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:

I have been looking for an excuse to do some more feminist adbusting since Your Mom Had Groupies, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Thus, I present a new ad campaign that I like to call Take A Beach Stroll With Sally (Click the image to make it bigger):

Or, if you don’t feel like spending your day messing around with Photoshop, you can just tell Bacardi exactly how you feel about their new campaign.

EDIT: Sources in Israel (oooh, I love saying that) have informed me that this is an old campaign, dating from 2007 or 2008. They are not sure if it was dropped by the company or even if it was ever officially used by Bacardi. McCann Digital is an Internet exclusive ad agency known for its disgustingly offensive campaigns. McCann recently listed the ad campaign on Best TV Now, dating it as being from this month and listing the client that commissioned it as Tempo.

Possibly, and this is entirely my speculation, it was going to be submitted to the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival. Does anyone else have any clues? I, for one, would love to hear from Bacardi on the matter. Adbusting remains very satisfying, whatever the response.

EDIT: McCann has pulled the promotional minisite down and removed it from their website! Heh, feminists either crashed their site or… they feared the bad press. I wonder…

EDIT: An apology (Corporations apologize? I have never heard of such a thing!) from Bacardi can be seen in the comments. Also, the lovely Mir submitted her own ad-busted version of this ad, which I think is hilarious (and suffering from far fewer rage issues than my own:

Sketching out a circle this size was a real bitch, let me tell you. But cutting out tiny lattice work with an exacto knife was even worse. Hello, early onset arthritis.

Next it was on to the cars. Stark had the brilliant idea of using the largest pieces cut out from the wheel itself. That way they would be all the same size and it would save me the effort of having to cut out eight more pieces. Also, it saves paper! Brilliant! All I had to do was trim the corners a bit.

I also had to sketch out the support that will hold the wheel to the background piece, complete with tiny American flag.

Commence painting!

And finally, I worked on the cars. I trimmed the corners, cut out the windows and painted all eight cars. The colored cars will be the swinging cars and the white cars will be the stationary.

Next up, I would like to finish painting the background. Stark had an idea for making the boardwalk look how it used to, with space underneath where people could sit. Since I have the sand already taken care of with a sheet of beige paper, I figure I can just draw on the rest of the white paper below the storefronts. I was thinking that it would be the space below, then sand, then maybe even a world beneath the sand, like skeletons and garbage and even a dinosaur or a UFO… Anything is possible (and will add approximately seven more years onto the project).

I also have to work on the puppets for the credits sequence, starting with the Astroland Rocket and hamburger man. I am feeling by Michel Gondry and want to make a movie of me making the puppets by setting up a camera on a tripod to take a series of photos that can be animated.

Last night I finally took the plunge after a thirty minute phone consultation with my mother, and I have to admit, they were really good! Just like I remembered my grandma making them! So, in effort of spreading the yum, I will share the recipe (now with photo illustrations!):

6. Combine all the dry ingredients in a small bowl, mix, then add the olive oil slowly. The olive oil should just moisten the bread crumbs so that they are easily spooned into all the crevices of the open leaves. My mother describes the consistency as being like wet sand, when it starts to clump together. Pull open all the layers of leaves and really get the stuffing in there. There’s nothing worse than getting to a section of leaves with no stuffing.

14. DINNER IS SERVED!

]]> http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/2009/03/16/general-life-updates-how-to-make-a-stuffed-artichoke/feed/ 1 http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/2009/03/08/production-diary-shoot-the-freak-equipment-prep/ http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/2009/03/08/production-diary-shoot-the-freak-equipment-prep/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:56:50 +0000 michelle http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/?p=59 Today I started planning out the background for the main credits sequence, which will be an animated view of the beach, boardwalk storefronts, and the Wonder Wheel. I decided to track the equipment I’ve been using as well as the process of making this movie. This will either succeed in recording my path to success or, well, help me learn what methods fail spectacularly.

Here is the electronic equipment that has been used so far in the making of this movie:

Pictured: Canon GL2 Digital Video Recorder, Zoom H2 Digital Sound Recorder, MacBook Pro, DV Tapes, Canon Powershot Camera
Not Pictured: Maxtor 1TB External Hard Drive, Canon Rebel XT

Here are the art supplies that we purchased for use in the animations:

Pictured: Coney Island: Lost and Found (reference images), sketch book, portfolio, some sheets of heavy poster board, a set of gouache paints, several synthetic brushes, a palette, a glue stick, an Exacto knife, thumbtacks, a cutting board, a protractor and compass set (from Dollarama! this is a low budget film after all), and a pencil case filled with pens, erasers, white-out, pencils, a bone folder, and a hole punch/awl.

Today, I did some color tests with the gouache paint. I wanted to make sure it could produce bright, circus-like, opaque colors with a minimum of effort. I haven’t worked with gouache before, so I was worried it would be too washed out. Luckily, it was perfect!

I also decided to plan out the background for the main credits sequence by making a scale drawing in my sketch book. I wanted to make sure there was enough room for the letters and puppets to move across the beach and be legible. It was important that the puppets also be of a size that is reasonably easy to cut-out and manipulate for the animations.

After struggling through incredibly simple math, I finally managed to hit upon proportions that I think will work rather well for the project:

]]> http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/2009/03/08/production-diary-shoot-the-freak-equipment-prep/feed/ 1 http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/2009/02/15/production-diary-shoot-the-freak/ http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/2009/02/15/production-diary-shoot-the-freak/#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:50:58 +0000 michelle http://www.michelle.koenig-schwartz.com/chronicles/?p=57 I think it can finally be said that production is fully in motion for our movie about Coney Island, currently titled Shoot the Freak.

After a recent brilliant decision to get in way over my head and add animated transitions and credits to the movie, I have felt newly inspired to get things moving again.

So far we have:

1. Went to Curry’s and picked up some basic supplies for paper cut out animation. Purchased: Notebook, portfolio, some sheets of heavy paper, cutting board, a set of gouache paints, paintbrushes and palette.
2. Made some preliminary sketches for the credits sequence, some basic animations, and a parachute jump transition.
3. Perused Flickr commons for public domain images of Coney Island, went through Coney Island: Lost and Found, adding post-its to every image that might be of use for transitions or flashbacks.
4. Installed Joomla on this domain to test it out for possible use as movie website.
5. Downloaded Celtx for use organizing storyboards, footage, sounds, and production materials.
6. Took notes on three DV tapes worth of footage, spanning from Summer 2007 to Fall 2008, and audio recordings from Summer 2008. Now I just need to transfer that to a searchable database before my handwriting becomes unreadable.
7. Finally finished cutting up the interview tracks, labeling them, giving them basic descriptions, and loading them to the temporary website.

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