Tastes of London- I’ve come around…

Last time I was in London, I ragged pretty hard on the food culture in this post. How can you blame me- I live in Italy ferchrissake. However, I returned in May to be greeted with a brand new view. I realized, the food culture in London is better in certain ways than in Italy. GASP!!!! HOW DARE I??? The English??? Better food culture??

Wait, wait just hear me out! I have a few reasons. Some of the most celebrated chefs have come out of the UK. Nigella, Jamie Oliver, Gordon Ramsay, just to name a few big wigs in the food world. 2nd reason: The youth is leading and taking charge of the artisan, slow food movement in the UK. In Italy, everyone talks about the cute mom and pop bakeries that start rolling out dough at midnight in order to have fresh breakfast pastries and bread by dawn. But key word: mom and pop. Pay attention the next time you are in Italy in these wine shops, veggie stands, bakeries, banco mobili (food carts) selling lampredotto or porchetta. They are sadly mostly in a similar (older) age bracket. Due to the idea that there is little opportunity left for the Italian youth, a large percentage (of the youth) are fleeing this country at an alarming rate and not following behind their parents slow food from scratch ways. Instead, the food supply is increasingly becoming monopolized by questionable entities, and in come regions affected by polluted water ways from illegal dumping and improper municipal waste management (by more questionable entities) which eventually seep into the food system. Afterall, water is the principle ingredient in the feed for crops and livestock. You have polluted water, you have polluted soil. If given a choice, I would much rather purchase mozzarella di bufala produced in Devon (UK) than from Campania (Southern Italy).

This time in London, I was refreshed by the amount of youth working at these artisan food markets. Even delighted that I found various young Italians as slow food purveyors, too. Struck by this reality, I returned to Florence only to notice I was one of the few young people on the morning commuter bus. But also discovered how fortunate I am to have a job in Italy and even more determined to not give up on Italy and the necessity to the positives or else if I do, with everyone else, many things that the world loves about Italy will be flushed downstream, just like toxins polluting the precious mozzarella.

That being said, here is a collection of what I found during my last trip. Enjoy:)

cheese. amazing cheese. cheese that will make you drunk.

My new favorite food market. In the world. Okay, not really but close!

Swedish brain looking (blue) cheese! Amazing!

even deer salami! So yummy!

Makes me miss the PNW fish scene at Pike Place!

Hake! You gotta creature lurking in your mouth:/

love the baked goodies!

My first pastry pie- beer and beef w minty mushy peas by Pieminster

Buns that will go straight to your buns!

CORAL MUSHROOMS!!!

Craft ale and smokey stout. I love England.

Pulled pork sandwich at the Real Food Festival by Jamie Oliver

My 1st sunday roast in the UK! Lamb, cabbage, yorkshire pudding (puff pastry on top) w duck fat roasted potatoes. And of course, craft beer.

At home (well, someones) making bacon wrapped dates stuffed with manchego. I enjoyed being able to find international cheeses and turkish dates in UK. Italy can be very Italian food centric.

Kinda Paleo Pasta

I’m gonna cut to the chase:

onion & olive oil. red pepper. tomatoes. spices. herbs. sausage. all in that order. starting with heat.

Grate Zucchini. mix in. Or saute alone. If alone- lay atop rucola. If with sauce- atop altogether on a bed of rucola.

Dinner. no grain, no pain.

in all simplicity- Curious Appetite.

p.s. don’t know how to make a tomato sauce? Take some tomatoes, score the bottoms. Plung in boiling water for a couple minutes. Plunge in cold water. Peel skin. Immersion blend the pulp with chopped garlic. Add olive oil. Salt and pepper. Voila! Sauce.

Big hunk of la tagliata in Florence

In my last post, I ranted for about 12 hours about getting a hold of some Italian meat for a tagliata (sliced Florentine steak) experiment.

Well this is the piece of meat I found. Chianina.

My frog oven mitten was an admitted casualty in this process. 1st the cow…now the frogs…

Then about 3 minutes on each side this hunk of love made my house smoke

Then I turned the flame off and threw on the pan cover for about 2 minutes to let the juices set in, not dry out. Or something. I just remember my new best friend saying to throw on the lid or coperchio (which I thought was called copricoperchio)

Last step was the sprinkle on some “grosso” sea salt (chunky flakes). According to BFF, the heat makes the salt scioglie (melt) into the carne flesh.

Final dish: sliced tagliata on some peppery arugula with sliced parmigiano and drizzed with fresh olive oil, balsamic glaze which is my crack that I put on a lot of dishes and speaking of crack- cracked fresh pepper.

Result: Delicious. Wine pairing: Rosso di Montalcino (fancy for Sangiovese. Wine speak for red wine from Tuscany). You could taste the countryside in this flesh. It was a rollercoaster of flavor. Texture: not tough but not melt in your mouth. Realization: I should have bought the meat in advance and let the muscle fibers relax for a couple of days. FISH is what you want to use up the same day, not steak. And I should have cooked it for less time. Still amazing though. A good reminder of why eating Tuscan ranged meat is way better that the corn fed confined American crap meat. I swear I could taste the Chianti the Chianina was reared on. (Chianina do not actually fed on wine grapes, that is just my food fantasy).

For the curious appetite in everyone…

Curious Appetite;)

Big hunks of meat and men in Italy

Meat. MEAT. It’s a controversial thing. I was however a vegetarian at one point. Not for fun and not for fashion no no. For 8 years. You’ll never guess what broke my carnal strike. Italy. 2007. Rome. Product: Free range chicken. Yep, damn skippy I ate that. And it’s been love ever since.

After a conversation about food (shocking in Italy, I know) with my new best friend who happens to be a chef was shocked that I hadn’t tasted la bistecca fiorentina yet. The Florentine Steak. I see his point but bear with me, there are a couple reasons:

1. I haven’t won the lottery yet. (America, enjoy your cheap subsidized meat while you can.)2. I haven’t met the right restaurant.

But my new best friend tells me it’s so easy to make at home and with meat from the market. Italian meat market. ahh. ha. ha. Poor me…

So I forget the cut he tells me to buy. I speak Italian thanks to many years of studying classical writers, historians and poets in college. I might be able to recite a line from Dante’s Inferno in the Florentine dialect, but I am completely ignorant to how to order cuts of meats from the butcher. Sirloin? Flank? Howdya learn THAT?

Google was pretty useless for a meat guide. So I try to just go to the market and pick out a piece that looks like the right kind.

And as you can see, it’s pretty damn hard to decide. There is even a cut of meat called “bicchiere” which means glass (like a glass drinking cup). After talking to the meat man (ohhhh yeeeeeaaaah) the right cut is like 25 euros a kilo. In the restaurant it’s like 45, so not so bad if you can make it at home. I told him I would do a “giro” of the market and come back.

So I finally found a cut. A cut from a traditional Italian bovine race called Chianina, one of the oldest cattle breeds in the world. Tuscans and tourists who know 3 things about Italian gastronomy go nuts about it for some reason.

Tonight I will endeavor this little hunk of Chianina love. So far, I have stuffed eggplant and a caprese salad to pair. Red wine as well, but of course. I decided to make the steak in a tagliata (cut) fashion with arugula and shaved grana padana.

To be continued….

Curious Appetite

 

 

 

 

 

The Monsanto Protection act digest

What the hell, America. I leave for 5 minutes and you (they) pass an act that could quite possibly destroy American agriculture as we know it. All of the strides the local organic food movement now trampled on. All of the earnest efforts of  unbiased scientists sounding alarms to ecological and human health can now be officially plunged down the toilet. And the big wigs at Monsanto are smug about having put one(a big one) past the system and a whole gigantic country of people who will now be their lifelong customers- whether they like it or not.

I can write a digest of all the proven risks of GMO’s, all the fears, how Europeans refuse to accept GMOs, all the realities, how MNC’s manipulate the poor for their gain, all the governmental back scratching, fear mongering and all the scandal. But you can inform yourself. You can search for that in your engine, or as the cool kids say “google it.”

America, why do you let big business take over common sense?  It is time to wake up. It is time to defend our food. It is time to start respecting our home. It’s time to start making some decisions that will improve the future of food. It is not my place to tell you how. There is loads of information out there, figure it out. I am concerned that our children will grow up in a world where clean water is scarce, air is filthy and food is concocted in a laboratory. I know as a human race we have to keep innovating,  like a plane in ascent that can’t exactly stop its climb. But I think we can be innovative with how we turn the tide and save our planet before we destroy everything that has been gifted to us so mysteriously.

Wake up, people. Walk away from your packaged convenience food, your favorite name brand junk food and flip off the telly of your reality show. This is reality. The US just signed a bill that is allowing GMOs to take over the food supply, and will never be taken off the shelf even if science proves (again) that it’s exposure will harm human health.

http://www.salon.com/2013/03/27/how_the_monsanto_protection_act_snuck_into_law/

http://www.ibtimes.com/monsanto-protection-act-5-terrifying-things-know-about-hr-933-provision-1156079

Get up, stand up and do something! Before it’s too late.

Curious Appetite.

Italian food and restaurant empires back home

My current read is Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl, who was the food critic for the L.A. times and the New York Times. I really enjoy this read for many reasons, one is that it was set in the 90′s…the age before food bloggers, popular online publications and before the trend of hipster boutique restaurants. It’s hard to explain and I am well aware of this hypocrisy for slamming bloggers, but I really look fondly upon newspaper journalism and carefully selected (and paid) food critics. Nowadays everyone thinks they’re a chef, a photographer, a critic just because they have a food blog.

Granted, blogs are good and have a purpose, but they also have undermined journalism in a way and undercut the industry because people with little talent and a poor ability to captivate are willing to give their work away for free (or for an “internship”) just for status. The blogosphere and twitter has become a big arbitrary popularity contest. Furthermore, I think this blogosphere culture has created a supply of cheap, search engine optimized information that crowds out talented writers like Ruth Reichl to the point that if she were to have started her career in the age of the blog, who knows if she would have had the same broadcast and reach.

I’m not trying to be the next best blogger or the most read. I just want to blurt out my million opinions about food and dining and I have no interests hiding behind my blog. I can’t say I believe the same for other bloggers who have their page loaded with advertising.

I started reading up on online food critics from back home on at least a newspaper’s website, The Seattle Times and I was reading up on one of the critic’s raving of a new Ethan Stowell restaurant that supposedly is supposed to represent Roman food and derives its style inspiration from the lovely gorgeous quarter of Trastevere. It was quite weird to read some of the comments, being that I lived in Rome (and live in Florence now), I was amused by some of the sincere ideas about food in Rome from this restaurant review by the Seattle Times. I saw a mention of his “Roman street pizza”. Give me a break! I really resent how trendy putting the word “street” onto a menu item has become. I can just imagine all the “ooooh roman STREET pizza- let’s get that!” coos from foodie hipsters and Seattleites. Serves them right to be paying a whopping $16 for a pie which here costs about 5 euros. In my opinion, the pizza in Rome kinda sucks! After reading, I began to wonder how Ethan Stowell got his idea for a posh Italian restaurant chain/empire. I am sure he spent time traveling in Italy, doing research and reading books…but did he really live and breath the air in Trastevere?

Did he understand the Romans on motorinos howling out mortacci tua! to the insanely packed disorderly traffic jams that make Rome so chaotic? Has he ever eaten trippa alla romana? I don’t even want to start with asking if he knows what lampredotto is. Perhaps he is well informed, but I doubt he even scratched the surface of Italian life. Like most well-off Americans, he doesn’t even know what Italians have to live with everyday. I doubt he gets that the restaurants in Italy that he tries to replicate abroad get taxed to their eyeballs and can’t afford to take on more staff at even poverty-level wages. Meanwhile, the well-tipped staff at any given Stowell establishment I imagine can’t even pronounce conchiglie or most other Italian food terms without a nails on the chalkboard American accent.

And I bet this highly pretentious chain of restaurants can overcharge for Italian-style food without realizing that most of the recipes were originally designed to be filling for Italians in times of austerity, not filling pockets abroad for trend savvy restauranteurs.

But just like the oversaturation of food bloggers and everyone thinking they are as worthy of readership as Ruth Reichl in her days as the New York Times food critic, the chef world has also become undercut with people like Ethan Stowell who think their superficial relationships with Italy can earn them the badge as an Italian chef.

Ciao for now;)

Sincerely yours,

a very cynical (and ironic) curious appetite…

Fresh pasta making adventures

A lot of people I know who like Italian food love pasta. It is the cornerstone of Italian cuisine, it is what makes Italian cuisine, at least modern-day Italian. I go through phases of shunning carbs and gluten but during the winter months like January and February- I can’t seem to help myself.

Recently I have had to attend some culinary dinner events which included pasta making top chef-like challenges. So after one weekend of an event I borrow a pasta maker because I’m really curious if I can do it on my own after observing it at these events. All I gotta do is look up a recipe, give me a machine and I’ll figure it out, right?

So I call a pal to see if she is game for an afternoon of pasta making. She trumps my request by adding that we make our fresh pasta with a ragù of cinghiale, which is Italian for wild boar. The game is on.

The night before I was excited. I told some Italian friends about my plans for the next day, they seemed impressed and respond by saying basically how weird is it that a couple of Americans are making something that Italians themselves are forgetting about.  Italy is being colonized by the Big Mac meanwhile American foodies teach themselves how to make the traditional dishes their grandparents used to make. Incredible.

After some trials and tribulations of finding wild boar meat in the city of Florence, my trusty sidekick succeeds in finding some from a local butcher and marinates it overnight with garlic, rosemary and wine.

We spend about 3 hours simmering a wild boar ragù- which is basically a red meat sauce starting with a battuto of carrot, celery, onion, peeled tomatoes, red wine and ground marinated cinghiale.

While the sauce is simmering we mak’ala pasta!

Start with 1 cup of all purpose flour and a cup of whole grain flour (believe me the consistency and texture is real nice- plus the fiber will make you feel less guilty for eating pasta! score!) mix it in a bowl with a pinch of sea salt. Pour it on a dry surface and stick your fingers in the middle to form a volcano

Then when you get a deep valley in your lump of flour, crack 4 eggs into it, careful to not let the lava spill quite yet.

Then you put a few drops of olive oil in your egg lava nest and try to whisk the mix without letting it spill of the sides. But if it does, don’t worry. I did and the pasta came out just fine. Once the lava is all mixed, start incorporating flour in little by little with a fork.

Then just say screw it with the dainty fork and just get your hands all up in it and capture all your flour and knead like crazy- pasta dough is very kneady process and needs a lot of kneading care. get it…get it??!!! It’s a PUN!!!! No? Just me? Okay moving on….

Once your dough has got all it has kneaded..(okay, I promise to stop…) Tada! Let it rest, it’s taken quite the beating. For about a half an hour. In the meantime, feel free to eat chocolate, drink coffee and sip on wine. Yep, that’s Italy!

After the rest and by now I hope you’re buzzing and cracked out on caffeine…it’s the perfect time to do something time consuming and somewhat tedious- and that’s rolling out the pasta dough and cutting it! Good thing we were making a slow cooked ragù…maybe that’s why it was discovered! Maybe someone left some meat sauce on the stove while making fresh pasta and it turned into a delicious melt-in-your mouth wonder!

Be sure to keep your surface nice and floured as you are slicing your dough and flattening it out a bit.

When using a pasta machine and making sheets of pasta from the dough, start with the lowest setting and work your way up to your desired thickness/thinness. Once you make flat sheets of pasta, you put it through the cutting attachment as seen here in exhibit: z.

After you cut your pasta, you lay them on a flat plate-object like a plastic sheet or cutting board make sure they don’t stick together by adding a bit of flour, untangling the strands like hair.

And you must have a fun face on while you are doing it. Otherwise, you’re doing it wrong. In fact, in life you must always have a fun face on.

Your slow cooked ragù is almost ready. So boil up a large pot of water, add all your hard earned pasta in and cook for no more than 3 minutes. A spectator in the peanut gallery of this adventure said “how funny that something that takes so long to prepare takes so little to cook.” Deep thoughts about pasta, yes this is Italy.

When your pasta is cooked and drained, pile some on a few plates and dollop a nice ladle of your slow simmered wild boar cinghiale ragù on top. Grate some aged pecorino on top and you got yourself a plate of pasta that will knock Dante Alighieri’s socks off.

Don’t forget to stop and smell. Watch. Drool. Devour.

Don’t forget to pair with some red wine. Chianti Classico, Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, Brunello di Montalcino…heck just make sure you have some goddamn red wine, preferably from Tuscany. Oh and make sure it’s daytime. Drinking during the day is totally okay. Only in Italy can you drink all day and be called a wine expert. Back home we call that a lush or an alcoholic! What a relief to live with real culture!

I think I will use this post as blackmail to get my friends and family back home to come visit. You want this? Then come visit me. Mwahahahaha! I mean, hundreds of dollars on a plane ticket is sooooo worth a lunch like this…and with me- hello! Sheesh. NO BRAINER! See you soon!

BUON APPETITO!

Thanks to Sarah, my partner is cinghiale crime, for the lovely photos. You can follow her blog on her adventures as a movement theater teacher at Helikos in Florence here: http://slianef.wordpress.com/