Roberta and I talked with Mike Chalut and Jonathan Rosa on The Mike Chalut Show with Acey Rowe [mp3]

I also spoke by phone with Pearse Murray on his What’s Going On segment [mp3].

Thanks to everyone at PROUD FM for helping us publicize the CLGA and International Women’s Day!

Read more!

The first is on our experience watching a taping of Battle of the Blades:

And the second is on our free tickets to the So You Think You Can Dance tour:

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.

It has been my great goal to make ribollita for about… well, three years. I kept saying I was going to do it and then never put in the effort, despite looking up recipes numerous times. Well, I finally gave in and got ‘er done. I used a modified version of Lidia Bastianich’s recipe, from her book Lidia’s Italian American Kitchen. I’m sure if you’ve known me for more than five minutes, you’ll know how much I fangirl Lidia, so I thought it best to go with her version of the Tuscan stew. Also, the woman isn’t totally irrational and toned down a lot of the “And then, since you are an Italian housewife who lives in the kitchen, make sure and stand over the stove and stir the pot for twelve hours and then don’t eat it for three days” aspects of this dish. When I spend a few hours cooking, I better get to eat the end product immediately!

Have a lot of veggies and cans of beans to get rid of? Ribollita will take care of it. It uses a lot of leafy greens, as well as potato and onion and such. A lot:

Cutting the veggies up into smaller strips probably takes the most effort, the rest is just stirring and waiting.

After adding that mountain of veggies to the pot, we quickly realized that we were running out of space. There wasn’t even enough space to shove in the stale bread!!

We had to split the stew into two pots! Note to self: Buy bigger pot.

This stew ended up being really yummy. You were, in fact, able to eat it right out of the pot (we kinda skipped out on that twice boiled thing):

But the leftovers were even better! Instead of yet another microwaved dinner, we put the stew into French onion crocks, added some chopped onion and cheese on top, and shoved it into the oven. This was fantastic!

General comments – the soup is really hearty. Even the French onion crocks servings were too large for me! I loved the bread, but I think next time I will want to add more beans. It’s also rich, yet bland in the way of much Tuscan food (hello, unsalted bread, what the hell is up with that?), I wish there was a way of adding to the flavor, but I’m not sure how I could do that without adding some sort of meat (sausage?), and obviously that isn’t going to happen in the Stark/Manta household. Perhaps some rosemary or sage or something? I think that might be committing some sort of Italian blasphemy… but as my ancestors were all from the dirty South, I don’t have to fear any ghostly revenge.

In other cooking adventures, there was also my first (non store bought mix) baking adventure. It involved a lot of crying over the phone to Stark at work. But, banana bread! It was yummy!

I also found a package of vegetarian ground chicken at the grocery store months ago, had an idea for a dish, then shoved the chicken right into the freezer and forgot about it. The idea was to recreate a Chinese dish that I hadn’t had in years. It was ground meat of some sort, flavored with peanuts, wrapped in lettuce leaves, with hoisin sauce for dipping. I, of course, couldn’t remember what it was called, so I ended up Googling “Chinese lettuce wrap.” At which point I discovered that this dish was very popular with P.F. Chang’s and other horrible American chains. I almost lost hope, but then went with the recipe I found on About.com that didn’t mention P.F. Chang’s. Stark messed around with the sauce to make it vegetarian and we used a few different veggies and way more ginger. It came out really well and it looked pretty, too!

I told my mother about the dish and she remembered that it was called Yuk Sung (spelling?). This brought up more recipes on Googling, and none of them mentioned P.F. Chang’s, thank goodness. I guess calling a Chinese dish “lettuce wraps” brings you down to their level. Next time I will definitely remember to buy iceberg lettuce. It works better for wrapping than romaine.

Finally, I made stuffed artichokes and rice balls for Thanksgiving. There are no photos of the rice balls because the were so good that we ate them all before I remembered to get out the camera. No joke. These were amazing. The only photo I have is the lunch I made from a zucchini, the leftover filling and cheese from the rice balls and the leftover breadcrumbs from the stuffed artichoke. Yum!

I got this recipe from my friend D. and I don’t know where she got it from. I got rid of the mushrooms and the meat. I could have added peas, but I HATE peas, so I didn’t. Otherwise, I stuck to the recipe. I thought maybe the filling was a bit of a waste of energy, since it ended up only being onion, garlic, and tomato, but Stark really liked it, so I guess I will keep making it that way. A lot of work, but soooooo worth it. I only wish there were more.

3/4 cup dried porcini mushrooms
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 cups beef stock
1 (16-ounce) can peeled San Marzano tomatoes and their juices, crushed by hand
3 tablespoons plus 1 tablespoon butter
1 2/3 cups Vialone, Avorio or Arborio rice
2 eggs
2/3 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1 onion, chopped
2 ounces prosciutto, finely chopped
7 ounces ground beef
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
5 ounces mozzarella, cut into 1/4-inch dice
3/4 cup unseasoned bread crumbs
1 liter extra virgin olive oil

Soak the mushrooms in 1/2 cup water for 2 hours. Drain the mushrooms, reserving the mushroom water, and chop finely. Dissolve the tomato paste in the mushroom water and set aside.

Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan, combine the beef stock, crushed tomatoes and 3 tablespoons butter, mix well and bring to a boil. Add the rice, reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the rice is done, stirring occasionally. Turn the rice mixture out into a serving bowl and gradually stir in the eggs and Parmigiano. Set aside to cool.

Meanwhile, in a 12 to 14-inch saute pan, melt the remaining tablespoon of butter over low heat. Add the onion and prosciutto and cook over high heat 3 minutes. Add the ground beef and cook until well browned. Add the mushrooms, mushroom water-tomato paste mixture, and salt and pepper to taste, and keep at a simmer. With a spoon, make egg-shaped portions of the rice, and make an indentation in the center of each one. Place a teaspoon of filling in the center of each ball of rice, along with a few cubes of the cheese. Roll each ball in the bread crumbs so that it is completely coated, and set aside.

In a large, heavy bottomed pot, heat the olive oil over high heat until it is almost smoking in batches, fry the balls in the hot oil until they are golden brown, about 5 minutes. Remove with a slotted spoon and allow to drain on paper towels while seasoning with salt and pepper. Serve with tomato sauce, if desired.

As for the Worm Bum, the costume has been fully assembled and now only needs several dozen layers of paint. I just realized that with my poor understanding of color theory, I neglected to buy yellow, but I’m going to see if I can make do without it.

After finishing the bottom armature, we started on the top piece. This came together quickly and efficiently, if I do say so myself:

Then there was the rather lengthy process of covering the entire thing, featuring many emergency trips to Fabric Land for more creepy synthetic batting. I have a poor understanding of math as well as a poor understanding of color theory:

At one point, Punky hopped right in. I think she thinks my Halloween costume is her new cat bed. Wrong you are, Punky! Although… maybe you can have it after Halloween. After all, what am I going to do with a massive worm bum.

We finished covering it with batting and Stark held it all together to test how it would look. Rather wormy, if I do say so myself.

Thus began the upholstery process. Side note: I have no idea how to spell “upholstery,” and every time I try, I spell it so badly that no spellchecker can even theorize as to what I meant. I end up having to Google my random spellings and hope that someone on the Internet will have also spelled it that badly and that someone else on the same page will have spelled it correctly. Considering the state of spelling on the Internet these days, this usually works. I find this whole process depressing, as I pride myself on my good spelling and decent grammar, but right now I can still see the search bar in the corner of Firefox and it is assaulting my eyes with my attempt to Google “apulster.” Gah. But I digress. Anyway, here is Stark being properly scared of my wormy bum.

And here I am taking the costume for a test drive. Still to be completed: Graboid arms. But, I think I am getting the scary face down, no?

Stark and I had an amazing idea for a costume while watching a movie that shall remain nameless. This led to elaborate plans for a costume that quite possibly will be too awesome to even fit in the apartment. It involves acrylic paint, a wire armature, and yards and yards of the same stretchy fabric they use to make figure skating costumes. WHAT COULD IT POSSIBLY BE? You’ll have to wait and find out.

But here, in the interests of posting something to this blog so it looks like I actually work on projects instead of just procrastinate, are the first photos of Worm Bum construction. No one involved has any experience with making armatures, so it was an adventure, to say the least.

Here are the beginning stages of assembling part one of the armature:

And the final product, with cat: