Pizzaiola for a quick mid-week dinner

The connection between the adjective ‘pizzaiola’ and pizza is that of their both being from Naples in origin and of three ingredients that were the staple for a neapolitan pizza: tomato sauce, garlic and oregano.

Carne alla pizzaiola means cooking fairly thin slices of beef in a pizzaiola sauce made up of …. you guessed it: tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and oregano.

Maybe our grandmothers cooked the meat for a long long time … but for a long long time since then, it is now considered a ‘fast’ way of dealing with dinner.  The cooking is deceptively easy to get wrong … and once or twice I have been offered ‘pizzaiola’ meat that was very tough to chew.  So the answer is to cook the meat as briefly as possible.

Olive oil in the saucepan, together with cloves of garlic and a spray of dried oregano.  Turn the heat on very low so as to cook the garlic very gently.  Once it has turned an attractive golden colour, it can be removed (I prefer to leave it in).

Here are some slices of beef that my butcher cut up for me.  You can see that they are very thin.

Cook them for about two minutes on one side …

And then another minute or so on the other side.  Sprinkle some salt.

Pour as much or as little passata di pomodoro as you like.

Cook for another two or three minutes and then switch off the heat.  Taste and add more salt if required, and add pepper too.

I then added some fresh oregano leaves …  but this is not really necessary (it’s just that herbs are an obsession of mine).

I had previously made some ‘cicoria saltata in padella’ – that is stewed chicory greens that are then cooked with olive oil, garlic and a few fresh tomatoes.

And here was dinner …. pizzaiola with chicory.   Very healthy, all told … and definitely tasty.  Needs bread to mop up the sauce, however, beware!

A close-up.  I love the way the sauce ‘glistens’.

Sunday’s Lamb sauce for fresh pasta – ragù di arrosticini

We are fortunate to have, within walking distance, a butcher’s that is open until 1 o’clock on Sundays and you’d be surprised at how many people gather there to shop on what should be a day of rest.  Not many a Sunday ago, I managed to get there in the nick of time five minutes before closing, as they were finishing putting away the various cuts of meat and there really wasn’t much there for me to choose.  I literally did an eeny-meeny-miney-mo with what was there and hey presto! I ‘chose’ some cubes of lamb on skewers that go by the name of ‘arrosticini’.

When I got home, the family craved a pasta dish of some sort and so I had to remove all the cubes of meat off the skewers and make a lamb ragù for Sunday lunch.  It turned out to be very rich and filling and tasty and more-ish … and I reverently thanked the Eeeny-Meeny-Miney-Mo Saint of Sunday Lunches for having intervened so quickly and graciously.  I have already written a post about the helpfulness of arrosticini (The Trouble with buffets and why arrosticini are a God-send -Nov. 2011), so I definitely saw a ‘connection’ that Sunday.

PART I

Please note that I used a pressure cooker to cook the lamb sauce.  Pressure cookers may sound old fashioned and fuddy duddy but I love them for this sort of thing.  It took 30 minutes to cook the ragù in a pressure cooker … it would have taken over 1 hour in an ordinary saucepan.

Ingredients: 2 onions, 2 carrots, 1 celery stalk, fresh herbs, about 10 fresh tomatoes, salt and pepper, tomato paste, 1 glass of white wine, fresh peas, fresh pasta, pecorino romano cheese.

Douse a casserole with plenty of olive oil and then add chopped/sliced carrots, celery and onion (this is known as a ‘soffritto’).  Turn the heat on and sweat until fairly tender.

Do not allow to brown.

Now add the arrosticini (cubes of lamb) and turn the heat up.

Give it a good stir as the meat begins to lose its pink and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Squeeze about 1 tablespoon of tomato puré/paste into a glass and fill with white wine or water and stir and blend.

Wash some tomatoes (on the vine if possible, or cherry tomatoes) … Put the tomatoes on the bottom of the pressure cooker.

Then transfer the meat and vegetables to the pressure cooker and pour the glass of tomato sauce inside too.  Mix well and seal the pressure cooker before switching on the heat.

Here, in the pressure cooker, cook the sauce for 30 minutes.

PART II

While the ragù is cooking … use the casserole to cook some fresh peas.

Slice an onion and sweat it in some olive oil for a few minutes …

These had been fresh peas which I had shelled and then frozen a few days previously … Add them to the onion.

Add just enough water (very little indeed) to cover the peas …

Add a teaspoon of sugar and salt and white pepper …

And cook for as long as it takes the peas to become tender (in this case it took about five minutes).

The 30 minutes are up …. the peas are ready and the ragù is cooked and tender:

Taste the ragù and add more salt if necessary.

Pour the ragù into the casserole with the peas and mix well.

Choose some fresh herbs that you love …

Chop them finely and add them to the ragù.

PART III – Time to cook the pasta

Here is some lovely fresh pasta that I had bought at the Ariccia Farmers’ Market the day before.

Drop the fettuccine into the salted boiling water and cook until ‘done’: in this case it took about 4 minutes.

Please note that there is no need to worry about pasta being ‘al dente’ when you are dealing with fresh as opposed to dry pasta, nor when dealing with egg pasta — be it fresh or dried.  And please do not throw away the cooking water when dealing with fresh pasta.  Fresh pasta is a guzzler and will slurp up any sauce very quickly.  So it is a good idea to keep some of the cooking water, to add to the sauce if needed.

Remove the cooked pasta and put it directly into the casserole with the lamb ragù.

Use a wooden spoon or spatula or two large spoons to mix the sauce and the pasta together.

PART IV – Serve!

Shower the pasta with plenty of freshly grated pecorino cheese.  Buona Domenica! Enjoy!

Breaded chicken – petto di pollo impanato

The last post was about one of Italy’s favourite home-cooked foods, the ‘fettina impanata’ (or ‘cotoletta impanata’ too as it is sometimes called), which is made using slices of beef.  If you use slices of chicken breast, instead, it becomes ‘petto di pollo impanato’.  I added some  chopped up fresh herbs to the breadcrumbs to give it a little extra zing and served it with slices of oranges.

Here are the slices of chicken breast, dunked in beaten egg first, then coated in breadcrumbs that had been sprinkled with chopped herbs.

Shallow fry the chicken in olive oil, a few at a time so as not to overcrowd the frying pan and ruin the result (the more stable the temperature of the frying oil, the better).

Fry on one side for a few minutes, until it turns golden …

And turn over once only.

Looking very inviting already!

Sprinkle with plenty of salt (the nice kind of salt, the untreated sea salt which is good for you and not the nasty chemically dried tablesalt that is bad for you) and then cover with a few thick slices of orange.

Cheerful colours on a gloomy day … simple to make (it actually does not take that long to prepare) and very more-ish.

Here it is served with chicory and with a potato and aubergine cake.

Breaded meat – La Fettina Panata

One of the Milanese signature dishes is the ‘Cotoletta alla milanese’ and is justifiably celebrated as something gorgeous to enjoy.  A veal cutlet is all it may be but it is also very big because it is cooked ‘bone in’.  It is best cooked in clarified butter.  And it is somewhat expensive.

In Rome, the dish has been modified to a more pedestrian level, using a deboned and thinner cut of beef as opposed to veal which is fried in olive oil.  We calle this the ‘fettina panata’ (‘fettina’ means ‘small slice’).   Children loooove fettina panata.  Even older children known as adults love fettina panata!  It is fried and thus perhaps not in the same league as ‘healthy’ foods but should never be sniffed at.  Any leftover fettine panat (plural) are served again the following day in an onion and tomato sauce.  And fettina panata makes an excellent sandwich filler.  It can even be eaten cold and is thus excellent for picnics.  The following photos date back to the end of last October.  I had bought the meat at the Ariccia Farmers’ Market.

Here are the slices of meat.

I cracked a few eggs and used a fork to beat them, adding a pinch of salt and a few drops of lemon juice.

I then placed the slices of meat in the beaten egg bath.

It’s a good idea to leave them there for at least half an hour and to turn the meat over so that all of it gets coated in the egg.

Pour plenty of bread crumbs into a bowl and pour the olive oil into a pan and switch on the heat.  In the meantime, remove the slices of meat and, one at a painstakingly time, press them down firmly in the breadcrumbs, on both sides.  This is a very important step in the procedure.  Do please press very hard otherwise the dish will not turn out well.

You can speed up the procedure by cooking some fettine while carrying on breading the others.   If you prefer, you can even bread the fettine in advance and then leave them in the fridge until it’s time to cook them.

A variation on the fettina panata is to bread it a second time, as you can see in this photo.  The fettina panata is breaded and then put back in the egg wash and then breaded a second time.  The ‘coat’ of breadcrumbs will be thicker and crunchier this way.

Here are the last fettine panate frying in the olive oil.  It can get a little messy …

Place the fried fettine on some kitchen paper first …

Sprinkle salt and serve with wedges of lemon for those who like lemon juice on the fettina panata.

Irresistible ….

Nigella’s carrot cake: the Venetian version way

I happen to like Nigella Lawson very much (i.e. her food programmes on television) and think it’s marvellous the way she always looks on the bright side, whatever else might be said of her culinary skills.  She is not out to impress, she is out to please and satisfy, and enjoy herself in the process — and I love that about her.  I have two or three of her books but I have to admit to not having tried even one of the recipes therein.  I looked at one once and closed the book in self-loathing despair: it was all about ‘cups’ (I reason in grams and kilograms) and other arcane culinary steps that puzzle me into inaction.  And yet on television, when I can ‘see’ what she is up to, I think I can easily replicate a recipe.

What I share with Ms Lawson is a visceral fear of not being within reach of food.  I do not make midnight rampages into the fridge as she does on her TV shows but I definitely need the reassurance of food in my surroundings.  My cupboards must never be bare … that would be very frightening indeed.  I hate being invited at someone’s house for dinner and discovering that the food is tasteless or worse.   I have been known to cry over ‘bad’ food at a restaurant.  And when I travel, I always carry a little bit of food for the trip, even if it’s only nuts and chocolate or dried fruit.  When I accompanied my son on a school trip to Moscow and St Petersburg (this was a few years ago), my suitcase was full of parmesan cheese and parma ham, nuts, chocolate, dried fruit and yes, I confess, even 12 large plastic bottles of mineral water!  (A friend told me how her husband had drunk Moscow water and got himself into a terrible state of health because there were traces of uranium or whatever in the drinking water.)  I am sure that good food is to be had in Moscow and St. Petersburg but I knew that the school’s travel budget would be taking us to affordable establishments where quality would not necessarily take centre stage.  I was right.  And I always carry my own salt in my handbag — proper unrefned sea salt (the kind that is good for your health) as opposed to the nasty tablesalt that supermarkets sell and that ruins your health.  I get alternately teased and mocked over this salt habit but I also notice that people turn to me at the restaurant table when they need a pinch of salt to liven up what’s in front of them on their plate.

What I don’t share with Ms Lawson is a sweet tooth.  Dessert and pudding is something I never look at on a restaurant menu.  I am usually too full to want to eat dessert.  Last week, while ironing and watching a Nigella programme on TV, however, I was very much intruiged by a carrot cake she prepared.  She had drawn her inspiration from Venice where she had eaten it made this way and discovered that carrot cake was indeed a Venetian invention of its Jewish population in the Ghetto (the word ‘ghetto’ actually hails from Venice).  What is very ‘good’ about this recipe is that it contains no flour, so suitable for those with gluten problems.  It looked easy enough to make … and here is the result!

The ingredients are: 150ml olive oil, 250g almond flour (or peeled almonds that you can process into flour), 150g sugar, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, 3 eggs, juice of half a lemon, lemon zest, a grating of nutmeg, a handful of raisins steeped in sherry (I didn’t have any so used whisky instead), toasted pine kernels, 2-3 grated carrots.  The carrot cake is accompanied by a cream made up of:  250g mascarpone, 2 spoons icing sugar and a good glug of sherry.

Nigella insisted that the carrots be grated by hand and eggs and sugar and olive oil creamed also by hand – but I contravened on this and used the food mixer and the result was jolly good, pace Nigella.

Start by preheating the oven at 180°C.

Here are all the ingredients (except for icing sugar).  Please note that the lemon should be a non-waxed organic lemon!  Put a handful of raisins in a cup or jar or glass and pour plenty of sherry or other liqueur over them to soften them.

In the mixer are the almond flour, the peeled and roughly chopped carrots and the sugar. The rest of the ingredients are waiting on stand-by.

Process the first three ingredients.

Then add the olive oil …

The three eggs …

The lemon zest ….

The vanilla extract …

And some freshly grated nutmeg.

Mix all these ingredients together very quickly.

Then, depending on how liquid or thick the mixture is, squirt in a judicious amount of lemon juice …

And process one last time.

Line a 23 cm cake pan with olive oil and parchment paper.  Get the final two ingredients ready: the pine kernels and the raisins in their alcoholic bath.

Put the drunken raisins into the cake mix.

Scatter the pine kernels over the top (the reader with a beady eye will notice that I didn’t toast the pine kernels, which I should have done, I forgot in the heat of all this photographing.  Always toast pine kernels, it is better for our health apparently).

In the oven for about 40 minutes.

Very nice.  Actually, very nice indeed.  Maybe next time I would add a little bit more sugar (i.e. 200g instead of 150g sugar).

Thank you Nigella!

Of artichokes and bricks – Carciofo al mattone

I’d never heard of this recipe until my husband mentioned eating artichokes baked with the aid of a brick in a restaurant in Rome (“Evangelista” in Via delle Zoccolette).  Artichokes being ‘the’ vegetable of choice around the Easter period, I decided I would give the brick method a go.  You really can’t wrong with artichokes, whichever way you cook them.

The first thing to do is turn the oven on at a high temperature, 250°C., and place two bricks inside — to get them all fired up.  Then proceed to trim the artichokes.

Place the trimmed and cleaned artichokes in a saucepan and ‘oil’ them very well.  Then add a little oil to the saucepan too.

Turn the heat on.  Sauté the artichokes for a few minutes and then add about 1 cup of water.  In the above photo, I have just added the water and you can see the steam.

Cover the artichokes and cook on a low heat for about 10 minutes until they are tender.  Check every now and then that there is enough liquid in the pan.  When the artichokes are cooked, remove from the pan and set aside and discard the cooking water.

Get out a roasting pan and cover with parchment paper.

Place the artichokes upside-down on the parchment paper and sprinkle plenty of salt over them.

Cover the artichokes with another sheet of parchment paper.

Place the bricks on top of the artichokes.  You can’t tell from looking at the photograph but these bricks were very hot!

Place the artichokes weighed down with the bricks in the oven.  Cook for 30 minutes.

Here they are just out of the oven.

The have been flattened by the weight of the bricks and the oven has rendered the artichoke leaves nice and crisp.

Looking very friendly, I must say …

And here are the artichokes on the table, served side by side with Pizza alla scarola.

I’m not sure this is exactly how carciofi al mattone are supposed to be cooked but they were nice enough to eat and so, as experiments go, I would give myself 10 out of 10 for effort.

Pizza con la scarola

‘Pizza con la scarola’ is a savoury pie that is typical of the cuisine of Naples and the Campagna region and is a favourite at Christmas especially.  ’Scarola’ stands for escarole or broad-leaved endive which can also be eaten as a salad when it is tender enough.  Although it is a ‘stuffed’ pie, I decided I would cook it like a pizza instead, with the scarola and other ingredients used as a topping.

The ingredients are: dough, escarole, olive oil, garlic, pine kernels, olives, raisins, salted capers and anchovy fillets. (N.B.  I didn’t have any olives that day so there aren’t any used in this particular recipe.)

Plenty of salted boiling water …

Blanch the escarole for 4-5 minutes.

Drain and leave to cool.  Then squeeze and roughly chop.

Cook some garlic in olive oil on a gentle heat (the garlic must not brown).  While the garlic is cooking, make sure you have the following ingredients to hand:

A few salted anchovy fillets, washed of the salt.

Salted capers being rinsed of their salt on the left and raisins being brought to life again in some water on the right.

Cook the escarole in the pan for a couple of minutes and add salt and pepper.  Then add the olives, raisins, pine kernels and anchovy fillets.

Switch off heat.

Here is the dough.

I oiled the oven pans and spread the dough over them just using my fingers.

I spread the ingredients evenly over the two oven pans.  And at this point I decided that a little cheese wouldn’t go amiss.

So I added some thick slices of smoked scamorza to the pizza.

The pizza cooked for about 40 minutes in a hot oven at 200°C.

Just out of the oven.

About to be served.  This is a terrible photo and I was going to take another one … only I didn’t get there fast enough … the pizza con la scarola got eaten!