It was a beautiful fall day today in Philadelphia – sunny, with temps in the high sixties. I woke up wanting to bake, not bike. Seasons *have* changed.

My morning baking was simple: zucchini bread and banana-coconut-chocolate chip bread. I split them up and delivered all but a few slices of each to neighbors. I’m grateful to have landed in a building with so many wonderful people. When I moved in and signed a month-to-month lease, I never imagined I’d end up living here longer than I’ve lived anywhere since my childhood home.

After brunch with Luca at Carman’s Country Kitchen and some errands, I came home to chores and more kitchen fun.  Made D’jej de’al homes: chicken with chick peas. It’s Moroccan spices brought a surprising sense of comfort. Sharing here the recipe:

D’jej de’al homes

Spice mixture:

1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon turmeric

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 1/2 teaspoons coarse salt

Cut up a chicken (or use packaged thighs), remove the skin and rub the spice mixture onto the meat. Let sit an hour or so.

Saute several chopped onions in butter and olive oil. Saute the chicken and the onions until brown.

Add a can of chick peas, two to three cups of chicken broth (or water) and copious amounts of cilantro.

Simmer for an hour or so until the chicken falls from the bone. Serve with cous cous or brown rice.

I got this recipe from a cookbook I used to use often: The World’s Finest Foods: 180 Classic Recipes from Around the World. Past dinner parties have featured recipes from the pages on Morocco, Greece, Spain and Italy, but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually attempted any of the recipes from Thailand, Japan, China or Mexico. Mediterranean flavors attract me. Still. After all these years. Will travel to Italy in December.

So the other night for my dinner date with Ben and Rachel, I wanted to do something I hadn’t done before, so browsed through Biba Caggiano’s Trattoria Cooking and settled on a recipe from Cannavota a Roma. It’s a ridiculous twist on a chicken marsala, made with turkey instead, and baked briefly in the oven with mozzarella cheese.

Brown 4 turkey breast slices in a pan with a few tablespoons of hot butter and oil,  then set aside. Cook about half a pound of sliced  mushrooms in the same pan, then add a bit of marsala and a few tablespoons of cream and salt to taste. Place the turkey in a baking pan, pour the mushroom marsala over it, and top with sliced mozzarella and bake, until melted.

Was this dish a hit? Ben really liked the cheese, and the flavor of the mushrooms was good, but the turkey chops were dry and tough. It may have been because we did not “serve at once” as the recipe says, but the more likely cause is that there is simply not enough fat in the turkey breast to render it juicy. Had we eaten it with the suggested Pinot Nero from Alto Adige, would anything have changed?

In either case, I’m thinking that this dinner has marked the end of my vegetarian summer. While I love beans, greens and cheese, I’ve grown somewhat bored with eating them all the time. I think the real reason the turkey was dry is that I’m simply out of practice! I’m glad cooking season has arrived again.

Ben and Rachel bought mango pasta on their trip to Hawaii a few months back; we finally had a chance to eat it tonight — for dessert.

It’s made with semolina and mango puree … while high quality, it didn’t really taste like mango, which was fine with us! The texture was really nice, and the color a light pumpkin.

I made it with fresh mint, ricotta cheese, orange zest and blueberry honey from a local farm.  It was a great combo! Quel surprise!

What sort of ’sauce’ shall we concoct for the green kiwi pasta, I wonder?

Last week at the restaurant, the guys gave me some fresh yeast so that I could experiment with breadmaking. In the moment I wrapped it in plastic, I truly believed I’d make a biga, then a bowl of dough. Alas, the yeast sits unopened on the top shelf of my fridge. I’m afraid the only experimenting I’ve done here is with a bag of Trader Joe’s whole wheat pizza dough!

 After stretching the dough into a pizza pan, I covered it with shaved potato and sweet onion, then sprinkled chopped rosemary, thyme, parsley and salt, drizzled olive oil, and crumbled goat cheese on top. Though potatoes on pizza are a total carb bomb, it’s really a great combination, especially if they can get kind if crunchy.

The result? Mediocrity. Despite having cooked the pizza at a higher temperature for more than twice as long as the TJ bag instructed, the crust was still somewhat soft. Its flavor was weak, lacking both salt and whole grain goodness. Oh well. 

I had dessert at Capogiro – tiramisu and pignoli, both new flavors for me (and neither impressive) – then head over to the restaurant to help with some prep for the Appetite for Awareness event tomorrow night at the Wachovia. Check out what Fabrizio cooked up with some of the leftover polenta:

This was his ‘fantasia’; he insists that all cooks have it. Finger-sized sticks of polenta, with creamed spinach, ground beef and cheese. I didn’t expect to like it, but it was good. Bravo, Fabizio.

Every so often I get the chance to head over the Ben Franklin bridge and into New Jersey, where the gas is cheap and the stores are plenty. About 20 minutes from Philly, in Cherry Hill, resides Wegmans supermarket – a foodie’s bounty. Truly. If I ever abandon the urban life, I want to live near one of these. Mark my words.

Perimeter shoppers adore Wegmans for its variety of high quality foods. Walking through the fruits and vegetables inspires the urge to eat well. Mushroom risotto? or perhaps a tart with a lemon scented crust? Braised fennel for pasta, or shaved in a salad? How can I use that huge bunch of fresh mint?

For me, standing before the olive bar conjures visions of Mediterranean travels past – Ligurian hillsides and Andalusian highlands, Delphian valleys, stone-tiered terraces in Lebanon. In my twenties and early thirties, the men I loved were from families with olive groves. My lifelong friend Kim still jokes about that being the most frequent element of my dating “pattern”. Ha ha! One day I’d like to have an olive tree and a rosemary bush that don’t die in the winter … even if these exist in a greenhouse.

Picture grabbed from here.

Of Wegmans’ many treasures, I discover the most intriguing at the cheese counters, mostly because I’ve eaten so few of the varieties they carry. On my last visit, I discovered quadrello di bufala, a soft cheese from Lombardia. I ate it at room temperature on rosemary bread. It was the perfect meal.

Quadrello di bufala is produced in the provincia di Bergamo (near Milano) at a family-owned dairy that has dedicated itself over the past 3 years to making cheese with milk from water buffalo. According to Janet Fletcher, they’ve now got 25 varieties. Very interesting, indeed. She describes the cheese so beautifully, I hardly want to take a stab at it myself:

Take a moment to appreciate this cheese’s seductive aroma, a merging of cave and mushroom scents with the frank fermentation smell of cultured milk. On the tongue, it is supple, creamy and coating, with plentiful salt and a vigorous tang. In Quadrello I find everything I am looking for in cheese: a compelling fragrance, a pleasing texture, flavor balance and a long finish.
(Read more here.)

Each time I make the trip to Wegmans, I tell myself I can always go again in another few weeks. So far, I’ve made it there no more than 2-3 times per year. LOL. Last year at the Appetite for Awareness event, I begged the guys at the Wegmans table to consider opening up an outpost in the city. All I need is the perimeter, I said. They just laughed. The drive over the bridge is no big deal; it’s just conceptually far far away.

At the end of the service tonight, I noticed that Fabrizio had a large bucket of tomato sauce, and wondered what it was for; nothing on the northern Italian menu features it. He reminded me that there was some tomato in the wild boar ragu, but what he really had it for was the staff meal: penne with eggplant and tomato sauce. (He’s from Napoli.)

Uninterested in the eggplants, and worn out from a chaotic shift, the sight of the tomato sauce got me thinking about the Pomodoro Technique, a simple time management trick where you work for 25 minutes on a task and take a 5 minute break. Put forth by Francesco Cirillo, an Italian software developer/project manager,  I suppose the idea behind the frequent breaks is that it gives your mind a chance to refresh? The Pomodoro Technique makes little sense to my nonlinear way of being, and contradicts the basic principles of ‘flow’:

…the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. Proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (as defined by Wikipedia).

Image grabbed from Wikipedia

The Pomodoro Technique would crash and burn in a restaurant environment. Tonight, for example, 4 demanding customers came in wanting a six top outside at a few empty tables they saw. I told them I thought we were holding one of those tables for a reservation, but to wait 5 minutes so that I could figure out if I could seat the reservation at another table instead. A few moments later, I went to tell them I could seat them but they had disappeared into the night without a word. The remaining two in their party showed up about 10 minutes later, surprised to learn that the others had left, yet relieved they didn’t have to dine together. They grabbed a two-top, I lit a candle, and everyone was happy. While the 5 minute ‘break’ in this case wasn’t a self-imposed “pomodoro”, it broke the flow that would have otherwise proven more profitable for the restaurant. 

Working in a busy restaurant is all about being in a flow state. That’s why I love it. Teaching/taking Spin is all about flow as well. Cooking too, if I start actually *doing* it myself again.

Carlino's fresh pasta, spinach from Whole Foods, organic sauce from a jar. 'Nuff said.

It may appear as though I’ve abandoned my two year blog experiment, but the sad truth is that my iBook has died. 4.5 years old, its keyboard was worn and processing slow, but it lasted longer than any lover. Goodbye, iBook. I miss you already.

Kind of.  I’ve somewhat enjoyed living my leisure life off the digital grid. I cycle, and continue to hope that physical therapy will lead to recovery from my labral tear. I play in my garden, which – at the end of the season – is just about rid of weeds. I hang out with the Italians and talk on the phone with out-of-town friends. I’d love to head back to Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit,  but doubt I can make it work. I’m the ‘best man’ in a dear friend’s wedding in early October, and worrying a lot more about what the heck I’ll wear (Saturday morning wedding/lunch in NYC) than what I’ll say in a toast. One of these days I’ll get back to writing about the fabulous Italian food I make/eat … provided that I actually start cooking again.

Oh, and the chataranga dandasana is still absolutely unachievable, despite one year of “training”. Sigh.

Photo grabbed from About.com

The fish that’s now on every menu: branzino. A simple sea bass, once abundant in Mediterranean waters, is now mostly farm raised (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

While at the restaurant tonight, the guys cooked up a filet that was too small to serve, and offered it to me. Grilled simply with some salt and pepper, drizzled with parsley and oil, this is the perfect summertime meal. Simple flavors, simple pleasures. Chef served it with cauliflower sauteed in butter, a side I have no idea why he continues to serve. It’s tasty and all, but not particularly interesting to sophisticated palates. I’d like the simplicity of the fish to arrive with something a bit more complex. I think the contrast would work well.

After Spin class tonight, I came home to a refrigerator whose only protein came in the form of tofu and parmigiano and no creativity to make it work. I needed the enjoyment from the food, not just its calories. Who could cook for me?

The Chef. He’s a captured audience. I could eat there solo and chat with Joey, Arturo, Elliot and Miguel.  Turned out Carlo was available too! Got a second impromptu dinner this week. Perfect.

For the past few weekends, I’ve been helping out at the restaurant on busy weekend nights, hostessing/bussing/serving. I adore the fast-paced environment there, watching the kitchen work its magic and chatting with the customers about their trips to Italy. Since I last ate there many months ago, the Chef has added some new specials which have intrigued me. One is pentolaccia, a mixed fish and seafood dish served in a brodetto (broth) with aromatici, pomodori and toasted bread. Buonissimo!

Can’t find much online about the origins of pentolaccia, but my guess is that it’s a fisherman’s ‘pot pie’ equivalent. In Italian, pentola = pot;  -accia is a suffix conveying a bit of ugliness. This dish, however, has nothing ugly about it.