Category Archives: Italian recipes

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Stuffed Rolled Pork Roast

07 Sunday Sep 2008

Posted by in Italian recipes, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

A couple of years ago the Captain and one of his buddies added a rotisserie to our bbq using inexpensive and readily available parts. He uses it almost weekly in the summer and the results are always stupendous.  If you don’t have room for a rotisserie, check out the Ron Popeil counter-top appliance, or one of its cousins from Ronco – Just Set It and Forget It!  Our friends H & J have one and have successfully cooked legs of lamb amongst many other things. A rotisserie chicken that you cook yourself is 1,000 times better than the salt- and water-filled birds from the supermarket.

This week’s Best Thing was the rolled stuffed loin of pork that the Captain cooked on the rotisserie. It is a simple dish, but the flavors of the prosciutto and the marjoram make the happiest of marriages with the pork. He cooked it for about an hour and a half, but of course cooking time is always dependent on the size of the roast, the temperature of the fire, and the distance of the meat from the fire. You will have to be the judge of when it is done.

And if a rotisserie is not available to you, this roast can be cooked very satisfactorily in a 375 oven.

The recipe is on the right, under ‘Recipes.’  Buon Appetito!

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Tagliarini with Porcini Mushrooms

24 Sunday Aug 2008

Posted by in Italian recipes, Italy, Piemonte, Uncategorized

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

We think our cousins want to kill us.  No kidding!  They are lovely people, but look at what they made us eat on Thursday.

We started with hot little red peppers, some stuffed with anchovies, others with tuna or cheese; these are among my favorite things to eat in the world.  They also served olives with the same variety of stuffings.  In the picture you can see the salami and the lardo they forced us to eat. Lardo‘s name tells you exactly what it is. It sounds disgusting, but it is one of the most sublime things you will ever put in your mouth – rich, creamy, salty – it is sinful (and also deadly, I suspect).  It’s an interesting food with a long history and is so good it is impossible to resist.

In case we were feeling cholesterol-deprivation we were also given three kinds of cheese, two goat and one cow, all Piemontese, that were to be eaten on little crackers and topped with mostarda, either grape and wine, or pear and pinoli (these mostarde  were just like jam).  I had to keep trying them as I couldn’t decide which was better. Cousin Gino served the Cortese wine that the Captain and I had just picked up at the Rinaldi winery – about which more soon (stay tuned).

Following this group of light antipasti we moved on to this week’s Best Thing That We Ate: Tagliarini ai Porcini.  The mushrooms are beginning to appear in the woods to the north now, and this is a dish that wants fresh funghi.  You can find the recipe over on the right under Recipes; it is starred as a Best. This dish is also served frequently in Liguria, but according to Fred Plotkin it is made with olive oil instead of butter, and there are neither tomatoes nor pinoli in it.  We loved the Piemontese version.

Thank goodness there was no meat course; we would have croaked for sure.  We had offered to bring a clafoutis of peaches which we did.  But perhaps Cousin Giovanni was afraid her family wouldn’t care for our dessert, so just in case she served Stuffed Peaches (pesche ripiene) and Gino popped the cork on a crisp prosecco.  Both desserts are pictured on the left.  Giovanna’s dessert was almost selected as this week’s best – it had a very surprising ingredient.

As a quick bonus, here’s how she made it:  Take most of the pulp out of the peaches, leaving sturdy little peach boats with skins still on.  Chop up the pulp with amaretto cookies and add some unsweetened cocoa powder.  Stuff the peach halves with the filling and bake in a moderate oven for a while.  Couldn’t be easier or more delicious.  The mixture of chocolate and peaches was both startling and pleasing.

By the way… this was lunch.

Buon appetito!

The Best Thing We Ate This Week – Spezzatino di Vitello

17 Sunday Aug 2008

Posted by in Italian recipes, Piemonte, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

Do I have a picture of it?  Of course not!  But I do have a lovely shot of the pot in which it was cooked:

The pot belongs to our friends Leo and Isa who spend some of their time in the little Piemontese village of Sostegno.  Evidently the pot is picking up some good vibrations, as Leo likes to listen to Rock and Roll while he cooks and cleans up.

The Captain, who cooked the Veal Spezzatini for Friday evening’s dinner, had harvested some fresh bay leaves and one very hot pepper for his recipe.  It looks rather Christmasy, no?

We joined Leo and other friends for a celebration of Ferragosto in Sostegno, as we do every year.  This year we had the Big Meal on Thursday evening.  It was an enormous fish, called in Italian a ‘lucio’ (pike) more than four pounds, that son Silvio had caught the day before.  In fact, it is one of the ugliest fish I’ve ever seen – how about you?  Ever seen one uglier?    But I must say, it was quite delicious once it was filleted and cooked on the grill. In this picture it is soaking in its pre-cooking bath of lemon juice and herbs.

But back to the matter at hand, the Spezzatino di Vitello…

This is something the Captain frequently whips up, and it is always a little different.  The starred recipe, under recipes over on the right, is the way he made it on Saturday, and in spite of the remarkable fish, it wins the nod for the best thing we ate this week. (Sorry, Leo and Silvio – the fish was good, but…)

There were two other Very Good things we ate over the weekend, and they get honorable mention this week: Leo’s mother’s stuffed eggs and Leo’s Polenta Cuncia.  I wish I had a photo of the eggs because they are lovely, and quite different from what we think of when we think ‘deviled eggs.’ For starters, they are green (Get back, Dr. Seuss!).  I do have a photo of the polenta:

Basically polenta cuncia is polenta into which you have stirred massive amounts of cheese and a bit of butter.  It is heavenly, though it makes your arteries scream.  Usually it is served during the cold weather, because it is rich; we had it on Friday because it was pouring rain all day and was rather chilly – it’s a wonderful dish for the upcoming days of autumn and winter.

Recipes are over on the right under the heading Recipes.

Buon Appetito!

How to bust a diet – Italian style

07 Monday Jul 2008

Posted by in Italian recipes, Italy, Piemonte, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

A friend who is dieting recently wrote an e-mail lamenting the fact that she had fallen off the wagon by eating – gasp – a piece of toast with marmalade, and drinking – double gasp – a G & T.  I had to tell her that hers were but minor peccadillos…

THIS is how you really shoot a diet all to pieces ~  Get up too early, eat a sensible breakfast, drive 2+ hours to Sostegno in Piemonte, to the country house of Leo and Isa. Hang around waiting for Carlo and Reka to show up for lunch, eat bread while waiting. Then eat some more bread and drink some wine with it. That wine was good; have some more.

Carlo and Reka & Anna and Jacobo appear, go to the table. Eat polenta cuncia – usually eaten in winter but it’s cold and rainy today, so… it is made with lots and lots of cheese and butter and it is so good you must have just a little bit more. Then have some other anti-pasti, perhaps a brace of stuffed eggs, some more bread with egg yolk something on it, then some bagna cauda on half a broiled red pepper (bagna cauda is a sauce made of anchovies, garlic and oil.  Its name is sometimes written “bagna calda”, but it is a Piemontese dish, and the correct Piemontese word is “cauda”.  Thus sayeth Leo). The salami looks pretty good too, so try several slices of both kinds. But it’s all so salty! Drink more wine.

Then eat the main course, which is just plain old ordinary polenta and a cotechino, which is a sort of fatty, spicy mixed meat something stuffed in a casing and boiled for a while. Red wine. Feel like you’re going to die. But wait. L & I’s daughter Anna’s boyfriend’s mother has sent along a tiramisu, and it would be awful if word got back to her that someone didn’t like it. Eat tiramisu. Oh gosh, look at the time – it’s after 4 p.m. Go for a walk, a long walk, no matter the rain.

Prepare for dinner. Help by setting the table and testing to see if the bread is still good. It is. When asked say that you want the fish instead of the beef (because after all you are on a diet!). Commiserate with Louis that his pesto lasagna has had to sit too long before being served. Eat a big square so he won’t feel badly. Eat your whole fish after removing head and tail – it has been baked in tin foil with olive oil and has been stuffed with thyme. It is heavenly. Feel sorry for all the fatties eating meat. Eat a second portion of salad because it is good diet food. Wine? Yes! Some of each please, and 2 extra glasses of the Triminer because it is particularly good with the fish. Dessert? No thank you. Oh, that’s right, we brought it (purchased, not made: a light cakey thing called Dolce Varese)- the others might think it’s poison if you don’t eat it. Have a second piece to lay their worries completely to rest.

Go to bed hating yourself, but resolving to do better tomorrow.  That’s how we go off-diet in Italy! How do you do it?

Meet me at 50.0 LMT at the Castello… we’ll do lunch

20 Tuesday May 2008

Posted by in Italian recipes, Italy, Liguria, Rapallo, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Remember when the US tried to go metric?  Disaster!  Just how much is a gram, a liter, a kilo??

One of the vexing aspects of living in the EU is trying to adapt to the metric system.  Somehow 27 C doesn’t sound nearly as warm as 80 F, at least not to my American ears.  We encounter conversion woes every time we are given a recipe.  The result is that we’re living in a half-way house, marooned between metric and imperial measures.  An example is the new lasanga recipe over in the Recipes link to your right – I asked Louis to write it out for me (he made it several nights ago and it was very well received , especially by Massimo).  When he gave it to me the ingredients were in grams, for both solids and liquids, and the temperature was in Fahrenheit; fortunately a quick visit to a terrific conversion site made it easy to list the imperial equivalents for American and British friends.  Somehow I don’t think we’ll ever be completely at ease in this metric world.

Don’t even get me started on clothing sizes (bras come in 1, 2, 3 or 4… what does that mean??). And shoes (my size 39 sounds huge, but it’s really only 8.5).

At least the clock looks the same here – what would a metric clock look like?  We’d have to dispense with 2 hours on our clock face and come up with all kinds of strange names.  Turns out it’s been done!  It takes us about half a centiday (+/- 12 minutes) to drive from our house to downtown Rapallo… I think.  No, let’s stick with our present clocks with their friendly faces.  It’s hard enough to figure out how many grams of cheese to put in the lasagna!