My Plan

With 18 regions that I have not yet covered, and around 11 weeks left to cook, I realize that I can't cover all of the regions of Italy. (At least not during WISE)

After looking through my cookbooks I have decided what regions I plan on cooking from, but this is subject to change as I get more information on the regions.

Right now my plan is to work through the following:

1. Tuscany
2. Umbria
3. Basilicata
4. Abruzzo
5. Trentino-Alto Adige
6. Lombardy
7. Molise
8. Emilia-Romagna
9. Valle D'Aosta
10. Liguria

I also plan to dedicate a day to making fresh cheese. There is a water buffalo farm about half an hour outside of Ithaca, and buffalo milk is supposed to make the best cheese. My plan is to go to the farm, get fresh milk, and immerse myself in cheese making for a day.

New Cookbook!

I got a new cookbook called "Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy" by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich, and I am very excited about it. I have seen videos of her cooking, and she reminds me of my grandma. Like my other book, it is split up into regions of Italy. It is filled with personal stories from her experiences in the different regions and a lot of history as well. I think this cookbook will be a lot easier for me to use, because the recipes are still complicated and authentic, but they are explained much better as it is written for an American audience whereas my other book is written for Italians and translated. I am still going to use my other book, but I'm excited to have two regional Italian cookbooks now.

Sardinian Meal

This meal was not nearly as successful as my first stab at Italian cooking a week ago. I made the entire thing pretty much on my own this time, and it involved a kitchen full of smoke, a small meltdown, extremely frustrating dough, a few missing ingredients, and overall relatively gross dishes.

 The day started relatively calmly. I grated a huge amount of pecorino cheese, steamed some spinach, and mixed them with eggs and saffron to make the filling for my stuffed pasta.

 To make the pasta I followed the same steps as last week, only with more eggs and no oil. When I tried to roll the pasta dough out it repeatedly stuck to the table, no matter how much flour I used. After about half an hour of struggling with the seemingly ruined pasta dough I became extremely frustrated and had a meltdown. I declared the dough useless and gave up.

My mom didn't believe that it was destroyed, and saved the day by bringing me a pasta maker. I didn't want to use it at first, because I can be very stubborn and wanted to prove my cookbook wrong by hand rolling pasta as an American, but I begrudgingly used it and it worked great.

 When the pasta was all cooked I added some pesto that we made from our garden basil and garlic over the summer. My parents claimed that they enjoyed the stuffed pasta, but I thought that the pecorino flavor was way too intense, and didn't really like the way they turned out.

The zucchini dish was the only thing I liked from my Sardinian meal. It was incredibly easy to make. I sauteed the zucchini slices in a little oil, and then added sugar and white wine vinegar. It was refreshing and really tasty.

The onion pizzas were very interesting to make. Rather than making dough and putting pizza toppings on it, the dough and pizza "toppings" were all mixed together, and then baked on top of cabbage leaves.

 I unfortunately underestimated the amount of time it would take to bake these, so even though they were meant to be the antipasti, they weren't done until well after dinner was over. My mom thought they were delicious, but I thought they were very strange and slightly bland.

For the dolce dish I had a bit of a problem with missing ingredients. The recipe calls for grappa, which I obviously can't buy on my own, and I completely forgot to get butter when I went shopping, so I had to wait for my dad to come home from work with the necessary ingredients. To make this batter I mixed water, butter, and almost a dozen eggs.

 Frying these fritters was a big challenge for me. I heated up the oil way too much, and the kitchen filled with smoke and smelled awful. My brother opened to doors for ventilation, so I was cold, smokey, and frantically attending to hot oil and fritters.

 The fritters appeared golden brown on the outside so I thought they were done, but when I cut holes in them to inject the honey and grappa mixture, I found raw dough. I think the reason for this was that I put to much batter in the oil at one time. I doubt I will try this recipe again, but if I do I will use much smaller fritters.

 After the smoke incident, I decided to stop frying. Rather than wasting the remaining dough, my mom and I decided to bake it. When it first came out of the oven it looked perfect, unfortunately it was really late by the time it was done, so we decided to eat it in the morning. When we got to it the next morning it had sunk down, and was basically a dense disgusting slab of buttery egg.

Although this was not the most pleasant kitchen experience I've had, I learned a lot. It was extremely frustrating at the time, but now that it's all over I find the whole disaster to be kind of funny and realize that I can't make a perfect meal every time.

Sardinian Menu

The Sardinian recipes in my cookbook featured a lot of eggs. There was also a lot of sheep's milk cheese, as it is traditionally a land of shepards, onion, zucchini, cabbage, and very doughy recipes. Almost all of the pastas are stuffed, and there is a lot of seafood, as it is an island. Rather than oil, a lot of the recipes call for lardo (animal fat.) A very thin traditional Sardinian bread called carta di musica (music paper bread) is in a lot of the recipes, but I unfortunately couldn't find this anywhere in Ithaca.

My Menu:

1. Antipasti: Agnolotti con Cipolla (Onion Pizzas)
2. Primo: Culingionis de Casu or de Arrescottu (Sardinian-Style Stuffed Pasta with Spinach)
3. Contorno: Zucchine in Agrodolce (Sweet-and-Sour Zucchini)
4. Dolce: Zippulas (Honey Filled Fritters)

Shopping List:

• Onions
• Plum Tomatoes (1 3/4 lbs)
• Hard Pecorino
• Zucchini (2 lbs)
• 1 head of cabbage
• eggs
• Fresh Pecorino (1 lb)
• Spinach (1/2 lb)
• White wine vinegar
• butter

Cooking Class with Chef Samantha Izzo

This past Tuesday I went to a cooking class with chef Samantha Izzo. It was incredibly helpful and inspiring, and I got a delicious dinner out of it! She taught not only the specifics of 9 dishes, but she talked a lot about techniques for cooking in general. It wasn't a hands on class, but she walked us through every step of each dish very carefully as she prepared our dinner. The 9 dishes that she prepared for us were a Caesar salad with homemade dressing, fresh baked foccacia bread, fresh homemade ricotta cheese, tomato and fennel orzo, roasted mixed peppers with capers and marjoram, sauteed fennel with almonds, raisins and saffron, whole baked fish in sea salt, and lemon pound cake with homemade lemon curd.

Some of the basic things she taught:

• When choosing vegetables, the smaller veggies tend to have more flavor.
• Organic foods tend to be better, not only for health and environmental reasons, but they tend to be better from a chef's prospective as well.
• Always keep the blade of your knife on the cutting board. It allows for more control and is also safer.
• When separating egg yolks and whites, simply let the white run through your fingers and catch the yolk in your hand. Your hands work better than any tool you can buy for this.
• When chopping garlic, smash the whole bulb with the side of your knife before peeling it. It makes it easier to peel and easier to chop.
• Sea salt is better than regular table salt or kosher salt for most dishes.
• When using leeks don't try to wash them before cutting them. Cut them up and place them in a bowl of water and the sand and dirt will sink to the bottom.
• Yeast is dead and will not do its job if it doesn't foam a little and smell when you mix it with warm water.
• Recipes are just a guideline, they are meant to be interpreted and changed as you see fit.
• Always buy extra virgin olive oil.

The most interesting part of this class for me was the whole baked fish in sea salt. She made a mixture of a little water, a little egg white, and a lot (4 full boxes) of sea salt, and spread a layer of it on the bottom of the baking sheet about a half an inch thick. She then put the whole salmon on it, and filled the cavity with leaks and spices. When the cavity was filled she put the rest of the salt mixture over the fish, covering everything but its head. The idea is that the fish is completely sealed in, and will stay moist and retain all of it's flavor. When the fish came out of the oven the salt was rock solid. She had to smack it really hard with the back of her knife to break the salt, and then pry it off in big chunks. I normally hate seafood. I try it over and over again and can't seem to get over the fishy taste and smell of it, but to my surprise I actually enjoyed this salmon.

Sicilian Meal

This meal took me about 5 hours to make (that's with all the help from my mom), and I enjoyed every minute of it.   

My Sunday started at 9 am, making pasta. This is the part of the meal that I was most scared to make, and most proud of when I had finished it. The ingredients in pasta are very simply: flour, eggs and olive oil. I had to make a crater in the middle of the flour, and beat the egg and olive oil together until it was a all the same consistency. It was really difficult to not get the flour in the egg while doing this.

 My cookbook suggested that Americans use a pasta maker instead of rolling out the dough, as this is something that takes experience. Of course this challenge made me want to roll out the dough. I discovered why they say to use a pasta maker. The dough was extremely hard to roll out, and it took me a very long time to get the dough to the correct thickness. By the time I was done my arms were sore from pushing so hard on the rolling pin!

 To shape the pasta I cut it into thin strips and rolled it up on a knitting needle. My first few attempts at this failed. The first strip I wrapped around the needle while holding it in the air, and the pasta strip broke because it wasn't supported. The second time I wrapped it too tightly, and it bunched up when I attempted to push it off the needle. By the time I got to the third strip of pasta I had figured out the right technique.

                                         

To make the sauce for the pasta I put ripe plum tomatoes, chopped almonds, fresh basil, minced garlic, olive oil, salt and pepper in a big bowl and smashed it all together with my hands. It was incredibly fun, but the tomato juice stung my hands a little. 

                                         

I added the cooked pasta to the fresh sauce and again, mixed it all together with my hands.

 The final touch was to add breadcrumbs crisped in olive oil to the top of the dish.

Making the lemon pudding was very interesting. I started by rubbing 50 sugar cubes on the rinds of 3 organic lemons. This was very time consuming, and I didn't think it would work to get the flavor of the lemon, but it worked very well! I added the lemony sugar cubes to a pot of hot water with corn starch and more sugar. It cooked on low heat for about 20 minutes before going in the fridge to chill.

 The final product was very sweet. If I was going to make this again, I would use more sugar cubes rubbed in lemon, and less straight up sugar. I  think the lemons in Sicilia are more pungent, and therefor they only need three. With supermarket lemons in New York I think the recipe needed to be adjusted.

       

 After putting the lemon pudding in the fridge to chill, I started on the eggplant roll-ups. To prepare the eggplant I had to peel it and set it aside in salt for a little while so it could "loose it's bitterness," which I thought was very interesting. After it had sat for a while, it was rinsed, dried, and then fried in oil. The filling was made of crumbled whole grain bread, a lot of flat leaf parsley, a little garlic, olive oil, and an egg. When both the eggplant slices and the filling were finished I rolled them all up and put them on top of a layer of tomato puree and parmigiano-reggiano, I put another layer of this on top. The eggplant was baked for about 20 minutes.

Right after I served the eggplant I was in the kitchen getting the lemon pudding all ready to be served next. My dad came in teary eyed and gave me a big hug. My eggplant roll ups tasted just like his great-aunt Mary's. She is famous in our house because my dad and his siblings are always trying to duplicate her recipes to no avail.

 My first course served, but last course made, was somewhat of a failure. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong, but immediately after this picture was taken it got very hectic and started going downhill. The hot oil that I was trying to fry the cheese in sprayed up at me, completely freaking my mom out, and the cheese completely melted and became one huge mass of oily very un-appetizing cheese. My family thinks that I should have cut the cheese into smaller pieces, or put less in the pan at the same time. It ended up tasting ok, but it looked horrific, causing much laughter and mocking from my brother. Being my first meal, and the very beginning of this project, I would say it's a success that only one dish caused me and my family to laugh.



Sicilian Menu!

I've decided on the menu for my meal from Sicilia. While looking through my cookbook I noticed that they use a lot of fava beans, eggplant, sheep's milk cheese, artichoke and citrus, which is consistent with my research of this region. I also noticed they fry a lot of their food, which is interesting as I didn't find anything about this while researching Sicilia.

My menu is as follows:

1. Antipasti: Caciu all'Argintera (Fried Cheese) The Sicilian name translates to "silversmith's cheese," which is said to be in reference to the color of the cheese once cooked.
2. Primo: Busiati col Pesto Trapanese (Busiati with Pesto) This type of pasta gets it's name from the Italian word Busu, which means knitting needle. It is made in Trapani, Sicilia by wrapping the dough around a knitting needle to get it's shape.
3. Contorno: Involtini di Melanzane (Eggplant Roll-Ups)
4. Dolce: Budino di Limone (Lemon Pudding)

I won't be making a secondo course because I don't eat meat, and the formaggio e frutta section of my cookbook has no recipes from Sicilia. 

I would have liked to make Palline di Bucce d'Arancia (orange-peel balls) for dolce because they are supposed to aid with digestion, but unfortunately they require 4 days of soaking orange peels in water and I am cooking tomorrow night.

Shopping List!!!

• fresh caciocavallo cheese (1 lb.)
• fresh oregano
• blanched almonds
• ripe plum tomatoes (10)
• fresh basil
• breadcrumbs
• eggplants (4)
• fresh tomato puree
• Parmigiano-Reggiano
• crustless bread
• grated pecorino
• flat-leaf parsley
• sugar cubes
• ripe organic lemons (3)
• lemon leaves

Traditional Italian Meal Structure

1. Atipasto: appetizers
2. Primo: hot dish (pasta, risotto, gnocchi, polenta, soup)
3. Secondo: fish or meat
4. Contorno: side dish served with secondo (salad or cooked veggies)
5. Formaggio e Frutta: "first dessert" cheese and fruit
6. Dolce: "second dessert" sweet cakes or cookies
7. Caffe: coffee or espresso 
8. Digestivo or Ammazzacaffe: liquors

First Mentor Meeting 2/10/11

I had my first meeting with Ms. Scholl yesterday and I am very excited to be starting this project! We went over my project proposal and talked about if I can realistically cook from all 20 regions in the next 16 weeks. I will need time at the end to cook my final big dinner and to get my presentation all set, and I will be out of town for a week in April. This leaves about 13 weeks to do all my cooking in, which means I would need to research 2 regions and cook 2 meals almost every week. We talked about doing sections of Italy rather than every single region. I will have to look into this more, but there is a good chance some of the smaller regions that are close together have similar styles of cooking.

We talked about what I want/hope from my mentor, I shared the research I had done on Sicily with her, we went over my two week plan, and I told her about the cookbook (La Cucina) that I am using.

The goals we outlined for the next two weeks are as follows:

• Plan, shop for, and cook 3 full meals. (During February break I will be able to cook 2 meals)
• Write at least 6 blog entries.
• Write at least 6 entries about the research I am doing.
• Take the cooking class at Simply Red Bistro! This will add a full meal, making my goal for the next 2 weeks actually 4 meals.

Before my next mentor meeting my goal is to have one of the meals finished, have at least 3 of the blog entries written, and have at least 3 research entries done.

It was a great first meeting!

Regions of Italy

This map shows the 20 regions of Italy.  I have decided to start with the southern regions and work my way up, so this week I am focusing on Sicilia (Sicily).

Dear Reader

My entire extended Italian family are amazing cooks, but somehow I didn't get the gene.  My family, especially my sister, always makes fun of me for not knowing how to cook, so for my WISE project I plan on learning. 

There are 20 regions in Italy, and my plan is to learn the different styles of cooking for each region and prepare a meal that is classic to that region.  I intend to use as much local ingredients as possible, as it is better for the environment and is something my family and I are committed to.  I also plan to cook all vegetarian food, as I do not eat meat.  At the end of my project I hope to have a big dinner with friends and family.  I will serve some favorite dishes, some dishes that needed improvement from the first time I cooked them, and some dishes that I never got the chance to make but wanted to. 

While I am very excited about this project, I am a little worried about staying on task with the research aspect and I will need to push myself to write a few times a week.  I am also worried about finding the time to cook.  Some of the recipes require many hours of preparation, and it may be difficult to finish them in a timely fashion if I start after school or work.

My hope is that by the end of this project I will not only know more about the country where my family is from, but I will be added to the list of great cooks in my family.