Posted by Ed Levine, February 7, 2006 at 1:13 PM
I always like to compare at least two reliable and credible sources when I am about to go somewhere, so in that spirit here is Faith Willinger's take on Venetian food. Faith is a food writer and cookbook author who has lived in Italy for many years now, and I have found her to be fairly reliable. She can (like all of us) get a little too chummy with some of the people she writes about, but she certainly knows Italian food inside and out, especially northern Italian food (she lives in Florence). Her book Eating in Italy: A Traveler's Guide to the Hidden Gastronomic Pleasures of Northern Italy
(1998) is worth seeking out, as is Fred Plotkin's Italy for the Gourmet Traveler, Revised
. Both books are dated but still useful. When you add all of this info up we may be, in my son's words, getting into 511 (too much information) territory, but I'd rather err on the side of too much info rather than too little.
Posted by Ed Levine, December 5, 2005 at 1:31 PM
I have now walked past my wife's scrumptious lemon-glazed pound cake ten times in the last eight hours, and so far I have been able to resist its siren call.
The cake was left over from our dinner party last night, which severely tested my diet discipline. I made two recipes from Mario Batali's excellent new book, Molto Italiano: 327 Simple Italian Recipes to Cook at Home
, and both were huge hits with the crowd we had assembled. The Winter Caprese salad, slow-roasted (for two hours) Roma tomatoes, Buffalo-milk mozzarella, toasted pine nuts, a dab of pesto, and a basil leaf, was a fine starter. I was amazed that the totally cardboardy winter Roma tomatoes were transformed by the slow-roasting.
The main course was a braised (in red wine and tomato sauce) pork butt that had been browned in a paste of garlic, pancetta and Italian parsley. The 7 1/2 hunk of pork cooked on the stove for four hours, so by the time we served it, it was as tender and flavorful as the best barbecue.
In fact, I decided it WAS Italian barbecue.
The pork was accompanied by a celery root puree my wife made from a Bass Serena cookbook, Serena, Food & Stories: Feeding Friends Every Hour of the Day
.
I tried to watch my caloric intake by not having seconds and eating very little of the cheese and bread we served beforehand. I also made sure to eat a couple of pears and an apple in the course of the day, which was mostly spent shopping and cooking. I also had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and two pieces of whole-grain bread and a piece of American cheese (Deluxe, not the cheese food crap) for lunch, so I wouldn't be starving when our guests showed up around seven.
I had lost five pounds going into the dinner, and I will get on the scale Wednesday to see if I can maintain my weight loss momentum. Oh, yeah I broke down and had a couple of bites of the lemon pound cake tonight.
Posted by Ed Levine, November 17, 2005 at 1:40 PM
Given that I read on-line every major newspaper's Thanksgiving-obsessed food section this past Wednesday on SauteWednesday, I feel compelled to share with all of you my Thanksgiving menu.
I buy an Eberly Farms Organic Turkey and brine it overnight. This year I hope to avoid last year's catastrophe, which resulted from buying a cheap styrofoam cooler to brine the bird in. The cooler broke and there was a flood of salty brine water all over our kitchen.
Other years I've bought Kosher turkeys and Murray's free-roaming turkeys, and had good luck with both of those as well. Just try to avoid buying a Butterball. They have a strange unnatural taste, probably from the crap that is injected into them. The most fashionable turkey to buy this year is a heritage bird. They're much more expensive than even my organic bird, but they do have a more intense and distinct flavor. If you like dark meat, this is the bird for you. If you haven't ordered one by now, you're probably out of luck. Every website that is selling them appears to be sold out.
Continue reading »
