My footprints were the only ones on the sidewalk early yesterday morning as I walked into the blizzard’s wind towards the subway line on Market. Got down to DC just fine, staying underground to connect to the metro and Pentagon City mall (a last-minute request from my friends in Italy). I caught what turned out to be the last train back into the city before the metro shut down mid-day.

Urban blizzards are beautiful. Was glad to have compelling reasons to go out; am sure that I would have otherwise chosen only to watch it from my window. Our dinner party menu included cheese and crackers, cassoulet, salad with roasted beets, walnuts and goat cheese, chocolate fondue with fruits and gingerbread cookies. Lots of food. All of it delicious. Great conversation too.

Duck confit for the cassoulet - legs roasted 4 hours in a pot of duck fat.

The table, with salads, and DC native in the background.

Gluten-free gingerbread men, dressed for Easter

Making the cassoulet was an all-day affair, with so many moving parts, I’m not even sure I could get them down if I tried. Eric and Rich grabbed the recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, a magazine known for its tested recipe and its precise descriptions of cooking techniques. Washington Post calls it “the food geek’s bible”.  What struck me most about the recipe was the variety of meat used. There was bratwurst and salt pork, pork shoulder and duck confit. Carrots, onion, garlic, tomato, chicken broth … lots went into the dish. You could tell. Its flavors were quite sophisticated.

I remember well the first cassoulet I ever ate…it was vegetarian! I recall none of its flavors, only the shopping for seitan ’sausage’ at the Shadyside Natural Foods market, the one and only store that carried it. It was the only and only time I had ever bought it as well, about 15 years ago. I wonder if the seitan sold today has and improved flavor/texture?

Eric thinks I’m on my way to becoming a militant vegan. Oh dear. I don’t see it.

Was chatting with a friend on my walk home tonight about making homemade torrone. Initially dismissed the idea as folly, but got to wondering why. Why couldn’t I try it? Who cares if I fail? If nothing more, at least I’ll get a blog story about my efforts.

If I get a chance this weekend, I think I will take up his challenge. From the recipes I read online tonight, both the ingredient list and the process are fairly simple. Wonder, though, where I might buy edible rice paper? Stay tuned …

The snow is back on my blog! I love WordPress.

I made pizzelle tonight with a very special kitchen guest whose hands and handiwork appear below.

I appreciated his mathematical approach to the task at hand. There were more perfect circles than I’d ever gotten on my own. Hmm.

I’ve been eating lots of great apples this fall, mostly thanks to my friend Ray, who brings them back from the farms he visits. Last week I saw some “local apples ” at the supermarket and bought a few, thinking I’d make Jewish apple bread some weeknight. Instead, the work week got the best of me and I found myself with an extra hour on a Sunday morning and a desire to try something new.

Enter Biba Caggiano, and her recipe for torta di mele e mandorle from Masuelli trattoria in Milano, where Signora Masuelli “prepares the daily menu according to what she finds in the market in the morning”. Lisetta prepared the cake according to what she found in her cupboard, which unfortunately included almond only in its ‘extract’ form. Drat. I did have the apples, though, and the Amaretti di Saronno – little round almond cookies – the recipe called for, as well as the basics (butter, flour, eggs). I could substitute the almonds with pine nuts, right? Frangelico and Amaretto are similar, no?

It worked. Don’t ask me how. I pretty much followed the proportions of the published recipe, but with different ingredients, leaving out the lemon zest and cold espresso. Here’s what I did, and how it turned out.

Torta di mele e pignoli

4 oz. toasted pine nuts

6 large apples, peeled and diced

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 pound of butter, at room temp, cut into pieces

4 large eggs

about 10 pairs Amaretti di Saronno cookies

1 1/2 cups unbleached flour

1/2 cup almond flour

pinch of salt

1/4 cup Frangelico (hazlenut liquor)

about 2 tablespoons of honey

Blend the butter, sugar and eggs in a food processor. Add the amaretti, flour and salt, and pulse until blended. Add the Frangelico and honey to finish the batter.

Add the pine nuts and the batter to the bowl of diced apples, and pour the mixture into two buttered 10-inch cake pans. Smooth out the top with a spatula and make sure everything settles into the pan.

Bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes, until the tops are brown and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

The cake is decidedly delicious, mostly apples, with just enough batter to bind them together. It remains a bit too dense and sweet for my tastes. Next time I’d cut down on the sugar and ask around for something to lighten up the batter. Other torta di mele recipes I saw used yeast … maybe I’ll try Marcella Hazan’s recipe next time around?

Rachel and Ben take me places I would otherwise never go: the KFC in a mansion on City Line, the  Whispering Bench in Fairmount, the Korean war memorial in Penn’s Landing. Expert geocachers with a penchant for bargain hunting, more than anyone I know they embody the spirit of modern day exploration. Tonight they took me to Aldi, a supermarket that, although somewhat close to our apartment building, I’ve never been in. Fascinating.

It smelled bad when we first got in, like some noxious blend of chemicals and rotten meat. Truly bothersome at first; I’m certain that if I had strayed in on my own, I’d have turned around immediately and left. Ben and Rachel wanted milk, so we continued down the aisle. Once over the smell, I was fascinated by the choice of foods, piled up and displayed directly in their shipping boxes. All was colorful, with brands I had never seen. Prices were incredibly low: $1.29 for a box of graham crackers, $.87 for a 2-pound can of crushed tomatoes, $3.99 for extra virgin olive oil (from Italy, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey). The cashews came from India and Vietnam, the frozen flounder from China … and the gelato from Italy.

I had to buy it and bring it home. Artisan gelato at Capogiro sells for about $ 5 for a half a cup; Aldi was selling this large container of Mamma Italia mixed berry gelato for only $3.99. Who doesn’t like frutti di bosco, and if it was made in Italy, surely it couldn’t be so bad. Despite a belly full of pizza, we bought it for dessert.

Its texture was just right: light and airy. The frozen fruits were tart and true to flavor. The gelato was neither too sweet nor particularly distinct in its flavors. Rachel said it tasted like the top layer of one of those paper-wrapped ice cream cones you buy at a convenience store near the beach. Ben noticed that it is only 130 calories for a half a cup. We ate more than half of it. What else can I say?

I’d like to believe that I could satisfice with a tub of this in my freezer, but must admit I am totally spoiled by the all-natural gourmet flavors of gelato at Stephanie and John’s homegrown Capogiro. Rosemary goat cheese, gianduja, Thai coconut …. must arrange another gelato date sometime soon.

Why should I be eating a slice of just-baked, warm zucchini bread at 11:30 pm? Because I want to and it tastes good, that’s why.

In a futile attempt to incorporate whole grains while reducing reduce fat & sugar last year, I played around with various recipes, but in the end, enjoyed nothing I made. This year I’ve returned to the classic recipe, dictated by my sister Missy, who got the recipe from my mom. I’m going to write it up here so that I have it next year:

3 well beaten eggs

2 cups of sugar

1 tablespoon of vanilla

1 cup of oil (I used canola)

2 cups of shredded zucchini

1 tablespoon of cinnamon

3 cups of flour

1/2 teaspoon of baking powder

1 teaspoon of salt

1 teaspoon of baking soda

1/2 teaspoon of freshly ground nutmeg

1 cup of nuts

You basically  mix these together in the order that they’re listed (with dry ingredients pre mixed of course), pour the batter into two greased and floured loaf pans and cook at 350 for one hour. Flip them out of the pans shortly after baking and cool them on a cookie rack.

Neighbors and security guards love zucchini bread. Share freely. Pretend that it’s an old Italian recipe passed down through generations.

I haven’t actually frozen this sorbetto yet, but the thought of it excites me. Who will I invite over tomorrow to eat it with me?

Sorbetto di melone

Blend a super ripe cantaloupe with the

Juice of one orange and

a basil-infused simple syrup.

The flavors work, in an unexpected kind of way, in its blended form. Wonder what it’ll be like semi-frozen? This is turning out to be the summer of sorbetto.

My garden has gone mad. Zucchini grow mammoth before I can get down there to pick them, and they intentionally hide beneath the gigantic fuzzy leaves. I had a few red tomatoes today, but their bottoms were black, victim of the dreaded blossom end rot. My beets are cramped, unable to grow large. My parsley comingles with clover, and my basil so wants to flower despite my pruning.

I was once quite adept at gardening, mostly because I looked at it every day while eating breakfast on my deck. In my urban life, my garden is out of sight, out of mind for days at a time. It drifts through my thoughts as insignificantly as the thought of a former lover, or the dream of a new one.  Maybe one day I’ll again manage to pay attention.

Ben and Rachel came over for a super casual dinner tonight. We had gnochetti sardi with garden pesto and blueberry sorbet.

Sorbetto di casa

Blend 2 cups of blueberries in the food processor.

Add the juice of one lemon.

Add about a quarter cup of simple syrup to taste.

Add some limoncello and chambord.

Swirl around in the Donvier ice cream maker and marvel at how simple and delicious this treat is.

Marvel too, how nice it is to have dinner with friends who don’t care that your hair is wet from a post-Spin shower or that you have no bread, no second or salad to round out the meal.

One of Grom’s signature flavors is “crema di Grom”, an egg custard gelato with pieces of ‘pasta di meliga’ – cornmeal cookies. Grom’s website describes this as including chocolate, but the variety sold at the NY store contained none.

Omage grabbed from Grom's website: http://www.grom.it/ita/prodotto.php?ID_cat=1&SUB_cat=6&gusto=Crema%20di%20GROM

In my small scoop, I got only one bite of the cookie. Pazienza! Curious to learn more, I bought a bag of them, from a baker in Battifollo, a small town in provincia di Cuneo. Made with stone ground corn meal, butter, egg yolks, honey, yeast and vanilla, they’re a perfect combination of texture and flavor.

According to the Sapori del Piemonte website, these cookies have been around since about 1850, before Italy was unified into one state. Passed down through generations of family recipes, these cookies used to be made only in people’s homes, typically for chrisstening celebrations. In piemontese, they’re called le “batiaje”.

These days, bakeries across the region make paste di meliga, with local varieties of stone ground corn. Though recognized by Slow Food, I wonder if and when the native corn varieties will disappear, and whether these would retain their characteristic flavor with the GM varieties we find in the States. Lots of recipes for these exist online. Perhaps I’ll try making some when cooking season returns in the fall?

Took the Bolt bus up to NYC this morning to meet up with Simona, my sorellina italiana, and learned her good news just moments after seeing her in the W lobby: she’s pregnant! Due in November, just in time for a Christmas visit. Che belle notizie!

Hungry after a morning of shopping, she wanted to eat lunch right away, so we chose a restaurant a block away from her hotel near Times Square: Scarlatto. With a somewhat uninspired ‘northern’ Italian menu, she asked that they make her a simple dish off the menu: pasta with tomato sauce. Moments before ordering, I had told the waiter she was pregnant, so he really couldn’t refuse the request. LOL. What arrived was just what she wanted (with too much garlic for my tastes). I ordered nothing worth writing about. Honest food served at honest prices.

Post-pasta, she was craving gelato and looking to buy her husband books about the moon, so we headed to the Upper West Side where Grom and Barnes and Noble are only a few blocks away from each other.

Originally from Torino, Grom sells the flavor of Italy for $5 a pop. From the English version of their website:

The idea is to apply a principle that is common to all the best restaurants in the world to the production of artisanal ice cream: buying raw materials of absolute top quality.

It was for this purpose that at the end of 2002 Guido Martinetti and Federico Grom set off on their quest, from the Langhe to Sicily, for the best that agricultural Italy but not only, could offer.

The principles are very strict: only fresh fruit and when it is in season from the best consortia in Italy, no colouring or additives that are not natural, Lurisia mountain water as a base for sorbets and high quality full-fat fresh milk for the creams; eggs from organic chickens and selections of the best cocoa and coffees from central America.

With shops now open all over northern Italy, Paris, New York and Tokyo, they’ve got a good thing going. By centralizing their production in Piemonte, they assure all stores uphold their high quality standards.  They’ve even founded a farm (Mura Mura) to grow their own fruit. These guys are on a mission…and I love them for it. Thank you, Guido e Federico, for bringing Italy to the United States….and thank you, Simo, for making the trip and giving me good reason to escape my windowless office.