Fusilli con gamberi e melanzane – September 8

Cooking, being an inexact science, sometimes surprises and sometimes disappoints. It reminds one of musical improv or other strange mixings where sometimes, you can follow the instructions and end up with an inferior product, and sometimes, it all just works. If yesterday was the former, today was the latter.

An adaptation of this. I’m intrigued by seafood and eggplant dishes, so expect another similar dish to follow, perhaps with mussels. It’s a very southern combo, quite different to the cucina veneta that I know best.

I think one thing that made a difference is that I salted the eggplant for much longer than I intended. I sliced thin, then cubed. I also scored some wine, really the remains of a bottle of 13% American chardonnay and thus not suitable for drinking, but perfect for the magic that cooking with alcohol seems to bring. (My brother, who makes me look like the amateur that I am, is more aware of the chemical reactions involved.) I also washed and dried (as best I could) the slices before cubing.

While this was going on I was thawed my Italian branded, but Thai-caught shrimp.

Sautéed one large garlic clove, added the eggplants, let them get soft, added a good dash of the wine. Put on the pasta water to boil.

Once the eggplant were soft, I added another can of these magic Victoria cherry tomatoes. (Not having the polpa that the recipe called for.)

I am lucky enough to have fresh basil growing outside (yes, war zone herb garden), so I topped with that, frozen parsley and dried oregano.

Mixed well with a dash of the pasta water and let it evaporate.

It came out smashingly. I’m surprised I was able to control myself enough to save some for later. I had a healthy appetite thanks to this morning’s 10K — although war zone running is perhaps best left for another blog.

Now, off to the PX to see if they’ve resolved their shipment issues. If nothing else, I need some more canned tomatoes.

I invite readers to send in ideas for okra.

September 3 — Pasta con bietola e pancetta

Warning: this dish looks much healthier than it probably is

With the leftover pancetta from the amatriciana and some frozen bietola, I had a couple of options. Basically an amalgamation of these two recipes.

I did a soffritto with EVOO, frozen onions (working on obtaining fresh ones) and peperoncino while I boiled the bietola. I had the rind (cotenna) of the pancetta, so not wanting to waste, I threw that in and let the fat render down into the EVOO.

I strained out the bietola, kept the water boiling, added the greens to the soffritto, and added the fusilli to the water. (As anyone who’s made the Ligurian classic trofie al pesto con patate e fagiolini knows, there’s magic to cooking pasta in same water used to cook greens.) When the pasta was just al dente, I strained and tossed the whole thing in the soffritto, which of course by this time had a good amount of pork fat in it. The fusilli turned a dark color due to the fat. I then threw in a few pomodori al forno (Saclà, Italian PX) — these are semi-dried, so much fatter and juicier than the usual sun-dried ones. I tossed the whole thing with grana padano (Italian PX), not pecorino as I’d have preferred, and the result was excellent. But then again, as grandmothers from both the Southern U.S. and the southern part of the boot know, fat from the belly of the pig does make things good. As my dad would say, “now you’re cookin’ with grease!”

I’m learning how to moderate with very quick-warming and very hot burners (my moka boils up almost instantly in the morning), so the key here was to cook the pancetta and cotenna very slowly. I also took the time to slice the pancetta very, very thin, almost like bacon. (It pays to cook when not starving sometimes.)

I took a break from cooking and eating as I had another stomach bug, the second in as many months. M&M Enterprise Cooking started as a way to avoid food-borne illness but there are a lot of ways to get sick. As a colleague asked, “did you touch a doorknob?” So as long as I’m able to handle it, M&M will continue. Today I went ahead with the plan to make spaghetti all’amatriciana.

Amatriciana, like many simple regional dishes, has many variations and there are a lot of opinions about it: onions or not, white wine or not, pancetta or guanciale, spaghetti or bucatini. I’ll leave it to the curious to look around the internet, although I’ll caution all readers against the New York Times article of January 2008, which exacerbates a number of ridiculous misconceptions about Italian cookery that American travelers have.

This simple and inexpensive dish was a go-to for my Veneta wife and I when we were dating and first married, so I’ve used a variation of her recipe, which differs from stalwart Giallo Zafferano’s in that she never reserved the guanciale/pancetta. What can I say, she’s not from the south, but lived with meridionali for a long time. I prefer to add a bit of wine, but it’s not easy or cheap to get alcohol here, so I forwent this time.

As per usual, the first thing you always do for timing is put on the big pot of cold water to boil for the pasta.

Unlike the wine, I was able to obtain a 200 gram piece of pancetta tesa from the ever-reliable Italian PX. I used somewhere between half and three-quarters of it, cutting off the rind and reserving it for a later bean dish. I cut it straight through, leaving a hunk of pink meat in the middle and fat on either side. I tossed that in some good EVOO and added some frozen onions (Italian PX, hard to get fresh here).

This is where it gets tricky — the onions will burn quickly, and you want all the pork fat to cook off into the EVOO. I managed to avoid burning, but my onions got a little more caramelized that I’d normally prefer. I then added some organic red pepper flakes (these came from Amazon).

Next, I tossed in a 400g can of good cherry tomatoes (Victoria, €1.90, Italian PX). I turned up the heat a bit, now that I had some liquid to prevent burning, mashed the tomatoes and kept stirring till it all got to a good consistency.

The Granoro spaghetti (half of a 500g pack, €1.50 at the Italian PX) cooked al dente in about four minutes (always undercook a little, as you’ll finish it all in the pan). As I was draining, I added some of the starchy water to the condimento.

I mixed everything, as one must do, while adding liberal amounts of Grana Padano (the PX has been out of the more authentic Pecorino Romano for the past two weeks).

I plated it carefully, added a tiny bit more cheese, and tiny bit of the Zucchi EVOO (not what I used for cooking).

The result was better than I expected. It all came together well in the mixing, and the pasta itself absorbed the wetter parts of the sauce. The peperoncini and pancetta conspired to make a smoky, earthy flavor. My only regret is that some white wine would have brought that out more, and pecorino even more.

There’s still a hunk of pancetta left, so there’s a chance to revisit.

Humanitarian note: don’t forget that Amatrice, the town the dish gets its name from, was hard-hit by an earthquake two years ago. There’s a festival promoting their local culture starting today, if you’re in the region.

Next up: cooking with frozen seafood, something the PX seems to never run low on.

Penne all’Arrabiata

Five tomatoes and a long hot red pepper sitting in my fridge for a week meant that it was time for this dish. This is about as simple as it gets, so the real challenge here was properly skinning and seeding the tomatoes. I basically followed this recipe by Giallo Zafferano’s Sonia Peronaci to the letter. My mom taught me her mom’s method for peeling tomatoes — immerse for a few seconds in boiling water, run under cold water, and then the skin comes off easily. Grandma would apparently then just squeeze them directly into the cooking vessel. (She was of Scottish, not Italian, extraction.) This method is fine but it’s a bit hard on the old hands. Sonia’s method, which calls for making an X-shaped cut on the top of the tomato and then immersing in a bowl of ice, offers a slight improvement.

Granoro penne, the end of the DOP pecorino (which, I note, to date has not been restocked), frozen parsley all from the Italian PX.

Tomatoes from a vendor at the bazaar.

Chili pepper from the cafeteria.

Also a bit of organic Zucchi EVOO at the end.

The problem with this dish, like with the shrimp, is that the tomatoes on offer are simply not that juicy. I used five, which seems way too many for one dish of pastasciutta normally. But these things don’t cook down much, and what juice there is remains thin and watery.

Think it would have been superior with some canned cherry tomatoes or passata, which I’ll keep in mind for the next pastasciutta dish — all’amatriciana.

As my Italian-American college roommate taught me long ago, there’s something about letting any tomato-based dish cool overnight that does magic things to it the next day. Not a whole lot to say about today’s dish — all the basic ingredients and their sourcing were described in the previous post. Today’s task was simply to boil water and add Granoro penne rigate for 9 minutes while last night’s parmigiana pugliese re-heated in the oven. Drain the pasta, mix everything in the pot, top with some DOP pecorino and the organic Zucchi EVOO, and eccociqua — a delightful sort of pasta alla norma con salsiccia.

Mixing in the pot is absolutely essential, another tip from my old roommate of origini meridionali I learnt before ever even setting foot in Italy. Yet many non-Italian cooks don’t do it and I can’t fathom why, or why not. The just-cooked pasta will be porous and ready to accept the flavor of whatever you’re eating it with — it’s a quick and easy trick that adds a lot of flavor. This ties into a greater idea that non-Italian cooks focus on the “sauce” (more properly a condimento) more than the pasta itself — a cardinal mistake in not only my opinion but likely that of 58 million Italians. This 21-year old New York Times article makes that point in excellent detail.