time to make a phone call, set the table, or have a drink.  The sauce has to be finished before the pasta, and you can’t hesitate with the cooked pasta or it will overcook and get sticky.  I drained the fusilloni, reserving a cupful of the cooking water just in case, and quickly mixed them with the hot sauce.  I added the cheese and a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and tossed again.  (The hot water wasn’t necessary this time.  If the pasta had been dry, I would have added a little to loosen it up.)  Meanwhile,  Charles opened a bottle of Pallagrello, an unusual, red wine from Italy and we sat down to eat.

The  fusilloni had good wheaty flavor and held their texture and shape beautifully.  The ridges in the pasta captured the bits of sausage and basil and tangled around the long arugula leaves.  The pasta was a perfect match for the rich sauce, freshened with grassy flavor of the arugula.   As I savored the pasta and the rustic, pleasantly bitter wine, I thought of all the ways I might use fusilloni again.  It would go well with all kinds of meaty ragus or sauces containing bits of cauliflower or broccoli, or strands of zucchini or carrots.  If by chance you cant find Don Bruno fusilloni, use regular fusilli, gemelli or rotelle.

MACARONI/TOMATOES/SPICY SAUSAGE

Adapted from The Bistro Laurent Tourondel Cookbook by Laurent Tourondel and Michele Scicolone (John Wiley & Sons 2008)

Serves 4

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for finishing

12 ounces hot or sweet Italian sausage, casings removed

1 small onion, finely chopped

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1/2 cup dry white wine

4 medium-ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into large dice

Coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

8 ounces fusilloni

1 bunch arugula, tough stems removed and coarsely chopped (1 cup)

2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil

1/2 cup freshly grated Pecorino Romano or Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Cook the Sausage In a skillet large enough to hold all of the ingredients, heat the oil over medium heat.  Add the sausage meat and cook until lightly browned, stirring the meat to break up the lumps.   With a slotted spoon, transfer the meat to a bowl.

Add the onion and garlic to the pan.  Sauté until the onion is tender, about 5 minutes.  Add the wine and bring to a simmer.  Cook 1 minute more, scraping the bottom of the pan.

Add the tomatoes and season with salt and pepper.  Simmer for 20 minutes, or until thickened.  Stir in the sausage meat and cook until heated through, about 1 minute more.

Cook the Fusilloni Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil.  Add the fusilloni and plenty of salt.   Cook, stirring frequently, until the fusilloni is al dente, tender yet still firm.   Drain the pasta and add it to the skillet with the sauce.

Finish the Pasta Add the arugula and basil and toss well.  Drizzle with a little extra-virgin olive oil.  Sprinkle with the cheese and toss again.  Serve immediately.