I Used to Make Gnocchi All the Time

I used to make gnocchi all the time. Like twice a week. I don't know why, but I fell out of the habit. Feeling a twinge of nostalgia, when H-bomb needed dinner and we had nothing prepared, I made a batch. Gnocchi are an under-appreciated pasta, probably because when they're made badly they're heavy and tough

I've been adding apples to things recently, mostly because I'll see an apple sitting there while I'm making something and think, whatever, maybe that would be good with apple. When I decided to make gnocchi, I noticed an apple sitting there, and nature took its course.

Conventionally, potato gnocchi are made from cold cooked potato, flour and eggs. This requires the foresight to have cooked and cooled a potato in advance, something I do not have. I typically peel and dice the potatoes, boil them and shock them in cold water to make the temperature manageable. If the potato hits the flour and egg while the starch is still hot, the whole mass becomes elastic and gluey and no fun to work with or eat. For this batch, I diced the apple and added it to the potato prior to boiling. On a whim, instead of water I decided to boil the potato and apple in vegetable stock with a pinch of saffron. I love the way saffron brightens otherwise starchy foods and thought it might make the gnocchi a little more interesting on their own.

When the potato was ready, I mushed it up with a whisk since I don't have a ricer,* then added the egg and flour and kneaded it briefly. I don't use the whisk in a beating motion, but like a more conventional potato masher, up-and-down. It's important not to handle the dough too much or the gluten in the flour binds with the starch of the potato and the pasta gets tough and gluey. With a conventional pasta you need to work the dough so the gluten develops, which helps the texture of the finished noodle, not so with gnocchi.

Another difference is that once the gnocchi pasta is formed, I like to cut it quickly and get the gnocchi into boiling water immediately so the gluten in the flour doesn't have time to get rubbery. With a conventional pasta, I'd rest the pasta before rolling to make the dough sturdier. Gnocchi are relatively big on the fork and in the mouth, so they need to be tender and light or they're a drag. I try to get through the process quickly, without using my hands too much**

I rolled the gnocchi pasta into little logs and cut it into lumps, then grooved them with a fork and plopped them in the water. They cook fairly quickly, but not as quick as cut pasta. Once they float, they need about another minute on the boil and they're done. Normally I just dump the pasta pot through a colander to collect the cooked pasta, but gnocchi are fragile enough (when made well) that I usually scoop them out with a wire basket. This also drains them well enough that I can toss them straight into the skillet for finishing.

After boiling, I like to toast gnocchi a little in olive oil or butter. They can be served like that with some herbs, parmigiano, black pepper and salt, or dressed with a sauce. We didn't have much to make a sauce with, but we had some V8 juice, which is pretty tasty, so I thought I'd give that a shot. I've used V8 instead of vegetable stock in other applications and it has proven versatile enough to make me take occasional excursions into the unknown like this.

Once the gnocchi were browned a little, I splashed a glug of V8 into the skillet and tossed the gnocchi, and in no time at all the V8 combined with the olive oil to make a nice thick emulsion that glazed the gnocchi as it intensified. I crushed some dried herbs on them before a final toss, then plated them and grated some Asiago on top. The saffron was a great idea, it made the gnocchi a bright yellow color and gave the body of the gnocchi a delicious whiff of the exotic, and the mineral overtone was balanced by the sweet-sour character of the apple. The glaze was tasty, but the acid in the V8 changed during cooking, leaving a slight chemical undertaste, and made me wish I'd just served these little yellow marvels on their own. I'm sure I could make a reduction of fresh juices that would work better, but I'll still endorse V8 for future experiments.

*My birthday is July 22
**That's what she said

Read More

Who Doesn't Like Brussels Sprouts

There's a persistent cultural perception that people don't like brussels sprouts, and I can't figure out where it came from. Everybody I know loves brussels sprouts. Whenever somebody brings out brussels sprouts, somebody is sure to exclaim, "I love brussels sprouts!" The only thing I can think of is that there are a few noisy assholes who don't like them and complain about them publicly, and through these outbursts they have the whole world convinced their opinion matters. They're the climate-change deniers of food. Sprouts are delicious. Only an asshole doesn't like brussels sprouts. Here are some sprouts served as contourno to a sausage ragu. The ragu was pretty standard, just some lumps of sausage and bacon cooked with shallot, garlic, apple, red pepper and tomato, then spooned over some polenta and garnished with grated parmigiano. The brussels sprouts were dressed with a vinaigrette of mustard, honey, garlic, sesame oil and sriracha on top of some big bib leaves of Italian basil. When I served it, Heather clapped her little hands together and said "Brussels sprouts! I love brussels sprouts."

Read More

Food Friday: Yellow Peas with Bacon, Pork Loin and Sausages

The Bishop Hill (Illinois) Heritage Cookbook ((c) 1982/seventh printing 1995) is everything you could want in a community cookbook. There is an introduction to food in the Bishop Hill Colony. This introduction/history includes when foods were introduced to their area, what people ate and what the typical day's menu was like in the 19th century.

Recipes in the cookbook include everything from the past to the modern. Names and some affiliations accompany recipes. Some of my favorites include the name of an exchange student and when he was living in the community. The cookbook ends with recipes from local establishments and foods served during events.

The Bishop Hill Heritage Cookbook is so much more than a cookbook, it's really a study of the community's food history.

Read More

Who Gave Us Venison

I grew up eating game meat. My dad Frank Addison Albini was a terrific shot with a rifle and had generally excellent hunting skills. While my dad loved hunting and fishing, he didn't romanticize them. He was filling the freezer, not intellectualizing some caveman impulse or proving his worth as a real man. He spent considerable time working on the accuracy of his weapons and hand-loaded rounds for specific game and conditions, because he considered taking an animal with more than one shot needlessly cruel. Everyone he hunted with aspired to his ability.

In large part I owe my adventurous palate to my dad shooting so many different things. We regularly ate elk and venison, but we also had seasons where pop filled all the tags he could get, and he occasionally made excursions to Alaska, so in addition to all manner of fowl, I've eaten bear, antelope, wild boar, caribou and probably other big mammals I've forgotten. My mother handled this Noah's Ark larder with aplomb, happily using game in place of beef or pork in lasagna, ravioli, sausage and wherever else required.

I was reminded of this all when I discovered a parcel of Venison backstrap (loin) in our freezer. Somebody had obviously given it to us as a gift, probably from some fancy food place that sends things in dry ice and styrofoam, and I had put it in the freezer for later use. Sadly, I do not remember the giver, which implies that I failed to thank whoever it was, but perhaps this public humiliation will succeed in sharpening my social graces where everything else has failed. I defrosted a tidy little loin, which is called the backstrap when it's from a deer. I suppose if squirrel meat ever becomes commercial they'll come up with a name for it on a squirrel.

I love the rub Tim Midyette has developed for red meats, and lately I use it whenever I cook anything that walked on four legs. It's a simple dry mix of espresso, sumac, salt and pepper, and it works magic. I hadn't tried it on game meat, but the discovered venison gave me a perfect excuse. I rubbed it into the loin and let it rest while I prepared to sear it.

I only have one skillet, a simple steel line cook's item I bought at a restaurant supply shop 20 years ago. I also have an iron skillet, but it takes so long to heat up that I only use it when I have time to kill or need to make cornbread. Since I needed to make both the venison loin and a sauce for pasta to serve as a side dish, I had to stage the cooking and manage the skillet resource to serve everything at an appropriate temperature. The venison would need to rest after searing, so first I needed to put water on to boil, then sear the venison and let it rest, which would give me enough time to make a sauce for pasta. So I did that.

Venison like most game meats is exceptionally lean, and has to be served rare or it's tough and nasty. With a bigger cut, this can be difficult to judge, but with a little strip of loin like this, you basically just sear the margins and let it rest to come up to temperature. Takes a couple minutes.

The pasta sauce was pretty simple. I blanched white asparagus in the pasta water, then cut some of the asparagus and sauteed it with some leeks and red pepper in olive oil. When the sauce was almost ready, I dropped the capellini in the water. Capellini is a great pasta to serve with something like this because it's delicate enough not to compete with the vegetables and it cooks in a couple of minutes.

I tossed the pasta with the vegetables and plated it with a couple of the spears of asparagus, then sliced the loin and set it on top. I garnished it with some chopped scallions and mint, drizzled it with olive oil and shaved some asiago over everything. I thought it looked pretty good, but when I brought it to Heather her first words were "Why is there penises in my food?"*

She was referring to the asparagus. Because of the shape.**

*That's what she said no kidding.
**They look like penises.

Read More

Agnolotti of Leeks, Kale and Magic Nuts

I have a modest kitchen. Since it's just Heather and me eating, I don't need to cook large quantities of anything, so I don't need a large pantry for staples, I get by with a normal civilian range and oven, and I don't like gadgets so I don't need storage for a crap like a duck press, egg slicer and cherry stoning machine. In a normal week's cooking I'll literally only need one knife, one skillet, one pasta pot and one rice pan. Occasionally I'll break out the dutch oven if I need to braise something or bake bread, but that's about it. I sometimes use a food processor, but they seem a little bit too fiddly for most chores and they're annoying to clean. We don't have a dish washer, and Heather, bless her heart, has never washed a dish in her life, so the less I have to clean, the better. I own a KitchenAid mixer but I haven't used it in years, and I don't have any attachments for it. I'm solidly against attachments, because they require attaching, detaching, cleaning and other things that aren't cooking. I'm pretty sure the KitchenAid is in the cupboard under the toaster but I'm not sure. I suppose I'll find out when we move.

About the only gadget I don't mind is the pasta machine. If you're going to make pasta, you either need a giant work surface and long pin for rolling it out by hand, which I don't have, or a pasta machine and a nine-inch square spot on the counter. That's my jam right there, the nine-inch one.*

I make cut pasta sometimes, but that requires an attachment**, so I'm more likely to cut sheets of pasta with a knife, or just use dry pasta from the store. Usually if I'm making fresh pasta it's for ravioli of some kind. I don't have any ravioli molds, so usually I just fold the pasta over the middles into little agnolotti or sometimes use a glass to cut circles for mezzalune.

Tonight's pasta was a way to use up the remaining kale from a massive kale indulgence brought on by some particularly nice bunches at the fruit stand. I had some endive, kale and a leek, and made a plan to stuff ravioli with the mixed greens and serve with some browned butter. I cut some bacon into 1/2-inch cubes and started them rendering in the skillet with a little olive oil, then added the leek to get it wilted. I like almonds with greens, so as an experiment I added a bunch of chopped cashews and almonds to the skillet. More about them later, they did magic. While all that was underway I stripped the green kale leaf web off the stems and chopped it into ribbons.

When the leek was tender I added the kale and salted everything. The kale goes in before the other leaves because it takes more time to cook. If I were using collards I'd put them in first, same with beet, turnip or mustard greens. Softer greens like escarole, frisee, spinach, celery leaf, herbs -- basically anything you might eat uncooked -- take much less time to cook, and can disintegrate if cooked too long. I'm always charmed by how much the volume of fresh greens cooks down. You start with an afro and end up with a burr. I chopped up the curly endive, and once the kale had wilted I added the endive and a handful of both celery and mint leaves, which have the effect of brightening any cooked greens..

Sometimes greens can have a slightly dank, musty undertaste, so when everything was tender, I took it off the fire and added a splash of rice vinegar to keep the muddiness at bay. I didn't want to make a puree out of it while it was still hot, because the bowl of the processor is plastic and I seldom feel comfortable about putting hot things in plastic, not just because I might distort the plastic, but because maybe some mutagen chemical could cook out of it and I'd get face cancer or grow a dick out of each armpit. I tasted a bit of the greens and liked them, but doubted the wisdom of adding nuts because they didn't seem to be doing anything. How little I knew then.

I turned my attention to the pasta, which was the same simple recipe I've used forever. I put enough flour on the counter (I guess it's about a cup and a half), then crack an egg into the middle of it, making a little well, add an additional egg yolk, some salt and a spoonful of olive oil, then start stirring the egg with a fork, gradually incorporating more flour into it until it becomes a mass of dough, then grab the whole pile and knead it with the remaining flour until it comes together as pasta. I used semolina this time, but the same basic technique works with almost any kind of flour. It seems like the flour will bind with the eggs until satisfied, then no more flour joins the party, so you basically can't fuck it up. I'm all for things I can't fuck up.

I kneaded the pasta for a while to develop the gluten and make it elastic enough to stretch around the middle of the agnolotti, which I expected to be lumpy from the nuts,*** then put it aside to rest for a few minutes. If you let fresh pasta rest before you roll it, it doesn't retract after rolling as much and rolls down to thickness easier.

Then the magic happened. I put the greens in the basket of the food processor and pulsed them. When I stopped to check the consistency, I grabbed a pinch and tasted it, and was surprised to find that the nuts had given up some of their fat **** and emulsified the greens into a creamy mousse. It was both richer and nicer to eat than the greens straight out of the skillet. I suddenly felt like a goddamn genius and like I invented something and started hollering for the patent attorneys again. I couldn't wait to get the pasta ready.

I rolled the pasta out in a scorched panic, laid it out on the table in yard-long strips and filled it with the greens like I was trying to win a medal in it. Only then did I realize I had no water boiling yet. I sorted that out, and while the water was coming up I ran out into the alley and grabbed a couple of big fuzzy leaves off Old Man Sage. It's incredible, Old Man Sage is still happy out there in his bucket in the dead of winter, laughing, pimping, dancing on the graves of all the other herbs. When I got back indoors, the water had come up to boil, so I salted it and tossed in the agnolotti, and while they boiled I browned the sage in the skillet with some butter and garlic.

 The sage butter was ready precisely when the agnolotti were, so I strained them into the skillet and tossed them until the butter and the residual pasta water emulsified into a light sauce. I plated the agnolotti, dusted them by grating the last of the homemade cheese and decorated them with finely sliced scallions and black pepper.

The nut transformation was evident even inside the pasta, making the greens rich and smooth, and the toasted flavor of the nuts made the agnolotti more complex, which married nicely with the butter sauce. Made it worth breaking out two gadgets for one meal.

* Said the Bishop to the Actress
** Said the salesman in the sex shop
*** Said the Bishop to nobody in particular. Maybe an actress.
**** Bishop again.

Read More

Food Friday: Sauerkraut and Oysters

"I like your cooking , I just don't like it when you cook stuff from 1870."
      --My youngest son to me after being asked why he didn't like Pink Stuff.


Contrary to popular belief I do not make my children eat foods from the 1870s, for the most part. For the Holidays I decided to go ahead and make Pink Stuff, a jello dish I described in a previous post. While the adults loved it, the children were less then thrilled. They complained that the mixture of ingredients sounded awful (dry jello, cool whip, pineapple and cottage cheese) and that they didn't like the texture of cottage cheese.

Honestly, that suited all of us adults fine because that meant there was more for us.

For this Food Friday, I am posting a recipe for a dish where the ingredients don't sound like they would be good together but like Pink Stuff, this dish might be great. Sauer Kraut and Oysters is not a combination most people eat today. However, I love sauerkraut and like to imagine dishes aside from hot dogs were its use is embraced. 

This recipe is from the "Cloud City" Cook Book by Mrs. Wm H. Nash (Ladies Congregational Church). Leadville:Co. Herald Democrat Steam Book and Job Printing House. 1889. Available from Internet Archive at
http://www.archive.org/stream/cloudcitycookboo00nash . The recipe was submitted by Mrs. Werner and can be found on page 44.

The history of Oysters in the United States is an interesting one. Our ancestors loved oysters and they were plentiful . I would highly recommend the book by Mark Kurlansky. The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell. New York: Ballantine Books, 2006.

Read More

Food Friday: Oh The Things We Eat During The Holidays

I love that the Holiday season is like a time of free reign over eating pretty much everything and anything. Foods you would not eat during the rest of the year become fair game during the winter months.

So what types of things do you eat during the Holidays? I came across a series on unique holiday foods on NPR called Chompsgiving to Chew Year's: Holiday Dishes. This is a great series that shares family recipes and I highly recommend it.

From Flickr Commons

One of the reminiscence in this series is about ambrosia salad. Entitled, When Ambrosia Salad Spells Dread it tells the story of one man's repulsion to a jello dessert that in my family was officially called "Pink Stuff."

Now I must admit that I was considering making it for our Christmas luncheon. I like the stuff and I wonder what's not to like; it has dry jello folded into Cool-Whip with cottage cheese and fruit. It's not like some jello salads that I have seen recipes for that include ingredients like fish and cheese.

But to each his own. The one lesson in this is, write down those holiday recipes that are unique to your family so they can be passed down the generations.

Here is our family's recipe for the Pink Stuff though this is just one variation of the salad. I've also heard of people adding different canned fruits and even nuts.

Pink Stuff
This is a Jello dessert salad that my mom would make to serve at different holiday dinners.

1 package Strawberry Jello (You are using it in powdered form, do not prepare it)
1 tub of Cool Whip
1 contained of Cottage Cheese (small curd)
1-2 cans of mandarin oranges

Mix all the above ingredients together, mix well or the Jello crystals won’t dissolve. Once mixed, put in the refrigerator for a few hours to “set.”

You can choose to use different flavors of Jello and different fruit combinations.

Read More