Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Landhaven Bed and Breakfast Cooking Class

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Explore Italian cooking beyond pasta and pizza. Polenta, beans, potatoes, and rice dishes are so satisfying--and gluten-free.

Calling all Inner Italians in southeastern PA and central NJ!

I’m looking forward to teaching a Saturday evening class (January 21, 2012) “Savoring Italian Tastes” at the charming Landhaven Bed and Breakfast owned by Donna and Ed Land. Located in the village of Huff’s Church (Barto, PA), it’s an easy destination for anyone from the Lehigh Valley, the Philadelphia area, or west central NJ.

My class is part of a Food Lovers’ Weekend showcasing gluten-free cooking. On Saturday evening, I’ll show how to prepare delectable Italian dishes that just happen to be gluten free: Risotto with Shrimp and Peas; Cheesey Polenta all’Arrabiata; Zucchini Crust Tomato Basil Tart; Chicken and Red Potatoes alla Pizzaiola. You can sign up for my class only or enjoy a weekend package with two nights lodging with Donna’s incredible breakfast, 3 cooking classes, tastings, and field trips.

Call or e-mail Donna to register:

610.845.3257

donna@landhavenbandb.com

Piadina

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A piadina filled with prosciutto, cooked greens, and fresh ricotta cheese.

As la pizza is to i napoletani, la piadina is to i romagnoli.

In Romagna, the part of the Emilia-Romagna region on the Adriatic coast east of Bologna, the flat bread piadina is ubiquitous. It’s ancient and like so many other good foods was born of cucina povera. It consists of flour, strutto (lard), and water (sometimes milk). Numerous dialect names attest to its favor: Piada, pie, pjida, pièda, pji, pida.

Genuine piadine are flavored with pure lard which is soft at room temperature. If you can find unhydrogenated lard (I bought some at an Amish butcher) use it. Otherwise, olive oil is a better choice.

Piadina is flat like pizza but with important differences.

Pizza dough is prepared with yeast. Piadina is not although bicarbonate of soda is sometimes added.

Pizza dough contains no fat. Piadina is tenderized with lard and increasingly these days with olive oil.

Pizza is baked in a very hot oven while piadine are grilled on an unglazed terra cotta stone known as una teglia or uno testo. More energy efficient! Once upon a time, the grilling took place over the ashes of wood fires. Now it’s completed on a stovetop. A cast iron pan or griddle works beautifully.

Piadine actually have more in common with Mexican flour tortillas than with pizza. Like other quick breads, they must be eaten warm when they’re most flavorful and pliable. Cut into wedges, they are a welcome addition to an antipasto platter.

A vintage ad for piadine on a wall in Dozza: The best snacks with genuine products.

Piadine also make delectable panini. Thinly sliced prosciutto or other salumi, sautéed lascinato kale or chard, any soft cheese, arugula, whatever you fancy—just lay the fillings on top of the bread and fold.

Piadine are fun for a casual do-it-yourself supper where guests grill and fill their own. The dough can be mixed several hours ahead of time and left to sit, covered in plastic, at room temperature or in the refrigerator (warm to room temp before grilling).

I tried several different recipes from good sources, including a fine one from Chef Paul Bartolotta in Food & Wine. His piadine are 10-inches wide, a bit too broad for my cast iron skillet, so I narrowed the width.

I experimented with cooling and freezing piadine. I found the reheated breads almost better than the freshly grilled ones. Even in such a thin bread, the layers of pastry were more defined. [Read more…]

Cucina Povera

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Pomodori, Fagioli, e Cipolline (Roasted Tomatoes, Beans, and Onions) Photograph by Andrea Wyner

As cultural tourists, who among us isn’t dazzled by the Tuscan sun? We see ourselves feasting beneath its rays: Platters laden with antipasti, pasta, bistecca all fiorentina, Sangiovese wine, and sweets . . . la dolce vita.

But Tuscans in their 70s, 80s, and 90s tell a story of a different table.

These old kitchen hands are the witnesses who inform Pamela Sheldon Johns’ latest cookbook Cucina Povera: Tuscan Peasant Cooking (Andrews McMeel). Johns, an American cookbook author who owns Poggio Etrusco, an organic agritourismo near Montepulciano, has written a cultural and culinary history of a by-gone world. [Read more…]

Sara Jenkins Respects Italian Food

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Regional Italian dishes rely on specialized ingredients like superfino rice to make a characteristically creamy risotto.

Chef Sara Jenkins, of NYC’s Porchetta and Porsena, writes in Atlantic magazine that Italian cooking has too often been shoved in the back seat behind haute French cuisine and even nouvelle Spanish.

She works to change that perception and hits upon two essential points.

First, there is no such thing as Italian cuisine. There are many Italian regional cuisines.

Second, the reverence for fine food in Italy is democratic. The plumber and the professor both appreciate and know good cooking.

Grazie, Sara.

Here’s her article.

Sizzling Melon Salad

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Sweet garden cantaloupes ready for the picking.

Lovely Lisa, the neighborhood queen of zucchini and tomato cultivation, has diversified this season. She’s growing cantaloupes and I think she’s on to something. One plant is bearing enough sweet, juicy orbs to supply an entire block of freeloading friends.

I picked two cantaloupes and let them to ripen for several days in a cardboard box filled with tomatoes, peaches, and other fruit sitting on the kitchen counter. The rind beneath the webbing actually turned a lovely yellow, something I’ve never seen with store-bought melons. I could actually detect the scent of cantaloupe!

Lovely Lisa and her husband Dr. Bill host an annual pool party so the time seemed ripe to showcase her home-grown cantaloupe in my pot-luck dish. I wanted something more exciting than the classic prosciutto and melon (not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

I remembered a Southeast Asian mixed melon salad recipe from Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken of Border Grill fame. It’s a vivid mélange of lime juice, sugar, hot chiles, and mint.

Hmmm, how to Italianize it? [Read more…]

La Pizza Improvvisata

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An impromptu pizza--the wonderful product of foraging.

An impromptu pizza: the wonderful product of kitchen foraging.

A recipe can be a useful thing.

A recipe is useful when we just have zilch inspiration about what to serve the in-laws.

A recipe is useful when we want to explore a cuisine that’s foreign to us. You’d better believe when I cook a Thai dish, I want some guidance from someone who’s been there.

A recipe is useful to introduce us to new and creative flavor combinations.

A recipe is useful—make that nearly essential—for a home cook baking a Sicilian cassata or any other elaborate pastry.

A recipe is useful to “visit” other cooks to see how they do things.

But is a recipe really necessary to cook?

While I make part of my living by creating, writing, testing, and editing recipes, I’m going to bite the hand that feeds me by saying, “no.”

The earliest European written recipe cook book is thought to have been created in Latin in  the 1st century. De re coquinaria is credited to the Roman gourmet Marcus Gavius Apicius. Yet modern human beings had been eating for at least 50,000 years before those recipes were written.

How?

They explored their environment . . . sniffed, tasted, applied heat, threw in some flavorful plant cuttings. They experimented. They cultivated some seeds that reproduced staple grains. They shared their learnings with family and friends. They used their physical senses with an application of common sense.

That’s what I did the other night. My weekly batch of bread dough was doing its thing while I was putting in a full day on the computer. I hadn’t planned anything for dinner. So, I did what any self-respecting human would do. I foraged.

I had the makings of a crust on hand. Such a deal! I pinched off the amount that would have been one loaf of bread and patted it into a pizza pan. (A non baker could keep purchased yeast dough on hand in the freezer for such opportunities.) In the refrigerator, I found a zucchini, half a bell pepper, a few mushrooms, an opened container of Pomi tomato sauce, and a hunk of extra-sharp Provolone cheese. I always have onions in the pantry so I sliced the onion, zuke, mushrooms, and pepper, and sautéed them in extra-virgin olive oil until they were soft and golden. I painted the crust with the Pomi, scattered on the veggies, and went crazy with the Provolone. Into a 425 degree oven for about 12 minutes and I had a triumph of woman over recipe: la pizza improvvisata.

 

Full disclosure: I love cookbooks. I’m a cookbook author.  I own hundreds of cookbooks. There are so many joys to be had from beautiful food books—getting dinner on the table is only one of them. But, if you are starting out in the kitchen and have no skill set to rely upon (perhaps you were raised by wolves?), I recommend cookbooks that are more than a collection of recipes, such as How to Cook Everything (Tenth Anniversary Edition) by Mark Bittman, , The New Making of a Cook by Madeleine Kamman, Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking by Michael Ruhlman.