Eat Your Greens!

Cavolo Nero
aka Lacinato Kale, Dinosaur Kale,

Glorious Tuscan Black Cabbage

This time of year when you drive around the Tuscan countryside you’ll probably see gardens with neat rows of a strange looking plant that looks like a little palm tree but missing the leaves. What you’re looking at is a harvested cavolo nero plant. Known here as lacinato kale of dinosaur kale, the Tuscan black cabbage is a winter staple that is absolutely delicious and central to the winter kitchen of Tuscan cooks. Young leaves can be harvested as soon as 2 months after planting but left to grow this wonderful vegetable can be harvested up until the first hard frost. Although some country folk maintain it is better after the first frost which tenderizes the fibrous dimpled, leaves  which resemble ostrich plumes before picking. It’s a VERY hearty vegetable.
When I lived in Tuscany I had rows and rows of it in the garden or “l’orto” as it’s called in Italian. I usually had very big batches of it so I would blanch it and drain it and squeeze out the excess water , chop it and put it in a plastic bag for freezing. I’d usually put it in 10 oz. packages like the boxes of frozen spinach we can buy here. That way I could approximate how much I had in US measurements.
I had some favorite ways to use it and one was in pasta. Here’s what I did:
Defrost the cavolo nero and saute with plenty of sliced garlic and extra virgin olive oil. Meanwhile cook a short pasta. The traditional shape for this dish is the farfalle or bow tie pasta. Cook the pasta in plenty of salted, boiling water. While the pasta is cooking shave some ( be generous) pieces of pecorino cheese over the cavolo nero. When the pasta is finished cooking ladle it out of the pot with a slotted spoon and add to the cavolo nero. It will need the extra pasta water to make a nice sauce. And always save a little of the pasta water if the pasta seems to dry. Cook another minute or so. Farfalle is always a little tricky because you have to get the little pinch in the middle to be as soft as the rest of the piece. You might want to cook the pasta one minute less than the box directions and continue cooking it with the cavolo nero until you are satisfied with the al dente quality of the pasta.
Another way to use cavolo nero is as a topping for ” fettunta” or garlic bread. Toast a nice big slice of crusty bread. You can use a baguette. Rub it with a clove of raw garlic. Saute some onion and pancetta and a few red pepper flakes and add the chopped cavolo nero. Cook until everything is soft and blended and then top the toasted bread and anoint with extra virgin olive oil.
Cavolo nero is essential for ribolitta, the bread based kale, bean and vegetable soup found all over Tuscany or it can be served as a side dish with just about anything. So when you see this in the produce aisle and wonder what to do with it here are a few ideas for dinner or an appetizer.
Buon Appetito!

My Julia Child Story

I remember watching Julia Child on what we called “educational television” way back in the mid 60’s. She seemed exotic and definitely not the General Electric cooking shows that I saw from time to time. I watched and was enthralled.

I remember one time visiting my sister and her family in Plainfield, NJ around 1966 and my dear sister had prepared Coq au Vin from Julia’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Mele wasn’t known for her cooking skills but this was memorable. Really memorable since we had pretty much grown up with canned vegetables and Chef Boyaredee. Problem was that is was SO damn good and she followed the recipe so exactly that after the first serving that was it. Nothing left. But that was also her nature..she  was very exacting. We all remembered that sensational dinner but this time the old saying “always leave them wanting more” didn’t satisfy our stomachs.

Forty years later I was asked to make a Tarte Tatin. I was living in Tuscany at the time and yes, one could ask how I got myself in that situation. Not how I came to live there but how I received the request to make such a dessert. I had and still have a dear American friend living in a nearby village and she got me invited to this particular dinner party where the hostess requested the TT. The hostess and her husband were “veddy British”, old school, London Dry, and all of that and also experienced word travelers. At the time I was not all that fired up as a baker of anything let alone an upside down apple pie. I went to work and read every damn thing I could about the tarte and the Tatin sisters. I set about to do this undoubtedly trying to save my reputation as a fairly good cook and my friend’s insistence to the hostess that I was a “professional.” Mmm-hmm.

I researched as if I was trying to reinvent penicillin. I found shortcuts that I knew would be seen as cheating from my hosts. I came across  Julia’s recipe and since I didn’t have a copy machine I wrote down every word and proceeded. My friend who had hyped me so well brought me the apples that I needed and dropped them off to me the night before.  It was October and the air was getting that particular way which makes you appreciate apples even more. I told her what I wanted- a combo of Granny Smiths and Yellow Delicious. She came up the road in her Saab and handed them off to me. I told her she had no idea what she had gotten me into.

The next day, prepared and ready for anything, I started. The whole thing was to not have those damn apples stick to the pan…but no cheating with a non-stick. I had a stainless steel Cuisinart and that was the designated vessel. Apples sliced and perfectly arranges in the pan, etc. I basted those beauties with an ear bulb (freshly purchased for the occasion) until they were appropriately soft and fragrant and then on went the pastry. I tucked it in and made it look ready for sweet oven dreams. It was beautiful but I also remembered watching a Julia episode where the thing just collapsed as soon as she flipped it. Julia was soooo cool. It was fine the way it was in her book or on that particular episode at least. I shoved it in my Hail Mary oven (that’s another story) and what else? Hoped for the best. Nobody could say I wasn’t prepared.

Make a long story short, my hosts served a less than stellar dinner  (well, compared to my blood sweat and pride) and all I could think about was the damn tarte that I had carried on my lap in the car down all of those bumpy country roads. LIke a little apple child. What was going to happen when I flipped it? I whipped the cream thinking that in a short time I’d know.

I placed the platter on the skillet and with total Julia panache I upended it and honest to God, not an apple was out of place. The apples were beautifully rounded and concentric and the juices perfectly flowed throughout. I’m sure the hostess thought I’d done this a million times. I could barely contain my rapture but I did. Yes, it could have been beginner’s luck but it was also a studied and studiously written recipe. Thanks, Julia!

A Bowl of Summertime

I had some of that wonderful Pane di Altamura left over and it was getting stale. When life gives you stale bread make panzanella! Panzanella pretty much epitomizes summer in Tuscany. It’s a salad of bread, tomatoes, red onion, cukes and basil and dressed with red wine vinegar and extra virgin olive oil..and salt to taste.

You might ask what bread is doing in this salad. Stale bread shows up in a lot of Tuscan cooking. Tuscan cooking is very much based on “la cucina povera”. It’s how the Tuscans cooked ( and still do) and used everything that was available to them. Nothing was thrown out and there was little money and a family to feed. Bread stretched things out and potatoes did too. But more on the potatoes at another time.

Here’s how you do it:

Soak your stale bread in some cold water to loosen it up. Break it into chunks and squeeze out the excess water. Add the moistened bread to a bowl. Now, ascolta! This is important! Make sure you have a hearty country style bread because otherwise it’s going to disintegrate. Think your bread is too stale? Mine was like a brick and it still worked beautifully. And actually the pane di altamura is from Puglia (shhh, don’t tell) and there is salt in the bread unlike the Tuscan bread which has zero salt. It made the salad that much better.

Next chop some tomatoes. Lots of them, after all, it is a bread and tomato salad. Chop or slice a red onion as much as you want. Add both to the bowl with the squeezed out bread. Tear a handful of basil leaves into the bowl and then add some sliced/chopped cukes.

All of the cukes that were in the kitchen were about to be made into pickles so I managed to snag a few slices that I had reserved for soaking in my Hendrick’s Gin on the rocks. This was before I decided to make the panzanella. In fact, they WERE soaking in the gin when I snatched them out (I could’ve used more..cukes, not gin) but  enough to achieve the cuke freshness that is essential to panzanella. They certainly were crispy.

I  lightly doused the mix with EVOO and red wine vinegar added some salt (I had just bought  Penzey’s Shallot Salt and tried that) tossed it and that’s that. I let it sit for a few minutes so the flavors could harmonize and then served

Tuscan food is noted for it’s simplicity. Don’t go getting fancy with panzanella. It’s perfect exactly the way it is.

Making Bread and learning about Life

I just put 2 loaves of Pane di Altamura into the oven. I’m working with the Carol Field recipe from the revised edition of The Italian Baker. I started the biga yesterday afternoon and it tripled in size by bedtime. This morning it had deflated but I read that it’s ok if that happens. So, I started mixing the dough and it was really sticky. I mean really. But I persevered assuring myself that after 10 minutes something would happen and that it would become smooth, elastic, and slightly moist which it did eventually. Then a 3 hour rise and then shaping and the second rise.

Now, I’m dense sometimes when I read a recipe and Carol Field says that there are 2 ways to shape for the final shaping and one was simpler than the other. I don’t know how many times I’ve read through the recipe but I couldn’t break up the 2 processes as she wrote them. What I ended up doing was the simpler shaping instead of the folding and shaping. Second rise was an hour and she writes that the loaves should double in size and there should be obvious big air bubbles. They did double in size but no visible bubbles. I slashed them again and put them on the peel and slid them in as the recipe instructed with the cast iron pan under the rack with the baking stone. Right before shutting the oven door I threw a  half cup of ice cubes in the pan. We’ll see. Kitchen smells good but the rest remains to be seen. Sometimes you just have to let it go and see what happens. It’s all about experience.

I like making bread, neophyte that I am. I don’t have a Kitchen Aid so it’s all done by hand. You have to ride a tricycle before the English racer, I think. I do a lot of research before I make bread b/c I’m in strict agreement that anything that could go wrong will go wrong. Is that how the saying goes?

But it’s a lot of work this learning process and you always hope that things will turn out right the first time. It’s that way in life, too. Isn’t it?

I just peeked in the oven and they have risen, golden and quite beautiful if I may so so. We’ll see.

Last week while MB and I were on S.9th St. in Phila. we bought some shrimp and Roma tomatoes..among other things. We were headed out to Nottingham to spend the night with my cousin and we thought pasta with a fresh tom sauce and shrimp would be a nice dinner. We settled on the patio in the back of her darling farmhouse and we enjoyed her delicious hummus and assorted crudites. We decided not to go out for dinner and instead cooked the shrimp and splashed them with lemon juice and added them to our feast.  We spent the rest of the evening enjoying the fragrance of the gorgeous spring night with Venus in the distance.

Back in DC the tomatoes sat until I roasted them yesterday. The house was filled with that slightly sweet tomato-y smell all day but we weren’t especially pleased that it heated up the kitchen so much. So, tonight I will saute some shrimp in garlic and a good splash of vino bianco and when they are almost finished I’ll throw in the roasted toms, a few calamata olives and a tumble of fresh herbs. We have an abundance growing just outside the kitchen door. I think I’ll choose, parsley, basil and oregano.

Since we’re definitely moving into summer temps here I think it’s time to put the polenta away and look for something else. I like cous cous very much and I also like quinoa, too. But then I thought the perfect side would be cannellini beans.  I better get moving on the beans subito! Buon Apettito!

Food historian Waverly Root describes Florentine cooking as “spare home cooking, hearty and healthy, subtle in its deliberate eschewing of sophistication, which is perhaps the highest sophistication of all.” To go one better, a friend of mine described it as a paradox of apparent simplicity of ingredients and techniques yet mysterious elusive subtleties. Whatever it is, in my heart, my Tuscan heart, it is the food I love to prepare and even more, enjoy. Andiamo cucinare e Buon Appetitio!