Monday, November 10, 2008

Ananea Moran













Thank You to Ananea and her boyfriend for giving two packs of flavored coffee from Batangas.

Picking a Winner

I've already noted that I don't have secret recipes. So when it came to participating in a chili cookoff, I had nothing "off the shelf". Time to hit my trusty cooking website: cookinglight.com. I searched for chili and a number of recipes popped up. How to choose? Some have chili powder, some have actual chilis, there could be tomatoes and wine or black beans and beer, cocoa powder or melted chocolate, chicken, pork, beef or chickpeas. There are a large variety of chili ingredients but it's the right combination that is key.
On cookinglight.com I found Southwestern Chili, Black Bean Chorizo Chili, Twenty Minute Chili and more.
Southwestern Chili had cajun sausage, chipotle pepper, yellow hominy and beer. I rejected it because it had garbanzo beans and red kidney beans. Too many beans.
Black Bean Chorizo Chili had the title ingredients plus lime juice, corn, and semi-sweet chocolate. Sounds too sweet and sour.
Twenty Minute Chili had ground turkey, canned tomatoes, and boil in bag rice. No chili should be done in twenty minutes.

On epicurious.com I found a great short ribs recipe with a green chili sauce, to be made at a later date.

Finally on recipezaar.com, I found a chili recipe that sounded delicious. It had tons of spices, different types of chilies, it was easy to make in the crockpot, and was made with beef stew meat instead of ground beef. Something about the combination of cumin, oregano, and fennel seed made my mouth water. I made the chili and it was spicy! Luckily I only had to compete against three other chilis and my entry managed to pull ahead in the end to win it. Hooray!

I guess I have a secret recipe now.

Fred said right

November 10

I wore my black pinstripe suit on the plane flying home from IFEC last Thursday, because that evening I was going to the Opera as a guest of the marketers of Prosciutto di Parma and Parmigiano-Reggiano. Both the ham and the cheese come from the Italian city of Parma, which was also the adopted home of Giuseppe Verdi, whose opera La Traviata was being performed at The Metropolitan Opera House that evening.
Fred Plotkin, who has the unusual quality of being an expert on both opera and Italian food, says this is the best performance of the Verdi masterpiece he has ever seen, and so he was commissioned to talk to us over dinner about both of them as well as the history of The Met, where he was the performance manager for a number of years. Actually, he spoke specifically about the food of Emilia-Romagna, the region where Parma is located, and about the life of Verdi, as well as how food should be consumed before watching opera.

I’d met Fred awhile back at San Domenico restaurant. I don’t remember why. He thinks we might have met when he was there to talk about the wines of Friuli, but I don’t recall.
At any rate, Fred is a very gracious man, but a particular one. He insists that Parmesan cheese be served not on his food, but near it, so he can add it as he likes. His prosciutto, when served uncooked, must not touch anything else on the plate until he is ready to combine them.
He approaches opera at The Met sort of the way I was taught to approach the silent Jewish meditative prayer known as the Amidah. For that prayer, it is common to take three steps back (small ones, as you are likely standing at a pew), symbolically removing yourself from mundane life, and then three steps forward to enter the world of prayer.
Fred says that at The Met, the custom, as the 12 chandeliers rise and dim to announce the beginning of the performance, is to take a moment to adjust your mindset to put it completely in the world the opera that is about to unfold before you.
So he’s a dramatic guy, but really in a low-key way, and he’s a very engaging speaker.
In a moment I’ll list the menu that was served at The Met’s Grand Tier restaurant, which Fred said was a typical pre-opera meal in Emilia-Romagna, and the visitors from the two hosting consorzi, both from Parma, didn’t disagree.
But first I’ll comment, as I did during Fred’s lecture — from which he paused as each course arrived so we could eat it, another sign of his gentility — that the wines served were not from Emilia-Romagna, but from farther north, in Friuli and Piedmont. From my limited experience in the region, that did, in fact, seem typical for a (fancy) pre-opera meal in Emilia-Romagna because, I said, although the people of that region are extremely proud of their food, they willingly say that their wine isn’t that great.
I really loved that about my visit to the region: That the people were proud enough to admit their shortcomings.
Both Fred and the Italians kind of protested. They all insisted that the region’s wine was getting better. But that wasn’t my point. Local Lambrusco — a sparkling red wine that is widely dismissed as “unimportant” — is delicious with the rich food of Emilia-Romagna. There’s no need to go defending it.
I restated my point: What I liked was that people in the region had the dignity and confidence to admit that they weren’t perfect.
No really, they said, there’s some much better wine coming from there now.
Whatever. Great ham and cheese, “unimportant” wine, mediocre listening comprehension skills.
Or possibly jet lag.

What we ate, drank, watched and listened to (notice that we didn’t have dessert until after the first act — the idea being that you eat relatively lightly so you will be energized and ready for opera, and then get an added pick-me-up midway through):

Parmigiano-Reggiano soufflé
Pinot Grigio 2007, Livio Felluga, Friuli

Prosciutto di Parma with sliced seasonal fruit (fresh figs in this case, but I liked that they kept it vague on the menu to allow for optimal seasonality)

Risotto Violetta with a mélange of mushrooms (Violetta is the title character’s name in La Traviata)
Barbaresco 2004, Produttori del Barbaresco, Piedmonti

Salad of field Greens with piquant lemon dressing

Parmigiano-Reggiano morsels with Aceto Balsamico (which is to say balsamic vinegar, although if you want the real stuff, the vinegar that people really fork over the cash for, that’s been aged for 15 years or more, you have to get Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale, with this was not)

La Traviata— Act 1
with Anja Harteros and Massimo Giordano

A trio of desserts — including a little rum-heavy custard that I really liked
with Coffee or Tea

La Traviata — Acts 2 & 3

And after that Fred took us backstage where we sat in the green room and briefly met the exhausted performers, who greeted us graciously and then, I presume, went out for dinner.

Still not playing hard-to-get

November 10

Regular readers of this blog will notice that I go out a lot. If someone asks me to go to something — nearly anything, really — and I can squeeze it into my schedule, I go.
Some of my more elitist acquaintances have told me I should be more circumspect of the invitations I accept, and recently I, too, have started to wonder if maybe I should play more hard-to-get.
You don’t see my friend Andrew Knowlton hanging out at Lower East Side bar openings, do you? You certainly don’t these days, as his wife Christina just had a baby, but for years appearances of the guy, whom I met nearly a decade ago when he was a young whippersnapper cutting out press clippings for his bosses at Bon Appétit, have been pretty rare. And now he’s, like, a famous guy, with a fan page on Facebook and a Wikipedia entry. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that he looks like Andrew Knowlton, but I wonder if his aloofness has helped.
Do you think my attention would be more sought after if gave it less often? Should I stop being such an event-slut?
The problem is that my job is to be out there, spotting trends, tracking down stories, getting scoops, and you just never know when something that sounds like a dud might be interesting.
Still, last week in Cleveland, during the IFEC conference, I despaired of picking one of the food tours to go on. I’d been to The Chef’s Garden many times. I didn’t particularly want to see the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame (although I do hear that it’s great). Michael Ruhlman’s speech from the night before convinced me that the West Side Market was worth checking out, but that was followed by a tour of Nestlé Foodservice’s kitchens.
Seriously, kitchen tours are something I can resist. That and wine cellars. Do I really need to see where the wine is aged? And how fascinating is a kitchen unless you have some sort of funky new equipment I haven’t seen before.
The West Side Market was cool, if for no other reason than the third-world prices of its meat and produce ($1/lb for blueberries, and I am not kidding), especially since pastry prices were sort of standard for the United States. And like Ruhlman said, you could find lamb heart and sheep head and all sorts of things there. I also liked the fact that the salespeople referred to all females as “girls.” I didn’t know that was allowed anywhere in the West anymore.
The Nestlé kitchen tour didn’t start well. They showed us a very brief high-tech promotional video with a bunch of buzzwords about providing its customers with various “solutions,” but nothing concrete. It was like watching a music video.
But then they split us up into teams and sent me into a kitchen with the food scientists, who taught me how to make lobster base.
They briefly showed us the ingredients for lobster stock — shells, mirepoix etc. — and then took us around the corner where they sautéed pre-cooked lobster meat (cooked on the lobster boats) with tomalley (that green stuff that’s the lobster’s liver) and roe in (unsalted) butter, making sure they held it at at least 180 degrees Celsius for ten seconds. Then they puréed that mixture with onion powder and the like, along with oleoresinated paprika, which is all the oil-soluble components of paprika, concentrated and used for flavor and color. That paprika was mixed with dendritic salt — scientists' way of describing the shape of a very fine salt — and added to the mix.
Then we put a little bit of it into a machine that tested its “water activity," to make sure it was low enough to have an acceptable shelf life.
Then we measured, if I remember correctly, 7.1 grams of it to be mixed with 230 grams of hot water to make lobster stock. We compared it to conventionally-made lobster stock, and it still needed more work. It needed to be redder, and I think I would have added more salt, although I suppose less salty is better than more salty.
From there we added cream, food starch that is stable when repeatedly frozen and thawed, chile pepper (I added more than our supervising chef wanted, but too bad for him) and brandy. We thickened it and poured it over chunks of cooked lobster, garnishing it with Chef’s Garden beet microgreens, and it was a passable bisque. I would have tweaked it a bit, and probably tossed in some more base, but chacun à son goût.
I love stuff like that, because the lobster base is how most restaurants make bisque these days (demiglace, too — I know fine dining chefs who order it, because the recipe’s basic enough and big food companies can do it much more cheaply and with more consistency), and it’s useful to understand that. I also like the precision of the whole thing, followed by a free hand with cream and brandy (but a rigid one with the starch), and whimsy with the garnish.

Happy Pepero Day


Happy

The day of Saint Martin

San Martino and the so-called "summer of San Martino" in Palermo are celebrated with cakes and wine. Not everyone know the history of this saint, but the opportunity to to eat much is not lost.


The rich people celebrate the Saint the 11th of November (San Martino of the rich), the poorest were looking for the following Sunday to celebrate (San Martino of the poor), the most gluttonous celebrate both days!



In Palermo in this day we eat three types of cookies, the simplest are the triccotti, round shape and flavored by fennel seeds. These cookies are very hard and we eat with the wine Moscato, a sweet wine made from grapes inzolia.


The same cookie (with a dough slightly 'softer), is drenched in rum and seasoned in two different versions. One is with ricotta and chocolate and covered with sugar veiled.

The other version seem a decorative element of a Baroque church! It contains the jam, is covered with white or pink frosting, adorned by sweet almond, from chocolates wrapped and silver decorations.



The day of San Martino in Palermo, but not only, was celebrated in the years because it coincided with pre and rural cults, which celebrated the last warm days before winter, which was called the summer of San Martino.



Furthermore, the name of this saint was linked to the production of wine, because around early November is produced the new wine. Hence the saying " in San Martino every must is wine." Became a good opportunity to taste the wine in the many taverns of the city, and drank to accompany boiled eggs, fried cardoons or biscuits.

In these beautiful days you could still eat outdoors roast beef, pork, sausage and drink so good wine! All this has made the holy very "friendly" and "famous" in the eyes of people from Palermo, that even in poverty, have in them the desire to celebrate and eat in the company of family and friends!

Some biographical to remember who was Martin of Tours.


Martin was a Roman soldier (not baptized). During one of his expeditions met a beggar with whom shared his cloak. During the night he had a vision in which Jesus returned him the mantle, why he don’t take cold (the mantle may also be a symbol of a more warm night) and praised him with the Angels because despite he was not baptized he had covered the beggar (that was the same Jesus). Next day Martino shocked by this vision is baptized, became Monaco and his work was mainly to convert to Christianity the people of Galli, to preach and to destroy pagan temples.


sacred images in Palermo