Perfect Scrambled Eggs? · Feb 8, 08:57 AM by James Martin
This recipe for Perfect Scrambled Eggs is getting lots of play among internet foodies these days. It involves a cobbled together double boiler.
This is a pretty fussy way to do it I think. The double boiler is really just a crutch to ensure that the temperature of the pan in which you cook the eggs doesn’t get hotter than the boiling point of water.
Here’s my recipe for perfect scrambled eggs.
Gently whisk eggs with a little water and set aside. Jab a toe of garlic with a fork, so that it sticks in the tines. Jab it lots before it sticks if you want more than a tiny hint of garlic in your eggs. Meanwhile, heat a saute pan under a very gentle heat. If you have an electric stove this should be easy. When the pan is warm add a tablespoon of butter, which should melt luxuriously but not bubble furiously or darken in color—throw it out if it does and start over.
Then tip your bowl of eggs and let them gently slide into the warm pan. After a few seconds start gently forking your eggs. See? The tines of the fork can’t do any damage because they’re covered with the garlic. Clever, no?
Just before the eggs are “done”—they should still glisten wetly, tip them into the plate and let them set a bit so that they finish cooking.
Then season and eat. (You don’t add milk or salt to the eggs before cooking because it toughens them.)
That’s how I do it. Except for the times I chop some pancetta in the eggs before cooking that is.
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The War on Root Vegetables · Jan 12, 09:15 AM by James Martin
Perhaps I’m the only one in the universe, but I look forward to winter cuisine. I don’t seem to have the aversion to root vegetables that other folks have. Nor do I find a diet rich in them monotonous.
Then again, root vegetables seem to be the current focus of a backlash against eating local foods. You know, “who’d want to be stuck inside eating turnips all day?”
Full disclosure: I had chickpea and kale soup last night. It was good, especially with a drizzle of olive oil, a winter thing, too. Now on to the story:
“If you are determined to eat locally in South Dakota or northern Germany, you’re going to be eating a lot of potatoes, parsnips, and kale in the winter, and not much else,” says Anthony Fisher, professor of agricultural and resource economics at Berkeley in the article The Locavore’s Dilemma
I wonder if Mr Fisher knows how to cook. It’s not all about parsnips. Ever had shavings of parsnip with nuggets of pancetta over pasta? Winter dish.
Italians often jack up the flavors of things with a small amount of intensely flavored pig slaughtered in December, just in time for the root vegetables. In fact, if you tell an Italian waiter you don’t eat red meat and ask him what he recommends, I’ll bet he mentions at least one dish flavored with pancetta or prosciutto. In Italy, meat used as a flavor enhancer isn’t even considered meat. In small amounts, it’s a spice.
In any case, let’s see what kinda guy Mr. Fisher is:
“I enjoy eating two navel oranges every morning,” Fisher says. “Whenever possible, I prefer oranges from California—their taste is excellent. But in the summer, when the oranges are out of season in the state, I buy oranges from the southern hemisphere. Without global trade, I wouldn’t derive the enjoyment and nutritional benefit I get from oranges for much of the year.”
Well, ok then. Now we see the problem. The Hypocrite’s Dilemma. Yes, if you’re determined to eat the same goddam thing each and every morning then you’re gonna be a cheerleader for a humongous transportation network to bring you that thing from afar you absolutely must have. But then you can’t—or a reasonable person like me won’t let you—claim monotony at being forced to eat root vegetables in winter.
The article cited above is also oddly market ignorant:
“We did a study with Columbia University and MIT with one of our cafés at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York,” said Maisie Greenawalt, vice president of Bon Appétit, a Palo Alto–based food service management company that endeavors to buy at least 20 percent of its food from local producers.
The café served 1,500 students. The experiment was to feed them local foods.
“While it was clear that it was possible to feed them 100 percent from local producers, it also became clear that we would strip the entire region of local food if we did that,” Greenawalt says. “In other words, nobody else from the area would be able to buy locally if the café became the priority for suppliers.
Wow. Let’s get this straight. We have local producers of food who are perfectly able to supply 1500 people with adequate nutrition. Now, the moment the demand increases, the supply stays the same? Whatever happens to market economic theory when it screws with your argument? What about that supply and demand thing we all learned in school (at least if you “caught sense” in the 60s and 70s as I did—I have no idea of what kids learn these days of “supply side economics”)? Doesn’t the price go up when demand exceeds supply to encourage more folks to enter the market? Don’t they flock to plant ‘nips?
Final confession. I’m not a locavore, although when I’m in Italy I’m probably closer than anyone in the US has ever been. Besides the lunatic fringe I mean. I’ve eaten meals with my Italian neighbors composed of things from the area around our little village. Polenta and the wild boar that loves to chow down on the corn they make into polenta, for example. I’ve had sausage from a neighbor’s pig simmered in the local and highly touted cranberry beans of our area.
Was it good? Why yes, those dishes were so darn good I’ll likely never forget them. The foods preserved for winter and a bounty of root vegetables are nothing for the Ivory Tower Wizards of Spin to sneeze at. I won’t let them.
——
Endnotes: Twittered from Bologna just today by @cookitaly: Beautiful winter produce in Bologna market today: cardoons, red ribbon radicchio, Puntarelle, artichokes both round and pointy, citrus…
Lordy, what a monotonous diet those Bolognese must suffer in the winter! Turnip your noses at that!
Filed in: Food Living in Italy
Bread · Jan 7, 06:55 PM by James Martin
We’ve been back in California for a week now. I’ve done some things I didn’t do for the last three months we were in Italy. For one, I barbecued hamburgers on the grill. Turkey for Martha, beef for me. Sure, I could have done this in Italy. But, it isn’t done so I didn’t. It’s an American thing. So I fired up the grill on our California back porch.
Martha bought the buns. Some buns! I tried cutting through them. They collapsed. Gently I drew the serrated knife, sawing as if I were performing surgery on somebody I wanted to live, plumping the buns to keep them “inflated” as I slowly drew the knife through.
I had already noticed that the buns had no substance; they were almost lighter than air. I thought if I didn’t have a good grip on them, they’d end up plastered to the ceiling.
My head is now filled with fantasies about the corporate bakery these buns came from. I’m imagining a board meeting. There are scientists in white lab coats and the corporate schmucks in thousand dollar suits. They are discussing how the cellular wall of the bread has been miraculously thinned out so that more air can be contained inside. We’re not talking the usual scientific measure of “half an RCH”. Nope, thinner. Much thinner. Impossibly thin. The suits like that. The shareholders will like that. “We’re happy to report that we can get 2 million buns from a pound of flour with our advanced technology” will be repeated at the shareholder meeting and there will be lots of clapping.
I miss real bread for all. I miss Italy. There are no suits controlling the bread in Italy. Well, maybe some bread is controlled by suits. But in the little villages there’s bread. Real bread. Real bakeries.
(Yes, I know I can go to Whole foods and get a loaf of flavorful real bread for $5! I do! But I can also get real bread in Italy, pane al forno, for a tiny fraction of the price. I can buy it by weight. As much as I want. “Gimme half of that piece” I can say, although in Italian. Why does American bread cost so much when someone has the big idea of actually putting wheat in it? Why do we need corporations to stuff more air in our bread? It’s one of the great mysteries of our time.)
Filed in: Food Living in Italy
Popular These Days
Corkscrewed! · Jan 6, 10:09 AM by James Martin
Technology is an amazing thing, isn’t it? Well, it’s not a thing, but the thing to the right is a thing for sure. It came yesterday. What do you think it is used for?
I should have asked in a poll, but I’m too lazy. Perhaps you know of an application. I was thinking maybe it could be thrown in a suitcase you’re taking to Italy. The TSA guys would have a cow. Their probing meathooks might take a beating if the thing wasn’t wrapped up. But that’s just plain mean.
You could screw each corkscrew into a bottle of wine, then go on stage at the local talent show and spin the bottles around your pinky. On second thought though, something like this probably won’t get you any hot babes or studmuffins, so why bother?
Ok, I know the intended application so I’ll just come out and tell you. Obviously the thing is made from the business ends of 8 corkscrews. You screw 8 corks (without the corresponding bottles) into this deal until they’re snugly pronged. Then you have a hot plate. Homemade. Primative art. Recycling!
But Martha and I have refined this idea to suit our needs. We have decided to screw on only the corks from memorable wine we selected for no good reason (“Hon, isn’t that label just gorgeous?”) but we want to purchase again because they turned out to be quite tasty. That way, before we go to the store, we will have a central focus for our wine urges, meaning we’ll forget all about it but will know immediately that we forgot because upon returning from the store the corkscrew thing will be sitting on the table in full view—unless there’s a pot of unfinished spaghetti alla puttanesca covering it.
Sometimes we forget to wash pots, too.
A Luni Christmas Eve · Dec 24, 07:42 AM by James Martin
Yes, here in the Lunigiana we’re blessed with a laid-back lifestyle and a land full of good things to eat. After documenting the processing of Armando’s pig, we’ve been invited to eat much of it at Armando and Francesca’s house. Tonight we’ll be eating cotecchino con pure, or a sausage made from the meat and skin plus some mashed potatoes.
But things aren’t all paradiso found in northern Tuscany. Nope. After our snow storm, in which our entire village lost water for an entire day, the murkey russet sludge started coming from our pipes at the exact moment we lost electricity. It was time for bed, luckily, so we hibernated a while.
But then came the rain. A torrential downpour that put soccer fields completely under lakes complete with ducks.
That was yesterday. You can see the blue bike stored under the overhang in the picture.
It rained all night, then stopped for about three hours. Now it’s raining gatti e cani, cats and dogs. I’m glad we’re on a hill. I wasn’t so glad when the hill was iced over.
Then, to top it all off, someone hit our car while it rested peacefully in our little community parking area. A tail light is broken, a bumper smudged in black. No note, not even in Italian.
Ok, so there are good things to balance the bad. Here’s a picture of a presepe entered in a presepe competition in Pontremoli done by grade school students using only pasta shapes. It sits on a bread paddle. I think. It brings a smile anyway. Click to see it bigger. How many pasta shapes can you see?
So, I know I’ve been somewhat discouraging with this post, but hey, come and visit the Lunigiana some time. Friends have fixed up a kinda neat 17th century monolocale as a vacation rental. It’s a big room with a great kitchen and sleeping loft called Podere Fiana.
I’m looking forward to tomorrow, when I get to have some real turkey, one of Armando’s, that doesn’t have a breast so large it couldn’t walk around proudly. I don’t know about you, but porn star turkeys are about the last thing I want on Christmas.
Sometimes it’s the little things that make a holiday a good one. Hope yours is all you want it to be.
Filed in: Food The Lunigiana
Time to Butcher Pigs in Tuscany! · Dec 22, 02:34 AM by James Martin
At one time here in the Lunigiana, butchering was a critical mission. You needed food to get you through the winter without any refrigeration other than the cooling temperatures of the season. You killed your pig and you preserved a good deal of it as prosciutto, salami and other products that fall under the category of salumi.
My neighbor Armando still follows the old tradition. The pig he sacrifices in December yields prize winning salame Toscana most years, and he makes great lardo and Culatello as well (the inner muscle of the ham or prosciutto).
I was able to watch and take pictures this year. Of course, I labored thus after an offer to “help” with the whole deal. The butcher, Giovanni, really didn’t seem to need any help, leaving me to my own devices, which included a still camera and video camera.
It took roughly 2 and a half hours to totally break down the pig into pieces that would sit overnight, including processing the intestines into roughly cleaned sausage casings. The next day, early in the morning, the pig was further broken down, some of the meat being ground for the salame tascana, mortadella, and sausage and stuffed into the cleaned intestines. That took the whole morning. By noon we sat down to a pig feast while the preserved meats were hanging handsomely.
I’ve prepared a slide show of the process used to break down the pig in the field. You might want to take a look if you don’t get physically ill at the sight of an animal being processed for food: Tuscany Pig Butchering
Filed in: Food The Lunigiana
How Italy Ruined My Thanksgiving · Nov 26, 12:32 AM by James Martin
Martha and I came to an agreement on Thanksgiving many years ago. We don’t do turkey. A turkey is too much for two people, especially the way US industrial turkeys have had their beasts bloated by “science” into the big and tasteless tits real ‘mericans secretly enjoy wrapping their lips around (but are hell, of course, for the turkeys to carry around, on account of they drag on the ground and such).
Anyway, our tradition is this: rich or poor, we will always have a no-holds-barred, blow-out Thanksgiving feast. Often this meal consisted of things you didn’t see very often in the supermarkets—yummy natural things that allow us to really give thanks for the animals that had given their lives for our pleasure and sustenance. We might target guinea fowl, pheasant, rabbit—and throw in a crustacean or two, for which we’d make a pilgrimage to the sea for of course.
As you can imagine if you’re American, all this required a sacco di soldi, or s**tload of cash, not to mention many long pilgrimages, mostly because the industrialists haven’t yet gotten around to making cheap and tasteless white meat out of quail, or give them enormous breasts, so they’re rare enough in the market that you pay dearly for them.
Problem is, this year we’re spending Thanksgiving in Tuscany. All of the foods I’ve mentioned, the exotic “game” birds, the crustaceans fresh from the sea, and other comestibles like truffles, porcini mushrooms, and good wine, are all normal foods here. You don’t hunt them down in specialty stores, they practically come to you!
Take that prawny thing you see over there to the right trying to get you to look left. You go to the Fivizzano market to get your turnips and such, and there’s always the nice man inside the fish van just waiting. There is no stench of rotting fish. There are no Styrofoam trays, each with exactly the same number of shrimp in them, marinating away in a bacterial slime that came with them last week when they were trapped in their little Styrofoam coffins by a judicious encasement of saran wrap blithely applied by a snot-nosed kid fresh out of high school. No, they’re fresh from the sea, they’re on ice, and you can order as few as 1 of them. What a concept! And if you don’t know what something is or how to cook it, the fish guy actually knows!
We may make a pilgrimage today to Lunigiana Naturalmente. But it’s not the same. We’re not forced to go there by the lack of demand for good food by the population at large.
So Italy, shame on you. You’ve ruined our Thanksgiving ritual. Good food ought to be rare enough to be enjoyed only by the industrial elite and a couple of crazy people who’ve saved over the year to see what the rich could eat if they had taste. It’s cathartic, you know?
Otherwise, Thanksgiving is just no fun at all.
—-
I leave you with a photo of the grilled prawns. Well, not really the prawns, the aftermath of shells. This kind of picture is what I always think of when I think of Italy, the remains of the meal doused in endless sunlight.
And this was in November. You know, the off season.
Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving. Don’t eat too much.
Filed in: Food Living in Italy
Pranzare! Or Not. Lunch in Italy · Nov 24, 08:25 AM by James Martin
A few weeks ago we made a discovery while doing some shopping in Fivizzano’s Tuesday open air market. It was noon. We noticed folks buzzing around a pizzeria with the unlikely name of Vladimir opposite the bus yard, where cooks had evidently been spending the morning churning out pizza, focaccia, and other delights from their forno a legno or wood oven. On market day they also produced a rather amazing farinata, a chick-pea pancake-like deal. Farinata can taste a bit like compacted sawdust if you don’t make it right, but Vladimir evidently knew all the secrets. We bought some. It was the best.
Today we got to Vlad’s at just after 11. The nice lady said the farinata wasn’t quite done—come back in 10 minutes. So we walked around Fivizzano a bit and returned. There was a crowd. Gray haired old ladies were walking out with packages cradled in bony arms, faces aglow with pride as if their packages contained stacks of freshly printed Euros won in the lotto.
Yes, food is like that in Italy. We had come across a farinata frenzy. We had lost. By the time Martha had inched up to the counter there was no more.
“You can wait ten minutes…”
Ah, well, no thanks. Hunger knows not the clock.
Vlad is evidently as much from the old school as he is from the old country. He makes the best farinata in the land. He charges a reasonable price for it. People flock to his store. He sells out in a matter of minutes.
It used to be this way in America. Things have changed. Now ten million dollar a year industry executives sit around a big table discussing the best ways to water down their product, or, in the case of airlines, devising ways to make such a complicated mess of pricing that folks can no longer compare the cost of different airlines running the same route and so can be tricked into paying too much.
But alas, I am on the verge of losing the point. Here it is: Italians take their midday meal seriously. It is the backbone of the modern Italian culture.
And the government wants them to stop. Eating lunch I mean.
Lunch breaks are a wrench in the workday gears, according to Government Programme Minister Gianfranco Rotondi on Monday who asked Italians to keep them short or skip them entirely. ~ Minister tells Italians to skip lunch
Can you imagine? Don’t eat, just work? The gears of industry want all of you. Who gives big biz a pass on such blasphemy? In the old days there’d be blood in the streets—or at least a sciopero of several weeks. Italians would be mad even if told other people do it—er especially if told other people are idiotic enough to do it:
The minister gave Germany as a good example, where he said employees working nine hours a day took 45 minutes at most.
Let me tell you a story. We were sitting in a restaurant we like very much called Dal Mi’ Cocco in Perugia, just outside the Etruscan wall. It’s near the University. Next to us was a German researcher working with Italians on a University project. We struck up a conversation. He said he found it hard to break away from the project.
“Italians are nuts! They work all night! They never take a dinner!” he lamented. “I was famished. I had to sneak out and eat something.”
So you see, if this government idiocy comes to pass, not only will the hard working folks who run restaurants and provide worker’s lunches to hungry working folks be out of a living, but the Italians, who aren’t eating lunch or dinner, will obviously die out—the first culture ever to die from voluntarily never eating in order to grease the gears of industry.
I’m not trying to be a Negative Nelly here. There is a bright side. Property values will go down.
Then you can go to Italy and buy a house and not eat, too.
Filed in: Food Italy News