Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Five-Ingredient Winter Tomato Sauce

When I was about seven or eight I started seeing colors with numbers. A color would jump out at me when I thought of or saw a certain number. Five was red. Eight was forest green. Three was yellow. Seventeen was violet. Eleven was always light green, a pea green. Every number below twenty had a color. Then when I was around 16, all the colors mysteriously went away.

Forty plus years went by with no colors, and then about two months ago they came back. Not all of them, though. So far there are only three.  Five is still red, and it’s the strongest by far. That was true long ago as well. It’s a clear, bright red, a tomato red. Three is yellow. Eight is still forest green. But that’s it.

When the colors started flashing again, my first thought was, what’s going on, am I having a stroke? I was a bit scared, but I quickly eased back into it and started to enjoy my colors, hoping they would stay and more would follow.

I tried to think back to when I was young and it all started, wanting to remember if I liked the visions then. It’s hard to describe what they’re like, then and even now. I think back then they were a mixed blessing. I loved the colors sparking in my head, but they also could be intrusive, like when I was supposed to be learning arithmetic and the numbers and colors just created chaos. That is most likely why I never really learned any math in a solid fashion. It didn’t hold me back too much, but I think it might account for why I never measure anything when I’m cooking, unless I need to set a recipe for others to follow.

My colors have returned in time for the new year. I take this as a good sign, maybe for a lively year to come.  So here’s a simple five-ingredient winter tomato sauce that starts out with bright red canned tomatoes, a solid number five. They turn a little darker when you cook them, taking them out of that category. I don’t have a number for maroon. I can’t remember if I ever did. But, in any case, the taste is good, smoothed over by butter, sweet onion, and rosemary.

This will make enough for a pound of pasta. I especially like it on ricotta gnocchi or as a sauce for merguez-stuffed peppers. My mom often added peas to this kind of simple sauce. I love that too, as you can see in my photo, and pea green always went with eleven. It would be nice if that came back.

Read Full Post »

A story with a beginning but no end.

Read Full Post »

Recipe below: Fusilli Lunghi with Clams, Pancetta, and Sweet Pimentón

I recently got back from a trip to Andalusian Spain, where I went partly to look into the life of Federico Garcia Lorca but also to eat a lot of ham and seafood.

The jamón was excellent. It’s on every menu. You find those big legs hanging in almost all the food stores, along with ropes of dark red morcilla, the blood sausage I’m also crazy about. After a few days of eating lots of cured pork products, I went into ham fat overload. The stuff is rich. But I didn’t get sick of seafood, especially shellfish. Southern Spanish cooks have a way with clams, usually involving garlic, olive oil, and sherry.  The clams are simply opened over a high flame, their juices mixing with the sherry and everything else, and then quickly brought to the table, often sprinkled with pimentón, either sweet or hot. I love the dish.

I have a long history with clams, mainly because my father was in love with them. He dug for them with his buddies on the Glen Cove beach in all sorts of weather. He steamed them in a big black pot that had a spigot at the bottom for the delicious hot juice to pour out of, to drink straight or mixed with vodka. Clams raw, on the half shell, served with cocktail sauce, were a big Italian American thing in the sixties and seventies, a mandatory appetizer before a ribeye at Manero’s Steakhouse in Roslyn, where we’d go for birthdays and such. Back then clams were a man’s game, like cigars, but I was into the sport, all of it—digging, cooking, and eating them, and even cleaning up. I loved hearing the clink of many empty clam shells as I dropped them into the garbage can.

Clams still mean Christmas Eve to me. My mother almost always cooked some form of them with pasta every year. I now do the same, alternating red and white versions, sometimes adding a splash of Pernod or cognac, and mixing up the herbs. I like rosemary with clams, but basil often wins out. I often also throw a plate of baked clams into the seafood mix, lately with a Sicilian or pistachio pesto on top.

Since I’m still in a post-travel Spanish food head, this Christmas Eve I may go with this fusilli lunghi with clams, dry sherry, and sweet pimenton. It’s a really fragrant dish. I added pancetta to it. If you’re a stickler for Catholic tradition, you can leave out the meat, or make it for New Year’s.

I love fusilli lunghi. It’s a little slippery to get into your mouth, but that’s half the fun. The one I buy is made by Setaro, an excellent Neapolitan company. For a neater eating experience, you can certainly go with spaghetti instead. In any case, Buonitalia offers a huge assortment of Setaro pasta shapes. Anything you can imagine, and some really big ones like their giant lumaconi, paccheri, and candele lunghe. Their bucatini is also excellent.

For this pasta I used a mild pimentón del la Vera. You can use a hot one if you prefer. I like the La Dalia brand. This dried chili is used often in Southern Spanish dishes, on poached octopus, on potatoes, and sprinkled over many fish-type tapas. I kind of got addicted to it, but it can overpower you with smoke if you let it. And the Spanish sometimes let it. I try to use it sparingly.

Happy Christmas cooking to you all.

Read Full Post »

Still Life with Soup Tureen, by Oskar Moll.

Recipe below: Minestrone with Pumpkin, Parsnip, Borlotti Beans, and Rosemary

Minestrone, the big chunky vegetable soup of Italy, is traditionally cooked long and slow for a uniform flavor that many people find comforting. Not me. There’s something about that sour long-boiled vegetable taste that turns me off. The minestrone of my childhood, both Progresso and homemade, was so disappointing, bland, boring. And I wasn’t crazy about the soup’s look and texture either. I cook my minestrone hard and fast. My grandmother would definitely not approve. Her summer minestrone was soft and greenish brown from its zucchini, yellow squash, and string beans, with a suggestion of maroon from its long-cooked backyard tomato. I know long-cooked vegetables are a Southern Italian thing, the idea being to try to coax nuances out of the vegetables. But you reach a point of diminishing returns, and my people have crossed it many times. My family used to cook broccoli rabe down to practically a purée. I haven’t made it that way for decades. Why grow or buy beautiful vegetables and then go boil the crap out of them?

I’m not saying a minestrone should be al dente. That would be completely un-Italian. You do need to release flavor with cooking. I’m looking for the perfect sweet spot of tender but not falling apart. This is especially important with pumpkin, butternut squash, and sweet potato, all of which disintegrate into a mush with almost no encouragement. I like having the beautifully colored little bits of vegetable collapse in my mouth, not in my bowl. The cooking time for this is only about half an hour. I think my grandmother let hers go through a whole afternoon of soap operas.

I served this fall soup topped with a spoonful of parsley sage pesto. I thought that was a nice match with the rosemary. If you’d like to give it a try, you can find my recipe for the pesto here.

Read Full Post »

Recipes below: My Chili con Carne; My Hot Sauce, Mexican Style

If you’ve never tasted chili as imagined in the culinary head of an Italian American girl, you’re in for a treat. I am the chili queen of the West Village, or at least I’d like to think so. Over the years I’ve been playing around with my recipe, and I believe I’ve now gotten it down, a good blend of North Mexican, Southern Texan, Northeastern American, and Southern Italian. Sound like a mess? It works for me.

I grew up with chili. Every other Wednesday it appeared on my public school lunch tray, very brown, very sour. It trended in 1970s New York, a thing at all-night diners, the perfect hangover helper. Diner chili was often dull beyond belief, helped by a coating of Tabasco. Every Italian American mom I knew made chili, mine included. It’s similar to putting together a good ragù Bolognese, so the reflexes are in place. My mother made great ragù, with nutmeg, white wine, milk, and a touch of tomato. Her chili was okay, but it wasn’t in her blood, so generic ingredients, such as supermarket chili powder, took over. I can’t stand the taste of that stuff.  Chili cooking is not in my blood either, but I just figured it out. First off, no musty chili powder. I instead go with a mix of dried ancho, smoked paprika, and cumin, and then I add soft notes with cinnamon and allspice. It tastes like country cooking. Whose country I’m not sure.

So here’s my version. I make it with a mix of beef and pork. It’s a medium-hot chili that suits my husband and sister, who can’t take too much heat. I serve it with my hot sauce on the side (the recipe for that is here, too).

Read Full Post »

Recipe below: Shrimp Saganaki with Feta, Dill, and Marjoram

There used to be a small Greek restaurant, or more accurately a kind of a diner-restaurant, on the corner of Seventh Avenue and 14th Street, right around the corner from my Manhattan apartment. Mykonos was a casual place with average Greek food, and you could also get an American-cheese omelet or a hamburger. I liked their spanakopita with a side of Greek salad, which was what I almost always ordered. And they served a super-resinated retsina, which I always ordered. I ate there a lot. One afternoon, having a real need to get out of the small study in my small apartment, I walked in and sat down, feeling pretty good about myself. I didn’t order my usual spanakopita but chose instead something called shrimp saganaki, because I didn’t know what it was, and the mix of shrimp and feta sounded so terrible I just had to try it. This must have been about 25 years ago.

Everything went well enough with my retsina, but I was feeling anxious about a piece I was on an early deadline for for Food & Wine magazine, “How to Grill Summer Fruit”—hard to write in January. My bubbling plate of shrimp and feta and tomatoes arrived. It looked decent and smelled like dill and dried oregano. Not bad at all. But for some reason, seemingly out of nowhere and for no reason, I started to cry. I tried to choke it back, but that just made it worse. Everyone in the place stared. The waiters asked if I was all right. I said yes. They whispered to one another in Greek. I thought if I didn’t pull myself together they might call the police (as if the cops didn’t have anything better to do). I had a job. I wasn’t living alone. I had friends. But at that moment I felt like a creep. Was I turning into one of those West Village wack jobs who drink alcohol in diners at one in the afternoon? I hoped not. Maybe I was at a point in my life where I was just all-around scared.  Maybe I actually had no idea how I was going to write that fruit article. Maybe I was hoping my Italian American father would walk in and bring me back home. These were all possibilities.

After what seemed an embarrassingly long time, I stopped crying. I apologized. The waiters assured me everything was okay. I felt like a mess and knew I looked red and blotchy. One of them reheated my dish. A nice touch. He also brought me another retsina, a free one. An even nicer touch. I then ate the whole shrimp thing and loved it (although the shrimp was a tad overcooked—I suppose it would have been better had I eaten it when it was delivered). Shrimp with feta turned out to be a good thing. The waiter then brought me a baklava, also for free. Maybe I should have cried in restaurants more often.

This saganaki shrimp creation was a 1960s-era Greek dish that made its way to this country largely via Greek-owned diners and restaurants. It’s an elaboration on a cooked cheese preparation also called saganaki, which is just the name for the crockery it’s cooked in. I still order it when I see it offered, and it hasn’t made me cry since, which I take as a sign of my maturity. Symposium, an old-time place on the Upper West Side, makes it, and it’s not bad there. Not great though. Mykonos is long gone, so I can’t have it there anymore. I’ve ordered it at other restaurants, other Greek diners, and found it unreliable. It requires a delicate balance. You need lovely shrimp, good fresh or canned tomatoes, fresh herbs, and a tangy but not chemical-tasting feta. It’s not usually great at a diner, but higher-quality Greek places often get it right.

If you cook it at home, as I often do, you can make this potentially lovely dish sing sweetly. I like to prepare it at the end of the summer and in early fall, when I’ve still got local tomatoes and lots of herbs in my garden. Like now. Marjoram and dill might seem a strange combination, but, as I’ve discovered, they really aren’t. Dill mixed with oregano is a common flavoring in Greece, so, by extension, marjoram, oregano’s gentler more floral sister, has to be good—better even, and less harsh. I’ve added a little cinnamon and honey to the tomato sauce because I’ve tasted and liked those flavors in some versions.

I’ve been saddened this year with summer’s end. Not crying saddened, but just kind of dulled out. Making this shrimp saganaki again, with what’s left of my homegrown tomatoes and herbs, really picked me up. Maybe it can help you too.

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

Recipe below: Penne with Chicken Livers, Summer Tomatoes, Cognac, and Sage

In Diana Vreeland’s “Why Don’t You?” column in Vogue, she would dare us to do all sorts of zany things like ride down Fifth Avenue on a leopard wearing nothing but a pair of jewel-incrusted Roger Vivier court shoes, and other wild fashion stunts. I’m thinking of starting a food version of that column, suggesting you try cooking something you might not want to, for fear or disgust.

This gets me thinking about chicken livers, which happen to be one of my favorite foods. I understand that a lot of people don’t love them, whether from the way they look, reflecting too strongly on what they actually are, or maybe just thinking they don’t like the taste. Okay, I sort of get that. But all I ask is that you try them this way, in a pasta dish, with beautiful end-of-summer tomatoes and a lot of fresh herbs.

Here are a few tricks to making delicious chicken livers: First, buy really good ones, not the nasty Perdue brand, and make sure they’re really fresh. Dry them well, so you can get a good crispy sauté. Also—I learned this in my years of restaurant cooking—a last-minute flame-up with cognac or brandy or grappa or a fruity eau de vie will do wonders to remove that slightly irony taste that many find unappealing. Also you must not overcook them. A uniform gray throughout is no good. Ideally a touch of pink in the center is chicken liver perfect.

For herbs, sage and liver are a time-honored combo, so I went with them. But to round out the dish I added rosemary, too, incorporating it during the cooking so it mellowed out. The sage I cut into chiffonade and scattered in on at the end. I sometimes find that if you chop sage finely and leave it too long on the heat it can get a musty taste. This way it stays fresh, without opening up and permeating the whole dish.

Read Full Post »

Recipe below: Apricot Tart with Almonds and Thyme

Growing up in New York I’ve almost never had a decent apricot. Seems we don’t know how to grow them here. Even in season at farmers’ markets they’re usually sour or, even worse, mealy and tasteless. I asked the people at Migliorelli Farm in Tivoli about this and was told that apricots are “temperamental” and have a “short period of perfect ripeness.” My brother, who lives north of L.A., says the local apricots out there are much better than we get. I was upset to hear that.

Cooking helps immensely. The ones I found recently were pretty sour but also juicy and  just so pretty I had to buy them. The ones Migliorelli grows are a deep orange with splotches of pinky red. They smelled good, sort of like apricots should, so I thought heat and sugar would wake them up. And they did.

This tart was inspired by a Patricia Wells recipe I learned about many years ago. The technique is so easy compared with pâte brisée–based tarts. What you do is basically make a cookie dough and press it into a tart pan. You don’t even have to roll it out. And forget about the annoying blind-baking bean-and-aluminum-foil procedure. You just stick it in the oven to firm it up a bit before filling it. Cut the apricots in half (small plums also work well), stick them cut side up in the pan, and pour a cream and egg mix over the top. I flavored my custard with almonds and a drizzle of orzata syrup, which I love and which is less obnoxious than that crappy, ultra strong almond extract, the ruin of so many Italian American pastry shops.

The mix of apricots and almonds can’t be beat, and, as I’ve just discovered, adding fresh thyme brings the whole thing together with a weird hit of savoriness.

You’ll want a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom.

Read Full Post »

Recipe below: Grilled Pork Chops with Caper Sage Salsa

I love a grilled pork chop. When it’s properly done the fat gets all crispy and there’s a slight pink at the bone. My nostalgia for grilled pork grows partly from childhood memories of my father’s boozy summer grill nights, when everything and everybody was amply toasted and things were not often properly done. It’s a mixed bag of recall, but it gives me mostly a good feeling.

Dick would start his grill nights with a “mart,” meaning a good-size glass of vodka on the rocks with a twist. He’d have a few of those and then move on to the big bottle of mouth-puckering Chianti. The pork went on a fire that never was given a chance to die down to suitable-for-cooking orange coal. Flames shot up, and the meat almost always emerged burnt on the outside and still cold in the middle. My mother would scream that everything was “completely blackened. Disgusting. And raw.” There was a lingering fear of trichinosis back in the late sixties and early seventies, so the “raw” question stirred panic in Italian American moms (maybe in all moms, but it seems the Italian ones were always especially prone to medical scares). We ate all the blackened raw pork anyway and sort of loved it. The few pork chops that were actually overcooked in addition to being blackened (no trichinosis there), were coveted. I actually preferred the rare ones. They were more like steak. I also thought I knew that trichinosis was a thing of the past. All the pork chops, in whatever stage, got topped with fire-roasted onions and peppers, and that was a good touch. I suppose our grill nights might possibly have been just as unruly without the booze, but I guess we’ll never know.

I still love grilled pork chops, especially soaked in a simple marinade. Here I prepare a marinade with a hint of the sea. When I “man” the grill now, I try to not get too bombed and actually pay attention to what I’m doing, which in a way seems like less fun than when my father was at the grill, but I guess it’s a tradeoff. I like my pork cooked juicy, with that little touch of pink. I try for that and usually more or less succeed.

Sage is a strange-smelling herb. I like it, but sometimes it stumps me. I search for new ways to use it, especially since I’ve got so much of it in a patch that comes back bigger every year. This sage and caper salsa was a surprise. I was expecting it to be kind of harsh, but the good olive oil, the capers, and the pine nuts seemed to bring out the sweetness in the herb. Sage is lovely on pork, classic, but also, I have discovered, on whole grilled trout. And try it on thick slices of roasted pumpkin or butternut squash, as the summer moves toward its end.

Happy summer grilling to you.

Read Full Post »