Erica De Mane

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.