Tomato Pie with Jumbo Scallions and Bacon

I hope the holiday season gave you all time to be still and reflect on the year as it passed perhaps via most golden and perfect of all meditation opportunities, fooling around in your kitchen with no pressing need to generate a large or timely meal, maybe utilizing a night or two in that golden week between Christmas and NYE. If you did not have this opportunity, I guess you missed out.

By the end of it all, even I had had enough. Lasagna and Thanksgiving Food Dinner II with the families, a standing rib roast for the two of us, fried chicken on NYE and a sundry of interspersed meals inspired by greats like Tom Colicchio and David Chang. You might think I’d give up after this feastish onslaught and say “meh” on this particular evening, but the last night before the return to work, waking up early and wrestling I-95 called for something delicious, if not seasonal. E suggested making some pizzas and that felt perfect.

White Pie with Ricotta, Arugula, Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano

I have the blind-baking system down for our gas-burning Metro-oven, which in all measurable respects is vastly inferior to our New York City electric-powered chamber of thermal awesomeness (it’s no where near as hot and no where near as dry). Never daunted by hardware deficiencies, I cope. I push the pizza dough thin on my board while pre-heating the oven set at the maximal setting with a cookie sheet inside. Next, out comes the cookie sheet and flop goes the dough on top. If you miss or mess up (creases, wrinkles or folds…) you have *one* more chance before it cooks too much to recover, so flop good. Attack the dough with a fork to properly perforate. Five minutes with nothin’ on it to get the cooking done.

The first pie was anointed with my stove-top quick tomato sauce of sautéed garlic, red pepper flakes, de-glazed with wine and finished with two big cans of squished tomatoes. I bubble this vigorously for at least 30-45 minutes. I knew the sauce would lack the gravitas of a long- batch, so I added some cubed bacon to the pie and some sliced jumbo scallions for a fresh, fairly light but satisfying pie. E assumed command of the second pie, prepped the same way and prepared in the traditional piadina-style from Emilia-Romagna, as seen in some magazine we bought like 5 years ago or something. [Ed.--It was an adaptation from a Food & Wine recipe from 2007/8 I believe. The original recipe is here if you want to try your hand at making piadini.] Another simple assembly of prosciutto, arugula, ricotta and Parmesan it is simple and significant, a solid pizza anytime.

May whatever you concocted in that last holiday weekend carry you to a frank and fortunate new year. And if you didn’t cook anything during that magical time, get on it! Until later!

Roast Beef Sandwich with Grilled Red Onions and Radish Slaw

While I tend to keep these thoughts off of the blog (mainly because Michael doesn’t want this to turn into a let’s-bash-celebrity-chefs snarkfest, a request I can understand), when around friends or coworkers I am known for being a bit…opinionated about various food personalities. My ire is usually only aimed at a select few who will go unnamed here, but when you are generously gifted a cookbook for the holidays and the giver prefaces you opening it with “I don’t know if you like this person” it’s a sign that you can be rather intense about said opinions.

Whoops.

The preface was completely unnecessary, of course, because when I saw it was a copy of Tom Colicchio’s ‘wichcraft I was positively elated. I’ve always wanted to try out his sandwich shop (there are locations all over Manhattan and he’s expanded to other cities too), but in all of our weekend travels around the city I never seemed to be near one when I was searching for something to eat. Well, it’s time to make up for lost time and lost sandwiches, and what better way to dive in than to make his take on a classic roast beef?

Roast Beef with Radish Slaw, Grilled Red Onions, and Black Pepper Mayonnaise

The great thing about this book is the mix of unique and traditional recipes, often which can be found in a single sandwich. His roast beef with grilled red onions and radish slaw is a perfect example of this: he has you prepare the beef simply and fairly traditionally, and then swings right with some unconventional takes on sandwich toppings, and you pick up a few new techniques or new-to-you flavor combinations along the way. The grilled red onions in particular were an unexpected treat: first rubbed with oil and then charred and slightly cooked on a grill pan, they are then transferred to a bowl and tossed with curry powder, rosemary, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper. They become a lovely little condiment that can be either used immediately or stored for up to a week, and they make a grand and very fast alternative to caramelized onions if you’re making burgers during the week. The radish slaw–a combination of daikon and horseradish, topped with thinly sliced red radishes–provides a good amount of bite and the right amount of crunch and freshness to the sandwich so that you don’t feel like you’re eating a big and bread-y meat bomb.

He also has you whip up some homemade pepper mayo to slather onto the bottom half of the roll, and all I will say to that is this: if all mayo tasted like homemade mayo, I’d like it a lot, lot more than I do now, which is probably for the best. This may have been an amazing sandwich, but it’s only the start, because I have so many pages earmarked to try over the next few months.

Momofuku's chicken and egg

Neither Michael nor I said the actual words over the course of the last week of 2011, but in retrospect it was pretty clear we were both missing our tiny kitchen after four days of holiday celebrating with not much opportunity to get behind the stove. Day two of our mini-we-miss-New-York-Week (subtitle: the week we bounced back and forth between Tom Colicchio and David Chang’s cookbooks) was another “let’s take on a Serious Project!” day–although while this is a dish that takes some time to make, with a little planning I could see us enjoying this on a random weekday evening. It was also a great opportunity to break in one of our Christmas presents (although that is a very poor choice of words given what it is):

A set of rice bowls! My brother-in-law is an artist (primarily painting) and a ceramics teacher (not his primary medium but Michael and his siblings are all naturally scary-good at ceramics) and so we have an apartment chock full of his original work and a budding collection of some beautiful dishes that he’s made for us in the studio: namely a coffee mug, a tea mug, and these bowls (of which there are four in all). While there was no way I would not serve chicken & egg in these vessels, I was a little concerned that they’d be too small given all of the delicious food that would be packed into them: brown rice, a poached egg, confit-ed chicken thigh, scallions, and the ever-addictive quick-salt pickles. It’s not easy to tell from these pictures, but they are about the diameter of a well-sized navel orange, more or less. That’s a lot of food to fit into half a navel orange.

That worrying was completely unfounded once we dug into our bowls and promptly were stuffed almost before we got down to the brown rice, and that’s because you basically cook chicken legs (or thighs only, in our case) in rendered fat that’s spiked with bacon to add smokiness. Ideally it turns into a confit of sorts, but we didn’t go that far on this try–this is where some additional time and planning ahead would have been even more helpful, but the chicken still came out really delicious despite us kind of skipping this step. (Forgive us, Chef Chang.) The chicken is then grilled skin-on and despite cooking in fat it came out quite crispy–then again, the same could be said for fried chicken, so that really should come as no surprise. But it does show you how often we deep-fry food in our household.

Everything else came together smoothly and (mostly) perfectly. The rice needed time to cook, of course, but left on the stovetop it didn’t need much tending and it was nothing simpler than to run a knife through some scallions. The quick-salt pickles were also a breeze to make: 2 Kirby/pickling cucumbers sliced thin either using a sharp knife or mandoline and then mixed with 1 tablespoon each kosher salt and sugar, then letting them sit for 10-15 minutes before rinsing off the salt and sugar. One of my poached eggs was a little over-done (three minutes was a bit too long), but still edible, of course.

So maybe it’s not the most typical of weekday fare, but it did give our Wednesday night an injection of New York sophistication.

Bone-In Ribeye Steak, aka the best damn roast beef we ever had.

One of the downsides in traveling to celebrate the holidays is not having a reason to buy any of the special holiday-only products that are usually in one’s supermarket meat department. At Fairway this is particularly difficult when you see such fascinating things like goose or capon or the crown roasts of lamb and pork that are on special and look absolutely delicious, but are far too large for two people to reasonably consume on their own. The week before Christmas tested our resistance to not hauling home a huge hunk of meat when Fairway was sampling its standing choice rib roasts: two bites of the medium-rare beef had us both sorely tempted,  but it felt a little too over-indulgent, even for us. Cut to a few days later when a gift card to my favorite store fell into my lap and it took all of five seconds for me to offer to use it to procure a couple of bones of rib roast. We purchased it the evening before we were heading to Pennsylvania for the holiday weekend, and the following morning it was in the fridge, dry-aging to perfection.

Post dry-aging, prior to going into the oven

We had portioned out the meat to serve over two meals: one of the ribs would serve for Tuesday’s dinner (the night we returned) and the other would be saved for roast beef sandwiches later in the week (more on that in another post). What I struggled with, though, was what to serve with the beef on Tuesday–I wanted pasta (obviously)–but I had no idea what would pair well with such a huge slab of meat. Moreover–I wanted something that felt grown-up, sophisticated. Adult. Something that challenged me and wasn’t just my favorite foods mixed into a pan, a dish I could learn something in the process of cooking it.

Enter Tom Colicchio.

It’s funny–the week of dinners between Christmas and New Year’s was a wistful tribute to great New York chefs, or at least two: Colicchio and Chang. The theme wasn’t intentional, but I wanted to take the time that was afforded to us to challenge ourselves during the week and to take some risks, and what better way to start than by attempting to gently cook and enjoy cabbage? I’m a very, very bad Irish girl in that I loathe most cooked cabbage  (and I’m a very bad German as I abhor sauerkraut, to the point that the smell of it makes me feel nauseous). But there was this dish of lightly cooked cabbage, cranberry beans and braised artichokes* that caught my attention because it fulfilled all of those qualities: it certainly was sophisticated, it was by no means a dish I would serve to a child, and it seemed like it would work as a nice pairing to a big slab of roast beef. That it would challenge my dislike of cooked cabbage was the Parmigiano-Reggiano on the proverbial plate.

Orecchitte with artichokes, cabbage, and cranberry beans

I took the reigns in cooking this dish: I shelled the beans and then cooked them for the hour and a half they needed, and then I brought together the vegetable ragout. The only thing I cheated on was braising the artichokes, as the fresh ones I saw in the store didn’t look great and so I grabbed a few marinated ‘chokes from the olive bar instead. (In the future, I’d omit the artichokes entirely rather than use these again–too briny and intense for an otherwise relatively delicate dish.) The finished results of the dish that night were tasty, and the photo I Tweeted earned me a polite response from Chef Colicchio himself which made my week. But it did not keep in the fridge–the cabbage wilted and made that watery cabbage residue that reminds me too much of sauerkraut. But the cranberry bean preparation was excellent–one that I’m more than happy to make again and again whenever I want to include some beans into a soup or another pasta dish, and really, that’s the kind of thing I hope to pick up from Tom Colicchio’s cookbooks. I don’t always love his final dishes, but I love how every dish starts from preparing the ingredients properly, and from there countless possibilities burst forth. And frankly, that’s good enough for me.

Ginger Scallion Sauce

Were I not fairly certain that doing this would elicit more than a few odd glances (and if it lasted more than a day or two), I would make an enormous batch of David Chang’s ginger scallion sauce, dole it out into quart-sized containers and give it to people as holiday gifts. While not nearly as festive as a plate of Christmas cookies, I would dare any recipient to not fall for this sauce/condiment at first bite. It goes with virtually anything we’ve paired it with so far, from ramen to rice noodles to hanger steak;  it’s rather economical to make over and over again once you’ve purchased a good supply of grapeseed oil, sherry vinegar and soy sauce; if you get the right kind of soy sauce (Tamari), it’s virtually gluten-free. Sure, the sodium content is higher than some would like, but it’s not so bad so long as you avoid eating the whole bowl yourself in one sitting.

It doesn’t help that it is all too tempting to do this, but self-restraint, people: show some and your forbearance  will be rewarded.

The one downside to making this sauce is that you absolutely must mince the ginger if you want the full flavor effect that Chang promises. The first time I made it I went the Microplane route and grated it and while it did give the sauce flavor, it wasn’t as bold as I was expecting. (If you aren’t a huge fan of ginger but still want to try this, I would recommend going this route first and then adding more as necessary.) This time I took my half-hand of garlic, peeled most of it, nicked my left ring finger, wrapped said finger in a napkin to stem the bleeding and did my worst with the chef’s knife. Finely mincing ginger is a pain thanks to how fibrous it is, but breaking the hand into small, stable chunks made the task significantly easier, bleeding finger be damned.

The perils of mincing ginger aside, everything else comes together pretty smoothly and quickly, and the toughest part of it all might be letting the sauce sit for 15 to 20 minutes to get really good and, you know, not eat it all prior to the meal. I’ll be sharing this with my in-laws in a few days for Christmas Eve dinner (seven fishes FTW!), and in the meantime, I’ll share the recipe here with you.

Have a wonderful holiday!

Ginger-Scallion Sauce

from Momofuku

makes 3 cups

• 2 bunches scallions, sliced thinly
• 1/2 cup fresh ginger, peeled and then minced finely
• 1/4 cup grapeseed oil
• 1 1/2 tsp usukuchi (light soy sauce) or tamari if you want a gluten-free option
• 3/4 tsp sherry vinegar
• 3/4 tsp kosher salt, plus more to taste if needed

Combine all of the ingredients in a bowl, stir well to combine, and then taste to adjust salt and vinegar levels. Add more salt if necessary, then let sit (undisturbed, otherwise you’ll eat the whole damn bowl) for 15-20 minutes. Will keep for up to a day in the fridge.

Orecchiette with Tomato, Tarragon and Prosicutto di Parma

You know how when you make a tomato sauce and there’s all of those dark red or purple bits on the side of the pan? I want to make this sauce taste like that.
–Michael on the way home from Fairway after I nagged him to death about his super-secretive sauce idea.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I wish I had some profound reason for our collective silence, but to be honest, it boiled down to not feeling terribly inclined to write about food. The Thanksgiving holiday leaves me with nothing to say about holiday cooking since we’re not the ones cooking it, and we have to travel, and frankly I’m over writing about various squashes and how good they are with sage and rosemary and waxing endlessly on the deliciousness of roasted vegetables.. Yeah–they are all awesome. We know that. Let’s move on.

Over the course of the fall Michael and I have been tweaking red sauces fairly often, in part to rebel against the beige-ness of what tends to be made this time of year. This is a dish that evolved from that culinary puttering (see Michael’s quote above) as well as a very intense desire to have a sun-dried tomato pesto with orecchiette after a rather silly conversation on Twitter (see the #pastawar tag to see what I mean). Michael completely ran with it and flatly refuesd to give me the details of what he was thinking as he gathered ingredients at Fairway. Bastard. But I trusted him because he had a vision, and that vision included prosciutto di Parma, and there was no way I was going to object to any of it.

What I love most about this sauce I think is how weird it is: it’s not a traditional red sauce by any stretch of the imagination, nor is it in any shape a pesto, but it works–and more importantly, it works without needing to get a lot of exotic or incredibly expensive ingredients (OK, the veal stock may not be readily available, but everything else should). It’s also not terribly difficult: you saute the garlic, add in the tomato paste, stock, wine, Worcestershire and oyster sauces and let it reduce, reduce, reduce until it’s a thick, deep-brick-red color. Let it cool, then puree with the dried tomatoes and tarragon and toss with freshly cooked orechiette and the prosciutto.

Orecchiette with Sun-Dried Tomato Sauce

Serves 4-6

• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 Tbsp olive oil, plus more for pureeing
• 6oz tomato paste
• 1 cup dry red wine
• 1 cup veal or chicken stock
• 1/4 cup oyster sauce
• 2 Tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tsp onion powder
• 8 oz sun-dried tomatoes, chopped
• 4 oz tarragon, stemmed with stems reserved
• 1 lb orecchitte
• Kosher salt
• Grana Padano, grated
• 8 oz of prosciutto di Parma, sliced (but get it sliced a little thicker than you would normally so it doesn’t completely fall apart).

Bring the olive oil to medium heat in a small saucepan and add the garlic. Saute until fragrant, and then add the tomato paste, cooking for a minute or two, and then deglaze with the stock, red wine, Worcestershire and oyster sauce, add in the onion powder, stir to combine and let it simmer and reduce for about a half-hour or so–the idea is that you want to get it to a nice, deep red color and it will go back to being a paste rather than a sauce. Remove from the heat, and either in a food processor or an immersion blender cup combine the mixture with the tomatoes and tarragon and blend until a smooth paste.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to boil, salt it well, and cook orecchiette to package directions, about 8-11 minutes. Reserve at least a cup of the starchy pasta water as the pasta cooks. When al dente, drain the pasta and return to the pan, stirring the red sauce into the orecchiette (and use some of the pasta water to help the sauce coat if needed) along with the prosciutto. Serve immediately in pasta bowls with grated Grana Padano.

Marinated Hanger Steak Ssäm from Momofuku

I know, I know. We’re egregiously late in jumping on the David Chang/Momofuku bandwagon, but better late then never, right? This is what I’m chanting to myself as I write this post, feeling horribly out of date for never venturing even once to the East Village to try one of his Momofuku iterations, but in my defense I always assumed that all of his places were expensive and difficult to get into–and we really didn’t eat out that often anyway. (People who have asked me for restaurant recommendations know this all too well, as I end up usually directing them to various food stores rather than a lot of restaurants.) It’s not that we never ate out, but venturing to restaurants that didn’t publish menu prices seemed a little risky, or at least that’s what the pragmatist in me would rationalize. Feel free to correct me in the comments.

It’s not that I didn’t know who David Chang was–the talk where he and Anthony Bourdain call bullshit on Guy Fieri and cupcakes endeared him to me immediately–but to be frank, he intimidated the crap out of me, because he was a Serious Chef. His cookbook intrigued me but I always hesitated in getting it because I figured the recipes would be complex and ambitious and time-consuming. I realized that these were fucking stupid reasons to avoid getting it*, and so it landed on my Amazon wishlist for my birthday. In a way, my suppositions were correct: there are many recipes that are intimidating and time-consuming and require ingredients that aren’t readily available at Fairway and will likely inspire a stock-up trip in Chinatown the next time we’re in the city, but then there are dishes like the one pictured above. Sure, there are several components to the dish, but they are relatively easy to pull together on a quiet weekday night if you have a little time, and very easy to bring together on a weekend if you’re in the mood to experiment.

I think what I love most about this cookbook is that it’s one you read: Chang is more than happy to lift the curtain on what is cooking process is in a conversational style similar to that of Anthony Bourdain’s Les Halles Cookbook, and it makes you care about getting his recipes right. The header notes are filled with stories about how he developed these various recipes, and each section of the book provides a nice backstory to how each of the momofuku iterations came to exist, warts and all. Needless to say, when you actually hunker down and make the dishes you feel a little more prepared than just reading a list of ingredients and instructions, and that added dose of insight from him is enough to give you the confidence to take on even the most challenging of dishes.

The keys to the ssäm above is getting the meat into the marinade early (preferably overnight) and then cooked to the right temperature and making a hell of a ginger-scallion sauce. This is likely the easiest recipe in the cookbook, as it sits and melds longer than it takes to chop the onions, but it is definitely the crack of sauces. It is literally impossible to resist after your first bite, and you’re going to want to smother it on everything. It’s simply 2-3 bunches of scallions that are finely sliced mixed in with about half a cup of minced ginger (I grated it this time around which worked nicely), some light soy sauce (a higher-sodium soy sauce), sherry vinegar, and grapeseed oil and then seasoned with kosher salt. Stir to combine and then let it sit for at least 15-20 minutes, and you’ll have yourself a bowl of divine goodness. Chang says that it keeps in the fridge for 1-2 days, but I don’t think we’ve let it have the chance to do so in our house. Some brown rice and cabbage made it absolutely perfect–while the next time I’d like to make the red kimchee that he calls for in the actual recipe, using some leftover slaw that was flavored with sriracha and mirin was a fine weekday substitute.

Better late than never, I tell you. Better late than never.

*He curses a lot throughout the book, especially when talking about his love of meat, and that’s absolutely magnificent.

Noodles with Shiitake Mushrooms and Ginger

Turning thirty is a big deal…unless you work in market research. While I had no problem milking the day for a few nice things–like two glasses of delicious wine at Barcelona on Tuesday–I can say upon reflection that I think I struggled more with turning 25 (and therefore will do the same once 35 rolls around) because it means I’m in a new demographic age bracket. I’m reminded of the season four premiere episode of Sex and the City when Carrie receives the application to join some singles group and she laments moving onto the next age box, because suddenly you’re now in a group that’s viewed very differently from the one you just left, and somehow that can make you feel older than any one particular birthday.

But since no age-box-shifting took place on this particular birthday, no melancholy is necessary, right?

This year’s festivities were, on the whole, pretty great: I received some wonderful presents from M and my family, I got a mid-week trip to Barcelona (something we’re going to do more often–going out on Friday is for the birds), and this weekend I’ll get to indulge in some oysters and martinis at the Oyster House/Bar at Grand Central. Part of that present haul included a number of cookbooks: two traditional Spanish titles, Tom Colicchio’s Craft of Cooking, and Ferran Adriá’s The Family Meal, probably the one I was most excited for after getting a taste of what it would contain in this Mark Bittman article from July.

The Family Table intrigued me so much because it was a fresh perspective on one of the most written-about restaurants in the last ten years: the recently departed elBulli. These aren’t the dishes that the staff of 75 put out every night for their customers, but rather are the ones that they would make for themselves before service, also known in the restaurant industry as the family meal. The book is broken up into sections: an introduction filled with full-page photos of the staff in action and eating, the requisite review of key tools and ingredients one should have on hand to make the dishes, another discussing the various sauces and stocks that they make and keep on hand, and finally a series of three-course meals with amounts given for two people all the way to 75. (Michael likes to say that it’s a book for people who don’t like doing fractions. I say it makes the book more accessible for the home cook.)

Unlike what went out to diners for every seating at the restaurant, there is little in the way of kitchen wizardry contained herein, with only a few references to foams made and usually in the context of a dessert. Instead we’re treated to dishes that bear some resemblance to those found in Cocinar en Casa albeit with far less reliance on ready-made foods. It’s not simply a book of Spanish classics, either–influences from China, Mexico, Argentina and elsewhere make appearances, but seemingly with an elBulli twist.

We got our first indication of that when making the chimichurri sauce, which was definitely not the green version I was used to, but instead was red: chopped fresh tomatoes, parsley, garlic, cumin, vinegar, olive oil, chile. It was one of the few recipes that wasn’t scaled down for smaller amounts of diners–the smallest yield was 14 cups–but some quick math and Google conversions got us to the right proportions, even if we still have some leftovers.

The noodle dish was decidedly easy to whip up because while it required getting a few condiments from the Asian food section at Fairway, there wasn’t much in terms of actual prep work to do. The noodles cooked for three minutes and then sat in an ice bath, and all I had to do was slice the mushrooms and the scallions, mince the ginger, and clean the bean sprouts, with Michael bringing everything together in about ten minutes’ time.

Duck with Chimichurri Sauce

As for the duck, once the sauce is made, there’s even less to do to get it ready. You score the skin of the breast , then sear it for four minutes (3 on the fatty side, one on the lean side) so that the duck stays relatively rare in the middle. It then sits in a foil packet for twenty minutes to rest before slicing and serving with the chimichurri on top. One breast was enough for the two of us to split, and I have a feeling that Michael will figure out a way to incorporate the rest of the chimichurri into one of our other meals later this week.

It was not a combination of dishes I would ever expect to have together, but the meal overall came together really well. Neither of us are much on dessert so the pistachio custard went unmade, but maybe the oncoming winter will inspire me to try something new. One thing is certain: I can’t wait to see what my other new acquisitions have in store for our palate.

Birthdays really aren’t so bad after all.

Carpionata Piemontese

Now I am quietly waiting
for the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Frank O’Hara, excerpt of “Mayakovsky” from Meditations in an Emergency

This passage kind of perfectly expresses those mean reds I mentioned a week and a half ago that have taken up in casa TMFP. It hasn’t helped that it was a fairly rainy week and therefore the sky grew dark out even sooner than it should, and in one of those rainstorms Michael’s new car was lightly clipped by some jerk near his office. And ugh–as I write this it’s gotten grey and moody outside again. It’s like the weather is gleefully pissing all over my “Operation: Abolish Mean Reds” efforts with every cold, grey, sodden day. It’s why we curled up with the second season premiere episode of Mad Men in all of its angsty glory but at the same time pushed ourselves from a culinary perspective–we may be indulging our grumpiness in some ways, but tasting something new and different could also be the jolt we both need. First up: our anniversary dinner on Sunday and going back to a genuine happy place.

Tartufo bianco season in Italy starts in early October with a huge marketplace in Alba devoted to people selling the spoils of their mushroom quests, and it also means that white truffles start appearing locally, whether in jars or stuffed into fresh ravioli. “Al Tartufo” signs tacked onto restaurant menus and fresh pasta shops become the norm and what seemed to only be a mainstay on a show like Iron Chef  is suddenly accessible and on a plate before you. It’s a marvelous thing to behold.

Our last night in Acqui Terme was a dinner of simplicity: just some fresh raviolis stuffed with white truffles and porcini mushrooms, drizzled with just a little butter. We spent the evening talking with our amazing innkeepers and playing with their dog Max, and all the while I was trying to not focus on the fact that we had to get up before sunrise the next morning in order to make it to Malpensa on time. We ended up waking up before our ancient alarm clock rang, wrote a long diatribe to our innkeepers in their guestbook, and each faced our misgivings about leaving in our own ways. I was devastated about leaving and, uh, wasn’t terribly quiet about it, while Michael was worried about the daily fog (nebbio) that enrobes the area every morning and makes the nebbiolo grapes so spectacular. There was considerable amounts of nebbio to deal with as he drove through the little streets and the little country roads that would lead us to the Autostrade, and to this day he claims that had the fog not lifted we would not have made our plane on time. But we did, and we had some prosciutto di San Daniele to eat on the way there, and the roads were gloriously empty, so it wasn’t all bad in the end. We made our flight in time, of course.

Pappardelle with Porcini Mushrooms and White Truffles

Naturally we’ve tried to revisit Piemonte in  many ways when our anniversary comes around, and thanks to a lovely cookbook gifted by a close friend we have a great source of recipes from the region for this time of year. To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about truffles recently until our inagural shopping trip to Fairway Stamford and a collection of canned goods caught my eye. Because the folks at Fairway are that awesome, they had to go and find these tiny cans from Italy boasting spreads/sauces that contained some combination of porcini mushrooms, white truffles or black truffles and another ingredient like tomatoes or pesto. The can that caught my attention, though, was the porcini-white truffle variety–pointing it out to Michael I made a note in my head to pick up one of these for a special occasion meal, because how amazing would it be to recapture some of that magic of our last night at Baur B&B?

We wanted have something more substantial than just pasta, however, which is how the first dish came about. Autumn in Piemonte does not boast hundreds of recipes, but each one they include is one of quality, and we were intrigued by the carpionata as it was something neither of us had ever seen, much less tasted before. A layer of fried zucchini lines the bottom of a casserole, followed by a layer of meatballs (half beef and half veal), then another layer of fried zucchini, and then topped with a sauce made from Barbera, good red wine vinegar, onions and garlic.

And then it sits for two hours before you eat it.

The results were good…but to be honest, the acidity of the vinegar was a bit overpowering for me. Michael loves anything with a strong brine so he was all over it, but I think to make it again would require either a little more wine or a little less vinegar to make it just right.

As for the pasta? Well, the pasta was fantastic–and I was immediately back at that lovely marble table in Diana’s amazing kitchen drinking Barbera and watching Michael cook.

Carpionata Piemontese

from Autumn in Piemonte

• 3-4 slices bread, crusts removed
• Milk
• 1/2 lb ground beef
• 1/2 lb ground veal
• 3 TB Parmigiano-Reggiano, grated
• 2 TB parsley, chopped
• 1 egg
• Flour for dusting
• 4 oz butter
• 1 lb, 2oz zucchini, sliced
• Peanut oil for frying
• 3 Spanish onions, sliced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 cup Barbera wine (we used Barbera d’Alba)
• 5 TB red wine vinegar (use the best you can find, as its flavor is pronounced here)
• Kosher salt and pepper

Smoked Pork Shoulder

Okay, so I re-visited the local fire codes and electric cooking devices are allowed on patios. I can therefore speak freely now about the latest foray into North-of-the-border balcony barbecue. This venture was not motivated by, but certainly reinforced by one of Alton Brown’s final Good Eats episodes, this an hour-long treatise on pork smokery.

This particular beast was the product of an impromptu spend-off, hastened by the approach of Hurricane Irene. We found ourselves in Fairway the Friday before the storm arrived, ready to fight of hoards of nasty panic-stricken Metro-ites (Metroids?) filling the cart with everything in sight not just for the storm itself, but for the week. Not a terribly logical action, you might say- stocking up on perishables before entering a period where power (and thus refrigeration) loss was highly probably- and you’d be right. I guess fortune favored the foolish and we were lucky enough to retain electricity throught the ordeal and my shoulder, roasted all day Saturday, was safe.

I’m not going to go into the entire process here, as the Good Eats eps are up on youtube, but I will make some comments, especially to anyone thinking of attempting this sublime and demanding art. First, I de-boned the entire pork shoulder myself as the store only had one (I guess they figured not too many folks need 8 lb pork roasts the day before a hurricane… ha!) and it was intact. I do not regret this, but I did not remove all the little scraggly (but otherwise fine) meat bits from the incision site, thinking they would be fine. Unfortunately, once brined they became jerky-like and I had to discard them anyway. I used the brine formulation Alton recommends, though my shoulders come out a bit saltier than I am accustomed to in normal ‘cue, so each time I attempt this, I add less or let it sit for a shorter time. I managed to get to 195 degrees (F) in my smoker this time, which is quite hot, but I’d really like to get the whole thing just over 200. I’d also like more smoke. Both can be achieved with better heat control and possibly more/smaller/drier hickory chips. I’ll admit the bark looked great, but I’m still tinkering with a dry rub that is as subtle as it is significant. I feel onion powder is somehow the key.

Is this all together too much trouble for what is in essence a grown man playing with giant pieces of food? I don’t think so. All told I’m probably into this whole endeavor for about $100 (equipment and food together) and all the results are edible and its a hell of a lot of fun, spending Saturday with the three B’s: barbecue, building stuff and barely obeying local fire codes. Be safe, be adventurous and until next time, cook on!