Mashed Potatoes and Salmon

You know how it is:  You go to a restaurant with other people, you order a dish and, when they bring the food, you look at what the other guests at your table have ordered and you regret that you can't eat that too.  It happened to me on a business trip to Atlanta last week when I really craved for the mashed potatoes my colleague had on his plate. I've been craving mashed potatoes since then and I've decided to make them tonight along with salmon because it have been eating very little fish lately.  It is a winter Sunday night, a perfect time for comfort food.

Mashed Potatoes with Garlic and Cheese

Ingredients (for 2-4 - it depends on your appetite!):

1 cup of milk
4 gloves of garlic

4 medium (about 1 1/4 lb) Yukon gold potatoes
2 tsp sea salt
1 1/2 Tbs butter
1/2 cup of grated Parmigiano cheese

Instructions:

1.  Scald one cup of milk with the garlic.  Let it simmer for five minutes,then set aside.
2. Wash the potatoes and cover them with water.  Bring the water to a boil, lower the flame, and let the potatoes simmer, covered, for about 30 minutes or until done - a fork can easily be poked through them.
3. Peel the potatoes and pass them through a food mill or masher.  
4. Remove the garlic from the milk.  Fold the garlic-infused milk, butter and cheese into the potatoes.

Salmon Steaks with Balsamic Vinegar and Ginger

Ingredients (for 2):

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
2 Tbs fresh ginger, finely chopped
1 Tbs olive oil
1 clove of garlic, finely chopped
1/8 tbs sea salt
1/8 tbs black pepper, ground
2 salmon steaks
Olive oil spray

Instructions:

1. Place the first 5 ingredients in a large sealable plastic bag. Shake well. Add salmon and refrigerate 30 minutes to 1 hour. 
2. Heat the oven at 375F.  Spray a shallow baking pan with olive oil.  
3. Remove steaks from marinade, place them in the baking pan and bake them for about 40 minutes until they are flaky.

Amaretti Cake (Torta agli Amaretti)

Some time ago I was looking through my Italian cookbooks and I stumbled upon a recipe I had never noticed before and never heard of. It was a recipe for Torta agli Amaretti.  Amaretti, for those of you who don't already know it, are flourless, almond cookies that originally are from Lombardy and are widely used in Piedmont's cuisine.  They are one of the traditional ingredients of Fritto Misto, a sumptuous dish with both sweet and savory components, but it is mostly used in making desserts such as Bonnet, the classic flan from Piedmont.

The recipe for this cake asked for several tablespoons of plum jam that I had made a couple of weeks earlier.   The recipe was easy.  The biggest challenge I had was finding the amaretti cookies.  I went to Buona Italia in Manhattan sure they would have them but they only sell the soft kind and to make desserts you need the hard ones.  Corrado's in Clifton was again my savior:  They had the correct type of amaretti piled up right next to the cashier.

The cake is in four layers. The first is the dough (not need for a rolling pin) that is covered with plum jam. After soaking the amaretti in Amaretto liqueur, the almond cookies are placed on the jam and, in turn, they are covered with a mixture of almond, eggs, and sugar.  The result is a rustic, moist, and quite tasty cake, perfect to warm up the first fall chills.

Amaretti Cake

Ingredients

2  1/4 cups (10 ounces) whole wheat or unbleached all-purpose flour

1/2 cup + 1/2cup & 1 Tbs  (4 ounces + 5 ounces) sugar

  1 Tbsp. baking powder

 1 1/2 Tbs (3 ounces) butter, melted, + some for the pie dish

  1 egg + 2 eggs 
  6 Tbsp. plum jam

 1 box (7 ounces) amaretti (hard) cookies

 2 Tbsp. + 3/4 cup Amaretto liqueur

 1 cup (4 ounces) peeled almond

Instructions

1. Slightly butter a spring cake form.
2. Preheat the oven at 325 F.
3. Swift flour, four ounces of sugar, baking soda and combine them in a bowl with the melted butter, two tablespoons of Amaretto, and one of the eggs.  Mix them by hand or with an electric mixer.  It is perfectly all right if the product you obtain is somewhat crumbling.  
4. Put the mixture in the fridge for 10 minutes. Then press the mixture against the bottom and the wall of the pan cake.  Lay on top of it the plum jam.
5. Soak the amaretti cookies in 3/4 cup of Amaretti liqueur and place them on top of the plum jam.
6. In food processor, crumb the almonds and mix them with five ounces of sugar and two eggs to obtain a custard-like mixture, and pour it on the amaretti to cover them.
7. Bake the cake for 60 minutes.  Then remove it from the oven and let it cool. 

Back in the kitchen with plums!

I can't believe it is almost a year since I have published my blog.  It is not that I have not cooked but I suppose that time and energy were on the low side.  For those of you who have not done it, writing a blog is a lot of work.  But it might be the cooler September air, or some unknown source of inspiration, and now I'm back and ready to take the rust off.

This post is somewhat a tale of an unsuccessful attempt at canning.  Even though my mother used to make jams, preserves, pickles and can tomatoes for the winter, my participation in those endeavors was limited to help cleaning fruit and vegetables and stirring the mixtures in the pot.  The science of canning (i.e., temperature and timing) escaped me. My friend Joan, instead, has everything under control when it comes to canning.  Her products have even won blue ribbons at state country fairs.  You may want to visit her blog, http://www.farmtojar.blogspot.com/   After making jams and preserves a couple of times with Joan, I wanted to go "solo".

I had been craving plum jam and I have had hard time finding it in stores. Plus homemade jam is generally superior to the store bought one.  I needed Italian plums, that is the long, purple prunes whose pit can be easily removed.  Sure you can make jam using round plums but they are harder to work with and I think they might also have higher water content.  Finding Italian plums was not an easy task.  My husband Brian and I went to two farmers' markets in the area, Scotch Plain and Westfield, and neither had them.  Also let's be frank: I love farmers' markets but I think that the produce they sell is too expensive for making jams.  Maybe it is because of my Italian background and of being raised in a family that had access to free produce from relatives who lived on farms or by foraging it.  But I cannot get myself to pay $3.00 a pound for fruit to make jam.  In any case since they did not have what I was looking for, we drove to Corrado's, a huge Italian supermarket in Clifton, N.J. that in the summer becomes canning heaven.  Sometimes the quality of the produce there can be disappointing, but not this time.  They had tons of healthy, Italian plums at $.99 a pound!  Since I had committed myself to making jam, I did not get tomatoes but they sold San Marzano variety for $18.00 a bushel.  (On a note, I'd like to add that on Sunday we went to the market in Trenton and that is also a canning paradise when it comes to balancing quality and price.) We proceeded to the cashier with eight pounds of plums, glass jars and pectin.  On the way back home, at Target, I armed myself with a canning kit (tongues to left the hot jars, funnel with a wide mouth to pour the product into the jars, a lid wand to handle the metal lids and rings, and a plastic tool to remove air from the jars).  I also bought the Ball Blue Book to use as a reference.

I was ready.  My plan was to make some plum jam and to can some of the prunes in syrup.  My aunt Maria used to preserve plums that were delicious in part, I suppose, for the quality of the raw product her trees gave her.    Now she is gone and I have not had them for years.  Last time I had bought them at the supermarket I had to throw them away because of their chemical taste.  I really had a craving for them.  So I started with Brian's help to prepare the plums by cutting them in half.  I also made a syrup with water and sugar to preserve some them in jars.  Everything seemed to go fine until we put the jars into a big pot with boiling water.  I did not have a rack to hold the jars in place.  The jars started shaking against each other and we were afraid they would break. But did my mother use a rack? No, so why should I then? However, I had forgotten that probably my mother avoided breaking the jars by wrapping them in rags. We lowered the flame, instead.  I started being concerned about my jars when I realized that the lids were not popping as I had seen Joan's lids do.  Brian went to read the Blue Book we had bought at Target and realized that the filled jars should have stayed in at least 180 degrees F water.  The temperature of our water was more like 160 degrees F.  The result is that even though my jam and preserved plums taste good they are not safe for long storage; they need to be kept in the fridge and consumed fast.  So much for savoring plums in the winter!

Today's I decided to make a big dent in the preserved plums by making a tart.  I looked on the internet for inspiration and the first recipe to appear was by Ina Garner.  I'm not a big fan of the Barefoot Contessa, but the recipe seemed pretty straight forward.  What I liked the most was that it did not require resting the dough for an hour or longer. 

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/plum-tart-recipe2/index.html

I tried to replicate it but I introduced some variations partially by necessity (e.g., using my preserved plums instead of the firm Italian plum Ina's recipe calls for - my plum were firm but before preserving them!), partially by choice (e.g, using whole wheat flour instead of all purpose flour).  Some other differences came about because I did not read the recipe carefully enough so I placed the plums with the skin up instead of down. 

I'm not giving up on canning.  I promise you'll see more of my adventures in future postings.


Plum Tart

Ingredients

• 2 cups whole wheat flour
• 3/4 cup finely chopped walnuts
• 3/4 cup light brown sugar, lightly packed
• 12 tablespoons cold unsalted butter (1 1/2 sticks), diced
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 1/2 pounds Italian plums preserved in syrup

Directions

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
2. Combine the flour, walnuts, and sugar in a large bowl. Add the butter and the egg yolk. Mix, either by hand or with an electric mixer, until crumbly.
3. Press 1 1/2 cups of the crumb mixture in an even layer into the bottom of a 9 1/2-inch spring form.  Arrange the plums in the pan, skin side up, to form a flower pattern
4. Sprinkle the rest of the crumb mixture evenly over the plums. Bake the tart for 50 minutes. 
5. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes. Remove from the pan and transfer the tart to a flat plate. Serve warm or at room temperature.

"Italian" Ricotta Cheese Pie (Torta di Ricotta)

One of my favorite cookbooks is Susan Purdy’s As Easy As Pie (Atheneum, New York, 1984), a book I found about 12 years ago at Strand, the large used bookstore on Fulton Street in Manhattan.  From it you can learn about the history of pies from Biblical times to the New World.  You can also learn what makes an American pie (“any pastry crust with a sweet or savory filling baked in a shallow round dish with a slanted sides”) a tart (a European cousin of the American pie with only a bottom crust and baked in straight-sided pans), and that deep-dish pies are always baked in deeper plates with a top but without a bottom crust.  What I appreciate the most about this book are the author's detailed instructions on pie making, from pastry-making techniques to how to make different types of pastry dough by using a variety of flours and fats, or by adding to the dough other ingredients such as nuts and chocolate.  I equally appreciate that each recipe even highlights what can be prepared in advance and that through the book Susan Purdy provides tips and hints on how to deal with problems commonly encountered in pie making.  In sum, it’s a book I can’t do without when I want to bake a pie. 

That’s why I found myself flipping through its pages when I wanted to make a pie to bring to a friend’s party.  I wanted to use ricotta as the main ingredient for its filling because I had some in the house that needed to be used.  Her recipe for Italian Ricotta Cheese Pie (Torta di Ricotta) suggests using one of four different types of crust: Basic All-Purpose Flaky Pastry, Sherry Pastry Variation, Nut Pastry Variation, or Cream Cheese Pastry.  I went for the basic recipe because I still have a lot to learn and wanted to check how using vegetable shortening (Crisco) affected the texture of the crust to compare with my recollection of the oil pastry I had made for the rice and mushroom pie (September).   I put no sugar in the crust dough to limit the level of sweetness of the pie.  Even though I don’t think this is an Italian crust (in Italy we don’t have Crisco), the result was good and interesting.  In any case, this is not a traditional Italian cheese cake because a traditional Italian cake would use mascarpone or some other creamy Italian cheese or some cream, and not processed, American cream cheese.

One common problem in making cheese cake is the development of surface cracks, and my cake was not immune to it.  Surface cracks can develop by over-beating the eggs that traps additional air in the batter which tries to escape when it expands while baking in the oven.  They can also be due to sudden changes in temperature.I think that in my case the latter was the cause of the deep slash in the middle of the top of the pie because it only developed after I removed the cake from the oven.  (For interesting and useful tips on making cheese cake, read http://www.dianasdesserts.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/bakingtips.cheesecakes/Cheesecakes.cfm) Probably, I should have turned the oven off few minutes earlier and at that point let it finish baking for few more minutes before cooling at room temperature.  This is another lesson learned.  Nevertheless, the ricotta pie tasted good and was proclaimed by everybody “blog-worthy”.  

Ingredients (for 11-inch pie):

For the pastry:

1 ½ cups all purpose flour

½ tsp salt

6 Tbs unsalted butter, chilled

3 Tbs Crisco

1 teaspoon lemon juice

3 Tbs ice water

1 egg yoke (optional)

Filling:

1 ¾ lb whole or reduced fat ricotta

3 eggs

1 cup granulated sugar

1 package (8 ounce) cream cheese, cut up in small chunks

1 tsp almond extract

1 ½ dark chocolate chips

To make the pastry:

1. Combine flour and saltin the bowl of the mixer or a large bowl. If using a mixer, beat the butter and Crisco together with the dry ingredients at low speed until the mixture looks like dry rice.  If you use your hands to combine the ingredients, incorporate the fats into the dry ingredients using only your finger tips or a pastry blender to limit warming the mixture and melting the fats. (You may want to put the bowl in the refrigerator for ½ before starting making the pastry to help keeping the mixture cool while you work it).
2. Add the liquid ingredients to the mixture a little at a time to control the amount of liquid you add to the pastry.  The amount of liquid you need will vary according to the humidity in the environment.  If you use a mixer, beat the ingredients at low-medium speed until the dough clumps around the paddle.  If you mix the ingredients by hand, work the dough until it clumps together but before it forms a ball to avoid overworking it.
3. Put the dough on a sheet of wax paper and form a ball.  Wrap it and put in the refrigerator for at least 30 minutes. 
4. After the dough is chilled, set the ball of dough on a lightly floured, large piece of wax paper, and pat it down to a disk.  Using a lightly floured rolling pin and moving from the center to the side, create a disk about 1/8 inch thick and 13 inches in diameter. 
5. Put the baking dish over the dough and flip the latter over it.  Press the dough down against the bottom and wall of the baking dish.  The dough should hang about ¾  to 1 inch over the border of the pie dish. Cut off the excessive dough. Fold the dough around the rim and pinch it with your fingertips to flute the border of the pie shell.
6. Pre-heat the oven at 425 F degrees.  With the tines of a fork, prick the pastry all over the bottom, and chill it until firm, 15-20 minutes.  Then put the pie crust in the oven for about 10 minutes to partially blind bake it. Cool it on a wire rack and lower the oven temperature to 350 F degrees.

To make the filling:

1. If using freshly made ricotta, or if it looks like it has some liquid (the one I used being low fat and commercial did not have any liquid!), press it in a strainer over a bowl to remove extra fluid.
2. In a mixing bowl beat the eggs well.  Brush some of the beaten eggs over the pie shell to seal it against the moisture of the filling. Add the sugar into the eggs and beat them for 2-3 minutes.  Add ricotta, cream cheese, and almond extract, to the eggs and sugar mixture and beat it until smooth.  Stir into it the chocolate chips.

Baking the pie:

1. Pour the filling into the pie shell making sure not to overflow it.  Bake it in the center of the preheated oven for 45 minutes.  Turn the oven off and remove the pie from the oven after about 10 minutes.  Cool it on a wire rack.  Serve it either warm or at room temperature.

A Savory Pie with Rice and Mushroom Filling

I love pies, savory and not.  For me, they are almost a synonymous of wholesomeness and bring back images of a simpler life connected to the land.  Savory pies have also the great advantage that when they contain both protein and vegetables they are almost a full meal.  It was a long time since I had made a savory pie and thus this Labor Day weekend was the right time for one. 

I decided to look for a recipe from Liguria, the northern Italian region that counts several savory pies (torte salate) among its traditional dishes.  What makes Ligurian pies especially interesting is that no butter is used in their dough even though butter is what the cuisine of Liguria’s neighbor, France, prescribes for pie crust making.    Pies from this part of Italy use olive oil.  I’m wondering whether recipes from Provence, the region of France with which Liguria borders, also use olive oil.  More research is needed.  However, one should not be surprise that olive oil is used to make pie crust in Liguria.  This is not a land of pasture and cattle whereas olive oil is one of the major agricultural products of the region.

I’m not sure I have ever had pie crusts made with olive oil before.  They always had either butter or lard, or, in this country, shortening (e.g., Crisco).  Using olive oil instead of either saturated (butter, lard) fat or Trans fat (e.g. Crisco) seemed to make my notion of pie wholesomeness more real.  Unfortunately, I think that the healthiness of this recipe might stop at the crust, but it is a first step in the right direction.  The filling is made of rice cooked in milk (low fat in my case), then mixed with onion, mushroom, and cheese.  The original recipe in Ricette di Osterie e Genti di Liguria (Slow Food Editore, 1995) calls also for two tablespoons of cream. I did not have cream in the house and I added a tablespoon of butter instead to give more richness to the filling.  

Pie crusts made with olive oil don’t have the flakiness of crusts made with shortening or even butter.  However, by using multiple layers of dough as this recipe does, the crust is not one-dimensional and at the same time it is lighter than a butter crust, which is a point in its favor when you have a rich pie filling.  The final result got strong nods of approval by all those who had the opportunity of tasting it. I’m sure you’re going to see more pie recipes on this blog in the near future.

Please note that I have used an electric mixer to make the dough.  I like using the electric mixer  because it leaves your hands free and clean to handle the other ingredients. Of course you can make the dough by shaping the flour into a well on the table or in a large bowl and slowly incorporating the other ingredients.

Savory Rice Pie (Torta di riso) – makes 8 servings

For the dough:

2 ½ cups (about 10 ounces) unbleached, all purpose flour

4 Tbs olive oil

½ cup water

¼ tbs salt

For the filling:

1 quart milk

1 tbs salt

1 ½ cup (about 10 once) Arborio, or other short grain, rice

3 Tbs olive oil

1 onion, chopped

½ once dry porcini mushroom, soaked in warm water

1 cup parsley, chopped

½ cup grated Parmigiano cheese

1 egg, beaten

1 Tbs butter

½ tbs pepper

¼ tbs salt

1. In a mixer, add to the flour at slow speed 4 tablespoons of olive oil, one by one.  Add also the water a little bit at a time.  As you add more liquid to the flour, the latter will change from powder to crumbs until finally it holds together.  If the dough is too dry, add a teaspoon of water one at a time.  If it is too wet, add some flour, a little bit at a time, until it holds nicely together.
2. Take the dough out of the mixer and shape into a ball. Wrap it into a piece a saran wrap and let it rest for one hour.
3. Bring 4 cups of milk with 1 teaspoon of salt to a boil in a 2 quarter pot.
4. Add the rice in the milk making sure to separate all the grains, occasionally mixing.  Cook the rice until it has still a byte.  Then remove the pot form the stove and let it cool for about 10 minutes.
5. In the meantime, strain the dry mushroom that you had previously soaked in warm water. Warm the olive oil in a pan. Sauté the chopped onion in the olive oil until it is translucent.  Stir in the mushroom and the parsley, and cook the mixture for about 10 minutes.
6. Mix the onion and mushrooms into the rice.  Add the grated cheese and quickly stir in the egg so that it does not scramble.  Finally, add the butter and season the filling with salt and pepper.  Set it aside.
7. Pre-heat the oven at 350F.
8. Oil a 10 inch pie dish.  Sprinkle some flour on a clean table surface.  Cut the dough into four parts.  Take one section of dough and, with a rolling pin, stretch it to a thin disk large enough to cover the bottom and the sides of the pie dish. 
9. With the help of the rolling pin move the disk of dough from the table surface to the pie dish.  Brush some oil on the dough.  Lay another disk of dough over the first.  Pour the rice mixture in the pie dish and press it to cover all the dough in the pie dish.  Cover the filling with another disk of dough, brush it with some olive oil, and repeat the same steps again with the last disk of dough. 
10. Make sure the top two disks of dough fully cover the pie dish.  Stretch the dough if necessary and seal the pie by pressing the dough against the brim of the dish.  Cut the dough that hangs out of the pie dish.  Hold a fork with the point of its tines up and press it on the brim of the pie dish.   With the same fork pierce to dough several times to allow for steam out of the pie while it is baking.
11. Bake it at 350F until the top crust starts browning, or about 40-50 minutes. When it is cooked, remove it from the oven, let it cool for about 10 minutes, then slice it and serve it.

BUON APPETITO!

Roman or not Roman?

I always wondered how all the fresh pasta stores in Piedmont sold baked pillows of semolina flour cooked with milk, butter, egg yolks, and cheese which are called Gnocchi alla Romana.  Italians are known to be very insular in their cooking and that they consider dishes from even few miles away as foreign.  So how is it that all these shops in the most provincial towns in Piedmont display this dish in their windows every day? How is it that even my mother made them and that it was one of the dishes most favored by my father, a man definitely not know for having an adventurous palate?  The mystery got solved during my research on this dish.  It looks like the people of Rome don’t recognize this dish as their own.  For them, as for most Italians, gnocchi are made with potatoes and they believe that Gnocchi alla Romana actually originated in Piedmont.  Now the mystery of their popularity in Piedmont is solved for me.  My guess is that they are called “alla Romana” because they are made with semolina flour, just like pasta for which Romans are know of - think of Spaghetti Cacio e Pepe e Spaghetti all’Amatriciana, for example - and not made with potatoes like the gnocchi that are a staple of traditional Alpine cuisine.    

Gnocchi alla Romana are generally round.  However, when you cut disks of pasta you also get with a lot of waste.  Thus I decided to make them squared. If you rather shape them round, you can add some lemon zest and sugar to the leftover trimmings and fry them in a pan with some hot oil. You will get a simple, tasty treat!    

 

Gnocchi alla Romana – makes 6 servings

Ingredients

4 cups of milk

1 ½ cup of semolina flour

3 egg yolks, beaten

1 ½ cup of grated parmigiano cheese

1/3 nutmeg, grated

½ tbs salt

6 Tbs butter

1. Bring 4 cups of milk to a boil.
2. Slowly whisk in the semolina flour and cook it at low heat for 5-8 minutes.  Remove it from the stove.
3. Fast incorporate the egg yolks so that they don’t scramble.  Then add 1 cup of the grated parmigiano cheese, the nutmeg, salt, and 4 tablespoons of butter.
4. Pour the semolina mixture in a baking sheet and flatten it out.  Let it cool for at least 45 minutes.
5. When the semolina mixture is cool, cut it into 2 inch squares. Butter a 9x13 baking dish and lay the squares slightly juxtaposing one layer over the other.  Then sprinkle the gnocchi with the remaining parmigiano cheese and dot them with the remaining butter.
6. Bake the gnocchi for about 15 minutes at 450F degrees or until golden.
7. Remove them from the oven and let them rest for 5 minutes.  Serve hot.

 

BUON APPETITO!

A Different Type of Fruit Salad

Last week I bought a cantaloupe that was not very sweet.  I did not want to eat it by itself but I did not want to let it rot in the fridge either.  Make a fruit salad? Boring! While searching on the web, I came across a recipe from Bon Appétit of a salad using watermelon and ricotta salata (http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2005/08/watermelon_ricotta_salata_basil_and_pine_nut_salad).  It was a variation of a recipe by the Iron Chef Cat Cora who uses feta instead of ricotta.  Both the recipes had basil leaves among their ingredients.  I decided to give the recipe my own spin: cantaloupe instead of watermelon and mint instead of basil leaves.  The result is a very refreshing, tasty summer salad you can serve by itself as an appetizer, as a side dish, or as a light end to a rich meal.  Bon appétit!

Cantaloupe and Ricotta Salata Salad  - makes 4 servings

Ingredients

½ large or 1 small cantaloupe, cut in small cubes

½ lb ricotta salata, chopped

½ cup of mint leaves

Juice of 2 limes

3 Tbs of extra-virgin olive oil

½ tbs freshly, ground black pepper

1.      Put the cantaloupe, the ricotta salata, and the mint leaves in a bowl

2.      Add the lime juice, the olive oil and the pepper.

3.      Toss the ingredients together and serve