Il Forno

Telline (wedge shells) and spaghetti

Whenever I handle the ingredients I am planning to use for my next meal, I cannot help think that there is a part of us that is still back in the Stone Age. Fact is, as much as I love quality ingredients, there is nothing that compares to the joy of using ingredients that you have grown, caught or prepared from scratch yourself.

I definitely have quite a bit of that old hunter-gatherer ancestor in me. My balcony is hardly a place where you can sit out and enjoy the summer sun: too many herbs and potted plants (quite a few used for cooking) there screening you from those precious rays. Likewise, when I walk into a wood I try as hard as I can to just enjoy the landscape, yet inevitably I find myself looking for mushrooms, berries and wild herbs. At the seaside, I look for molluscs, which, on the shores of Lazio, means telline.

Telline (Donax trunculus), also called arselle in Italian and wedge shells in English, are small triangular clams that live in the sand banks close to the shore. Commercially, these are fished by boats carrying nets that drag through kilometres of the superficial layer of the sand banks, something that, to my eyes, is pretty damaging from the ecological point of view. Yet the real way to collect – and earn – a well deserved dish of telline is fishing them yourself.

Charred Peppers Salad, Southern Italian Style.

I am just back from my short Italian break, which has been full of relaxing days spent at the beach, nice food and the occasional Italy football match on TV. My notebook and digital camera have captured the best food moments of the past week and, day after day, the essence of those scraps and shots will appear here. To start, I picked one of the simplest dishes I made in the past week, yet one which perfectly sums up the essence of Italian summer: charred pepper salad.

While you can use any peppers you like for this dish, getting some sun-ripened peppers in season is the best you could wish for. If you cannot find those, supermarket ones will do, but absolutely avoid pre-packaged peppers stored under modified atmosphere: I find these have a peculiar stench that will not go away no matter which cooking technique or how much seasoning you use.

I had some delicious giant yellow bell peppers at hand, each shaped slightly differently from the next, which worked like a charm. It would be impossible to find peppers like these in a supermarket: too irregular for the modern city customer, which says loads on the consumer misinformation we are exposed to. Luckily, Italian markets have not succumbed to this idiotic mentality.

Our small but cosy seaside home was quite near to the town of Fondi, with its medieval city centre and its rather famous produce market, the MOF. This huge market, probably the largest in Southern Italy, is mainly for greengrocers and purveyors but it opens to the public after 11 AM. It is not a place for everyday shopping: everything is sold by the case. Still, if you're planning on spending a week or more in the area (or if you live here) and want to do some cooking, it is a great place to buy good quality ingredients at prices that range between one third and half of what you would find in stores just a few kilometres meters away. We did some shopping here at the very  beginning of our holiday bringing back a few kilos of Sicilian round aubergines, zucchini, cherries and clearly some huge misshapen yellow bell peppers I used for this recipe.

Hot/Cold Mairübchen salad with pancetta and pecans

While shopping for vegetables at our local market, I recently ran across some great looking Mairübchen, baby turnips sold with their greens still attached. I bought them with the initial idea of serving these as a simple turnip salad, nothing more than sliced turnips in an Italian style vinaigrette. As usual I would have thrown the greens away. But then I remembered something I had read only recently from RussParsons on the LA Times: a very nice article entitled Eat shoots, leaves (requires registration). Looking at the turnip greens I couldn't stop thinking about the following line I had read there: "A veggie's most delicious bits are what often goes in the can.". What to do with those greens?

Eating them simply as greens would have been the obvious choice, but why not try and combine them to the turnips themselves? The idea of having the whole vegetable on a plate tickled my phantasy and so I started to toy with the idea of a salad with cold turnip slices and hot sauteed greens. Daniela, my wife, was not exactly enthusiastic about my culinary curiosity. Was I sure we could eat those greens? Was I going to poison us?

Baerlauch - Wild Garlic

As soon as spring arrives German markets and groceries fill up with wild garlic products, or Bärlauch, as it is called here. In the past four years I have noticed an impressive increase in wild garlic dishes in restaurants too. Whether a food fad or real fashion this plant of the Allium family, formerly considered a weed to a certain extent, is a real pleasure to eat. Other bloggers certainly think so too: just have a look at Johanna's wild garlic gnocchi, Petra's risotto or Maki's ravioli.I was dying to prepare something wild-garlicky too, so I was really content as I managed to find some fresh wild garlic leaves for once (you don't eat the bulb of this plant).

Duck confit with sour cherry sauce

If someone would have told me twelve months ago that I'd be making my own duck comfit I would have probably snarled and shaken my head. I discovered duck confit rather late, French products are not as easy to find in Italy as they are in the UK, but it was love at first taste. But making some myself? No way. And yet after reading again and again something started to tingle inside of me. So when the moment came to do some serious cooking I decided: confit it would be.

My original idea was to try and prepare some confit quails, one per serving. As fate wanted I didn't manage to find any, even when I tired ordering them in advance. Lucky for me there's a nice shop selling quality duck legs and breasts in this town: duck confit it would be.  I had started writing a little explanation on the method I used but there's someone who did so much better than I could on eGullet. I only changed the flavoring agents. Instead of the classic French herbs and spices I used a more oriental touch adding star anise, Sichuan peppercorns and Kefir lime leaves to the dry marinade. Cooking confit slowly in the oven is a sort of torture: the whole house smells delicious and yet, even when the meat is cooked, you'll should wait a few days at least before you get a taste of the moist, flavorful result. Should. I cut a chunk off one of the legs straight away. Hmmm!

Bean soup with shrimps

Sometimes I start thinking of a dish, start getting an idea that seems wonderful in that precise moment, fine tune the recipe and then . . . end up cooking something completely different. The opening dish I had chosen for my "birthday menu" was definitely not a bean soup. In a local shop I had seen some cute miniature pint glasses, which gave me the idea of a Guinness look-alike soup. Having bought some cuttlefish ink a while back I intended to use that to turn my soup black. On top of that I wanted to serve a frothy cream, flavored as to complement the soup. After some more thinking I had decided to play even more with contrasts: not only the black and white color, but also a temperature game. I would serve a cold soup, with a dominating full-tasting ingredient, topped with hot creamy and soothing foam. In the time it took me to mentally go from tiny pint glasses to finished recipe idea, the glasses were long gone. Oh well, time to think something new.

A long awaited meal

How to recognize you’ve completely lost control of the foodie beast inside you, part 374: as a birthday present, you wish yourself a day free of any other obligation to work on a gourmet five course menus you’ve been dreaming of for months.

Guilty as charged. I did it, and that bank robbery last week? Me.

I’m not kidding (apart the bank, sadly). That’s exactly what I did for my last birthday, months ago. When you have a little kitchen-curious kid, you can simply forget spending more than ten minutes in the kitchen before those little pudgy fingers will start poking around, pinching ingredients and generally distracting you from your knife work at great risk of chopping your fingers instead of the herbs. No problem as far as everyday cooking goes. Baking remains undisturbed, it can even be more fun with a kid around. Fancy a la minute cooking, requiring fast movements and concentrations, on the other hand is really out of question. You couldn’t imagine a kid strolling through Bourdain’s kitchen, could you?

Snow and hot chocolate

The first snow has fallen on Jena today. After yesterday's post I was in the perfect mood for a nice cup of hot chocolate made with cioccolato Modicano. I still had a bar of chili flavored chocolate from Antica Dolceria Rizza and that made for a thick, rich and just ever so slighlty hot cup of heaven.

 

My slightly modified method for a cup of Modicano chocolate

35 grams cioccolato Modicano, finely chopped
50 ml milk
50 ml water

Heat the milk and water together with the chocolate, stirring constantly till everything is melted. Keep stirring from time to time until you see the first bubble of the about to boil milk. Remove from the flame and use an immersion blender to make the chocolate frothy.

Enjoy!

Playing around with vegetables, part II: Provencal style stuffed zucchini

I am a stuffer. Vegetables, poultry, fresh pasta, you name it. If I find myself considering a recipe based on an ingredient endowed with a certain stuffing-prone shape you can be almost sure of the outcome. As soon as I saw those round zucchini I knew they'd be the prefect container. I had heard about round zucchini but had never seen them before on sale. These looked quite good: very firm, no spots or scratches and as big as a softball. Would they taste like proper zucchini or of nothing much, as most of the stuff I usually get? In both cases better chose a stuffing with enough taste of its own in case the zucchini turned out too bland. After looking through a few cookbooks the choice swayed between an Italian recipe with meat and a Provencal one with rice stuffing. No meat or normal rice left in the house but I still had some Camargue red rice. French recipe with French rice: sounded like a deal.

Playing around with vegetables, part I: yellow tomato salad

One of Brillat-Savarin famous quotes is his belief that The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star. Hard to argue with that, unless you're an astrophysicist. Ever tried eating a star? Take it from a chemist, burning balls of gasses are not palatable. As much as I agree with the Frenchman quote, I have to confess that given the choice between a new dish and a new ingredient I'd go always for the new ingredient. With a new dish, once you taste and enjoy it you're done. Having a new ingredient instead is like having a new toy: I can play with it, taste, test and tinker around till I know it better and start getting ideas, or, well, just nick them from a cookbook.

You can imagine my happiness in finding not one but three different vegetables I hadn't seen before in one of local the supermarkets, curiously the one that usually has the worst greengrocers section. I bought a good amount of all three and started making a cooking plan. The first vegetable to land on my chopping board were yellow tomatoes. I always wondered why in Italian tomatoes are called pomodori or pomidoro which means golden apples. I guess the colour of my yellow tomatoes might be a good explanation: maybe the first tomatoes to reach Italy were yellow.