Erica De Mane

The Woman who loves fish, series daydream 09, Laudator, 2011

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I did an interview on Heritage Radio Network today (Sunday), talking about food blogging and Southern Italian cooking. Listen to it here.

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Hello Everybody,

I’m sorry I haven’t been able to post this week. I’ve been very busy with various culinary side jobs. I’ll write to you  in a few days.  Happy fall cooking to you. I’m now loving broccoli rabe. I hope you are too.

Speak soon.

Erica Assunta

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Recipe: Carrots with Cumin, Olives, and Basil

There is a Moroccan dish of carrots seasoned with cumin and lemon that I’ve never liked. Somehow the combination tastes harsh to me. I do like the idea of cumin with carrots, though, and I’ve always wanted to create a more Southern Italian, I suppose Sicilian-inspired, rendition of it. I guess what has until now stopped me from going ahead with it was the fact that I’ve never tasted cumin in any Sicilian cooking. I don’t think they use it at all. They certainly incorporate many Arab spices, such as saffron, cinnamon, bay, black pepper, and even ginger sometimes, and, after all, they even cook couscous. But cumin is not popular with the Sicilians.

I’ve been seeing beautiful bunches of multicolored carrots at my Greenmarket lately. Pinkish orange, bright orange, dark plum, yellow, magenta. Just looking at them can make a bad day good. I bought a few bunches and learned a few things. First of all, I discovered that colored carrots, yellow and dark red ones specifically, have been around for a thousand years at least, but in the last fifty years or so farmers have been experimenting with pigments to create many new colors. I also learned that when I cut into the dark red ones, they weren’t red through and through but either bright yellow or orange at the center. That was amazing. I also noticed that these weird colored carrots are very firm and take longer to cook than the usual ones. I could sense this just by their feel, so I went ahead and blanched them first. I wasn’t sure if they’d give up some of their color, the way beets do, but I was happy to discover that they don’t, really. Just a bit, turning the blanching water palest pink.

I decided to go ahead with my cumin thought, creating a kinder, gentler cumin carrot. First off, I nixed the lemon. Then I added a pinch of sugar and a few garlic cloves—whole, not sliced—just for an undertone of flavor. I added a handful of black olives. They looked beautiful mingling with all the various carrot colors. And to pull it decidedly in an Italian direction, I added Marsala, and then basil at the last minute. I was really pleased with the taste. I’m not sure if any Sicilian would recognize this as a dish from home, but to me it somehow seems very Sicilian in spirit.

Carrots with Cumin, Olives, and Basil

(Serves 6 as a first course or side dish)

Salt
2 bunches carrots, the multicolored ones if you can find them
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 teaspoon sugar
½ teaspoon ground cumin
3 garlic cloves, peeled
Black pepper
A big splash of dry Marsala
A handful of wrinkled black Moroccan olives
A handful of basil leaves, cut into chiffonade

Peel the carrots and cut them into thick sections, on an angle.

Set up a pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Add a bit of salt. Add the carrots, and blanch them for 2 minutes. Drain them into a colander, and then run cold water over them to bring up their color. Drain well.

In a large skillet, heat a tablespoon of olive oil with the butter. Add the sugar, cumin, and garlic. Add the carrots, seasoning them with salt and black pepper. Sauté everything around for a few minutes to further soften the carrots and to blend all the flavors. Add the Marsala, and let it boil away. Add a splash of warm water and an extra drizzle of olive oil, partially cover the skillet, and cook until the carrots are tender, about 4 minutes. You should have a nice, moist glaze on the carrots. Pour them into a large serving bowl. Add the olives and the basil, and give everything a toss. Serve hot or warm.

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Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, Diego Velázquez, 1620.

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Recipe: Lasagna with Basil Walnut Pesto and Besciamella

When I was a junior high school student on Long Island many centuries ago, there still existed a class called home ec, something all the girls had to take, a requirement that by then no one took very seriously. I believe I took it the last year it was offered before it gave way to a newer, hipper curriculum, like sensitivity training (I swear to you that was a real class at my school too). The white-haired black lady who ran home ec was truly serious about teaching us to create our own potholders and to cook some extremely foreign food. There were two dishes that I remember distinctly. They will be forever linked in my mind, not only for their nastiness but because we assembled and sampled them both on the same day. They were eggs à la goldenrod and chipped beef on toast.

Eggs à la goldenrod consisted of toasted Wonderbread slices scattered with crumbled hard-boiled egg whites and drizzled with a chalky white sauce before being finished with the chopped up egg yolks. Chipped beef on toast began with the same base of toasted Wonderbread, but then a jar of thin, round grayish-purple meat slices was opened. A load of them were piled on top of the toast before being covered with the same white sauce. It was hideous. The only thing it had going for it was that it was extremely salty. I remember asking my father about eggs à la goldenrod, and he said, “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”  “What about chipped beef on toast?” I then asked. “Oh,” he said. “Shit on a shingle. Don’t you ever bring that into this house.” Don’t worry, Dad. I assumed he had been forced to eat this during his service in World War II, but it turned out his Puglian-born mother had prepared it once, in an attempt to Americanize their home. It evidently left an emotional scar. It’s curious to me that I was such a blasé home ec student but then went on to find the kitchen becoming such a big part of my life. It had everything to do with Italian food.

When my mother made a white sauce, it meant only one thing, lasagna. We called the sauce besciamella. Its aroma was beautiful, mingling butter and sweet, toasted flour, with hints of nutmeg and bay leaf and a whiff of dried red pepper. Miss home ec lady didn’t use any seasoning, not even salt. Her white sauce was like plaster of Paris.

Lasagna was a special-occasion dish, made for New Year’s, Christmas, or birthdays. My mother prepared a great one, very typically Southern Italian, with layers of thick tomato-y ragu, the top covered with the fragrant besciamella. The huge dish was allowed to bubble and meld in a slow oven until a good crust formed on top. What a fabulous invention. The lasagna recipe I offer you here is based on a pasta dish I once ate in Genoa, the home of basil pesto. The original was a plate of pesto-slathered pasta squares haphazardly stacked up and left to spread out in a very free-form way. It was divine. I’ve derived a more formal baked lasagna from that, and I’ve included a nicely seasoned besciamella for lusciousness.

I really love the way it turned out. It’s a loose lasagna, so it doesn’t need to rest. I’d serve it right from the oven, so it can pool out a bit on the plate. It’s perfect, I think, for a meatless Christmas Eve dinner, a little something to work in amid your fish courses. The kitchen can be a beautiful place. Merry Christmas.

Note: Piave is a cow’s milk cheese from the Veneto. You can often find the aged version, Piave vecchio, in this country. It tastes something like Grana Padano, but it’s much sweeter, almost like caramel, which is why I found it a good match for the bitter herbiness of the basil. If you can’t find it, use Grana Padano or Parmigiano Reggiano.

Lasagna with Basil Walnut Pesto and Besciamella

(Serves 6 as a first course)

For the pesto:

½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 large garlic clove, roughly chopped
1 cup very fresh, lightly toasted walnut halves
2 cups basil leaves (packed down—about 2 good sized bunches)
4 large sprigs marjoram
1 cup grated Piave vecchio cheese, plus a little more for the top

For the besciamella:

3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
3 cups whole milk
⅛ teaspoon grated nutmeg
1 fresh bay leaf
Freshly ground black pepper
Salt
A pinch of sugar
⅛ teaspoon hot paprika (I used the Basque piment d’espelette)

1 pound very thinly rolled homemade egg pasta, cut for lasagna

To make the pesto: Place all the pesto ingredients in the bowl of a food processor, and pulse until you have a rough paste. If the pesto seems too tight, add a little more olive oil.

To make the besciamella: Melt the butter in a medium-size saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour, whisking it to blend it into the butter. Cook, while continuing to whisk, for about a minute, without letting the mix color. You’ll smell a sweet, lightly toasted flour aroma. Add all the milk, and continue whisking. Add all the seasonings, and continue cooking, whisking often, until the sauce has thickened. This will happen around the time it comes to a boil. When bubbles appear on the surface, turn the heat down a bit, and continue cooking for another minute or so or until the sauce is thick and very smooth.

Put up a large pot of pasta cooking water, and bring it to a boil. Season it with salt. Cook the pasta sheets, a few at a time, until tender (a minute for really fresh pasta, a little longer if it’s more dry). Run the pasta sheets under cool water after draining, and then lay them out on dish towels.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Coat an approximately 9-by-11-inch baking dish (or an equivalent oval dish) with olive oil. Make a layer of pasta, and spread it thickly with pesto. Make another layer of pasta, and spread it with besciamella. Continue altering pasta with layers of pesto and besciamella. You should finish with a layer of pasta spread with besciamella and then sprinkled generously with grated Piave vecchio. Bake, uncovered, until the edges have browned nicely and the whole dish is bubbling hot, about 20 minutes.

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Pier Paolo Pasolini and Anna Magnani step out.

Try working off those excess Thanksgiving calories with a celebratory dance.  (Whose shoe is that?  Gina Lollobrigida’s?)

Happy Thanksgiving to you from Skinny Guinea.

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Italian olive oil for sale in Manhattan around 1930.

I just read an article that says that the good fat found in olive oil may provide one of the keys to appetite control and weight loss. Could it be true, fattening old olive oil?

Could be. It seems that oleic acid, a kind of monosaturated fat that olive oil has in abundance, suppresses hunger pangs and so can help prevent snacking between meals, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

In a study involving lab mice (who else?), the researchers found that when oleic acid reaches the small intestine, it’s converted into a hormone called oleoylethanolamide. The hormone sends hunger-dampening signals to the brain, which means you feel full sooner and can go longer without eating. The findings were published in a journal called Cell Metabolism.

Truly? Somehow it feels true. Just think how satiated you feel after a big bowl of spaghetti aglio e olio. Maybe olive oil and red wine, my two favorite foods, have all along been the keys to the Mediterranean diet. It’s gotta be.

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