Shucking oysters, shelling peas

Ay, caramba – cotechino!?!?

Wed, 20 Dec 2006 20:14:55 GMT

Risking the ire of every postmaster and USDA agent from Atlanta to San Diego, my mother-in-law, Assunta, included a cotechino in this year’s Christmas package. It arrived looking like a Borat prop. Read the rest of the post at: www.sosp.blog-city.com

Moving to Blog-City

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:26:33 GMT

SOSP is moving from Salon.com to Blog-City; the new URL is http://sosp.blog-city.com

Predictably, things don't look so hot in the new virtual cucina just yet. I hope (undoubtedly optimistically) to have the new blog space cleaned up by Sunday, December 16.

Alla prossima puntata!

Admin Stuff and San Diego Reader

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 23:42:41 GMT

Well, it seems that the problems readers have been experiencing in accessing links in SOSP's archive are due to a bug in the Salon software. The experts are at this very moment handling the matter and assure me that they should have a solution lickety-split (or in some such time frame). Your patience until this situation is resolved is, as always, deeply appreciated.

Also, much thanks to the editor of the San Diego Reader for featuring SOSP in the print and online editions of November 9.

Maledetti raffreddori

Sat, 18 Nov 2006 23:25:27 GMT

Earlier this week an offensive conjunction of Murphy’s Law, Gennarino’s Curse, and pernicious germs left Ale and me laid up with raffreddori. The germs and the Law responded well enough to OTC medications, especially to copious doses of hiccupy-boozy Nyquil. The Curse, however, was less tractable and only very grudgingly responded to the amulets I’d amassed about our bed. Who knows, maybe it felt insulted by my assemblage of horns.

Anyway, for the first 48 hours, eating was out of the question – even weak tea seemed distinctly unpalatable. But at the end of those first 48 hours the hunger pangs started up, ushering in a dilemma: what to eat, and who would cook? Ale’s something of a mamma’s boy (gross understatement), so the who was clearly me, but not without a fair bit of snapping and whining. The what was the real problem.

I keep a few cartons of Pacific (or Imagine) organic chicken broth on hand for use in stews and braises, but I’ve had reservations about using it for soups, preferring instead to brew up quick batches of broth in my trusty pressure cooker. After 48 hours of living with a cold and with a husband suffering from a cold, the pressure cooker was not an option. So I dumped a carton of the broth in a pan and when it began to boil dropped in a package of pastina. The resulting zuppetta (topped off with a light grating of Parmigiano) was surprisingly satisfying: not too thick, lightly fragrant. There are worse ways to reintroduce food to two still-queasy stomachs.

This morning I removed the last of the amulets from our nightstands (accidentally poking Mimi with the six-inch, evil-repelling boar tusk that my mom gave me many years ago when I left home). The bottles of germ-repelling, stupor-inducing Nyquil, however, I have not touched. If an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, then ten fluid ounces must be even better.

Technical Difficulties

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:56:00 GMT

It seems that certain links on the archive page aren't working. I hope to have this fixed asap -- but considering my devastating incompetence with the Salon software program, this asap might well extend into the weekend. Your patience is, as always, deeply appreciated!

The Pimping of Champagne

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:05:32 GMT

It seems that Pernod Ricard, the French spirits group, is poised to release onto markets tout de suite the world’s most expensive champagne. If you’re interested, it’ll set you back about 1,000-euros (roughly $1,300) per bottle. But you’ll need to be quicker than a jack-rabbit with Dick Cheney on its tail, because according to PR’s chairman, only a limited supply will be made and, presumably, it’ll sell out quicker than the blink of an eyelid. But don’t think you’ll be able to pick up a few methuselah’s on that next ski trip to Chamonix. Sorry, dudes and dudettes, the very limited supply will not be sold in

France

.

I just have three quick questions:

(1) why won’t this new ultra-premium, sooper-dooper, grand-poobah of champagnes be sold in France? (I suspect it has nothing to do with the French somehow failing to comprendre l’ame du champagne).

(2) where will this new ultra-premium, sooper-dooper, grand -poobah of champagnes be sold? (I have my own ideas: places like Minot, North Dakota where, as a friend once warned me, men are men and sheep are timid).

(3) what makes this new champagne different – presumably better – than other ultra-premium, sooper-dooper, grand-poobahs of champagne?

I can only speculate on the answers to my first couple of questions, but here’s a take on an answer to my third question. According to the UK’s Independent, there really isn’t much of a difference. “When you are paying more than 400 to 500-British pounds [about $975] for a wine it is not going to get any better in flavour. What you are getting after that is exclusivity, rarity."

Put it another way: what you’re really getting after that first 400 to 500-British pounds is a bit of je ne sais pas comme il faut le dire, a bit of added oomph to those silicon penile and breast implants that didn’t quite deliver the results you were looking for.

Well, here’s to hoping your 1,000-euros are well spent!

Three Reasons Why I Dislike the Word Gourmet

Tue, 07 Nov 2006 19:49:59 GMT

1. It’s overused by the food industry, the food media, and scores of foodies in English-speaking countries.

The French, inventors and rightful owners of the word, use it sparingly, and then most often to flatter doe-eyed tourists. We use it relentlessly. They use it as a virile noun denoting a connoisseur in the delicacies of the table. We use it as a castrated adjective denoting of or characteristic of a gourmet – in other words, denoting nothing.

2. Depending on one’s needs, there are better words in the English lexicon.

Take a look at the meaning of gourmet: of or characteristic of a gourmet, esp. in involving or purporting to involve high-quality or exotic ingredients and skilled preparation: gourmet meals; gourmet cooking. High-quality, exotic, and skilled preparation are just a few of these better words. They’re better because they’re more specific (though they’re still too generic for my taste).

It is true that specificity can, for certain people and at certain times, be thankless. This weekend I was browsing the La Jolla Bristol Farms, An Extraordinary Food Store, and came upon this text from the label of one of their pasta sauces:

Bristol Farms
An Extraordinary Food Store
Roasted Garlic
Gourmet Pasta Sauce

Shhhhh…we’re going to perform something like a Folger’s taste test with this label – we’re going to substitute the words high-quality, exotic, and skilled preparation for the word gourmet. Let’s see what happens.

High-quality. Is Extraordinary’s roasted garlic pasta sauce high-quality? In all sincerity, I’ve never heard of low-quality garlic; however, I can’t claim to be on perfectly solid ground with this. A type of garlic may well exist that is only pusillanimously pungent. Or perhaps there’s a type that’s so excessively pungent it’ll whack you back to the Ordovician era. I’ve never encountered either, but maybe I’ve just been lucky.

Exotic. Is Extraordinary’s roasted garlic pasta sauce exotic? I wouldn’t usually pair the words “roasted garlic” with the word “exotic. After all, humans have been roasting things, including garlic, from as far back as our Neanderthal youth. Roasted garlic could be exotic to, say, a Uranian, but definitely not to us.

Skilled preparation. Is Extraordinary’s roasted garlic pasta sauce skillfully prepared? How the heck would I know – I wasn’t around when they made the stuff. But to me, the definition of skillful preparation implies the presence of cooks trained in the art of sauce-making, and the real world of mass food production doesn’t work this way. Most likely, preparation is automated, and the people employed in this sauce assembly-line are trained in working with food-production machinery not in working with fine food.

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t see anything particularly gourmet in Extraordinary’s roasted garlic pasta sauce. The word is vague enough to hold out promises of excellence to the weary shopper so its use is quite appropriate for Extraordinary, but for us culinary coneheads, it reveals far more than it conceals.

End of label test.

3. It’s often used by dimwitted business people to insult consumers’ intelligence.

Please, somebody tell me what is the difference between regular popcorn and gourmet popcorn? Regular potato chips and gourmet potato chips? Regular root beer and gourmet root beer? It all sounds like junk to me, junk that should cost fractions of a penny not multiples of dollars.

I have a particular bitch with certain pizzaioli who try to pass off their particular pizza as a gourmet product. Trust me: there’s only one kind of pizza. It’s made by skilled cooks using the best ingredients, some of which may be exotic or expensive (though these evaluations are entirely subjective – exotic is merely something a person’s not unaccustomed to and expensive is merely something a person can’t afford). Anything made any differently is not a pizza, it’s a poopa.

Yes, of course, there is a difference between the Pizza Margherita or the Tarte d’Alsace I buy at Trader Joe’s for snacks and quick lunches and the pizza I’m served at Ciro a Mergellina’s in Naples. But Ciro doesn’t call his pizza gourmet: the restaurant’s reputation is impeccable and he’s confident that his diners are fully capable of differentiating a Ciro’s pizza from a TJ’s pizza. And if they’re not, peggio per loro (too bad for them).

Magic Mushrooms

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 20:53:16 GMT

There are two kinds of mushrooms in the world: those that cause pleasurable gastric hallucinations and those that cause pleasurable audio-visual hallucinations. The former are edible, the latter are not, or better, to the best of my knowledge, there are no mushrooms that are both gastrically as well as audio-visually pleasurable (but if you have information to the contrary, I’d be interested in hearing from you). When eaten, both edible and inedible mushrooms tickle your tummy, but the tickle of edible mushrooms subsides as soon as they’re whooshed from your stomach into your intestines, while the tickle of inedible mushrooms degenerates in no time into burning and cramping (if you meet a guy looking like the grim reaper at this point, don’t assume he’s just an audio-visual).

We shall keep our focus trained entirely on edible mushrooms here, because this is, after all, a legit food blog, and also because, frankly, I know little about inedible mushrooms. Once, long ago, I tripped out on some, but it was kind of a weird experience, because they were served at a black-tie dinner as a side-dish accompanying the beef Wellington. The audio-visuals blew my mind, but I think the show was entirely unintended by our straight-laced host, and the cramps that quickly ensued made my usual menstrual cramps feel like orgasms.

Anyway, edible mushrooms: that’s what we’re talking about.

For many of us, autumn is the season par excellence for mushrooms – not necessarily because they’re harvested in this period, but because the earthy flavors compliment the nippy air and the season’s aromas of burning wood (and, yes, the air does get nippy here in San Diego and we, too, are privileged with the aromas of burning wood, though admittedly, these aromas are on occasion the result of arson, rather than of agricultural burning or crackling fireplaces. But let’s not get picky, ok).

Last night I stirred up a quick batch of insalata di funghi (mushroom salad) to go with our stuffed bellpeppers. Ale pretty much ate the entire bowl, leaving me two tiny slices. What a gyp – next time I’ll make them when he’s on a business trip.

The is an adaptation of a recipe given in Il Cucchiaio d’Argento (the old, Italian version).

Insalata di funghi
4 persons

250 grams organic button mushrooms
Small handful of dried porcini, soaked
Olive oil
Lemon juice
Salt

Wipe the mushrooms delicately with a damp cloth to remove any dirt still clinging to them, then slice – thinly or thickly, as you prefer.

Chop the softened porcini. (I usually conserve the liquid of the rehydrated porcini in the fridge for a day or two, covered, of course, and then use it in another recipe).

Put 5 tablespoons of oil, about ½ cup of water, 5 teaspoons of lemon juice, and a pinch of salt in a pan. Bring to a boil and let it bubble gently for about one minute. Add the mushrooms, turn down the heat, cover the pan, and let simmer for about ten minutes.

Allow the mushrooms to cool off in their cooking liquid (if you’re in a rush, remove the lid from the pan). When cool (not cold), remove the mushrooms from the pan with a slotted spoon. Drizzle a little olive oil and salt on the mushrooms, stir gently to distribute, and let the mushrooms sit for an hour before serving.

Another dish that’s sure to get your family and guests smiling this season is penne del bosciaolo. This recipe was given to me when I first moved to Milan by the owner of a small trattoria – da Rita it was called – across the street from the barely-renovated horse-stable we called our home. It’s quick to prepare, spicy and sweet and rib-sticking, so you probably won’t need or want to serve a secondo.

Penne del boscaiolo
Serves 6

For the sauce:
2 hot Italian pork sausages (the kind from Whole Foods is quite nice), cut into bite-size pieces
1 cup of dried porcini, soaked; reserve the liquid
Pomodori pelati (canned tomatoes), passed through a food mill or sieve
Onion, minced
Garlic, minced
Olive Oil
Hot pepper flakes or minced peperoncino, to taste
Salt
Pepper

For the pasta:
Dried penne (Barilla, de Cecco, and Latini are excellent choices)
Grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, to taste

Prepare the sauce.

Cook the onion and garlic in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, until soft and translucent. Add the sausages, and brown, making sure not to burn the onion or garlic. A medium-low temperature is best.

Now stir in the porcini and peperoncino, cook for a couple of minutes, and then add the liquid used to rehydrate the porcini. Partially cover pan and allow the liquid to slowly evaporate. When the sauce has reduced, stir in the pelati and season with salt and pepper to taste. Partially cover, and allow the sauce to simmer under reduced, about 20 minutes.

Prepare the pasta, according to the directions on the package.

When the pasta and sauce are done, combine them. Stir in a knob or two of good butter for added richness, and a generous helping of Parmigiano.

Buon appetito!

There’s a lot of information about mushrooms both in books and on the web. Here's some interesting trivia courtesy of the Oxford Companion to Food (btw, these are direct quotes even though I’ve omitted the quotation marks):

Wild mushrooms grow in most parts of the world and form part of the diet of most peoples.

Most mushrooms are edible, but only a small proportion are worth eating; the rest are tasteless or unpleasant.

The flavor of the common cultivated mushroom, if it can be detected at all, falls short of that of its wild relations.

The Chinese, as is their wont, consider some mushrooms to be aphrodisiacs.

For Russians, familiarity with mushroom names is taken for granted from childhood onwards.

And here are a few online sources.

Mykoweb – Mushrooms, Fungi, Mycology

Mushrooms.com

The Mushroom Council

Fungi Perfecti – gourmet and medicine mushrooms (they carry a product called Muttrooms, which are mushrooms for mutts; whoo hooo, or arf arf)

Gourmet Mushrooms