Posted by Ed Levine, June 23, 2006 at 7:42 AM
My friend Arthur Schwartz, who knows more than anyone (Italian or American) about Neapolitan food (yes, he did write the book (Naples at Table), will be conducting three free one-hour cooking and eating workshops on July 6, 7 and 8 at the offices of Regione Campania in Manhattan, 4 E. 54th Street (enter through the Kiton store). To register go to Arturo's website, which also currently has a terrific piece on Italian food and ingredients (and a great fava beans and potato recipe) by the Food Maven himself.
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 25, 2005 at 1:39 PM
Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, along with the usual assortment of mini-triumphs and mini-disasters that always seem to accompany this most food-centric of holidays. I have been brining my turkey the last few years, which in and of itself causes many problems in a NYC apartment. We have a small fridge, so finding a cool place to brine the turkey in overnight is always an issue. This year I decided to brine it on a friend's penthouse terrace in our building.
I placed the turkey along with ten gallons of water and two cups of salt in a plastic storage bin I bought at my local hardware store, and deposited it on the aforementioned terrace at 6 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving. At midnight I logged on to get my email and also checked on the weather. Winds of more than 20 mph were forecast for NYC and vicinity that night, and those winds began to prey upon my usual pre-Thanksgiving anxiety. We went to bed around 12:15, and I found myself thinking about the turkey flying off the roof and killing or maiming some innocent bystander in for the Thanksgiving Day parade (our apartment is just a few blocks from where the parade begins). So after tossing and turning and considering this possibility for about an hour I decided to take the turkey in for the night. I took the elevator up to the penthouse and brought the turkey in from the cold and wind. I was relieved not to find anyone sleeping in the apartment (my friends were in Rome, and I hadn't told them I was going to brine my turkey at their place, so I was more than a little concerned that I was going to walk in to find friends of theirs staying there). I had already rehearsed what I was going to say: "Don't be scared. I'm just a friend and neighbor taking my turkey in from the cold."
I brought the turkey in and put it and some of the brining liquid in a big pasta pot in my friend's fridge. I took the plastic container with the rest of the now-bloody brining liquid back down to our house, and put it in our bathtub. Armed with the knowledge that my turkey was not going to wreak havoc in anyone else's life that night, I slept like a baby.
Oh, yeah, the brined turkey was magnificent. Even the white meat was tender and moist.
And even though there was an incident at the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade which slightly injured two people, I knew that my turkey wasn't responsible.
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.
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