Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Pasta with Delicata Squash and Fall Vegetables

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Pasta tossed with sautéed delicata squash, Brussels sprouts, and red onion in sage butter. Casarecce, a short dried pasta shape, has nooks to catch the condiments and a noodley exterior for a happy mouth feel.

Adjusting to the produce offerings of extended summer in North Carolina, (we’re enjoying heirloom tomatoes and peaches into October!), I found myself longing for a taste of autumn.

That’s when I spotted some hard shell squash at my Uptown bi-weekly farm stand.

A happy little striped cylinder caught my eye. “What kind of squash is this?” I asked.

“Delicata. It’s really sweet and good,” the vendor explained. “I eat it all the time. You don’t even have to peel it, the skin is that tender.”

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Peach Sorbetto

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peach sorbettoFarm to table sounds so simple, doesn’t it?

Take the peach sorbetto pictured above. It started at an orchard and ended up on my table.

I bought perfect peaches from Hausman’s Fruit Farm at the Emmaus Farmers’ Market on a recent fine Sunday morning. I froze a tray of peeled and sliced ripe fruit (click here for directions) then pureed the frozen slices in a food processor with simple syrup and lemon juice.

Easy peasey. And easily, the best peach sorbetto ever.

But to make those peaches, ah, not so easy.

For the peach grower, patience, skill, and luck are essential.

Patience is needed to nurture the tree for three to four years before it can produce blossoms that grow into fruit.

Skill is needed in feeding the tree, watering the tree, protecting the tree from pests and diseases, and harvesting the delicate fruit.

Luck is needed when Nature’s dealing out her early frosts, hail storms, wind gusts, and droughts.

As a fortunate peach eater, I thank the farmers for making it so (seem) easy to make this divine peach sorbetto.

Peach Sorbetto
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Recipe type: dessert
Cuisine: Italian
Author:
Serves: 2 cups
This frosty fruit sorbet is guaranteed to take the steam heat out of August.
Ingredients
  • 1 pound frozen, peeled sliced peaches
  • 6 tablespoons cold simple syrup (see Note)
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
Instructions
  1. Remove the peaches from the freezer and allow to sit for 10 minutes. Place in the bowl of a food processor fitted with a steel blade. Pulse to chop coarsely.
  2. Run the machine, scraping down the sides of the bowl, for about 3 minutes, adding the syrup and lemon juice through the feed tube. Process until the mixture is smooth.
  3. Serve right away or ripen in the freezer for 30 minutes.
  4. Note: Make simple syrup by boiling 1 cup water with 1 cup granulated sugar until sugar is dissolved. Cool and transfer to a jar. Store in the refrigerator.

 

Risotto with Asparagus and Shrimp

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11709415_10153362464781357_5099074015839789754_n (1)We were atop a ridge in eastern Pennsylvania but felt as if we were in northern Lombardy or Alto Adige. The 360-degree view of trellised grape vines and distant forests from Galen Glen Winery‘s tasting room is stunning.

Last weekend, the folks at the award-winning Andreas, Pa., winery hosted a cookbook signing and tasting of SimpleItaly’s Risotto with Asparagus and Shrimp paired with its crisp Grüner Veltliner 2014 Stone Cellar Dry White wine. The wine’s notes of grapefruit, mandarin orange, and honeysuckle embraced and softened the grassiness of the asparagus. What a match.

Owned by Galen Troxell (the grape grower) and Sarah Troxell (the wine maker who was awarded “Best Woman Winemaker” in 2014’s International Women’s Wine Competition in California ), Galen Glen was recently named the Best Winery in Pennsylvania in the New York International Wine Competition.

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Galen and Sarah Troxell (right) of Galen Glen Winery. On the left are Galen’s forbears who originally farmed the land in Andreas, Pa.

Philadelphia food writer, Craig LaBan, wrote, “they have pioneered the growth in this region of aromatic Northern European grapes — edgy Austrian Grünner Veltliner, exotic Alsatian Gewürztraminer, minerally Riesling — well-suited to the cold climate, and well-drained, stony soils.”

Family-owned, dedicated to excellence from the earth . . . Galen Glen may not be in Italy but it sure feels like it is.

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Lasagna alla Bolognese

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Lasagne alla Bolognese

By Sharon Sanders

Lasagne alla Bolognese (Bolognese-style lasagna) is a dish that embodies the allure of slow food. It has only four components but each deserves attention.

Little language lesson:

Lasagna (singular) is one sheet of pasta.

Lasagne (plural) is more than one sheet of pasta.

The Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese is the ingredient that takes the most time to produce—an average of two years. Luckily for us, the fine cheese makers of the Consorzio del Formaggio Parmigiano-Reggiano shoulder that task.

The salsa besciamella (béchamel) can be whipped up on the stovetop in 10 minutes. I enrich my besciamella with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese (salsa alla Parmigiana) which makes it technically a Mornay sauce.

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Tomato September Song

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Allow garden or farm tomatoes to ripen at room temperature to develop deep flavor.

Allow garden or farm tomatoes to ripen at room temperature to develop deep flavor.

The calendar says it’s the first day of autumn. This is indisputable science. The equinox, those brief few days when the daylight and the dark are “equal,” will soon tilt (as the Earth’s axis does) to bring days of less sunlight and more darkness.

But wait! I’m not giving up that easily. The sun is warm on my face today and the temperature is approaching 70 degrees. I still have plenty of locally grown tomatoes on the counter. I’ve chopped them and added extra-virgin olive oil, garden basil, and garlic.

After this heady mixture macerates for a few hours, I’ll toss it with cooked, drained rotini. The aroma will be like an intoxicating distillation of summer. The taste will be like sweet-tart sunshine.

Uncooked tomato sauce is macerated at room temperature before tossing it with hot pasta. Don't refrigerate the sauce. It would blunt the flavor.

Uncooked tomato sauce is macerated at room temperature before it’s tossed with drained cooked pasta. Don’t refrigerate the sauce. It would blunt the flavor.

The calendar says it’s the first day of autumn but, in my kitchen, it’s summer.

Rotini with Uncooked Tomato Basil Sauce
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Recipe type: Main
Cuisine: Italian
Author:
Serves: 4 to 6
Use any short pasta--such as rotini, penne, baralotti, campanelle, or shells--to capture the rich tomato juice.
Ingredients
  • 4 large or 8 medium very ripe tomatoes (about 4 pounds), cored and chopped
  • ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
  • ½ cup torn fresh basil leaves
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 teaspoon plus 1 tablespoon salt
  • 1 pound dried rotini
  • Ground black pepper
Instructions
  1. In a large bowl, combine the tomatoes, oil, basil, garlic, and 1 teaspoon salt. Stir to mix. Set aside for several hours at room temperature.
  2. Set a covered large pot of water over high heat. When the water boils, add the remaining 1 tablespoon of salt and the rotini. Stir. Cover and return to the boil. Uncover and boil, stirring occasionally, about 10 minutes, or until al dente.
  3. Drain the rotini and return to the pot. Add the tomato mixture. Toss to mix. Set aside for for 5 minutes. Stir and serve.

 

Castagnaccio

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In Tuscany, chestnut pancakes are a sweet taste of surviving through hard times.

In Tuscany, chestnut pancakes are a sweet taste of surviving through hard times.

In a recent Italian language conversation meeting, talk turned to castagnaccio. Daniele, our born-and-bred Tuscan from Siena, recalled snacking on this cake. He remembered it in detail. It was made from ground chestnuts and olive oil embellished with raisins, rosemary, and pine nuts.

To my American ears, such an austere combination of ingredients didn’t sound much like any cake I knew. But since I had never sampled a castagnaccio, I decided to bake one.

I ordered chestnut flour on nuts.com and while waiting for it to arrive, I started researching recipes.

Pamela Sheldon Johns’ Cucina Povera seemed like a good starting point since this “cake” was clearly food of the poor. She shared a recipe but the head note gave me pause. “This dense cake is an acquired taste, and it has taken me almost twenty years to acquire it. But its musky chewiness is much loved by Tuscans.”

Patrizia Chen in Rosemary and Bitter Oranges was more encouraging. “Semisweet, tender, and distinctively nutty, castagnaccio is in itself worth a trip to Tuscany in fall or winter.” She also refers to the preparation as a pancake which seems a more accurate descriptor than cake.

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