Erica De Mane

Benito Mussolini stands on a wheat threshing machine in Aprilia, Italy, to inaugurate the harvest of 1938 (I love the no-smoking sign).

Recipe: Warm Wheat Berries with Shrimp, Peas, and Spring Onion

A culinary trilogy has been running through my head all spring: dishes made from a seafood, a green vegetable, and some form of whole wheat. My recent posting of a recipe for Mussels with Whole Wheat Linguine, Swiss Chard, and Smoked Chili came from this mindset, and I’ve got more brewing in my little Italian-American head.

I really love whole wheat berries. I love the pure wheat aroma that fills my kitchen while they simmer. Their texture and taste is really special to me. I believe I first encountered their taste as a kid when we ate pastiera, the Southern Italian Easter cake filled with wheat berries and ricotta. In Southern Italy, wheat berries are used in all sorts of salads and soups. both hot and cold. Sicily has a filling dish called cuccia in which wheat berries are served warm, mixed with ricotta and usually something sweet like honey or grape must (possibly not a great diet choice). You traditionally eat this on St. Lucy’s feast day, December 13. I often buy big bags of wheat berries for no particular reason, just because I want to have them in my kitchen. I always find something to do with them.

Since spring pod peas have just arrived at my New York Greenmarket, I know I have to cook with them right away. Despite what people always tell me about the virtues of frozen peas, I’m sorry, but they’re just not as fine as fresh, and all the work involved in shucking and blanching just makes the latter more special for me. (more…)

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Ultra-fresh mussels from the Union Square Greenmarket.

Recipe: Mussels with Whole Wheat Linguine, Swiss Chard, and Smoked Chili

This past weekend I bought the most beautiful mussels from Phil Karlin, the number-one fish man at the New York Greenmarkets. They were tiny, glistening black, all shut tight, and they cooked up amazingly sweet and creamy. I’ve been getting local Long Island fish from Mr. Karlin for many years, and his seasonal catch has spoiled me. Nothing else seems fresh enough. His calamari? It’s slippery, firm, and caught that morning. His whole fish (I’ll take whatever he has on any given day) is a pleasure to clean—even the guts are pristine (he sells some pre-cleaned fish, but I actually enjoy the grisly labor).

I had these gorgeous little mussels in my kitchen, and I knew I wanted to show them off. Not only are mussels incredibly delicious, but they’re a low-calorie, low-fat, high-protein food, just about perfect. I love pasta with any type of shellfish, but since I’ve been trying to limit my intake of refined carbohydrates, I’ve switched more often than not to whole wheat pasta. Sound dreary? Not at all, as it turns out. You just have to rethink your sauces a little, making them piu forte. My solution for the mussels was to add bitter greens and a hint of spicy smoke, both flavors able to stand up to the whole wheat taste and texture, balancing the dish nicely. (more…)

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Nasturtiums at the Union Square Greenmarket in Manhattan.

And if you’d like to eat flowers, try some of these. They’re gorgeous and delicious. Here’s a recipe:

Arugula Salad with Nasturtium Blossoms, Spring Onion, and Black Olives

(Serves 2)

1 large bunch arugula, stemmed
1 small spring onion, very thinly sliced, using some of the tender green part
1 1/2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon Spanish sherry vinegar
A few scrapings of fresh nutmeg
A pinch of salt
Freshly ground black pepper
A small handful of black Niçoise olives
About a dozen nasturtium blossoms

Put the arugula and onion in a salad bowl. Whisk the olive oil with the vinegar, and season it with the nutmeg, salt, and black pepper. Pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently. Scatter and olives and nasturtium blossoms on top. Serve right away.

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Marcello snacking in bed? How un-Italian of him.

This is a problem. I never was much of a dessert person, but if I ate early and had time to kill, hanging around reading or watching TV, I’d start craving another glass of wine—totally bloating and unnecessary. And after finishing off the dregs of the bottle, I’d sometimes go back for round two and finish off that last piece of lasagne, or stuff in a few more meatballs. It’s just the same for you who crave sweets. The more time you’ve got to digest your food before bed, the more attractive that tub of gelato, hunk of salami, or extra vino is. Solution: Eat late. As late as you can. When you eat at six o’clock, unless you’re a farmer who has to rise before dawn, what are you going to do all night? Watch TV and raid the refrigerator is probably the answer. So drag it out, eat at nine, as they do in Italy and Spain. I love stuffing myself and then lying down with a book—usually a cookbook, wouldn’t you know it—and a couple of cats on my chest. All of a sudden it’s midnight, and I’m still full from dinner and ready for sleep (and I sometimes even wake up in the morning feeling full).

I’ve always heard that you shouldn’t go to bed on a full stomach. It’s bad for acid reflux, and calories eaten before bed are somehow super calories, harder to burn off and quickly turning to fat. The calorie part is simply not true, according to recent studies, including one from Oregon Health & Science University. Our bodies don’t stop working and burning calories when we sleep, so there’s no special time when we store fat. The same meal eaten at six or at nine will cost the same number of calories and be processed by our bodies the same way. The problem, insofar as there is one, is that late evening is a notorious time for binge eating. But that’s why a healthy, low-calorie late-evening dinner, with no snacking, has worked for me (and if you go out to eat, it’s easier to get a reservation at a late hour).

Now that I know calories are calories whenever consumed, any trick that stops me from squeezing in an extra little meal is worth it. When I was a kid my family would often have those huge Italian Sunday suppers at five or six, with the “big” sauce loaded with meatballs, sausage, braciole, and hunks of pork. I’d feel stupefied afterward, but then around ten or ten-thirty, my father and I would be hovering around the refrigerator digging for leftover meatballs and sausages to make huge hero sandwiches with. We’d have dinner all over again. Even as a kid, I felt that there was something wrong here, and as I watched my father’s gut expand to beach-ball dimensions, I became convinced of it. No one over the age of two needs four meals a day. So get a grip. Dispense of your American or Italian-American eating habits. Eat like a real Italian. I’m sure Marcello would have never eaten in bed; this was just for the movies.

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My light-as-air soufflé, just about ready to pull from the oven.

Recipes:
Fontina and Piave Cheese Souffle
Baby Spinach Salad with Radishes and Chive Vinaigrette

A soufflé is for me the ultimate diet food. You might find that strange, but think about it. It’s light and fluffy, gorgeous, romantic, and smells amazing while cooking. Okay, it’s full of eggs, but mostly the whites. It’s low-carb, so it fits into my diet philosophy nicely. And I serve it as a main course, not a side. But is a soufflé Italian? The word, which comes from the French verb souffler, meaning to blow, obviously isn’t. The technique, as far as I can determine, is traditionally French, but the true lineage of many French and Italian dishes can be a sore subject, since many Italians believe that everything culinarily worthwhile was originally Italian. Italians certainly use the term on menus, and chefs there make some fine soufflés using, for instance, porcini, Parmigiano, ricotta, and zucca. How beautiful is the idea of a soufflé made with Italian flavors?

Sformato is a word you’ll find on Italian menus as well. It means a delicate, eggy, baked mold, firmer than a traditional soufflé, more a custard than a puff. A sformato is always set with eggs, but it may or may not have beaten egg whites folded in at the end. I love a sformata, but it’s not particularly diet-friendly. I make one with cauliflower that has the texture of a tender custard. I’ve also made a chicken liver sformata that’s firm, with a rich flavor heightened by sage and Parmigiano. Neither is meant to rise very much, and both contain cream, making them dense and rich, packing a lot of calories into a very small lump of food (and they’re generally thought of as first courses, so they’re just the start of the meal). (more…)

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Don’t let this happen to you.

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A dieter’s delight.

Recipe: Pork Tenderloin with Roasted Pepper and Fennel Sauce

Pork tenderloin is a dieter’s delight. It’s got just about no fat—which is why I almost completely avoided it for years. Not only was I skeptical of fatless pork, but the few times I prepared the cut, it was dry and boring. In retrospect I think that was because I was still under the influence of the old-fashioned hammered-to-death pork cookery of my childhood. Now I’m enlightened. I’ve cooked up a few tenderloins lately, and I’ve discovered that they cook amazingly quickly. You should leave them pink at the center. That makes them a most delicious cut of pork, not as porky maybe as a big fatty, bone-in chop, but elegant, simple to slice, and open to all sorts of flavorings. So you can get really creative. I’ve chosen to emphasize fennel here. Pork with fennel is a classic Italian combination. I marinate the tenderloin for about an hour in fennel seed and a splash of pastis, among other things, and also include a touch of fennel in my roasted sweet pepper sauce.

One of the best ways to cook a whole pork tenderloin (a cut of meat that looks remarkably like a horse’s thingy, I must say), is by browning it well on the stove and then putting it in the oven to finish cooking (grilling is my second favorite method, and I’ll provide a recipe for that as we head into summer). You just want to get the meat’s temperature up to 140 degrees. That will make for a touch of pink and a lot of juiciness. Many books, even recently published ones, tell you to cook pork tenderloin to 150 to 155 degrees, and they claim that that will give you pink. Don’t do it. The result will be dry and gray. This small, tender cut, much like a chicken breast, keeps cooking after you take it out of the oven, more than does any larger, fattier cut, so if anything, you want to take it out a little sooner. The last one I made, I pulled at 138 degrees, and after I let it rest for about 5 minutes, it sliced into gentle pinky-beige perfection. It’s what I made for my mother on Mother’s Day. She loved it, and she’s not even on a diet. (more…)

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Just don’t do it: A scene from La Grande Bouffe.

Eating between meals? Try to get the very thought out of your head. What I’ve learned is that if I eat between meals, I won’t lose weight, period. I just don’t do it anymore. It was difficult at first. I didn’t miss the out-and-out crap so much, the midafternoon doughnuts or Fritos, but I did crave the good stuff—sfogliatelles (my absolute favorite Italian pastry), thick slices of buffalo mozzarella drizzled with great olive oil, a hunk of baguette stuffed with sopressata (the most satisfying 4 p.m. pick-me-up). I cut all that out of my life. It’s weird how disciplined I’ve become. Am I now a regimented killjoy with no spontaneity? Well, maybe a little. But as I see it there’s no joy in blubber or in diabetes. So I decided to try to stop spontaneously throwing stuff into my mouth, at least if I could. To my astonishment I discovered I could (most of the time).

I used various head-trip techniques to accomplish the feat. First I tried talking myself into enjoying feeling hungry. I know that sounds perverse, but it worked, on occasion. At the same time I noticed that when I wanted to eat between meals, sometimes it was from actual hunger, but mostly it was just plain boredom or anxiety, or a delightful mix of both. My supposed between-meal craving began to reveal itself for what it really usually was, just a gnawing emptiness that had nothing to do with my stomach. I tried replacing it with activities like sending comical but vaguely irritating e-mails to friends.

I came to realize that what I really needed was to understand that the only food worth eating is wonderful food enjoyed with friends and family while sitting at a real table. So the more creative my cooking becomes, and the more friends I can gather round, the more exciting my dinners are, and I can wait for them with anticipation, without picking. If all I had to look forward to after a long day of work was an impersonal frozen diet dinner thrown in the microwave, I’d never make it through the day without two pounds of greasy salami and a gallon of pistachio gelato.

Some diet books suggest eating five or six small meals a day, to keep your blood sugar on an even keel. That is the world’s worst advice. I don’t know anyone who has ever succeeded at that. Either you wind up eating five not-so-small meals a day and ingesting tons of calories, or you pick up any old crap and throw it in your mouth when you have a minute free. Not only do I know no one over the age of two who has the luxury of adopting such an eating schedule, and grabbing food and shoving it into their mouth like an astronaut, but it’s utterly un-Italian in spirit anyway. It’s a way to eat for people who really don’t enjoy food—the kind of people who eat “power bars.”

So for real dieting success and tranquility of spirit, the point ultimately is to do what Italians usually do; Sit down with family and friends and eat a great meal.

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