Category Archives: Food

The Best Thing We Ate – Pumpkin Ice Cream

28 Sunday Dec 2008

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It was a few weeks ago that we ate Sherri’s incomparable Pumpkin Ice Cream.  She has been kind enough to share the recipe, which you can find here.

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Don’t skimp on the trimmings!  You can see them above the bowl of ice cream: caramel sauce, candied pecans, and rum-soaked raisin.  All of them add immeasurably to the ice cream experience.  I especially like the pecans, but the others are awfully good too.  And as Sherri has pointed out, if all the raisins aren’t eaten with the ice cream they make a delightful little mid-afternoon nibble in the following days.

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Louise’s Birthday Cake

13 Saturday Dec 2008

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With luck we each have a birthday every year.  As it happened, this year mine was Major (or so it seemed to me) so the Captain pulled out all the stops on the birthday cake.

I love chocolate, although probably not quite as much as the next person. A chocolate bar in the fridge is likely to be nibbled to death over time, but it will not disappear suddenly. My idea of perfect chocolate is rich, but in small doses, and preferably with something other than chocolate as a foil. This elaborate cake is just right in all regards.

The picture makes it look a little gloppy, and I guess it is – but it’s gloppy in the best sense of the word. It fills your mouth with flavor and your heart with gladness. I didn’t get around to taking the photo until it had been nearly all eaten, so it is not a beautiful picture. But it was a magnificent cake.

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The neighbors were nice enough to come over for a couple of hours and help us out – this is definitely NOT a cake for two people to try to eat: too rich, too much of it. Most of us washed it down with Prosecco, Italy’s answer to champagne. It’s a sweet, but not too sweet, wine with bubbles that keep desserts from being cloying. A sweet dessert wine would not be good with this cake I think – too much sweetness.

It’s not the easiest cake in the world to make, but it’s not complicated. It just takes a while. And it is one of the best cakes you will ever eat. You can find the recipe here, or over on the right under good recipes.

Buon appetito!

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Crimson Pie

02 Tuesday Dec 2008

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Thanksgiving week – how much good food can a person eat in just a few days?  Too much!  We were guests this year of one of the world’s best cooks, Sherri of the Best Brownies in the World, and her piano-playing spouse Steve.  When Sherri straps on her apron you know you are in for some excellent eating, and this non-traditional Thanksgiving was no exception.

Stand-outs of the day’s eating (and yes, we ate from mid-day through the evening) were the Captain’s pate, a squash-pumpkin soup, crab cakes, grits with shrimp, pumpkin ice cream, chocolate mousse and my own small contribution, crimson pie. Over the next few weeks I’ll give you the recipes for some of Sherri’s treats, if I can coax them from her (as a natural cook she spends less time measuring, taking notes and writing down the recipe than she does simply cooking – so we’ll have to do some re-creation work).

For today I offer the recipe for Crimson Pie – not because it was really the best thing we ate (it wasn’t), but because I have the recipe right here and it is really good.  It is a blueberry cranberry pie and comes out a gorgeous crimson color – perfect for Christmas as well as Thanksgiving. (Recipe under ‘Recipes’ over on the right.)

We were given this treasure by Gerri Griswold of Connecticut fame, and we thank her every time we make it. She received it from her friend Alison Kurberry.img_7248

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Pizzoccheri della Valtellina

25 Tuesday Nov 2008

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The night before we left Italy our friends Elena and Michela gave us dinner.  Pictured above is the Pizzoccheri della Valtellina (pronounced peets-och’-air-eee della Vahl’-tell-ee’-nah) that Elena prepared.  I had never heard of this dish, but judging from the number of recipes on the internet it must be rather well-known.  It is one of the best cold-weather dishes I’ve ever eaten.  The first thing you will have noticed is that the pasta is not white; it is a buckwheat pasta (the pizzoccheri of the dish’s name), which is readily available in Italy.  It may not be so easy to find where you are, but it is easy to make, as you will see from the recipe over on the right.  This is a dish open to infinite variety depending on your taste, what you’ve got on hand or what’s in season.  Elena made hers with spinach, but you may use many different greens.  I have chosen the recipe that best seems to match what Elena gave us, but you may want a different one – there are a bunch of choices. But if you want to try Elena’s, click here or over on the right under Recipes.

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Risotto Bolognese

11 Tuesday Nov 2008

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Actually it was last week, and, alas, there’s no photo of this delicious dish.  You will simply have to imagine a steaming bowl of slightly golden risotto, with a big dollop of meaty bolognese sauce nestled in the center, the whole topped with a light dusting of freshly grated parmigiano cheese.  Neither component is especially original, but the combination is something a bit more unusual. As I write the rain is beating against the windows and it is chilly outside.  Many parts of the US and of Italy are preparing for the cold dark months ahead; there’s no better winter comfort food than a perfectly cooked risotto. With the Bolognese sauce, a salad on the side and a good bottle of wine this dish will restore your good will and sense of well-being.

The Captain has always used Marcella Hazan’s recipe for bolognese, but a couple of times ago when he made it he discovered we had none of the called-for celery, so he simply made it without. We discovered we preferred it that way.  The celery announces itself with just a bit too much emphasis in a bolognese we think.

As for the risotto, try to find carnaroli rice; it is the best variety.  If you can not find it, use the best arborio you can find.

As mentioned in an earlier post, Arborio is the most ordinary-looking little farm town you can image.  I had always imagined a sweet little fancy village filled with restaurants.  No.  Here is Arborio:

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As always, the recipes are over on the right (not above). Buon appetito!

A Pressing engagement – Olives, part 2

05 Wednesday Nov 2008

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Saturday, the day we took our olives to the press, was a gorgeous day. It turned out we had 99 Kilograms of fruit, not the 111 our funky scale told us (we weigh using the unreliable technique of standing on the scale with the olives, then without, then subtracting the difference; it’s kind of comical, especially the shocking ‘without olives’ part).  Mixing ours with T and J’s 75 K gave us a total of 174 K from which we got a total of 26 K of oil.  My trusty calculator tells me that almost 15% of each olive is oil.

We came home with 16.3 liters of oil, and T & J came home with 12.3, giving a remarkable liter of oil for every 6 K of olives picked, a very good result.  We were all happy except for T & J who had picked only half their trees.  Fortunately they were able to pick the rest the next day during a brief respite from the rain, and got them pressed with a batch of another friend at a different frantoio.

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The frantoio is in the teeny little building above, squished between San Pietro church and a building housing a delightful restaurant where we ate an enormous lunch (don’t even ask).  The olives are weighed, dumped in a chute, washed, and then disappear into a vast array of machinery with pipes, hoses, gears and belts.  Eventually one is told to put a container under a nozzle and, as they like to say here, Wah-Lah!  Olive oil, golden green and slightly bitter, arrives.

The bits that don’t come back to you as oil are pumped off into a big truck just outside the building.  All this muck is taken off to another kind of mill where it is heated and somehow even more oil is extracted.  What we received is the Virgin (or, I suppose, Extra Virgin) oil.  What is made from the leftover is ‘olive oil.’

Now the oil will sit in its demijohn for about 4 months.  Impurities will sink to the bottom, and somehow the bitterness will disappear and we’ll be left with the mellow, rich oil for which Liguria is justly famous.  It’s hard to wait!

There is a series of photographs of the process available here. Some of the photos look very hazy.  That is because the interior of a frantoio IS hazy – it must be from tiny particles of olive oil floating in the air.  They get into the back of your throat when you walk in and you wonder if you’ll be able to continue breathing.  It must be very good for the complexion.

So the Olive Adventure of ’08 is over.  Our trees will be pruned rather severely this winter, so it may be a year or two until we pick again – unless we can help our friends pick, which is always fun.  It was a Banner Year.

Olives!

02 Sunday Nov 2008

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‘Tis the season to be harvesting olives.  All around us the hills are festooned with colorful nets, principally orange and yellow.  They are wrapped around the trees and are attached one to the next making the steep terraces look like a brightly colored slopes.  The olives drop into pockets in the low parts of the nets, whence they are easily collected.

Our friends T and J have 51 trees which have been beautifully pruned and cared for.  They do not use nets, but instead hand-pick the olives, which is easy to do with their trees, none of which is much taller than we are.  The pruned and umbrella-shaped trees are much more productive than trees which are ‘let go.’

Our trees are in the latter category, very much in need of a pruning, which they will receive this winter.  They had been untended for at least 20 years when we bought our place.  Just after we moved in a friend sent a friend over who pruned some of the trees, but none of them very dramatically, and we’ve done nothing about it since.  This means the trees are huge.

We use a system that falls somewhere between the Old-Timers’ and T and J’s.  We have one net, which we carry from tree to tree (we have only about 15 trees).  Then we spend a very long time positioning poles to hold the net in place and form a bowl under the tree we’re working on.  There’s usually a fair amount of good-natured discussion about the placement of the poles, but eventually the net is positioned in a more or less stable way.  Then the Captain takes a long, thick bamboo stick and whacks the trees to make the fruit fall.  This is a time-honored way of removing fruit, but it’s fallen out of favor with modern olive-culturists.  The preferred method for removing fruit these days is the olive rake, a plastic rake with tines spaced just less than the average olive.  You attach the rake to the weapon of your choice (bamboo stick for us, this year as in photo) and comb out the branches.  The tines pull the olives off and send them spraying all over the place.  With luck a large percentage of them end up in the net.  The Captain alternates whacking with a stout stick and whacking with the rake on a long pole.  Meanwhile I use a rake on a small pole and wander around looking for low branches to strip.  I’m also crazy about finding olives on the ground and putting them in my basket – treasures!

This year the weather has not co-operated with many Ligurian harvesters.  We’ve had heavy rains and very strong winds, the heaviest since the great storm of 2000. A lot of olives have come down, and the weather for several days was just too nasty for gathering those that are still on trees.  Those who got their nets up in a timely fashion are doing very well (it’s a stand-out olive year).  Those who waited will have lost a lot of the crop unless, like me, they like to creep around on their hands and knees under the trees – not an efficient way to gather.

Once the olives are collected it’s good to get them to the mill, the ‘frantoio’, within three days.  Our favorite frantoio over the mountain in Val Fontanabuona went out of business while we weren’t looking last year (there was no olive harvest for anyone in Liguria last year – no olives). So instead yesterday we went to a different mill here in Rapallo.  Stay tuned for the report.  In past years we’ve gotten a liter of oil for each 7 or 8 kg of olives.  We had 111 kg this year (we also didn’t get all of our fruit picked before the weather turned on us).

If you’re really interested in olives, Mort Rosenblum has written a delightful book called ‘Olives’ and subtitled “The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit,” which is stuffed with history, culture and even some recipes.  If you enjoy Life-in-Italy tales, Extra Virgin by the Englishwoman Annie Hawes is an engaging account of her purchase of a rustico and grove of olive trees above Imperia some twenty years ago; she writes appealingly and amusingly of her neighbors and of the land itself.

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Slow Food

26 Sunday Oct 2008

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The opposite of fast food.  That’s the premise behind the organization Slow Food, which was started in 1989 in (of course!) Italy.

Every two years the organization sponsors a Salone Internazionale del Gusto in Torino which, for the first time, was joined this year by Terra Madre, an organization that promotes sustainable agriculture and food production, with a focus on the small producer and preserving taste and biodiversity.  The two groups have much in common in that they both have an interest in the responsible production of delicious food.  Terra Madre focuses more on the agricultural side of the equation, Slow Food on the side of finished food products.  Terra Madre had a much smaller group of exhibitors than did Slow Food, but they were much more interestingly attired (see web album). One theme of this year’s Salone was environmental protection.  Everything was recyclable or made from already recycled materials.

The Salone ran from Oct. 23-27 in the Lingotto Fiera, a HUGE group of pavilions which are a part of a former Fiat manufacturing site.  The whole Fiat plant there has been redesigned as a exhibition center, including the Fiere halls (70,000 square meters) and an auditorium, museum, and exhibit spaces.

Imagine two long aisles of nothing but cheese producers!  A beer hall with at least 10 different beers on tap.  Aisles and aisles of meat products.  Chocolate!  Pasta!  There’s not much that you can eat that wasn’t at the Salone del Gusto… except fast food. And there were not many fresh foods on view; some fruit, not many vegetables, and the meat was all cured in one way or another. One aspect of the Salone which we didn’t take advantage of (nor did many others I’m sure) is the great number of classes, conferences and so forth on various aspects of food, its growth, its preparation and presentation. Over 250 Presidi (chapters of Slow Food) from around the world had exhibits (or something?) – we never got to that pavilion.

Many of the exhibitors were from Italy, but there was a good representation also from Germany and Austria and even someone from Mexico.  And almost all of them gave little tid-bits of their food to taste (except for the caviar and chocolate people, darn it).  You can eat enough for a week on your E 20 admission ticket (and if you’re very lucky, as we were, friends will give you a brace of tickets).  Even the wine was available to taste in small amounts. (Mysteriously all the wine-tasting ground to a halt between 12:30 and 2:30, a great inconvenience to our friend Frank who had developed a powerful thirst.)  Beer of many types was on tap for E 3 for a generous glass.

I truly can’t single out what the very best thing we ate was, it was all fabulous.  We were very careful though, and came home with only one salami and one cheese.  It got easier to resist temptation as the day wore on and our stomachs filled with all our tasting.

Two years ago there were 160,000 visitors at the Salone.  It felt like they all came back on Friday when we were there – it was mobbed.  I can’t imagine what Saturday and Sunday must have been like.  The food people were all unfailingly friendly and pleasant – big smiles and no hard-sell.

It was a fabulous day, but a sensory overload.  There was entertainment in the background almost constantly, and the pavilions are not designed to cut down on sound bouncing around.  There was so much to look at, and to taste, that it was hard to take it all in at once (literally and figuratively).  Will I go back in two years?  If you’d asked me on Friday I’d have said Never!  Too exhausting.  Today?  Well I’d certainly be tempted.  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life.

Here’s a photo album you can look at if you’re interested.  It only scratches the surface of what we saw, but it does give… the flavor.

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Barley Mushroom Casserole

05 Sunday Oct 2008

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Do you find the cooler autumn weather gives your appetite a big boost?  I do!  These days it seems I can’t stop eating, and there is no end of good food here, alas.

Yesterday I was charged to bring home potatoes to go with the Saturday Night Steak.  But a friend and a glass of wine detained me, so the Captain was left with only his imagination and what was already on hand for the starchy part of our meal.

What he came up with was the perfect dish for the season, combining ease of eating and the wonderful Fall flavors of mushrooms and grain.  It does take a bit of planning ahead as there is a fair amount of let-it-sit time in this recipe.  But if you don’t need to whip something up in five minutes this dish is the perfect accompaniment for any meat you may be serving.  I think it would be great at Thanksgiving. If you’re not a meat eater this can be used as a healthy main course. Barley retains its bran and germ, which are nutritious.  (According to the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, eating whole grain barley can regulate blood sugar for up to 10 hrs after consumption compared to white or even whole-grain wheat, which has a similar glycemic index.)

So there it is: good for you, satisfying to eat, filling and, most importantly, yummy – you’ll find the recipe here or over on the right under recipes, *starred* as a Best.

Zoom Zoom

01 Wednesday Oct 2008

Posted by in Customs, Driving in Italy, Food, Italian habits and customs, Italian men, Italy, Liguria, Photographs, Uncategorized

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Sunday in Japan Valentino Rossi won his sixth Moto GP Championship.  That’s motorcycles, and a happy result for Italy.  And in Singapore Filipe Massa and Kimi Raikkonon did not win the Formula One race for Ferrari.  That’s cars, and cause for a national day of mourning in Italy.

Should you care?

Well, that depends.  If you live with or are going to talk to one of the 90% of all Italian males or 60% of the males in the rest of the world (and who knows what percentage of females) who follow motor sports closely, the answer is Yes.  You will want to be at least familiar with the main players so as not to appear a complete dunce.

Personally I stopped watching Formula 1 when Michael Schumacher retired.  There was something about his utter focus, determination and single-mindedness that warmed the cold northern cockles of my heart. (If you haven’t heard of Schumacher, he was the Tiger Woods of Formula One.  If you haven’t heard of Tiger Woods you need a subscription to Sports Illustrated.)  The new Ferrari ace, Massa, is a cute kid, but he doesn’t seem to have the killer instinct that Schumacher had.  And I never did watch the motorcycle races; those boys lean over way too far.

If you live in Italy, however, there’s a more pressing reason for you to keep abreast of at least the racing schedule, if not the results.  Within half an hour of the completion of either of these races the ordinarily gutsy driving of the Italian male becomes downright lunatic.  Sunday morning as I coasted sedately down the hill to Rapallo, shortly after the completion of the MotoGP, a young kid on his all terrain bike came screaming around a car in the opposite direction on a blind curve; he was in the middle of my lane, and very fortunate I wasn’t driving my gravel truck today.

We were on our way to the beautiful city of Chiavari just down the coast from Rapallo.  There is a Mercatino dei Sapori (a food market!) on the last weekend of each month; vendors come from all around the country with absolutely delicious things to eat. Over on the right you can find a link to an album of photos of this delightful event.  This week, however, my interest strayed from the comestibles to the sky, because there was a Canadair flying from the sea to an inland fire and back again, over and over.

The Canadairs are small 2-engine airplanes with big stomachs.  The pilots, who must have to pass an insanity test for the job, skim over the sea and pick up a belly-full of water which they then carry back to the site of the fire, on which they dump their load of water, back and forth, back and forth.  Again on the right you’ll find a link to photos of the Canadairs fighting fire – both from Sunday and from a couple of years ago when they were flying over the hill just behind us.  They engage in amazing feats of flying prowess, aiming right towards a hillside, for instance, and pulling up at the last possible moment, at the same time releasing their water which inertia carries forward to the burning hillside.  It’s incredible to see, much more exciting than either of the races that were on TV that morning.

There’s a great urban myth about the forestieri finding the charred remains of a swimmer, in full scuba outfit, high on a burned out mountain.  He must have been scooped out of the sea by a Canadair and dropped right into the heart of the fire!!  I believed this entertaining tale the first three times I heard it; then the penny dropped.

The pilot this morning flew back and forth low over the city of Chiavari instead of over a less-populated area.  We could hear the low grumble of his engines as he neared the city; the sound growing to a roar as he passed low over the narrow streets, which sent the sound bouncing back and forth till we weren’t sure from which direction it was coming.  The Captain, who should know, says he was between 300-400 feet above us, which sounds like a lot until it’s an airplane flying over your head.  Then it doesn’t seem like nearly enough.

As we were scooting home we watched this hot dog fly parallel to the coast up towards Rapallo.  He then banked sharply and flew directly at a cruise ship in the bay outside Portofino, banked very sharply and flew between the ship and the land, banked again in the other direction around the Portofino lighthouse, and headed back up to the airport at Genova where the Canadairs are based (rather poor pictures of these maneurvers, blue tinted for some reason, on the right).  Anyone on the ship or at the lighthouse will have had a more exciting morning than they had planned. The Captain says that the pilots eat in the cafeteria at the Genova airport at 12:30.  As it was 12:10 I’m sure this fellow was on his way back for lunch.  But he couldn’t resist giving the folks on the land a bit of a thrill.  No doubt he had watched the motor cycle race that morning.