Eating Fall: Romanesco and Creamy Pasta

This beauty is called Romanesco.  It is available now in the farmers markets.  Romanesco is very popular in Italy, specifically Rome.  In structure it is very cauliflower like; in flavor very broccoli like. I have family members who love to carefully break apart the little "trees", cook them, and place them on mashed potatoes for the holidays. So pretty and so delicious. 

I had a pretty large head of Romanesco (nearly two pounds) and we were craving a pasta dish.  So I made the following - it was amazing. And easy! 

Ingredients

One head of Romanesco (1/12 to 2 pounds)

Three large garlic cloves - leave the skin on the cloves

Extra virgin olive oil

Red pepper flakes

Three anchovy fillets (you can leave them out if you must, but they disappear and they provide so much flavor!)

Two to four tablespoons of Half and Half (full fat)

One pound of shaped pasta - I recommend penne; we used farfalle but I would use the larger penne next time

One half cup of grated pecorino cheese or Parmesan or a combination of both, plus more for service

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Technique

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees

Cut up the Romanesco into bite sized pieces

Spread the pieces out onto a large cookie sheet

Put the large garlic cloves on the sheet with the Romanesco 

Sprinkle everything with the EVOO, and salt & pepper to taste

Stir the mixture so that everything is coated and spread out on the cookie sheet

Cook in the 400 degree oven for 30 minutes or until the veg and the garlic are fork tender 

When you remove the cooked Romanseco and garlic from the oven, keep it warm and cook the pasta

Cook the pasta in a pot of salted, boiling water

Before draining the pasta take one cup of the pasta water out and set it aside

Drain the pasta, put the pasta back in the empty pot

Mash together the roasted garlic (by squeezing it out of its skin), the anchovy fillets, and dried red pepper flakes to taste

Toss the mashed mixture with the pasta in the pot

Add the Romanesco

Mix together the cream and the grated cheese

Add the cheese and cream mixture to the pot -  mix well 

At this point, you can thin your sauce - if you want to - with a bit of the hot pasta water you set aside; a little goes a long way! You probably won't need the whole cup of hot pasta water.

When the mixture is well combined, spoon it into pasta bowls and serve

For service offer additional grated cheese and extra virgin olive oil for a drizzle

Enjoy

Note:  As mentioned we used Farfalle - it was purple and white because it was made with squid ink. So in the second picture that's the dark edges you see. 

Eating Fall: Quinoa Stuffed Eggplant

We have had a very successful growing season with some things, especially Eggplant.  The eggplants we put in this year are small to medium sized with a lovely purple and white "striping" on their skin.  They have been coming in quite well since mid - summer. So, with this bounty, we have done a number of batches of Babaghanoush, we've made lots of wonderful eggplant Parmesan with homemade mozzarella, we pounded it and breaded and fried it, we made batches of ratatouille, and we made and froze batches of the delicious Nona Sauce - basically red sauce with eggplant literally melted into it.  We were open to some new ideas for our eggplants.

On a recent trip to the market we picked up a box of all natural Quinoa.  Note:  even this healthy food product does not escape the long arm of agri-biz.  You must look at the label and read the ingredients' list. You want to find that list to be very short. It should say, "Quinoa". 

A check of supplies one recent evening yielded two of our eggplants - one medium and one small, pulled that day; a box of Quinoa; a few of our tomatoes; some of our peppers (green chilies roasted); garlic; capers; some red onions; panko bread crumbs; our flat leaf parsley; our basil; a bit of Parmesan cheese; and, from our cheese CSA, a hunk of goat milk mozzarella.  This stuffed eggplant halves recipe was the result of combining those ingredients. Good fresh ingredients are the most important element. Again, remember this is more of a technique rather than a recipe. You can stuff your eggplant shells with lots of other ingredients; just cut your eggplants in half, scoop out the flesh or meat of the eggplant and start creating!

Il Moya Quinoa Stuffed Eggplant

First cook the Quinoa. Generally follow the box instructions. It's very much like cooking rice.  You can use water but we had some lo salt chicken stock in the refrigerator which added another layer of flavor.  Once the Quinoa is done you can hold it and keep it moist by taking it off heat, putting a clean towel over the pot and putting the lid back on the pot.

Cut the eggplant/s in half and scoop out the eggplant meat. Set it aside.

Chop up the red onion, the peppers you are using, the tomatoes, a clove or two of garlic, the basil, and a few salt cured capers (these should be soaked for a bit and drained to remove the salt).

I sautéed everything in one tablespoon of butter and one tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil until the mixture softened up and gave off some juices - about 3-5 minutes over medium heat. Stir often. Add salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste.

Add the eggplant that you scooped to the pan mixture;  I chopped some of the eggplant fine and left some in bigger chunks.

Cook over medium heat for another five minutes. 

Add the Quinoa to the other ingredients in the pan and stir to incorporate fully.  Just a minute or so.

Rub a thin film of olive oil all over a baking pan and lay the eggplant shells in the pan.

Sprinkle grated Parmesan cheese all over the inside of the empty eggplant shells.

Fill the eggplant shells with the Quinoa and eggplant mixture. Lay thin slices of the mozzarella over the mixture in each shell.

Chop the parsley and mix it into enough breadcrumbs (panko are best) to cover the top of each of your stuffed shells.

Sprinkle the breadcrumb/parsley over each filled shell, sprinkle each with a few drops of extra virgin olive oil and bake in a 350 degree oven for 35 minutes or until the shells are soft and the stuffing is bubbly and the cheese is fully melted.

Let them sit for just a minute prior to service.

Enjoy!

Food Questions Asked by 70 x 7 The Meal - Your Thoughts?

Tonight we had the extreme honor to participate in the celebration of thirty years of the Mural Arts program here in Philadelphia. Our city mural arts program is second to none and a model for other cities. The celebration of this important milestone took the form of a "70 x 7" dinner installation as have been carried out in many locations around the world by the artists Lucy & Jorge Orta (www.studio-orta.com). This was Meal XXXIV.  This was an "invitation only" event which led to a very diverse group of Philadelphians sitting down to dinner. I stood up once and looked out over the lines and lines of tables and people and I admit, I felt a tear.  This is my city - and it was well represented in the wide array of folks at those long tables.  Wonderful. 

So, to say it was an incredible event would be an understatement.  Nine hundred people dining, debating & meeting and greeting in the shadow of Philadelphia's beautiful City Hall. We enjoyed a family style meal of four dishes using heirloom vegetables prepared in delicious ways by our fabulous local chef Marc Vetri.  The topics discussed during the meal focused on heirloom vegetables and the loss of variety in food (i.e. 100 years ago there were 400 kinds of tomatoes; sadly, there are now 79), as well as how to get good fresh food to people in a local, seasonal and sustainable manner, and other challenging issues pertinent to the work of feeding us all.

Below are some pictures of the beautiful tables (as I mentioned, dinner was served for 900, the largest 70 x 7 meal in the world), the gorgeous and delicious food, and the two beautiful plates we were gifted with as attendees. We will cherish those limited edition plates! 

I am personally still buzzing from the event - and suspect I will be for awhile.  That said, I am interested in how other folks would respond to the questions that we were sent to consider before the event. We discussed these questions during dinner and we recorded our answers, which were then collected by the event staff. 

Here are the questions we tackled at the dinner. How would you have responded?

1.  What are the major food issues facing the world today?

2.  What are you willing to sacrifice in food quality or safety for convenience?

3.  How much diversity in the food supply is good for the environment and for people?

4.  What are the benefits and drawbacks to heirloom foods vs. genetically modified foods (GMOs)?

5.  Should food labeling be required to identify whether foods contain genetically modified organisms (GMOs)?

What are your thoughts?  Thank you!

Oh - the picture at the end is just a shot of the most beautiful City Hall in America. Thanks. 

Sweet Memories: Mimi, Me & the Jersey Tomatoes

Along about mid - July in my Hunting Park (Philly) neighborhood, the huckster would sing a different song as he came down the wide alley between our block - 9th Street - and 8th Street. It was usually very early in the morning. In those days of no air conditioning, he got an early start; his was a very hot job.

Sometimes I would wake up to the "song" and I still hear it clearly in my memory today.

                          "Jersey tomatoes. Three pounds for half a dollar". 

He would stretch out the "jersey tomato"part of course. It was a sing song that would be repeated over and over again loudly until he would find a spot, stop his truck, and begin to attend to all of the neighborhood women heading towards him.

Half a dollar/three pounds. I can't even think of a way to examine that reality! So I'll move on.

Oh those tomatoes!  Mimi - my grandmother, and chief cook and bottle washer in our home - would come into the kitchen with her assorted produce purchases and spread them out to examine them. Much as I do today. And always she would very carefully handle those tomatoes, giving them their own wide bowl.

Then the Hellman's, some sandwich plates, a couple of knives, salt, and the white sandwich bread would be brought to the table.  The bread was always, always, Strohman's. She despised that "Wonderful" bread! We never could get her to say Wonder.  In later years she discovered Pepperidge Farm white bread, but at the big house on 9th Street, it was always Strohman's. 

Mimi and I would sit at the table and she would make us tomato sandwiches.  Sandwiches with lots of slices of tomatoes, very thinly sliced and ever so slightly sprinkled with salt.  We were the only ones in the house who ate them! Not my grandfather, my parents, my sister, or our friend Marion who rented the apartment upstairs wanted any part of a sandwich with "only a tomato" on it. Crazy people.

Oh, the deliciousness of it! The warmth of the tomatoes, the way the juices would run into the soft white bread, the creaminess of the mayonaisse with tomato juices mixing into it, and no matter how hard I tried, the juices running all over my hands and face. 

We would look at each other over our sandwiches and smile and moan and eventually laugh at what a mess we were making. 

These days I make my sandwiches with my homemade mayonaisse, and soft white bread from a local bakery, but it is still all there. I see her laughing as I eat. Laughing because we were so glad that the others didn't want to share.  More for us. As I got older, there were a number of things that only Mimi and I enjoyed.  Dishes that nobody else in the house wanted any part at that time anyway. Food was a big connection between a woman who'd been a flapper in Atlantic City and, as a result, was sent off to Danville, Pennsylvania to work on a relative's (who were Mennonites) farm for many years, and the wacky sixties kid I was to become.

This picture is the first  Ramapo - a real Jersey tomato - that we harvested from our garden here at Il Moya.  It looks like we will yield about 10 or a bit more from our planting.  Every one of those tomatoes will be eaten exactly the same way. I'll be sharing with my better half of course, but these tomatoes won't be cooked, frozen, oven dried or anything else.  They will be thinly sliced, placed on soft white bread that has been spread with mayo and a sprinkle of salt. We will eat and the juices will run down our hands and we will smile. 

Thanks Mimi!

                          "Jersey tomatoes. Three pounds for half a dollar".

Eating Fall: Dealing with All of that Basil

It's time to start figuring out what you are going to do with all of the beautiful Basil growing in your garden.  Basil is a very popular choice. It's easy to grow, depending on the overnight heat, it will grow like crazy - even in a window box. It's a wonderful herb if you only have a small space or a window box, fire escape, or whatever as long as it has sun and warmth and water it will do very well.  Basil is also a versatile herb.  It's great in sauces, soups, eggs, and makes delicious flavored oils. And of course, Basil is the main ingredient in traditional Pesto.  A jar of pesto will hold well in the refrigerator for a couple of weeks if you keep a half inch or so of extra virgin olive on top of the pesto as you use it. 

For long term storage of my tons of beautiful Basil, I use three basic techniques:

     Freeze leaves

     Freeze a purée of leaves and extra virgin olive oil

     Freeze Pesto

For the first technique, wash and dry your Basil (always wash any herbs before you use it; you never know who's set up housekeeping in there!).  Pat it dry, pull the leaves from the stems and add the leaves to a good freezer bag. After you fill the bag squeeze out all of the air, label and pop it 

in the freezer. The leaves will turn black but they will maintain their flavor for sauces, soups, etc. When you take leaves out let them sit for a few minutes to defrost and give off excess moisture.

For the second technique, just add the leaves - treated as above - to your blender with extra virgin oil and just a touch of kosher salt.  Purée the mixture and pour it into ice cube trays.  Now I know you may have to go out and buy ice cube trays because of the ice making capabilities of many refrigerators but it's worth it.  Plastic trays stack together nicely for storage and if that ice maker ever goes south - you're ready!  When the "cubes" are frozen, pop them out, put them in a good freezer bag, label it and put it in the freezer.  With a couple of cubes, you have a delicious fat for pan roasting fish, steaming clams, spreading on hot bread or just tossing with hot noodles.  Wherever your imagination takes you, they are very versatile. I can tell you that they don't work as cubes in a Bloody Mary - nope not at all. Trust me.  It's an oil thing!

The last technique uses the blender method but does it with actual Pesto in place of just leaves and olive oil.  I keep the cheese out of my Pesto cubes but I do add the Basil, the extra virgin olive oil, garlic cloves to taste and a bit of salt to the blender and give it a good whirl. When it's incorporated I add some pine nuts and just stir them through. Pour into the ice. Use trays and repeat the freezing and bagging process. I like to vary the pesto a bit; I'll freeze a bag of "spicy" pesto (with some dry hot pepper flakes blended in), and a "traditional" pesto mixture.  Be sure to mark your bags!

Note:  I am not a fan of dried basil.  Some herbs, like oregano and marjoram, develop wonderful flavors when they are dried. In my opinion basil loses flavor when dried.  I always dry a little because I have so much, but I try to use it quickly and invariably I don't use it all.

With these techniques - especially the second and third ones, you can walk in the door on a weeknight and have a nice start on something delicious. And if you look in the cold cases at the supermarket you'll notice these "flavor starts" packets or whatever the various manufacturers call them. The packages say that you should just start with the cube or envelope and add your ingredients.  Well I have to say, somewhere in the mix of those things are olive oil and herbs. But - and this is a big but - there's a ton of chemicals and additives in there too.  

Yours will be pristine and delicious!

A Jar of Homemade Pesto  

Some of My Genovese Basil

Eating Fall: Second in a Series - The Incredible Fig

In the past few weeks, Figs have been front and center in the Farmers Markets. We're really lucky here in South Philadelphia to have tons of mature fig trees all over the neighborhood - and owners of those trees who sell their figs through local markets.  It's not unusual to get to the checkout and see beautiful figs in egg cartons with a sign that says, "Guido's Figs, one dollar each/$9.00 for a dozen". These figs are, as you can imagine, incredibly fresh, delicious and raised pretty much in an organic fashion.

Certainly Fig Jam is a great product to make with wonderful fresh figs. Our local canning guru, Marissa McClellan, has a great and easy recipe for fig jam in her wonderful book, "Food In Jars". We used her recipe to put up a dozen jars this year.  

But there are many other things to do with this heavenly fruit.  Below is a picture of a Fig Tart that we made recently.  It's simply one sheet of Puff Pastry, rolled out a bit, scored  around the edges, and filled with quartered figs.  My better half does the beautiful placement of figs onto the dough (second picture). I drizzled a bit of local honey over the figs and baked it at 375 degrees convection (400 degrees regular oven) for about 12 - 15 minutes.  Be sure the underside of your crust has a chance to get crisp - figs give off a lot of (heavenly) juice as they bake.  The accompaniment for this tart is three tablespoons of crushed shelled pistachios into a cup of thick Greek yogurt, sprinkle a little honey or sugar into the mixture and whip it together. Serve a dollop with each slice of the tart. 

My second favorite use of fresh figs is pizza. As you know if you follow the blog, we love to have Pizza Night at our home. One of the things that has made it so enjoyable is the fact that we buy pre-made thin pizza crust (Pillsbury, usually displayed with the rolls, in the dairy case).  Yes, from time to time we go the whole "scratch" road and we usually alway have a local bread or pizza makers dough in our freezer.  But on weeknights there is nothing like unrolling a lovely thin crust onto an oiled cookie sheet and getting creative.  And this is the perfect crust for Fig, Goat & Blue Cheese Pizza!

Oil the baking sheet with a bit of good EVOO.  Spread out the dough as close to the edges of the pan as you can - you want a thin crust after all - see photo.  Then pre-cook the pizza dough for 5 - 7 minutes at 400 degrees.  See photo. You don't want it very brown or anything, you just want a nice mild crispness.

Add your cheeses.  In this one we are doing one half chèvre, one half chèvre and blue cheese, with thinly sliced red onions and good EVOOO and chopped fresh rosemary over all. See photos. 

And then add the figs, sliced into rounds in our case because we are getting a little low on figs. The entire pizza is drizzled with a good extra virgin olive oil and popped into a 400 degree oven for about 10 minutes.

Let the pizza rest for about five minutes and slice. This is a great pizza for snacks with cocktails, as a first course or as a main with a great green salad.  

Go get some Figs and, at the very least, just stand there and eat them!

Enjoy.

Fig Puff Pastry Tart with 

Pistachio, Yogurt topping 

Fig Tart - Pre-Bake

Fig Pizza dough prep

Post pre-cook of pizza crust

EVOO and cheeses added

Thinly sliced red onions and 

Fresh, chopped rosemary 

Added

Figs added, with another 

overall drizzle of EVOO.    

Eating Fall: Easy Coq au Vin for Two

Fall is a great time for cooking and eating.  Over the next few weeks I thought it would be interesting and fun to share some recipes that seem to fit the return of cooler weather.  This first recipe is adapted from Ian Knauer's great cookbook, The Farm.  This version is just right for two people and if you round it out with some late season corn, and a salad or some sautéed greens, it makes an elegant and easy early Fall dinner.

Easy Coq au Vin for Two

Ingredients

Two chicken legs ( whole legs and thighs)

Salt & Pepper

1 Tablespoon of Fat - Bacon Fat or Duck Fat or a combination (which I used) OR 1 Tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil (see note)

One leek, cleaned and chopped

One celery stalk, leaves included, chopped 

One carrot, sliced

Three garlic cloves, smashed

One cup of dry red wine - whatever you would drink

One bay leaf

One large sprig of fresh thyme

Technique

Pat the chicken legs dry

Season the legs with salt and pepper

Heat the fat in a heavy skillet (I used a medium cast iron skillet)

Bring the fat to a shimmer

Sear the chicken, skin side down, until the skin is golden brown - this should take about five minutes - do not turn the chicken over, just remove it to a plate

Add the leeks, celery, carrots, and garlic to the skillet and cook - remember to scrape all of the brown bits (called "Fond") as you cook the aromatics.

Cook until the vegetables are golden, but not quite brown, about 6 - 8 minutes.

Add the wine, bay leaf, and thyme to the skillet and bring to a boil.

Put the chicken back into the skillet, skin side up, and simmer with a cover on the skillet for about 20 - 25 minutes.

Uncover and simmer for another 5 - 7 minutes to slightly reduce the sauce.  

Remove the chicken to a warm plate. 

Add one or two tablespoons of unsalted butter and whisk until the butter is incorporated into the sauce.

Remove the bay leaf and season the sauce with salt & pepper.

You can strain the sauce if you wish.

Serve the chicken with the sauce ladled over it.  Good crusty bread also makes a nice accompaniment.

Note:  I - and this idea is right from Ian Knauer's Book - keep a jar of mixed fat in the refrigerator.  What Knauer calls a Master Fat. So when I make bacon - and this kind of fat keeping is what we are most accustomed to - I pour off the fat (keep the brown bits out) into the jar. When I cook duck breast, if I am not using the rendered fat for fries, I pour it into the jar. Recently, I roasted a piece of Peameal Bacon. Some of that rendered fat is in the jar.  Knauer suggests that every few weeks you can sit the jar in warm water to incorporate the fats. This makes for a very, very delicious cooking fat and in this recipe it really adds a flavor level! Master Fat - highly recommended.