Roll out the red carpet, blow the shiny, loud horns, wear your fanciest dress (you too, men) – guess who’s back? Yes, I am still alive. Yes, Jonny has been keeping this blog afloat for a year now. And yes, I am ready to try to blog again. After a year of figuring out how to be a parent (and how to be comfortable being a mom and finally coming to terms with the fact that my life will never, ever be the same again) and learning to balance everything that comes with this new, crazy world, I finally feel like I want to write again. And what could be better to write about than the grapevine that not only GREW in the soil of our Brooklyn, NY, yard but even FLOURISHED and provided over 20 lbs of sweet, delicious Catawba grapes?

Many of you may have never heard of Catawba grapes before and until researching how to use the grapes for jam, neither had I. One factoid I did learn is that it is a native grape, discovered in 1802, mostly an east coast varietal and is used to produce some wine. I was amazed at how incredibly sweet the grapes were and figured the wine made from them would probably be some sort of dessert wine. In fact, the Catawba grape is responsible for the first American sparkling wine. I thought it was pretty cool to know that little old USA has native wine-growing grapes (in fact, there are about four types of native grapes). In the mid 1800′s, Catawba sparkling wine was even lauded by many experts in Europe (one person shockingly wrote it was better than anything that came from the Rhine!). The Finger Lakes region in upstate New York still uses this varietal to make much of the wine produced there.

As you’ve probably read in earlier posts, our garden bounty has been enormous this year and our two grapevines growing against a beautiful Brooklyn chain-link fence did not disappoint. Never having worked with home-grown grapes before, I realized that they could be used to make delicious jam. After de-skinning (by hand!) 4 pounds of them and making 5 jars of delicious grape jam, I needed something else. We found this wonderful recipe for a sweet flatbread in a Tuscan cookbook and I knew that I had to have it. It was incredibly easy to make and worked well with our morning espresso.

It rarely gives me any satisfaction to work so close to Penn Station, especially in the summer when the areas less salubrious residents are at their most pungent, and, dare I say, because of the heat, most crazed. It is at this time of year that the legion of stupefied zombies, fiending smackheads and other unfortunates, leaning precariously outwards from urine-stained walls or slumped droolingly over mailboxes as they await the opening of the methadone clinic, seem to be at their most numerous, and the sight of two filthy, toothless skags scrapping over a trodden cigarette-butt is as common as blue sky days in the desert. However, contrary to conventional New York wisdom, even in this charming setting good food can be found. In fact, this part of the city – at the southern end of the area traditionally known as Hell’s Kitchen – is rather better than the several blocks further east, where it is just as ugly and congested, but, most importantly, where there is a dearth of reasonable lunch spots.

Like another of my favorite communities, Carroll Gardens, the block of Ninth Ave between 36th and 37th streets is an old Italian-American neighborhood and features two special New York institutions – Manganaro Grosseria and Esposito Pork Shop. The former is my preferred lunch spot – where courtesy of the owner and in keeping the general spirit of the area, you get a fascinating window into an unbalanced (but, in this case, non-threatening) mind, and a touch of crazy with your giant sandwich – the latter is one of the finest butcher’s shops in the five boroughs, and it was here that I recently stopped to score a handful of duck legs, 2lbs of ground veal and a pair of porterhouses that must have been cut from a hippo.

The veal went into a Torinese sugo that we’ll post when it gets cool enough to eat that kind of food without engaging cooling systems, the steaks await the celebration of our son’s baptism this weekend, and the duck legs were simply sprinkled with salt, pepper and ground coriander and roasted in a hot oven for an hour. Served with a potato-celeriac mash and some shitake mushrooms in a butter-moscato sauce, this wasn’t exactly a light, seasonal meal either, but given the urban assault-course I endure everyday just to put a roof over our heads, it provided a calming and centering sensation, not unlike, so I am led to believe, the effects of a certain heroine-substitute.

When you think of old-style Italian-American restaurants does red sauce spring to mind? Red check wax table cloths, family-style servings, a free salad with your entree, rotund red-faced guys with their sleeves rolled-up, going “ey!” and slapping each other on the back? Sure, it’s a cliché, but it’s also close to the truth in a lot of places, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I, for one, love a classic east coast red sauce and meatballs joint, but it’s not the complete picture.

Ferdinando’s Focacceria on Union Street in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood has been in business as long as any in New York City. In 1910, in the heart of what was then a burgeoning Italian community, it opened its doors principally to cater for expatriate paesani working at the nearby Brooklyn docks, and it’s been serving the neighborhood faithfully ever since. However, unlike many of the other Italian eateries in the area, Fernandino’s does not serve everything with lashings of tomato gravy (not that they don’t offer red sauce – try it with their tripe), instead, they serve their original regional Sicilian dishes as if they don’t care or aren’t aware that long-established Italian restaurants are supposed to top everything with a meatball. They are most famous for their panelle and vastedda (chick pea fritters and veal spleen sandwiches, respectively), which they didn’t just decide to start selling since David Chang and Michael Symon announced it was cool for Brooklyn hipsters to eat offal.

That Ferdinando’s and many other original Italian businesses are still in operation in Carroll Gardens speaks to the fact that descendants of the neighborhood’s original communities remain where their forefathers first landed, in sight of Ellis Island across New York harbor. Not that simply by merit they don’t deserve to be in business, but that health-ninnies and changing dietary proclivities have discouraged most people from looking kindly upon rolls filled with deep fried chickpea dough or boiled calf-innards.

Our recent visit was the culmination of several years of anticipation and a pleasant relief after a terrible, screamy morning with our 5-month old. It was planned as our first lunch out with the baby, and we arrived flustered and desperate that he would nap long enough to allow us to get through a meal in peace. Finding ourselves a table at the rear, as distant as possible from the other patrons, we settled ourselves in and admired the time-worn decor of sepia-tint photos of the old country, a thickly over-painted tin ceiling and some attractive stained glass. The baby sparked awake shortly after we’d ordered our wine, but to our amazement, he emerged from his car-seat cheerful, quiet and relaxed. Maybe he is as susceptible as we are to a relaxing restaurant atmosphere? Whatever the reason, cue a great lunch.

Owner Francesco Buffa’s food is unrepentantly rustic and from the mismatched plates to the friendly but slightly gruff service, it is a truly authentic experience of old Brooklyn that is increasingly hard to find. Starting with a cold octopus and celery salad and a plate of garlicky broccoli di rape with a basket of crisp Italian bread from Mazzola bakery two blocks up, before proceeding with a panelle and mozzarella sandwich and a vastedda special (with the most unctuous ricotta), our happiness reigned for nearly two hours. In fact, so becalmed were we and Paolo, that we had dessert and espresso as the wait staff cooed around the baby.

Buddhists say that expectations are the root of all suffering, but even if we’d had the greatest morning of our lives instead of one of the most grueling, Ferdinando’s would still have been special. We will be heading back again soon to try their famous pasta con le sarde (with sardines, raisins and pine nuts) and rice balls stuffed with house-made ragu and peas. Whether Paolo will cooperate remains to be seen, but the food is so good that it’s worth the risk.

New Jersey, it’s like a cross-section of the entire United States stuffed into a very small area — fenced-in by heavy industry, ugly sub-divisions, peaceful tidal bays and relaxing shore towns — but with its own very distinct character. And, if you drive around it long enough, you’re bound to see some pretty interesting stuff. This goes for the social and the edible, as well as the geographic and architectural.

For example, every spring, you’ll find aged Italian-Americans risking the wrath of New Jersey State Troopers as they harvest dandelions from the banks and verges of Jersey’s myriad highways and parkways. The first time I saw this I thought it must be part of a program to get the elderly outside and active by having them weed public areas. Then, when I’d learned what they were really doing, I marveled at the genetic lottery these robust octogenarians were winning in spite of eating greens picked from the sides of some of the most heavily trafficked roads in the country. So, even though I was apprehensive — for that reason, as well as only having ingested dandelions previously in the form of the disgusting traditional British beverage Dandelion & Burdock (something my grandparents used to trick me into drinking by telling me it was Coke. Its taste is somewhere between sarsaparilla and rust.)— I figured I should give it a go myself.

Now, I haven’t yet had the privelige of picking my own weeds for dinner as cars and trucks whizz by on the NJ Turnpike, and when I do, you can sure you’ll hear about it right here, but I have experimented with eating dandelions a couple of times. The first was an unmitigated disaster, as their unbelievable bitterness ruined an entire meal: leaching acrid chemicals into the sauce and turning my mouth so far inside-out from the first bite that I spent the rest of the evening scrubbing the insides of my cheeks almost raw with a toothbrush.

But recently, I decided that they deserved a second chance. So, arming ourselves with a little research, as well as a precautionary array of tongue scrubbing devices, we set about turning a large bunch of sandy weeds into a delicious side dish. Happily, after a sound preliminary blanching, the outcome was an enormous improvement on our first, rash experiment. And, as part of a scrumptious early fall dinner of veal chop, rich buttery rosemary-brandy cream sauce, and a frankly beautiful (if I do say so myself) roast turnip, I was delighted to concede that eating weeds can, in fact, be very enjoyable.

Of course, the world needs another basic veal chop recipe like Williamsburg, Brooklyn, needs more frickin’ hipsters, but we have been on kind of a veal chop kick since we returned from Argentina in the spring. It’s an expensive habit for sure now we’re back, but in Buenos Aires, as with all kinds of cattle products, veal is very reasonably priced and is treated with a similar degree of skill as the more famous beef.

One particular veal dish stands out. At the rather trendy-looking Grappa restaurant in the Palermo “Hollywood’ district of BA, Amy had a spectacular grilled veal chop slathered with one of the most mushroomy sauces imaginable. It was as if entire sacks of porcini mushrooms had been somehow liquefied on her plate. The menu described it simply as a chuleta de ternera con crema de hongos and our pathetic (certainly for food and menus) dictionary couldn’t tell us what hongos are.

Still, we knew that we liked them and they were delicious, not to mention that hongos is just a fun word to say, so a couple of days after eating said dish, perusing the shelves of a local almacen, we were excited to find large bags of dried Chilean hongos at rock-bottom prices. It was only after we returned to Brooklyn that we learned that hongos translates as “fungus”, but even with a couple of bags of hongos in our pantry, we’re still not exactly sure what kind of fungus we are the owners of. They look and taste very similar to porcini, so we’re assuming that they are a related species, but research into the differences between hongos and setas (wild mushrooms in Spanish) returns no categorical answer except that taxonomically, mushrooms are fungi and fungi are mushrooms. However, one almost helpful Argentine website informed us that, fungus usually refers either to inedible mushrooms, or to the large (usually subterranean) organism of which the mushroom is but the visible, and gatherable, part. To turn the example above ground, the fungus is the apple tree, the mushroom is the apple.

Anyway, though we, like the fungus, might still be in the dark about many micological issues, we can assure you that should you find hongos on the menu anywhere in the Spanish speaking world, you should eat them, especially if paired with veal and a delicious buttery sauce.

Grappa
El Salvador 5802 – Palermo Hollywood, Buenos Aires
T: 4899-2577
E: grappacantina@fibertel.com.ar
Every day 12noon to 1.30 a.m.

Those with even a basic understanding of food history probably know that the hamburger as we know it today is an American adaptation of the “Hamburger-style steak” which originated in the now-German city of Hamburg, and was brought to this country by immigrants from Schleswig-Holstein. Demonstrating typical cunning and salemanship, all the Americans did was make this dish portable, and, having done so, they set out to make the world obese and diabetic by drowning these wildly popular sandwiches in hydrogenated fat and salt, and selling them for $1 each.

A marginally less successful, but somewhat healthier, tactic was adopted by Italian immigrants in Argentina, who, when they found that chicken was viewed with only slightly less disdain than fish in their new country, modified their recipe for pollo alla Milanese to include the ubiquitous Argentine beef. Like shooting fish in a barrel, once launched these new breaded and fried beef cutlets quickly became a hugely popular alternative to a steak across Argentina – a country that, since it, statistically, eats more beef per head than anywhere else on Earth, was likely crying out for alternative ways to serve their national dish.

Known as milanesas, they can be found in one form or another on menus and in grocery stores throughout Buenos Aires: most are beef, though chicken and veal (de ternera) are also typical, and they come in a variety of arrangements, the most common of which seems to be alla Napolitana.  This latter dish consists of a breaded cutlet topped with prosciutto (or cooked ham), melted cheese [cuartirola (sic) [Quartirola Lombarda] or Port Salut] and a splash of chunky, crimson tomato sauce, and is often served with fries (papas fritas). Not many people know this, but it is not, in fact, named for Neapolitan-style pizza, or the way the dish is served in Naples, rather it is so-called because it was first served in Jose Napoli’s, now-defunct, Buenos Aires Pizzeria Napoli establishment in the 1930s.

Indeed, this dish, remarkably similar to the French poulet cordon bleu, can be found throughout much of South America, and, in Chile, an almost identical dish is served as Milanesa Kaiser, or simply Escalopa, reflecting, perhaps, more the original central European roots of the dish in the Austrian Wiener Schnitzel, than its later variant the Lombardian cotoletta alla Milanese. In fact, such is the popularity of this technique of breading pounded meat and then shallow frying it, that you can find similar dishes throughout much of the western hemisphere with the wonderfully decadent Southern dish of chicken fried steak being perhaps the best known in this country.

And, resembling the frankly magnificent “chicken parm” sandwiches found in almost every pizza joint in the north-east US, the milanesa also sometimes appears in sandwiches in Argentina. As we had recently received some delicious samples from Napa, Ca., company GL Mezzetta, from their new (to the north-east US) Napa Valley Bistro line, including a jar of tomato sauce and one of peperoncini (pickled hot peppers), with the challenge of using them to create a contest-winning sandwich, we decided to use them to build ourselves a delicious, gut-busting torta de milanesa alla Napolitana.

An hour later, full and sporting messy red-sauce mustaches, we began to wonder how come milanesas do not seem to have had quite the same bloating effect on the Argentine population as the hamburger has in America…

Mezzetta Napa Valley Bistro Products
Tomato Basil Pasta Sauce
Altogether this is an excellent jarred sauce and beats the pants off its competition. It’s pleasantly chunky; the wine provides a nice rounded flavor and doesn’t overpower the tomatoes with too much acid; and the small pool of olive oil that had settled on the top of the sauce was a good sign, showing both that it included olive oil and that it wasn’t fully emulsified with stabilizers or other preservatives. Other bonuses for a jarred sauce include the clear listing of “fresh” ingredients on the label, rather than their dried or powdered counterparts commonly found in regular, generic bottled pasta sauce. Our only complaint, and this is a matter of personal taste, is that it was slightly too heavy on the oregano. If you’re a fan of oregano in your pasta sauces though, this is probably the finest jarred sauce you can find.

Make That Sandwich
If you’d like to enter your sandwich to the GL Mezzetta Make That Sandwich Contest, click here and read the guidelines and other small print, and submit your entry. The grand prize is $25,000!! Good luck, happy sandwich-making and buen provecho!

They (we) call it a Sunday Gravy because it really suits a Sunday best.  The long simmering, the wine drinking, the letting-it-sit-on-the-stove-till-the-family-arrives kind of gravy.  Thanks to the Sopranos, people all over the world have heard of Sunday Gravy. Some scratch their heads in wonder as to why some call it sauce and others call it gravy.  It’s a hotly debated topic but, in essence, this “stew” of veal necks, sausage, pork ribs, bracciole, pigs feet, etc. should always be called a gravy over a sauce. It requires long and slow cooking and is flavored by the meat, hence it is technically a gravy. Friend of the blog, Joe, at Italyville has a wonderful post on this debate and I’d recommend all who are still confused to check it out.

To make the debate even more annoying, the Italian Americans in this country have kind of created this confusion about gravy vs. sauce.  For many Italians in this country, whether you call this type of meal a sauce or a gravy is decided by the family you come from and even the area of the country you live in.  For my Italian family, a gravy seems to be ANYTHING that contains tomato sauce.  Come to think of it, my family calls anything you put on top of meat or macaroni as “gravy”.  But, rule of thumb is if you are in Italy and you ask for gravy, you’re going to get a sauce that contains meat (ragu).  Check out Joe’s link for a perfect example of this from the Sopranos.

Sunday gravy can be made with a variety of meats and as long as you have a decent variety, you can not mess this up.  Our Sunday Gravy included pigs feet, bracciole, pork necks, veal shoulder, and sweet and hot sausage.  Other traditional additions include pork ribs, beef ribs, pork chops, some even put meatballs in theirs.  It’s kind of a “what can you get your hands on” kind of meal.  With that said, I would like to recommend that you do not skip two key ingredients in order to get optimal flavor – pigs feet and the pork necks.  I know, guys, some of you may be squeamish about this but the flavor, OH THE FLAVOR, you get by simmering these delicious bits of offal.  If you feel uncomfortable serving them with the rest of your meat, well throw them out after they flavor your gravy.  But, personally, I believe these two bits of pig really make the gravy.

So put on your ‘fat pants’, throw on some Sinatra, pour yourself a big glass of chiant’ (Chianti to all you non-Northeastern US Italians) and give yourself a good four to five hours to watch the porky love grow in your pot.

SUNDAY GRAVY (serves a sh!tload of people – at least 6 hungry men)

Ingredients:

• 2 pigs feet (about 1 1/2 to 2 lbs)
• 1 pound bracciole (about a 8 inch long piece)
• 2 pounds veal, beef or pork neck bones
• 1 pound veal shoulder (in chops form or cut into 3 inch pieces)
• 1 veal shank (bone-in)
• 1/2 pound sweet Italian sausage
• 1/2 pound hot Italian sausage
• 1 large onion
• 5 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 cup red wine
• 1 28 ounce can of tomatos (preferably San Marzano – I prefer pureed over whole)
• some water
• olive oil
• salt and pepper

What to do:

1. Season meat with salt and pepper and, with a bit of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot (dutch over, preferably), brown all sides of each piece of meat.  Remove and set aside on a plate.
2. After all the meat is browned, add the onions and use the meat fat already in the pan to cook till soft (about 6-8 minutes), adding more olive oil if necessary. Add garlic and stir, cook for about a minute.
3. Add the wine and deglaze, scraping up the bits of goodness that have accumulated on the bottom of the pan.  Allow to reduce for a few minutes until it has reduced by about half.
4. Add tomatoes and one can of water (use the tomato can). Stir.
5. Add back the meat except the sausage and bracciole (which won’t be added until the last hour).  Bring to a simmer, cover and allow to cook for five hours.  Yes, kids, that’s five hours.  Ever once in a while stir.
6. At hour number four, add back the sausage and bracciole and allow to simmer for one more hour.
7. Taste and season with salt and pepper and add some hot pepper if you’d like.  Remove all the meat and serve separately from the gravy. Cut the sausage into 2 inch pieces.  Serve some of the gravy over pasta and enjoy.

I’ve talked about my sweet ‘ole grandmom, Anna, a few times on this blog. This was a woman who waited tables at the Golden Nugget (now Bally’s Grand) casino (R.I.P.) in Atlantic City until she retired at 76. This is the same woman who would wear winter gloves in the summer because her tiny hands would get cold. Once she angrily blamed the family for “stealing” her gloves, only to open up the dishwasher to unload and found them stuck to a few plates. This was also a woman who would wrap up uneaten meals and sandwiches from her shift at the restaurant and pawn them on us. This was also a woman who was so excited to get 8 free place settings of Golden Nugget-labeled china before it became Bally’s (thank god she did not feature these prominently in her non-existent china cabinet!).

This was also a woman who would cook for her family every night but passed virtually no family recipes on to me. I still get sad that I didn’t push her more to try and remember all her old-school recipes before she died. She loved to say in her deep, raspy voice, “Oh, Amy, ya know I don’t remember how to do that!”. But even into her final years, Anna could still make a few of her classics really, really well, and without a recipe. One of my favorites was her ‘Scarole soup – that’s Italian-American speak for “Escarole Soup” or, as it is often called in my family, Italian Wedding Soup.

When researching about the origins of Italian Wedding Soup I discovered that, duh, this is only loosely based on a traditional Italian soup called Minestra Maritata and has nothing to do with weddings (the name literally means a marriage of soup). Minestra Maritata is a Neapolitan soup made with greens and meat, hence the “marriage” of those two ingredients.

In my Italian-American fantasy, my great grandparents on my grandmom’s side came from Naples and brought their Minestra Maritata recipe with them to the new world. Over time, the pieces of meat became tiny meatballs and the greens were the cheap and delicious escarole. Too bad… I’ll never be able to ask my grandmom if my fantasy is true! There are many variations of this soup but, of course, I think Anna’s is the best. You could have this done from start to finish in about 1/2 hour.

ANNA’S ITALIAN WEDDING SOUP (AKA ‘SCAROLE)

Ingredients for Meatballs:

• 1/2 pound minced veal
• 1/2 pound minced pork
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
• 1/4 cup parmigiano reggiano
• pinch of garlic powder
• pinch of onion powder
• 2 tablespoons of parsley
• 1 egg, beaten
• 1/2 cup breadcrumbs (maybe more if mixture is too wet)
• salt and pepper

Other Ingredients:

• 8 to 10 cups of chicken stock
• 1/2 onion, chopped
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 head of escarole, bottom chopped off and greens cleaned (chop in half if you don’t like long greens)
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 3/4 cup parmigiano reggiano
• 1/2 box ditalini pasta (some people use pastina)

What to do:

1. To make meatballs: Add all the top ingredients together and mix with hands. Pinch a bit of the mixture and roll into a small ball. Each meatball should not be more than an inch wide.
2. Heat up a bit of olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan and fry the baby meatballs on each side – about 3-4 minutes. Remove from pan and drain on some paper towels.
3. Meanwhile, in another pot, add a bit of oil and saute the onion and garlic for a few minutes until a bit softer. Add the chicken stock and keep at a simmer. Add the escarole.
4. Add the pasta, stir it around and allow to cook in the stock – keep aware of the time so you don’t cause the pasta to go mushy. About two minutes before the pasta is done, add the meatballs back to the pot.
5. Beat together the two eggs along with the parmigiano reggiano. When pasta is done, kill the heat and slowly add the egg/parmigiano mixture to the soup while stirring.
6. Serve in big bowls with some crusy bread and a glass of chianti.
7. Be aware that the pasta keeps soaking up the liquid after cooking, so this is a soup that needs to be eaten immediately. Alternatively, you could cook the pasta separately and add in as much of it as you want to, reserving some for leftovers so they aren’t soggy.

Check out some other posts you may enjoy:

• Chicken with Figs
• South African Hot Toddies
  
• Fried Lamb Chops with Balsamic Rosemary Reduction
• Italian Roasted Pork with Salsa Verde

Nothing says summer to this Philly girl more than ‘going down the shore’ (translation: heading to southern New Jersey to go to the beach), grilling, horseshoes, and soft shell crabs. The first time I was asked to taste a soft shell crab I had to ask my dad what the f it meant. “You mean to tell me that seemingly normal-looking crab doesn’t need to be cracked and the meat picked out? You’re telling me I just eat the freaking shell? I take a bite out of it?” It was just difficult to wrap my head around this idea. I moved in cautiously… very cautiously. I could begin to hear imaginary bits of my teeth chipping off as I bit into it. But then it happened – I bit and my love affair with this seasonal delicacy officially began.

So, if you’ve never really had a fresh soft-shell or even saw one in person before (and if you are still reading), you may be curious as to what the hell is going on here. Well, a soft-shell crab is a crab that has been caught right after they have molted, or shed, their hard shell in order to grow a new, bigger one, and this only happens during a very short time each year. For a really intelligent explanation of this, please listen to our brilliant podcast associated with this post (note: we were a bit drunk on wine when we recorded this one).

Even though I feel that soft-shell crabs are all for me, only available in my neck of the woods (the Mid-Atlantic US), I am happy to report to all of you that they are also available in many parts of Asia. There is one big difference – the crab. Here in the Mid-Atlantic, our soft-shells are from the sweet, meaty and popular blue claw crab. In Asia, soft-shells mean using the mangrove crab.  Maybe you’ve been offered various types of fried soft-shells at your local Thai or Japanese restaurant?

When you buy a fresh soft-shell crab, you will notice that it has either been cleaned or not. If you’re squeamish, stop reading now. Basically the fishmongers remove their gills and (gasp!) cut off their faces. Ok, they cut off their face first in order to kill them – poor soft-shells. If you can’t get your fishmonger to do this for you, follow these instructions and do it yourself.  Do you have the heart? According to this article, people don’t often make soft-shells at home because they think it takes a long time to prepare. I’m here to assure you, they don’t. Grab your sharp knife or you kitchen shears and git down to cuttin’ off some faces!  Go on, girl (or boy)!

As I mentioned earlier, soft-shell crabs are very seasonal as their molting time only happens between May and July (at the latest). So, hurry and get yourself some fresh soft-shell crabs soon and please give this dish, one I consider one of the best and most simple preparations, a try.  Serve it with a side of long pasta – our choice is olio e aglio, or pasta with olive oil and garlic. Just make sure to slowly infuse your garlic on medium-low heat in the olive oil for about 20 minutes or more for the most strong garlic flavor!  You could also give our Soft Shell Crab Sandwich with Pepper Aioli and Capers a try!  We used our leftovers from this dish to make it.  Now, get out and ask for soft-shells!

SOFT-SHELL BLUE CRABS IN BUTTER AND GARLIC (Serves 2)

Ingredients:

• 4 soft-shell blue crabs, cleaned
• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 5 -8 cloves (depending on your love of garlic) of garlic, thinly sliced
• pinch of salt
• 1 cup of flour
• some pepperoncino

What to do:

1. Dredge your crabs in a bit of flour and pat excess off and allow to rest until needed.
2. Put butter and olive oil in a pan and heat on medium to medium-low.
3. When butter melts, add your thinly sliced garlic and saute lightly until the garlic gets a bit golden in color. Remove garlic with a slotted spoon and reserve on the side.
4. Add your soft-shells to the pan with the butter/oil mixture and saute on medium until the crabs are red all over. Make sure to flip them on to both sides to allow to evenly cook – about 4 or 5 minutes each side.
5. Remove crabs from oil and place on plate. Add the garlic back to the pan, add a pinch of salt and then drizzle the crabs with the garlic/butter and oil. Sprinkle with some peperoncino.
6. Serve with some pasta olio e aglio (spaghetti with garlic and olive oil) or pasta with red sauce. Enjoy!

****Stay tuned for another recipe using the soft-shell leftovers!

• FRITO MISTO DI MARE (FRIED MIXED SEAFOOD AND VEGGIES)
• POLLO EN PEPITORIA “KINDA” (HAZELNUT CRUSTED CHICKEN IN A FINO SHERRY, SAFFRON AND HAZELNUT SAUCE)
• CUBAN SANDWICH
• MORCILLA (SPANISH SAUSAGE) STUFFED GRILLED SQUID WITH A SPICY SAUCE

It was as if it was divine intervention. We finally found morcilla (see picture of sausages below – it’s the black one) in a specialty store up the block but we weren’t prepared to make a fabada or cocido – two other Spanish dishes which call for morcilla. I picked up one of my favorite Spanish cookbooks, The Food & Wine of Spain by Penelope Casas and looked up morcilla in it’s index. One recipe caught my eye, so I turned to the page and everything in the world just seemed be right. The recipe was for a traditional Spanish Easter bread called hornazo – basically a sausage-stuffed country bread. Whoa, sausage and bread all in one? Here in New York City there’s sausage rolls similar to this one from Proud Italian Cook. There’s also stromboli’s and calzone’s that can be stuffed with sausage, but they will also include sauce and/or cheese and maybe some extra ingredients.

What really drew me to this recipe, besides the use of my beloved morcilla, was the timing. Easter’s almost here and as you can tell we’re mildly obsessed with Spain… this recipe just seemed special. I really love authentic food traditions because, in America, we’re losing them every year. This month, Saveur magazine had a fascinating article about the southern Italian bread called pane di San Giuseppe (Saint Joseph’s bread) eaten in Sicily on the Feast of Saint Joseph on March 19th. The article was particularly interesting to me because as an Italian-American, I’ve always been intrigued by my Italian background and I always wished my grandmother offered up more stories growing up. Like some other first-generation Americans, my grandmother “conveniently” forgot certain parts of her history as she got older. It was as if the past was the past and they needed to look ahead. Anyways, according to the Saveur article, Saint Joseph’s bread was very popular in Italian communities in the US until recently, when most of the first-generation Italian-Americans died off. Many southern Italians living in America do not make this bread anymore – the tradition is dying off with the generation that used to make it. It just made me think about how sadit is that we all came from immigrants from various countries and it’s important to hold on to some of the traditions of the past. Talk to your grandparents. Ask them to share stories. Write things down. My grandmother is not around anymore, but my mother shares things with me – like my grandmom’s famous (well, famous in our family at least!) sausage and peppers sandwiches.

But, back to Easter and bread made around the world during this time. Easter bread is different in depending on the country. The Russians have kulich, the Ukranians have paska, the Greeks have tsoureki, the English have hot cross buns. The Spanish have hornazo. According to research, this Salamancan bread is traditionally eaten to celebrate the end of Lent. Obviously, a great way to celebrate a fasting of meat is to eat lots of it (with the sausage). Back in the day, eggs were looked at as a ‘sort of meat’ since they came from chickens and were not allowed to be eaten during Lent. They were preserved by hardboiling them and used in hornazo. Legend has it that this may actually be the beginnings of the term “easter egg”, according to Wikipedia. Also back in the day, during Lent, prostitutes in Salamenca were ordered across the river so that the men in town were able to concentrate on their religious observences. The men celebrated their ho’s coming home after Easter was over by partying and eating hornazo (maybe the word hornazo comes from what the men got when their ho’s returned?). This is how the “Monday of the Waters” festival began. Gotta love how Christianity puts a temporary bandaid on lustful thoughts and actions.

Even if you can’t find morcilla to add to your hornazo, you could still use this fabulous bread recipe and stuff it with whatever you choose. I know I’m going to make it all year round – why wait for Easter!? Happy Easter, everyone!

This is the way we are with a dish we call “lidia’s lamb”. I’ve no idea what the real name for it is since I’ve never looked up a recipe for it and I’ve only watched it being prepared once, on TV, by Lidia Bastianich, on her show Lidia’s Italy, but that’s what we call it. Essentially, it’s lamb shoulder chops braised in a sauce made from dijon mustard, anchovies, garlic and chicken stock, but such a description belies its richness and savory flavors and, if you’re crazy and you don’t like anchovies, it will put you off. So, just take it from me, you need to try this dish. It’s virtually impossible to mess up, it’s delicious and you can make it from scratch in under an hour, making it perfect for a weeknight meal, or if lamb is hard to find or expensive where you live, a good option for a dinner party because it’s so easily scalable for larger numbers. Plus, once you’ve made it the first time, you’ll be having cravings for it a lot.

Lidia’s Lamb
(recipe serves 2, but for more just scale the recipe up. You’ll probably need more than one pan too, but you can figure that out yourself)

Ingredients
2 lamb shoulder chops (4-6 oz each)
approx. 2 pints chicken stock
2-5 cloves garlic, thinly sliced (depending on your tolerance for the stinking rose)
1-2 shallots, finely chopped
2-4 anchovy fillets (the salty ones in oil, you know what I’m talking about) (add more of less depending on how squeamish you are about anchovies – see final note below)
6-8 tbsp smooth dijon mustard (we prefer Maille, but Grey Poupon is fine. Don’t even think about using American yellow mustard! Save that for your hot dog.)
2-3oz plain flour
2 tbsp olive oil
black pepper to taste

Recipe
Heat a large skillet to medium-high heat. Dredge chops in flour and shake off excess. Hit pan with the olive oil and add the chops.
Cook chops for about three minutes per side, or until golden brown. Make a hot spot in the pan and add the shallots and garlic.

Allow these to saute for a couple of minutes until softened and fragrant, then add the anchovies. Stir anchovies vigorously around the pan until they start to disintegrate. After about another minute or two, add enough stock so that the liquid is at the same level as the “top” of the chops. Using your tongs, scrape the crusty bits off the bottom of the pan and turn the chops over. Add about half the mustard at this point and stir it in.

Reduce heat to medium and allow chops to braise in simmering liquid for about another 25-30 minutes, turning chops occasionally. Keep an eye on the level of the liquid and add more stock whenever it falls below the “top” of the chops. Meat should have begun to pull away from the bones after about 30 minutes.

Taste the sauce at this point. It should taste like it needs more mustard. Add some or all of the remaining tablespoons of mustard according to your taste. Increase heat to medium-high and allow sauce to thicken for about another 5-8 minutes. When it’s done the sauce should be around halfway up the chops and be of a medium thickness, with a pleasant sheen to it. Check seasoning and add black pepper to taste before serving.

We often serve this with some roasted potatoes because they usually take approximately the same amount of time to cook as the meat, providing you cut them reasonably small, parboil them first, and slap them in at least a 400F oven. We also often serve it with some asparagus, kale or broccoli di rape on the side. It sounds kind of heavy I know, but it’s really pretty well-balanced and very satisfying. I promise you, you’ll like this one.

And, just a final note, if you’re worried that the people you’re cooking for don’t like anchovies, I will be amazed if they can tell this dish contains anchovies. All the anchovies do here is add a salty, umami-ish flavor to the dish that brings it all together. You’ll notice that I don’t add salt to the recipe – that’s why. So, please don’t exclude the anchovies because the dish will not be the same without them. Again, just trust us on this one.