It was a gray and drizzly Sunday in Milan, but we didn’t let that stop us! After napping for five hours when we got in yesterday (no sleep on the plane, unfortunately), and sleeping for ELEVEN hours last night (yay, Nyquil!), we set off to explore more of the city today. Milan isn’t really what I always imagined when I thought of “Italy” — quaint villages, winding roads (ok, they do wind a bit here, but not uphill or unpaved), open-air food markets, or areas that don’t resemble Paterson, NJ — but it IS a big, bustling city and enough like NY that we feel perfectly comfortable here. The architecture really is truly hideous in many cases, just like we were warned. The people are effortlessly stylish, which confounds us both, but Gil more so — I think he’s used to being one of the more attractive men on the mean streets of Ringwood. Me? I don’t worry about it so much, but I don’t think the women here like me. I’ve gotten some awfully judgmental stares.

Nothing much to say about the food yet. We got some crappy pizza at a tourist trap near the Duomo yesterday (You don’t say!), so I’m putting myself in charge of food from now on. Had the complimentary breakfast at the hotel’s restaurant this morning and haven’t eaten again yet. No pictures coming until we get home — something about size. I dunno. Gil’s the techie in this relationship.

We’re surviving without football through judicious applications of rugby, made more interesting by the fact that neither of us knows the first thing about the sport. Me: Oh, this is the sport where the guys pile up and push each other around! Gil: Yeah, and they can kick forward as part of regular play! Me: Oooooh, check out their legs! Gil: Shut up. So there you have it: In rugby, players do a lot of piling on and kicking with their large, muscular legs. And shut up. At least they can use their hands.

Still under the weather, friends, but I did manage to cook one meal this week! Poor Gil, it’s been takeout (hot and sour soup, mostly) or indoor picnicking for the past couple of weeks and I’m sure he’s tired of it. But hey, we’re leaving for Milan in a few hours — I’m positive we’ll be able to scare up a few amazing meals while we’re away.

Growing up, I never developed much love for shrimp. We always had a ton of it in the freezer, so whenever Mom was feeling uninspired, a shrimp dish appeared on the table for dinner. Now that I’m older and live in an area where the little buggers are more precious, I feel more appreciative of them, but I think I inherited my mom’s predisposition — whenever I’m not feeling up to cooking, shrimp make an appearance.

This time I marinated the shrimp (split and cleaned, but still wearing their shells) in a wonderful Moroccan grilling paste from Williams-Sonoma which I can’t find on their website. Anyway, the ingredients are basically what I would’ve blended up myself, but were ready to go without any real work on my part — just the thing. We had the shrimp with a yogurt/fresh herbs/garlic dipping sauce I mixed up and it was very good.

But the real star of the show was the couscous:

I adapted a recipe from Epicurious, using regular couscous instead of Israeli, cooking it without the cinnamon stick, but adding plenty ground cinnamon at the end. As it turned out, the couscous was so surprisingly good, it was the main course, and the shrimp were the side.

And apart from a few busy days at work, that’s been my week. I hope to post something more exciting in the next few days.

Arrivederci!

Yep, I’m still alive. I’ve really neglected things around here lately, but I’ve been fighting a sinus infection for over a week now and food just isn’t something I’ve been interested in. Now sleep, oh, that excites me. But I expect to be perfectly healthy again by the time we leave for Milan — in less than a week!

Boy, do I have some packing to do…

I’ve had tongue on the brain for about a month now, itching to try it out in my own kitchen/smoker, but have been deterred by travel or unkind weather every weekend. Can it be mere coincidence that just this very today the NY Times publishes an article singing tongue’s praises and even gives a shout-out to a Mennonite grandmother within?

If that isn’t a sign, I don’t know what is.

Let’s say you’re interested in making a certain dessert, a dessert that sounds so delicious there’s no way you could possibly wait until next weekend to prepare it. Let’s also say you don’t have the tart pan specified in the recipe, but are able to find mini tart pans at a local store. You’d try to make the recipe, anyway, wouldn’t you? Don’t leave me hanging, here. You would, right?

Well, I did, anyway. Perhaps I should’ve done the math to make sure I was using the proper number of tart pans. Or perhaps I should’ve eyeballed it better and realized the dough could stretch to five pans instead of the four I decided to use. Perhaps, schmerhaps. What’s done is done. This is the tale of my peach and thyme polenta tarts.

I started with the crust and things seemed to go well. The texture felt right and tasted like a good combination of savory and sweet, so I separated the dough into three sections before chilling them in the fridge. I realized a short time later that the dough would probably stretch into four tart pans, so I made adjustments on the fly when the time came to press the it into the pans. And still, everything looked ok to me.

So I baked them … and disaster ensued. The dough rose in the oven until it was nearly level across the pan, so I had to excavate the centers a bit for the filling. Once that was done, I noticed the peach slices would be far too big to arrange decoratively in the mini pans, so I trimmed them down and arranged and rearranged until I got a result almost pleasing to the eye.

That left filling the tarts with custard before baking, but with my track record on this dessert, I was worried. Would the custard leak through the tarts? Would they burn? Would they taste awful, making all of my work for naught? Oh, with the hand-wringing!

And then I pulled the tarts from the oven. Aaaahhh…

They weren’t the disaster I’d imagined and they smelled pretty good, too! But still, the test is in the tasting. After what seemed like a longer-than-average hour, we had the opportunity to take our first tentative bites of a tart andmadeshortworkofit.

I guess the moral of this story is to always follow directions, unless you really know what you’re doing. Of course, the corollary is if I can’t screw up this recipe, no one can (though I think I’ll look for the full-sized tart pan next time, just the same).

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Despite my well-documented love of the other white meat, there’s a cut of pork I don’t often cook — tenderloin. Pigs have been put on a diet over the last 20 years and are much leaner as a result. (I’ve even read that a trimmed pork tenderloin has less saturated fat than an equal portion of skinless chicken thigh, which is easy for me to believe.) But what’s good for our hearts isn’t necessarily great for our tastebuds or enjoyment in the kitchen — the tenderloin is a little temperamental to cook these days, as the time between undercooked and shoe leather grows ever smaller.

But I needed a project this weekend, so I put my mind to cooking a tenderloin in a way that would give it some wiggle room. My sage plant has been out of control for the past couple of months and this seemed like an ideal occasion to prune it a bit, so I coated the tenderloins with a lovely sage and walnut pesto.

Then, in a riff on one of my preferred ways to cook loin*, I wrapped them in some leftover prosciutto (remind me not to overdo it at the deli counter next time).

They roasted for about 30 minutes, until the internal temperature reached 160 degrees. After resting for a few minutes, they were juicy and very, very flavorful.

To accompany the pork, I made potato croquettes seasoned with a little bit of the pesto and fried in duck fat. And, for something resembling a healthy item on our plates, we had crisp-tender boiled asparagus drizzled with lemon juice.

You may think this is an extravagantly porky meal, but you haven’t met my dad. Last Christmas, he managed to feed us four types of pork in a dish where pig wasn’t even the focus. That’s dedication, my friends. The mind, it reels. The memories, they linger. The arteries, they clog.

* I can’t find the original recipe anymore, but basically, I rub a combination of mustard, garlic, and dried sage over pork tenderloins, then wrap them in prosciutto before roasting. Very, very flavorful.

Update: I’ve found the perfect pork-in-milk recipe. 

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to know his way around a shrimp recipe. If you haven’t yet clicked on the new Chadzilla cooking link at right, you’re in for a treat. I discovered his site a few weeks ago googling god-knows-what and stuck around for his love of scientific cooking and plain old enthusiasm for good food.

One of the techniques he trumpets is sous vide, but I’m too wary of trying it in my own kitchen, so the next best thing, I figure, is poaching. As it turns out, he wrote about poaching shrimp in olive oil with preserved lemons — it sounded like something I could probably attempt with some success, and I’m happy to say it was really delicious.

Poaching the shrimp gave them a very delicate, almost confit-like texture (as promised). After letting them soak in the poaching oil for about 8 hours, I wrapped them with prosciutto and grilled them lightly for about 30 seconds, just long enough to warm them through and crisp the meat on one side.

The shrimp promised to be very rich, so I thought I’d cut through some of that richness with a salsa verde from an old issue of Martha Stewart Living. I reduced the mint by about half because I’m not a huge fan of the stuff, so it had just enough presence to balance with the other ingredients and wasn’t overpowering at all.

If I’m ever down Miami-way, I’ll definitely stop in at Chadzilla’s restaurant. I’m sure it’d be one of the more memorable meals of my trip.

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It was certainly an inauspicious start for my boys.

But oh, how happy I am that the NFL season has officially begun! If you need me on a Sunday from now until January, just try:

Amy Roth
c/o Large Sofa, Living Room
Roth Manor
Ringwood, NJ 07456

Of course, it’s likely I’ll be spending some time with Terrence Howard as well — smoked meats pair so nicely with the pigskin, after all.

I picked up some broccoli rabe at Zeytinia over the weekend and needed to do something with it, and soon. A bulb of fennel was keeping the rabe company in the fridge, so I started formulating a couple of recipes. Upon doing a little research, I realized most of the heavy lifting had already been done by better cooks than I (though I was mostly on the right track), so tonight’s dinner came together quickly and turned out to be awfully good.

The beans you see above were a riff on a recipe in Super Natural Cooking, by Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks. It’s the first thing I’ve made from the cookbook, but the pictures alone are worth the price of admission. Wow. She’s so passionate about food, healthy cooking, and communicating it beautifully to her readers. If you can’t tell, I have a bit of a blog-crush.

Anyway, I made a few substitutions based on what we had in the house, but it turned out great, anyway. I’d probably go ahead and sauté the onions and garlic in olive oil before adding the beans next time, but otherwise would follow the recipe to the letter.

To go with the beans, I roasted some fennel wedges with prosciutto, Parmeggiano-Reggiano, and butter, then spritzed the bubbling mass with a little lemon juice. The recipe seems to be pretty common, but I’ll give credit to Lidia Bastianich, one of the authors I saw online and whose show I absolutely adore.

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