Posts from — January 2010

For Christmas, Stark bought me a copy of Lidia’s Family Table, and much like our friend C. and a certain Halloween magazine, upon presentation of this book Stark announced “I expect results.” So, for Stark’s birthday, I attempted to deliver some of those results.

For anyone interested in cooking, I highly recommend Lidia’s books and TV shows. Unlike many of those schmucks on Food Network, Lidia actually teaches you how to do things. She’s to Italian food what Julia Child was to French food. Her recipes aren’t intended to just show you how to make one very specific dish, but instead on how to combine a series of different skills and base ingredients to create an endless variation of dishes. Unlike that bobblehead, Giada, she looks like she actually eats the food she makes, and unlike that slob, Guy Fieri, she didn’t just steal all her recipes from her grandmother and never give her credit. In conclusion, you know Lidia is the best of all the Italian TV chefs because you can find her cookbooks in places of pride in the kitchens of real Italian mamas. So that is my opinion of Lidia Bastianich. I share it often and widely.

First up for Stark’s birthday dinner was sweet onion gratinate. You can actually get the recipe for this on Lidia’s website. I highly recommend you make this shit, like, NOW. It’s that good.

It does involve slicing up a lot of onions, though. Like, a lot of onions. Three and a half pounds of onions to be exact.

Then, like in so many of Lidia’s recipes, you cover them in cheese and butter and olive oil and more cheese. Lidia’s recipes are not exactly ummm… low calorie, let’s say. Her favorite ingredients are grana padano cheese, butter, olive oil, more cheese, breadcrumbs, hot pepper flakes, and more cheese.

But oh, it is all so worth it.

Then I set about to make pasticiatta, an apparently thoroughly unpopular dish, because I cannot find one solitary photo of it on the internet. I only mention this because there is a printing error in the book. It says “Turn to page 216 for a photo of pasticiatta,” but the photo is nowhere to be found. So I have no idea what Lidia (or anyone else, for that matter) thinks pasticiatta should look like. Now that I have tagged my photo on Flickr, I think I have officially set the internet standard for what pasticiatta looks like. Pasticiatta, for those of you who are wondering, is like lasagna, but instead of pasta there are layers of polenta.

This recipe was very involved. First I had to make marinara sauce. Then besciamella sauce. I was not a huge fan of Lidia’s fresh marinara sauce. I think I like my sauces thicker, richer and more blended. But then, I also didn’t want to be cooking sauce for ten hours like my grandmother used to do, so I guess that’s what I get for picking the twenty minute recipe. Next time I will try the longer cooking sauce from the book. The besciamella sauce was another bit of confusion, as I have never made a roux and had no idea what one should look like. I spent twenty minutes whisking flour and butter and mumbling to myself, in the manner of the little bird in that Are You My Mother? book, “Is this a roux? Is this a roux now?” When you find yourself pondering the question “What is a roux?” in the kitchen as if it’s a major philosophical quandary, you know you’ve been cooking for too long and the heat from the stove has melted your brain.

Then I turned to polenta. We have a very weak electric stove, as compared to Lidia’s gas burners, which probably have the power to melt rock into lava. It took forever to bring this stuff to a boil (Lida said ten minutes – HAH!) and then forever to thicken. It sure was delicious though. Not that I was licking the cooking spoon every five seconds… I swear!

Once the polenta was done, I spooned some besciamella sauce into a butter casserole dish, then a layer of polenta, then a layer of ricotta, then some grated parmigiana, then a layer of sauce, then more polenta, more besiciamella, more cheese, etc., until I reached the top of the dish. It was in the oven for a bit more than an hour until it got nice and crusty.

I served it up with some broccoli rabe cooked in garlic and olive oil, et voila. Dinner is served.

I have to say, usually I fret over whether or not my cooking has come out well and whether or not it tastes good or whether or not everyone is lying to me about the quality of my cooking, but this meal left no question in my mind. It was TASTY. Mmmmmm. And, since Lidia’s recipes are aimed at feeding a small militia or a incredibly reproductive Catholic family, we have many, many, many yummy leftovers.

For dessert I made struffoli. Struffoli are a Neopolitan dessert. They are fried balls of dough covered in honey. You can find a variation of this dessert from pretty much every culture on the planet. Fried dough and honey just go so well. Anyway, struffoli is the Southern Italian variety and my mother makes them every Christmas. I wasn’t back in New York for the holidays this year and missed out, so I decided to try my hand at making them. They didn’t come out as perfectly as my mom’s, but they were pretty damn good (and are almost gone already).

For any interested parties, this is the family recipe, which my mother ferreted out of an Italian mama in Bay Ridge many, many decades ago.

Anna Conticello’s Struffoli

3 tbs. butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups Bisquick
Vegetable oil for frying
Honey
Confetti

1. Cream butter and sugar. Add eggs, vanilla, the flour and the Bisquick. Knead dough with hands on a floured board.
2. Divide dough into pieces. Roll into long ropes about 1/2 half inch in diameter. Cut into little pieces, about 1/2 inch squares on a lightly floured surface.
3. Heat 3 quart sauce pan of oil (about half full). Put eight to ten pieces of dough in a frying basket and submerge in hot oil. Dough will form balls which will rise to the surface. Keep stirring them around until they are golden.
4. Drain the balls on paper towels. Repeat until all dough is used up.
5. Slightly mound the balls on two aluminum foil pie plates. Drizzle honey (slightly warmed) over balls. Sprinkle with confetti.

Guaranteed yummy! This recipe makes a lot of balls, so plan to give at least one of those trays away, unless you want to go into a sugar coma.