Erica De Mane

I just got back from the Union Square Greenmarket and can report that there’s still no asparagus. I guess it remains too cold down in New Jersey. But I was very happy to see my first spring garlic shoots. I wait for them all year. They are hardneck garlic planted in the fall and pulled up early, before they have a chance to form cloves. They look like scallions, but their aroma is a strong but clear, fresh garlic one. I love them. This is when I most love to make spaghetti aglio e olio.

I also saw mounds of ramps, a New York State alium that is both foraged and, lately, cultivated. I noticed that their price had come down this spring, so I bought a few bunches. Maybe I’ll make a pesto with them. I also love them roasted with olive oil and salt and laid over grilled lamb chops.

Next to the spring radishes, which I’ll serve tonight with good sweet butter and Sicilian sea salt, lay bunches of what turns out to be kale flowers. I have never cooked with them, but I bought some, so I guess I’ll figure something out.

Recipe below, in text: Cavatelli with Fava Beans, Guanciale, Cacio di Roma, and Mint

It’s an Italian cook’s Zen time of year again, the time when fava beans need peeling. It’s got to happen or else the earth cycle isn’t complete. I didn’t grow up with fava beans; I started peeling them when I cooked at Le Madri, in the early 1990s. Alan Tardi, the chef there at the time, would dump a crate of them at my station, and the anxiety would begin. How fast could I shuck, then blanch, and then peel the skin off every single bean by squeezing with my thumbnail until the skin slipped off to reveal the clear green mini bean beneath. With all my effort, maybe  I’d produce enough bald fave to put together ten or eleven appetizers of fava and pecorino before the dish was eighty-sixed for the night. But I sort of loved doing it. The swing of repetition and the pursue of rustic elegance got me hooked on fava beans. From then on I had to blanch and peel fave every spring, maybe not in restaurant quantity, and certainly not in that frantic fashion, but enough to make one or two dishes for my family.

I like creating new cooking rituals to add to my old ones, making my sometimes boring kitchen responsibilities richer. Many Italian Americans confine their kitchen rhythms to expressing nostalgia for their childhoods—like with the flouring, egging, and breadcrumbing routine of cutlet preparation. I really hated helping my mother with that. My hands got so disgustingly gummed up. I like to adopt newish boring tasks. It keeps me on my toes. Fava bean peeling really fits the bill, and I look forward to it every spring.

Here’s a recipe for cavatelli with fava beans, guanciale, cacio di Roma, and mint. To make it for two or three you’ll need 1½ pounds of fava beans in their shells. That sounds like a lot, but once you’re finished with them, you’ll see how little of it is actually bean.

Shell the beans. Then put up a pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Add the beans, and blanch them for about 3 minutes. Pour them into a colander, and run cold water over them to stop their cooking. Let them drain. Now comes the tedious part. Pinch the side of each bean, to break its skin. Squeeze the skin so the bright green bean pops right out. Beautiful color. Do this with all the beans. Have fun.

Take a chunk of guanciale (or pancetta, if you prefer), and cut it into small dice. You’ll want about ¾ cup. Get out a large sauté pan, and set it over medium flame. Drizzle in a little olive oil, and add the guanciale or pancetta. Let it get crispy.

Throw ½ to ¾ pound of cavatelli into a pot of salted boiling water.

Add a chopped spring onion to the guanciale, and let it soften. If you have fresh spring garlic, add a little of that too—but don’t bother if you’ve got only the papery supermarket stuff. Add the fava beans to the pan, and season them with salt. Let them sauté for about a minute, and then add a big splash of dry vermouth, letting it bubble for another minute or so. By this time the fava beans should be tender but still holding their shape.

When the cavatelli is al dente, drain it, leaving some water clinging to it, and add it to the pan, tossing it well but quickly, just to coat everything.

Add a big drizzle of fresh extra-virgin olive oil, a generous amount of coarse black pepper, and a few drops of lemon juice. Pour the pasta into a wide serving bowl. Add a handful of fresh mint leaves (see my note below), lightly chopped if they’re large,  and grate on some cacio di Roma (or another not too strong sheep’s milk cheese). Give everything a quick toss, and serve it out onto two (if you eat a lot) or three plates. Bring the chunk of cacio di Roma to the table for grating.  

About Casa Italiana

Last week I attended a lecture on Giordano Bruno at Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, which is part of New York University. Bruno is one of my favorite pantheists. If you’ve ever been to the Campo de Fiore in Rome, you’ve likely noticed the huge, dark, hook-nosed statue that hovers over the piazza. That’s Bruno. He was condemned to death by the Roman Inquisition and burned at the stake in Campo de Fiore in 1600 for not believing in hell and other accepted notions. He was a philosopher, a poet, and a scientist.  You don’t find a show about Bruno every day, so this was an event.

Over the years I’ve attended many lectures at Casa Italiana, programs on the theater of Eduardo De Filippo, on fashion in Italian film, on Verdi’s childhood, on Elsa Morante’s novel Lies and Sorcery, on the history of trans culture in Southern Italy, and, most recently, a show about music created by Italian military prisoners during World War II. This Italian cultural institution, on West 12th Street in Manhattan, has been run by Professor Stefano Albertini since 1998. I’m astonished by how much stuff Stefano and his crew put together, often three or four programs a week. Most of the programs are free, and you don’t have to be a member to sign up, although if you donate more than $100 you’re considered a member and get first crack at seating and other perks. They also sometimes put out wine and antipasti. It’s a great place to know about if you’re interested in Italian culture. I love it.

A note on mint:

I used spearmint for the dish above. Peppermint, to my palate, is too strong for just about any savory dish. Spearmint when fresh has a beautiful clean aroma and taste. But something happens to it when you heat it. Some chemical is let loose. To me cooked spearmint tastes like caraway seeds. I don’t get the caraway taste when I chew a raw leaf, but I do get it when it’s heated and mixed with onion or garlic. This is not a bad thing, but a little caraway goes a long way in a dish from central Italy.

I always thought spearmint must have some molecule in common with caraway, so I finally looked it up and discovered that yes, it does. Carvone is a member of a group of chemicals called terpenoids. It’s abundant in the oils of both spearmint and caraway seeds, and also of dill. So there’s my answer. I never knew that, but I sure tasted it.

To preserve spearmint’s clean taste with only a touch of caraway, I add it to a hot dish like this pasta at the last minute, and I don’t chop it much. The balance is good.

Woman with Fish, Francois Emile Barraud

I don’t really feel good about serving this to you. I’m sort of embarrassed, it’s so meager, but it’s all I’ve got. I hope you’ll accept it. It’s super fresh. Nothing fancy, but wait ’til you taste this fish. It just might blow your mind. We live on this fish, and we can’t believe how lucky we are.

Recipe below, incorporated in text: Asparagus Soup with Montasio, Lemon, and Tarragon or Basil

This is my second asparagus post this year, yet the season has only just got started here in New York. We had snow flurries a few days ago. Who cares? I’m cooking high spring. I make a smooth asparagus soup once or twice each spring. Smooth green soup, it never disappoints me.

Asparagus seems to be a subject many artists like. It’s a vegetable both rustic and elegant. A painter can go either way or both ways at once. I especially like pictures that stress both its skinniness and its lumpiness. I’ve noticed that most older paintings depict white asparagus, since that used to be considered fancy. Newer art usually goes for green. I’ve also noticed that the asparagus is almost always in bundles, not loose, and the ties on the bundles are often a tight squeeze, like the stalks are being choked. Not sure why. Maybe to add extra texture. Here are a few more asparagus paintings I like.

And that above is my asparagus soup with Montasio, lemon, and tarragon or basil, in this case tarragon.

To make this soup for four,  you’ll want a spring onion, one with the tender green stem attached, chopped.  A medium Yukon gold potato, skinned and chopped, and a big bunch of asparagus (at least a dozen thick ones, or more if they’re thin), the tough ends trimmed and the stalks roughly chopped. If you have spring garlic, you can add a little of that, too, but don’t bother if you can only find the papery winter stuff, as that would spoil the soup’s spring feeling. I also added a handful of celery leaves.

Drizzle a good amount of olive oil into a soup pot. Add the onion, potato, and asparagus, plus the celery leaves if you’re using them, season with a little salt and a pinch of fennel pollen, and sauté for two or three minutes. Add a splash of dry vermouth, and let it bubble away. Next pour in about 5 cups of light chicken or vegetable broth. Let it all cook at a medium boil, uncovered, until the vegetables are tender, about 10 minutes.

Purée the soup in a food processor, adding a little water to loosen it if necessary.

Pour it back into the pot, and add the grated zest from a small lemon and a tiny squeeze of lemon juice. When you’re ready to serve it, reheat it, and then stir in a few big scrapings of Montasio cheese and some black pepper. Taste for seasoning. Ladle out the soup, and top each serving with a bit more grated Montasio, fresh chopped tarragon or basil (I’ve made it both ways, and both are nice), and a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil. It will be good hot and good cold, too.

A note about Montasio: You can certainly use Parmigiano or grana Padano (or Asiago) in this soup, but I happened to have a piece of Montasio on hand, so that went in. I love this DOP cow’s milk cheese from the Friuli Venezia Giulia region. The piece I had was aged long enough to be a grating cheese. Age mellows Montasio, so you get a sweet richness with none of the always surprising pineapple taste of Parmigiano. It’s more one-note, but in a good, solid way. I like to switch out my Italian cheeses, so whenever I go to a good cheese shop, I pick something that I’ve never tried or haven’t had in a while, just to refresh my cheese memory. Cheese memory is a terrible thing to waste.

Recipe below, incorporated in text: Frittata di Pasqua with Ricotta, Soppressata, and Breadcrumbs

There was a time when eggs upset me like nothing else in the kitchen. I got over it by the time I was nine, but before then I thought there was something in the shell half dead or, worse, half alive, a blood spot, a pointy toenail surrounded by slime. I’d seen my father in traction after a shoulder injury, and I’d sprained an ankle, and my grandmother had migraines that set her face into a death mask, so I was familiar with pain. I wasn’t sure what was in that egg, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to hurt it. My grandfather sucked eggs raw, an Italian American hangover remedy, with a pin prick at each end. My father did this too. Raw egg was worse than cooked egg, but all egg was shiver-inducing. I was always happier with eggs around Easter, when we colored them, because then they were in disguise. I didn’t understand as I do now that even if hens never saw a rooster, they’d still lay eggs, lots of them, all blanks.

Now I find eggs not only useful but kind of miraculous, unfertilized goo put to great use by humans throughout the world. I can make mayonnaise, or a soufflé. I can carry a hardboiled egg around in my backpack, forget about it for three days, and then feel guilty having to throw it out. Eggs are a big part of my pagan Easter, symbolizing the rebirth of the earth, and they’re the backbone of many of my favorite Italian Easter dishes—pizza rustica studded with cheese and salame; pastiera, the sweet grain pie; agnello e piselli, a lamb stew with peas, thickened at the last minute with beaten egg; and the classic Southern Italian Easter frittata, often made on Holy Saturday to break the Lenten fast, since it usually contains chunks of soppressata or sausage. I’ll be making the frittata this year to start our Easter meal,  cutting it into thin wedges and serving it with a glass of prosecco. A nice beginning.

When I cooked at Le Madri and we made frittate daily for the antipasti table, I was taught that the proper look for the things was thin, lightly browned, and somewhat oily on the surface, not thick and spongy the way most Americans make them. That’s how I still make them. For this one I used a 10-inch nonstick pan.

My recipe serves four as an Easter antipasto, or to end the fast on Holy Saturday, or for Easter breakfast, or for la pasquetta, the Monday after Easter picnic, in which case you might want to make two.

To make my frittata di Pasqua, break 4 large eggs into a bowl. Add about ¼ cup of whole milk ricotta, a very small minced garlic clove, a handful of well-chopped soppressata (use one that’s not too dry), about ¼ cup of lightly toasted breadcrumbs (I used panko, but homemade crumbs from stale bread are traditional, just make sure they’re not too finely ground), a handful of grated cheese (I had Montasio on hand, but Parmigiano or a mild pecorino would work well), chopped flat-leaf parsley, salt, black pepper, a touch of nutmeg, and a drizzle of olive oil. Stir everything around until it’s well mixed.

Set your pan over medium heat. Drizzle in some olive oil, and spread it out to coat the bottom. Add the egg mix, and let it sit undisturbed for a minute or so. Then start pulling the egg mix in from the edges with a heatproof rubber spatula, letting the uncooked egg flow underneath.  Do this until it starts to look set but the top is still glossy and a bit liquid.

Stick the pan under a broiler for a minute or so to cook the top. It just needs to be set, not browned. Let the frittata sit for several minutes to continue firming up off-heat. Place a big flat plate over the pan, give it a flip, and turn the frittata out bottom side up. It should be tender but fairly firm and lightly browned. You can serve it warm or at room temperature.

Anyone remember basket cheese? It always showed up on our Easter table. It’s ricotta drained into a basket mold, which was originally made from straw but now is more likely plastic, and which leaves basket-like indentations on the surface of the cheese. It’s denser than ricotta but has a similar gentle taste. Southern Italians use it to make pastiera or pizza rustica. You can use it in this frittata if you like, but I prefer straight ricotta, since it’s fluffier. My family used to serve basket cheese straight, just drizzled with good olive oil and salt and black pepper. It had the mouth feel of tofu, now that I think of it, but tasted much better. I don’t see it around much anymore. Alleva on Grand Street, now relocated to New Jersey, used to sell it, but only around Easter.

Recipe below, incorporated in text: Warm Asparagus Salad with Dandelions and a Taggiasca Olive Vinaigrette

Local New York State asparagus doesn’t show up here until late April, early May. By that time I’m usually so desperate for spring, I’ve jumped the gun an eaten enough California asparagus to be thoroughly sick of my own stinking pee. I’m getting to that point now, but nonetheless I’d like to share with you an asparagus preparation I’ve made several times recently and liked a lot. It involves good olives and olive oil, not much of a surprise coming from me, but if you’re more accustomed to a gentle approach with spring asparagus (butter, tarragon, a squeeze of lemon), this could be a nice change. I hope you’ll consider my mix of thyme, anchovies, Taggiasca olives, strong olive oil, and bitter dandelion.

Taggiasca olives come from Liguria. I love just about everything about Ligurian food, with all its herbs and wild greens, but I especially love these olives, a relative to the just-across-the-border Niçoise ones. They’re small and dense and sweet, with low acidity. They taste like fruit. Their colors vary from greenish brown to yellowish brown, to deep red, and to deep reddish brown. So beautiful.

Taggiasca olives are not always easy to find, even in New York. I often mail order them from Gustiamo. They’re worth seeking out, but you can make this with any darkish olives you like. My feeling is that if you like an olive, you’ll like the vinaigrette it makes.

The cultivated dandelions you buy at a grocery store or even at your farmer’s market have a different taste and look from the wild stuff you pick off your local golf course. They don’t have that sweet vegetable smell and taste. They’re more like ramped-up escarole. The cultivated stuff is grown for its leaves, which become dark green and about twice as long as wild ones. All the energy goes into leaf growth, not into the roots, which stay kind of shrunken. When I gather wild dandelion I pull up some by the roots. I like to sauté the roots along with the leaves for a bitter crunch, and for a nice bed for something like grilled swordfish. As you can see in my photo, I used cultivated dandelion here. The leaves were huge, so huge they had outgrown their denti. Often when they’re this big, I braise them with beans, some pancetta, and maybe rosemary. But soon I’ll have the real stuff shooting up all over my yard. That will make the best salad.

If you’d like to make a warm asparagus salad for two with dandelions and a Taggiasca olive vinaigrette, first roughly chop up a small, fresh garlic clove and two or three oil-packed anchovies (I used Ortiz brand). Stick them and a dozen or so pitted olives into a food processor. Add about a teaspoon of sherry wine vinegar, 3 tablespoons of good olive oil (I used Olio Verde, from Sicily), a pinch of salt, a few grinds of black pepper, and the leaves from several large thyme sprigs (lemon thyme is especially nice here; I didn’t have any, but if you can find some, give it a try). Pulse a few times, just enough to break the olives up into bits, but don’t let it turn into a purée. The vinaigrette should be pourable but have texture and lots of body, like a loose tapenade.

Choose thick green asparagus stalks, about three or four for each plate. Cut off the tough ends. When you’re ready to serve the salad, set up a pot of boiling water, add a little salt, and blanch the asparagus until tender. Drain and lay it out on paper towels.

Divide the dandelion leaves up onto two plates, with their tips pointing outward in a circle.  Place the asparagus on top. Drizzle a generous amount of the olive vinaigrette down the middle of the asparagus. Garnish with thyme sprigs, if you like. Serve warm.

And if you’re down in the West Village, you’ll want to check a new Italian place, part mini-Eataly type market, part restaurant, open for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, from the same Italian guys who own Alice, around the corner, a restaurant with one of the best fritto mistos of fish I’ve had in the city, and Osteria 57, another local place with good Italian food. This team recently took over the big Sammy’s Noodle Shop space that went dark during Covid, renaming it Travelers, Poets & Friends, and turned it sophisticated Italian. I do have to say I think the name is terrible, both pretentious and sort of stupid. It reminds me of the old kids’ vomitorium on lower Seventh Avenue called Jekyll & Hyde, a Club for Explorers and Mad Scientists. Maybe the new place’s name would sound less dopey in Italian—Viaggiatori, Poeti e Amici? It doesn’t sound like a place that sells food in any language. One of the owners told me he thought it felt literary.

The name might be dumb, but the food is very good. I’m not going to give you a full-on review, since they just opened and I’d like them to settle in, but I will point out some highlights, as I see them, and some facts. For instance, if you’re looking to buy a quarter pound of thin-sliced prosciutto di San Danieli, you won’t find it here. The market and restaurant offer no meat whatever. I was told it’s a sustainability choice by the owners. That’s fine with me. They serve fish and sell anchovies.

A few Hispanic ladies fashion freshly made pasta out in the open. So far I’ve tried their busiate, which they call fusilli but to me is the same as the Sicilian pasta that’s hand-coiled around a knitting needle. I bought fresh paccheri, the Neapolitan oversized rigatoni. I also tried their saffron bucatini. All were excellent. These and other fresh pastas, such as ravioli cacia e pepe, show up on the dinner menu too.  

They’ve got all sorts of thick-slab pizza, such as an escarole, anchovy, and stracciatella square that I recently ordered as I sat at the bar with a glass of Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi. There’s booze, too, so you can have a negroni if you like. You can also sit down for a real dinner, and so far the menu looks wonderful. A few of the dishes that stand out for me are salt cod fritters (which I tried for lunch), grilled octopus with braised escarole and ricotta, mafalde with sea urchin and breadcrumbs, lasagna with wild mushrooms and walnuts, Sicilian red shrimp, and oysters with Calabrian chili. There’s a whole roasted dorade. I always love a whole fish.  

And they have a piano. Not sure what they’re planning to do with it, but in any case if you’re in the neighborhood the place is definitely worth a visit. It could even turn into a hangout for me, if it doesn’t get too packed. Oh, and they also have a gelateria, which must be good since there’s often a line there.

Travelers, Poets & Friends is at 461 Sixth Avenue, at 11th Street, (212) 420-0057.

For now they’re closed Mondays. I don’t know if that is for good or just until they get settled in. Maybe call first and ask.

Fish Woman, Auguste Rodin

I need air. I need to get air. I need more air.

Still Life with Organs, Caos,soy

Recipe below, incorporated into the text: Chicory Salad with Chicken Livers and Grappa-Flamed Grapes

Chicken livers haven’t been a constant in my life, but when they’ve shown up they’ve been memorable. I don’t recall my family doing anything particularly Italian with them. What I do recall was Eastern European Jewish–inspired, probably passed down to my mother through some of her lady friends. That, of course, was a classic chopped liver dish, bland but enticing to my young self. My mother presented it in an old-fashioned crystal bowl. It was chunky and tan, studded with bits of onion and hard-boiled eggs, always eaten with Triscuits. It looked lumpy, but its mouth feel was creamy. Its taste had a bitter undertone that I now associate with anything made with chicken livers, and that was what kept me coming back. My mother made it for Thanksgiving but also when they were having friends over for drinks. It went well with both gin and vodka.

And then there was a years-long gap in my appreciation of chicken livers, aside from enjoying various takes on traditional chopped liver, mostly made by New York delis and served on bagels (the 2nd Ave Deli rendition was a favorite). Years of no focus. Lots of dancing but no chicken livers. Then one weekend I went to visit my old friend George, who had recently moved to Massachusetts.  For a welcoming dinner he cooked a risotto with chicken livers, a recipe from his Piedmontese mom. Coming from a Southern family, I hadn’t had risotto at home (it was Northern restaurant fare), so this was new. The chicken livers were minced and sautéed with onion and, I think, butter. That’s the ground floor of the recipe. Then I’m not sure what went in, but the end result tasted like Parmigiano, with the chicken liver anchoring it in a deep, musky place. I tried recreating it when I got home. What I made wasn’t bad, except that after many tries it still had an uncooked-wine taste that made it sour. My version got progressively better as my culinary brain shifted into drive and my desire for chicken livers intensified.

Before I started thinking seriously about a career in cooking, I worked at Amnesty International, which believe it or not was fun, deadly serious but strangely fun. The office was on 57th Street, and only a few blocks away was Ralph’s, a solid old red sauce place. We stressed-out Amnesty workers often wound up going there after work for cheap spaghetti and acidic Chianti. Most old-school places like Ralph’s had predictable menus. Ralph’s did, except that they offered penne with chicken liver sauce, a dish you didn’t find in Little Italy, as far as I can remember. I zeroed right in on it. It was basically their thick dark red sauce plus sautéed chicken livers. It was a tad unbalanced, but I loved it, and I improved it with a shower of shaker-can “parmesan.”

I went on to improvise numerous versions of pasta with chicken livers, adding Marsala and capers, doing a deep take with tagliatelle, prosciutto, thyme, and juniper berries, and turning out a lighter version where I tossed penne with summer tomatoes, rosé wine, and basil. I also made several all-out ragùs, heavy-duty but mostly good.

Crostini di fegatini came into my life when I was going to cooking school and starting to plan my uncertain future. Chicken liver pâté on toast was a fad in the early eighties, and cooking schools were into it. I cooked up many variations, from the intense Tuscan kind with anchovies, capers, red wine, and sage, to Marcella Hazan’s demur Venetian style, with red onion and butter, and the French pâté of Jacques Pepin, with thyme, cognac, and bay leaf, all mounted with cold butter. These I decided weren’t better or worse than the New York Jewish chicken livers I had grown up with. They were just different.

My first cooking job was at Restaurant Florent. I started there when it first opened and stayed for four years. In the beginning, when the place was mimicking a Paris Les Halles bistro, we cooked a lot of organ meat and butcher’s cuts. Frisée and chicken liver salad was often on the menu, and I was fascinated by it. It had never occurred to me to add chicken livers to a green salad. And Renee, the lunch chef, taught me an important chicken liver cooking tip: Flame your livers in cognac or brandy, pushing their iron taste into the background. To this day I always finish sautéed livers with a splash of cognac or an eau de vie like Poire Williams. Grappa is also good.

I guess you can tell I love chicken livers. I think everyone should, and they’re easy to cook once you get over the look and feel of them. Raw, they’re an almost startling and weirdly glossy deep burgundy color, and they’re slippery and often a little bloody in your hands. There is also that connecting white tissue that needs to be cut away, but that’s the extent of necessary cleaning. Once they’re tidied up and ready to go, they’re quite beautiful. Most of the time I prefer to leave them in large hunks and cook them fast on high heat. That produces some popping and splattering. Don’t let it alarm you. Just stand back. And when you add the booze you will see a gorgeous, high flame. I live for that kind of thing, but you can always squelch it out by taking the pan off the fire or smothering it.

Here’s a new take on my favorite frisée and chicken liver salad. This one used chicory, a close relative to frisée but easier to find, and a fast sauté of grapes. I really liked the flavor combination, and it looked pretty on the plate.

To make it for two, take two big handfuls of chicory (I also included some escarole, because I had it), and place them in a wide salad bowl. Add one or two small inner celery stalks, sliced, plus the leaves, left whole.

Make a vinaigrette with ½ a small shallot, thinly sliced, a little mustard, salt, a pinch of sugar, tarragon vinegar or champagne vinegar, good olive oil, black pepper, and maybe some fresh tarragon, if you like.

Stem a big handful of red grapes, seeded or not, your choice, and sauté them briefly on high heat in a little olive oil and a pinch of salt, until they just start to soften but don’t yet collapse completely, about 4 minutes. Add a splash of grappa, and let it flame off.

Clean about 1/2 pound of chicken livers, and cut them into pieces about an inch across. Dry them off, and season them with salt. Take out another sauté pan, and get it hot over medium high flame. Add enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan. Add the livers, spreading them out as best you can so they’re mostly not touching. Sear them on one side, and then give them a flip to sear the other side. That should take only about 4 minutes total. You want them to stay pink at their centers. Grind on some black pepper, and then splash them with grappa. Stand back to watch the flame.

Pour the chicken livers over the chicory. Add the grapes. I also added a handful of toasted walnuts, which I thought a nice touch.  Pour on the vinaigrette, and toss gently. Serve right away.

Recipes below, worked into the text: Roasted Sweet Peppers with Mozzarella, Marjoram, and Anchovy Oil; Celery with Walnuts and Gorgonzola Dolce; Mushrooms Stuffed with Piave Vecchio Cheese, Pine Nuts, and Thyme  

New York in midwinter always gets me thinking about cheese. I eat a lot of cheese, and in the winter I eat even more. Bringing cheese into my home on a cold night is a solid and nurturing act. I have several good cheese shops near my place in the West Village, but winter can make me lazy and I often just go around the corner to West Side Market to get cheese. That is sometimes a bad move. Their cheese is mostly shrink-wrapped and suffocated, with “today’s special” labels slapped on iffy-looking specimens.

I’ve been thinking lately about making gorgonzola-stuffed celery sticks, a thing my mother used to serve at her ring-a-ding cocktail parties, always a thrilling evening for my sister and me, watching drunken adults crash into table lamps and piss without closing the bathroom door. When I went recently to buy gorgonzola, West Side Market’s blue cheese department looked sad, the gorgonzola in particular having a strange brown tint and proving both grainy and mushy when I poked at it. They had about fifteen different types of blue cheese, French, Italian, American, most looking past their prime. What the store lacks in quality I guess it figures it will make up in quantity. True American spirit at work.

They did have Arthur Avenue cow’s milk mozzarella with a fresh sell-by date. That’s usually dependable if I get it on the day it arrives (pain in the ass that I am, I always ask when it showed up, and I think they always lie to me), and if, when I get it home, I let it warm up on the counter to become a little pillowy. Bland but pleasant enough. I had two nice-looking but obviously out of season red bell peppers in my fridge, so I put together an easy antipasto of roasted peppers with mozzarella, marjoram, and anchovy oil. It was good with a glass of Chianti.

If you’d like to make it, you’ll want to start by roasting, skinning, and seeding a few sweet red peppers. Cut them into fairly large pieces and let them sit in a drizzle of olive oil, a pinch of sugar, and a little salt for at least an hour before you assemble the dish. That’s always a good way to brighten up winter supermarket peppers.

Layer a platter with alternating mozzarella and pepper slices. Mash a few oil-packed anchovies (I used the Ortiz brand) with good olive oil and a few drops of sherry wine vinegar. You can add a touch of chopped garlic if you like. Drizzle that over the dish, and finish with chopped fresh marjoram. I had a few leaves of basil in the fridge, so they’re included in the photo, but frankly I think it’s best with just the marjoram.

I’ve also in the past made something similar by substituting wedges of lightly roasted radicchio di Chioggia, the tight ball radicchio, for the peppers, which adds a nice bitter note. Another good winter option.

I finally did get my hands on a nice hunk of gorgonzola, finding it, of course, at Murray’s on Bleecker Street, a  real cheese shop, where I should have gone to begin with. I don’t know why I get so lazy in cold weather. It’s only a five-minute walk to Murray’s, and their cheese is always first rate. Now I was in business and was easily able to throw together my slightly retro celery with walnuts and gorgonzola dolce for a small dinner I was having the next night. It was a hit and also a surprise, because my guests hadn’t thought about that excellent ensemble in a long time. We had a baby boomer brain click.

To make it, all you need to do is mash up some room-temperature gorgonzola dolce with a handful of roasted (but cooled) chopped walnuts. You can use regular gorgonzola, but the dolce is creamier and gentler tasting. Get a head of crisp celery, cut it into your desired lengths, and fill the grooves with the gorgonzola mix. I look for celery that has a lot of leaves still attached. The filled stalks look pretty with their frilly tops, and the leaves add an additional texture experience. You can grind a little coarse black pepper to the mix, if you like. Serve it at room temperature.

While at Murray’s I also picked up a good-size piece of Piave Vecchio. It’s one of my favorite grating cheeses, and it’s not so easy to find, so when I see it, I buy it. Piave is a DOP cow’s milk cheese from the Veneto region. It comes in young and aged forms. The Vecchio version is aged at least 6 months, which concentrates its sweetness and gives it a good flaky crunch. It’s a nice change from the more predictable Parmigiano Reggiano or grana Padano.

I had a bag of medium-size cremini mushrooms that needed desperately to be used, so I decided to stuff them and came up with a filling of pine nuts, some panko crumbs, the Piave, and fresh thyme. I liked the result, finding it a little lighter than many stuffed mushroom antipasti I’ve tried over the years, probably because the inclusion of pine nuts made it less packed down.

To make this what you’ll want to do is stem your mushrooms and then give the stems a good mince. Sauté the minced stems with chopped shallot and a little garlic. I did this in a mix of butter and olive oil. Finish it with a splash of cognac. Add a handful of panko breadcrumbs, chopped thyme, lemon zest, and some toasted whole pine nuts. Grate in your Piave Vecchio, and season with salt and black pepper. Drizzle olive oil inside the mushrooms, and season them with a little salt. Fill the mushrooms with the stuffing, and put them, stuffing side up, in a low-sided baking dish. Squeeze on some lemon juice, and drizzle with olive oil. Bake for about ½ hour at 400 degrees, just until the mushrooms are tender and the tops are lightly browned.  Garnish with thyme sprigs, if you like. These are best served warm, not boiling hot.

Winter cooking can be drab if I let it, but it can also be beautiful when I make sure to walk myself to a good cheese shop and stock up on lots of excellent cheese.

Happy winter cooking to all my friends.