High on the list of the many things I love about Italy is the profusion of flowers I see every time I come here. Of course, it helps that my trips are usually in April or May, so it’s a good time for the flowers. In this post I show just some of the beauty I’ve encountered in Cisternino. The link will take you to the Google Photos album.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/58Pq73xzrp5NRNNf7
Briam or Briami is a classic Greek baked vegetable dish. I first made it seven years ago and have done different versions at least a half a dozen times since then. When faced with a dilemma last week about what to do with the beautiful vegetables I buy here in Cisternino, I decided to make an Italian version of Briam. I was pleased with the results.
In the Greek version of Briam, I typically add feta cheese at the end. To take advantage of the Italian products here, this dish gave me an opportunity to learn about a cheese I had never had before, namely Cacioricotta. I liked this cheese. It is similar to Ricotta Salata, just a Pugliese version, less salty as well. Here is the end product.
Uno dei migliori ristoranti di Cisternino è Vatellapesca. Il nome bizzarro in realtà significa “come si chiama” o “come si chiama” in italiano. Ho mangiato lì già tre volte durante la mia prima settimana in città, e ogni volta sono rimasto felice. Lo chef è Cristian Stasi, ed è molto creativo e simpatico. Il suo piccolo ristorante è essenzialmente di sua proprietà, ma posso consigliare tutti i suoi piatti e l’accoglienza del suo posto per pranzo o cena.
La prima sera ho mangiato due piatti. Il primo e il più entusiasmante sono stati i bocconcini di polpo con purea di fave e cipolle rosse. Era tanto delizioso quanto attraente. Il secondo piatto era un risotto ai funghi.
Tre sere dopo sono tornato a cena e mi sono goduto un altro pasto superbo. Il primo corso è stato insolito e sorprendente per me nel modo in cui gli elementi sono stati messi insieme. Conteneva fette di melanzane e radicchio, leggermente grigliati e conditi con un filo di olio extra vergine di oliva, insieme a una fetta di caciocavallo locale. Il formaggio veniva anche grigliato e servito piacevolmente caldo, accanto alle verdure. Il secondo piatto era ancora un risotto, fatto con pochi gamberi e una salsa rosata con barbabietole e scorza d’arancia.
La mia terza visita ha fornito un perfetto esempio di cucina e presentazione di un pesce intero – Branzino, una spigola – uno dei miei preferiti. Ecco la presentazione drammatica, insieme a un semplice miscuglio di verdure arrostite.
One of the best restaurants in Cisternino is Vatellapesca. The quirky name actually means “whatchamacallit” or “what’s-his-name” in Italian. I’ve eaten there three times already in my first week in town, and I’ve been delighted each time. The chef is Cristian Stasi, and he is very creative and engaging. His little restaurant is essentially just his own operation, but I can recommend all his dishes and the welcoming nature of his place for lunch or dinner.
The first night I had two dishes. The first and most exciting one was small octopus pieces with fava bean puree and red onions. It was as delicious as it was attractive. The second course was a risotto with mushrooms.
Three nights later I went back for dinner and enjoyed another superb meal. The first course was unusual and amazing to me in how the elements were put together. It contained eggplant slices and radicchio, lightly grilled and topped with a little extra virgin olive oil, alongside a slab of local caciocavallo. The cheese was also grilled and served pleasantly warm, next to the verdure. The second course was again risotto, made with a little shrimp and a rose-colored sauce featuring beets and orange zest.
My third visit provided a perfect example of cooking and presenting a whole fish — Branzino, a sea bass — one of my favorites. Here is the dramatic presentation, alongside a simple medley of roasted verdure.
For the first time since COVID, I am finally back in my beloved Italy, this time for three weeks. The first stop was Rome for one night to eat at La Matriciana, my favorite restaurant in the Eternal City. I had emailed Fabio, one of the owners a few weeks earlier to reserve a table. My first visit there in 2007 had secured a place in my heart with its traditional style, simplicity, and excellent food.
It was a Monday night, and the place was busy — with happy diners enjoying their companions and the food and wine.
I ate simply: first, a dish of clams and mussels, followed by perfectly-made Mezze Meniche alla Gricia, a short pasta raised to heavenly heights with guanciale (hog jowels).
A half bottle of Frascati and a small taste of Amaro completed the meal just right. After a 1/2 block walk to my hotel, I was ready for a good sleep after the transcontinental journey. Amazingly, I was able to get up at 5 AM to get a cab to the airport for my flight to Puglia.
Take a trip with me (culinarily of course) to Morocco. We’re going to make a classical Moroccan eggplant dish. In the process we will take a brief detour to a fascinating part of the wine country in both France and Spain, Côtes Catalanes, where we will pick up the appropriate wine for this meal.
I love full-bodied vegetarian meals. These areas in Morocco, southern France and Spain have many great examples. Tonight’s recipe is a Moroccan eggplant and olive tagine adapted from the Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons. I made one or two adjustments, and I was very happy with the results.
Here’s the recipe:
The recipe called for 6 plum tomatoes, but the ones I had were fairly large, so I decided to go the just 4. That was just right. The other adjustment was to replace the chickpeas with almost a cup of Rancho Gordo mixed beans I made and froze a couple of weeks ago. Definitely an improvement.
Finally, I chose not to make one of the recommended grains to accompany the dish. Instead, I sliced several pieces of Seven Stars bakery olive loaf — which went perfectly.
I also LOVE finding just the right wine to go with the meal. While the tagine was slowly simmering, I went into the wine cellar to choose the wine. My brain was rich with images of Moroccan spices on my palette (cinnamon, paprika, cumin), and I soon came up with this French wine from the Languedoc — je cherche le ciel — “I search for the Sun”. It was the perfect match!
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that it’s quite unusual for me to prepare a dinner which only required opening a box of pasta, opening a bottle of wine, and serving dinner in 12 minutes. Nonetheless, that’s the story tonight. Naturally, my choice was not a box of Ronzoni macaroni. The pasta involved is called Tartufissima; it’s tagliatelle with truffles, which I bought at Eataly in Boston.
It took four or five minutes to boil the pasta in salted water, and I heated up a tablespoon of butter in a pan and left it warm on the stove, then added the cooked pasta to the butter, plus some grated Parmigiano cheese, and served it for dinner. A few glugs of Ligurian olive oil helped it all slide down smoothly, The wine was, of course not an ordinary wine; it was a 20-year-old Refosco from Venezia Giulia. It was an amazingly good wine, and one that had been lounging in my cellar for many years.
It took just 88 grams of dried pasta, a little butter, salt, and pepper, and two glasses of wine for the perfect dinner. Quick and easy does not HAVE to be anything less than delicious.
It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m at loose ends. The obvious choice is to go into the refrigerator and mess around with the variety of leftovers I find. In addition, I chose a quart container of broth, auspiciously labeled “Bean Water”, which I could use to reconstitute some mushrooms. Part of what I had to choose from came from activities a week or two ago in which I was making chestnut flour pasta. I found a small package of that flour in my pasta material, and even though it was probably twelve years old, the flour was perfectly good, surprisingly. I had made some dishes with fettuccine from that flour, and more recently, I made tonnarelli.
In the refrigerator today, I found the tonnarelli leftovers, which included a small amount of porcini mushrooms that had been reconstituted, and some beet greens as well. The bean water got used with a tablespoon of butter to boil two kinds of mushrooms, some oyster mushrooms, which had dried out a bit in the refrigerator, and some dried black trumpet mushrooms, which I had purchased a few years ago. Both of them soaked up the bean water with gusto, and when added to the leftover pasta, made an excellent lunch. To brighten the dish, I added some blanched chicory, a slightly bitter vegetable from Puglia which balanced the flavors, offsetting the richness of the chestnuts and mushrooms.
After considerable thought, I decided that the pasta dish was rich enough that it needed a fairly full-bodied Italian red wine. The selection was a Barbera del Sannio, one of Nick Mucci’s iconic wines from Campania. It was, indeed, the right choice.
Fourteen years ago I created a recipe that has been a great success over the years. Here’s the original:
Tonight, amidst pouring rain outside, I made it again for dinner. The dish I made was close to the original. It did not have the benefit of Moroccan eggplant jam, and we had no small tomatoes We did have sun-dried tomatoes, so I substituted those. Instead of the roasted vegetable stock, I substituted a watered-down, rich mushroom broth, made and frozen a couple of weeks ago. And I set a resolution to make the eggplant jam one day in the near future. Accompanied by a Lugana from the Lake Garda region of Italy, it was every bit as good as the original.
My take-aways from the experience were twofold: (1) Vialone Nano is the best risotto rice, and (2) mozzarella in risotto is every bit as good as Parmigiano or Pecorino, and it’s a nice change of pace. Another benefit is that the mozzarella will help me make Arancini tomorrow, because the rice kernels will hold together better.
Often I make a meal from a combination of small leftovers. Some of these combinations are highly unusual, but I seem to have a sense of how the final dish will come out well — even though it would not appear so on first glance. Such was the case today for my lunch.
I’m reasonably confident that no one else on the planet made this dish today. Ingredients:
I just put them all in a pot with some water, heated it up and served the meal — weird, obscure, and delicious.
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