Food Feed

Sunday Dinner

YOWAH: Like any Italian American, Sunday dinner was a big part of my family life growing up. My grandmother, who everyone called Nana, would have the entire family over to her house on Sunday afternoons, usually more than 20 people. The kids would run around, my grandparents and great uncle would chain-smoke, everyone would gossip and tell stories and watch baseball and eat. The food was always buffet-style and everyone sat wherever they felt like sitting: it was not a “sit-down” formal dinner by any means. The atmosphere was informal and fun and raucous but still put-together and beautiful. My grandmother’s personality was the same way; she was very elegant and well-dressed and had excellent taste, but she was sassy and had a sharp-but-compassionate sense of humor that, even as a girl, I could tell was rare.

She was also one of the the best cooks I’ve known. I’ve heard her mother was also excellent; cousins secretly agree that my great-grandmother Salerno was a better cook than great-grandma Caringella, the one who went on to open a restaurant.

On Sundays, Nana made a lot of different foods, but there was always red gravy. It’s very simple to make, but there are a few things you have to do just right for it to come out perfect.

Important side note: to Italian Americans, “red gravy” means tomato sauce made with meat. It’s not “gravy” like you would eat on Thanksgiving. Moreover, the meat is just there to add flavor and fall apart into the sauce. Red gravy does not have meat evenly distributed like ragù bolognese or like whatever you’d buy in a jar.

Anyway, my grandmother made red gravy pretty much every week and served it either with fusilli lunghi col buco, tripoline or spaghetti. She would always eat hers with a lot of crushed red pepper on top.

Yesterday my dad asked me to make gravy for dinner, so I rode my bike over to Bari Foods and picked up some fusilli lunghi and Italian tomatoes. Here is the recipe.

1. Brown the meat. Use half beef and half pork, about one pound each. This time I just used pork; you can use whatever you feel like. Since you’re going to be braising it for forever, choose something flavorful and tough. It’s always good to put some neckbones in there. According to my grandma, this is the most important step. You need to brown the meat reeeeealllly well before you add anything else.
2. Brown the garlic. Two or three cloves is plenty. I use whole cloves because I don’t like the garlic flavor to be too strong. Italians put use garlic “in camicia” (literally “in the shirt”, or unpeeled) and take it out at the end. That way, you can’t burn it and the flavor is really subtle.
3. Add the tomatoes. Run a few cans of tomatoes through the food processor. You’ll want kind of a lot. I made the gravy in a 5-quart Dutch oven and I added enough tomatoes to fill it almost to the top. Use only Italian or California tomatoes. It’s always nice to have San Marzano, but they’re like twice as expensive, so that’s a personal judgement call. Just don’t bother with anything from like, Wisconsin or some bullshit. Add some coarse salt, black pepper, crushed red and whatever fresh herbs you feel like. I usually only use basil.
4. Braise the shit out of it. I think I let it go for like three or four hours. Seriously, the longer, the better. Taste it and adjust for seasonings, but be careful not to oversalt. If it’s too acidic, you can add a roux or just a couple tablespoons of butter to smooth it out.

My dad brought home a braciole and some meatballs from work and we added them to the gravy. We also ate bread that my dad had made and drank Cabernet Sauvignon.

Beardy Mussels

After much anticipation, we embarked on a new venture - Mussels Marenière.  I’ve loved this dish for a long time but have been too intimidated to attempt it.  But it turned out to be a lot easier than I imagined.

Before we get into the recipe, let’s go over the preparation.  This is 90% of the work.  As with all seafood, it’s super important to get the freshest mussels you can get your hands on.   They need to be alive when you prepare them so I wouldn’t recommend shopping more than a half day ahead.  They should smell like the ocean - not remotely funky. This recipe calls for 9lbs and serves six. 

When you get them home, plop them into a big bowl of cold salted water and let them hang for a half hour.  They’ll suck up the water spit up a bunch of grit and sand.    As you take them out of the bag, put any open or cracked ones aside.  Tap on the open ones - if they don’t close up in a few minutes they’re already dead and inedible.

Once you’ve let them do their sucking and spitting thing for a bit, it’s time to clean and de-beard them.  We used a scrub brush to get off the grim and barnacles, and then used my tweezers (improvised - but we boiled them!) to yank the beards off.  The beard is this weird little clump of hairlike stuff hanging off the side of the mussel.  I read somewhere that it’s best to pull the beard toward the hinge.  This seemed to work pretty well.  Don’t freak about getting all the beardies off because some can be really tricky.  After they are clean and shaven, transfer them a few more times between clean bowls of cold salted waters in case they have anything left to spit up.

Now it’s time to start the prepping the liquid.  Measure out 1.25 cups of dry white wine and bring it to a boil in a large stock pot.  While it’s heating, finely chop three shallots and six cloves of garlic, and roughly chop one bunch of flat leaf parsley (put a bit of this aside for a garnish).  Add all of this and a 1/3lb of butter to the garlic to the boiling wine and bring it down to a simmer for five minutes.

Add the cleaned, beardless mussels to the pot and cover.  Cook for ten minutes and stir often.  The mussels are ready when they open.  Any that haven’t opened by this point are dead and inedible.  So don’t break them open with a hammer and eat them!

Dish the mussels into a big bowls and serve steaming hot with hearty slices of sourdough bread.

A side note:  While a 1.25 cups of wine may not seem like much liquid, don’t add more like my stupid ass did.  The mussels will release a bunch of liquid while cooking and water down the broth.

We accompanied the mussels with roasted brussels sprouts with and a light salad.  A little crumble of blue cheese or squeeze of lemon is great on top of the mussels. 

To state the obvious, a dry white wine like a sauvignon blanc pairs excellently with this meal. 

This recipe came from Stéphane Reynaud’s Ripailles.  We also used Bocuse’s Dans Votre Cuisine as a reference.

Until next time…

Meeche. 

Wine and Cheese

DELTRON: Little is more heart warming than coming home to your besties sitting around a dimly (okay, cheaply) lit living room chatting over glasses of wine and untouched platters of fancy French cheese. Of course, the only reason why there was any cheese left by the time the last of us arrived is because, fearing that there would not be enough cheese to satisfy our hunger, we had eaten a pizza before hand.

A more deliberately planned wine and cheese party could involve intense research, accompaniments, fancy clothes, and definitely no pizza. So aside from some quick Google work and a last minute grape run, this gathering bore no resemblance to the conventional soirée—rather, it was the obvious, simple solution to my mother’s suitcase of cheese she brought back from a recent trip to France.

Here was the bounty:

Keeping to general wine tasting protocol, we decided to start with the milder cheese and finish with the stronger ones.

  1. Comté: There are a lot of struggles one faces when living removed from civilization, far from family and home. But 12th century shepherds took care to ensure that when they returned to civilization, they would bring good cheese. Because they were so far from any semblence of a village, shepherds pooled their milk, left it to mature over a period of months, and then brought huge wheels to markets at the end of the season.

We paired with the dregs of a Côte du Rhone (some of us are winos), but authorities say wines from the Jura, as well as Rieslings, Muscats, and softer Bordeaux blends are the classics.

2. Brebis de pyrénées: Mild, with sweet, nearly caramelly, grassy, and nutty undertones, Brebis is an easily-enjoyable cheese from the Basque region.  

 

General accord is that most anything goes, even fuller-bodied reds.

3. Camembert: Who better to take cheese production advice from than a priest from Brie, France? The answer was obvious to Marie Harel, a farmer from Normandie, who is responsible for the creation of this cheese. Creamy, fruity, and occasionally bitter, this cheese is always sold in thin wooden boxes and has become a symbol of France after it was used as soldier rations in WWII.

Goes well with almost anything, but try Beaujolais, Côtes-du-Rhône or Touraine), and it also goes well with a good local cider such as the AOC cider of the Pays d’Auge.

4. St. Nectaire, a strong, pungent cheese that no one seemed to like and elicited scatalogical comparisons. It is made in the Auvergne region, from the milk of Holstein, Montbéliarde, and occasionally Salers cows. According to some tasters, it was like a tree: the rind was like bark, and the cheese tasted like wet leaves.

5. Époisses de Bourgogne: This one is called the King of Cheese and was reputedly a favorite of Napoleon. Pretty stinky when ripe, it is rumored to be banned on the Paris metro. Yet Époisses is nothing less than exquisite, with its deep, complex flavor and a silky texture. The orange rind is the result of weeks of brining and then a final wash with brandy or burgundy wine. Delicious.

Pair with Chardonnay. “Butter with butter,” one taster explained matter-of-factly.

5. Roquefort: The apocryphal story goes like this: Sex drive conquers hunger when a young man abandons his simple lunch of bread and ewe’s cheese to run after a beautiful girl he sees in the distance. Young man returns months later to witness the miracle of Penicillium roqueforti, which has transformed his cheese into something far richer, stronger, and saltier. Almost 2000 years later (Roquefort first shows up in the written record in 79 AD), the cheese is one of the most famous members of the blue cheese family, and enjoys special appellation d’origine controlee status—only cheese whose ripening occurred in the natural caves of Mont Combalou in Roquefort-sur-Soulzon is permitted to bear the name Roquefort. Hint for all Roquefort imbibers: feel free to abandon cheese for potential intimate encounters, but make sure to have a mint before.

Pair with sauternes, a sweet dessert wine, or a bold wine from Cahors or Rasteau.

Mac in Girl World

YOWAH: We were all about comfort, cheese, and carbs this time, deciding to put Meesh’s next brilliant ambitious-and-delicious idea on hold for something hangover-friendly. It was the first time we did a Food Feed project in Girl World (my super girly, floral-print-everywhere apartment) and the menu fit the lazy Sunday evening perfectly: macaroni and cheese with swiss chard, cauliflower, and bacon and coconut cupcakes for dessert.

The macaroni and cheese recipe is from Hudson Valley Mediterranean. I had made it once before and it is so tasty! You can substitute whatever vegetable you want for the chard and use any kind of cheese, so it can be really versatile. We stuck pretty close to the recipe this time but the bacon was Meesh’s excellent idea. I look forward to messing around some more with this recipe in the future.

I know that it seems super decadent, but the great thing about this recipe is that it’s more healthy than you’d think. There is no butter in it at all! The béchamel is just flour and milk; to make the roux, you just use a little bit of hot milk in lieu of butter. The other secret? Cauliflower. The starch in the cauliflower kind of binds everything together and makes it super creamy. The cauliflower also serves the same purpose as the pasta with about half the calories. It is still a complete stretch to think of macaroni and cheese as “healthy,” but I can legitimately say that it is a healthier version than most.

…and then we put bacon on it.

You can find the complete recipe here.