Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Roasted Red Snapper with Fennel Rosemary Vinaigrette

It has been pouring here on and off for about two weeks. My basil is flooded and my garlic soaked. I’m worried. My garden needs a dryout. And I’ve been dreaming of fancy outdoor grilling, but due to all this rain, it has not yet happened. I love doing a whole fish on the grill. It’s a romantic experience, and with all the herbs I’ve got growing, providing they’re not all drenched out, it can be high-end fragrant. I will get out there soon, I promise you. In the meantime, I’ve been at my oven, which is also a very good place to cook a whole fish.

As you’ve all heard a zillion times, cooking fish whole brings out more flavor than just doing a fillet. I don’t like to beat you over the head with this, but it’s true. Everything stays contained under the skin—the fat, the natural moisture, the gelatinous stickiness from the bones, plus all the flavors you stuff inside it. I think the hesitation for most people is not knowing when the fish is cooked, but that’s not hard to gauge. I like a high-heat roast, so I’ll go with 425, even 450 degrees. My 3½ pound red snapper took about 20 minutes. I started checking after about 15 minutes by inserting a paring knife alongside the backbone to see if the meat could be lifted from the bone but stay pretty much in one piece. Once it could, the fish was ready. I didn’t let it get into “easily flaked” territory, especially since a fish will continue to cook a little after you take it out.  

I went to the market looking for my favorite little rougets (called red mullets in this country), but my fish guy at the Chelsea Market was all out. I guess I had the color red on my mind, so I instead went with a red snapper, a beautiful fish, very mild and white-fleshed. For flavoring I returned to my much-loved fennel rosemary blend, a tradition for porchetta that works well with all sorts of seafood as well. Fennel alone is, of course, classic with fish, but when you blend it with rosemary the flavor is fuller yet not overly assertive. A deep perfume develops.

What a prickly beauty. Big tail, small head. Will she ever get out without tiny, bloody scratches? I say, not likely. But artichokes are always worth the effort.

Recipe below: Zucchini Gratin with Thyme and Goat Cheese

It seems a lot of people need help with zucchini, mostly with how to change it up from the usual pan sauté. I know I do, so when I come up with a good recipe, I want to share it with you. And if you’re growing zucchini and now have tons of it coming in all at once, you really do need help.

This is an easy gratin, but it looks kind of fancy. Good for a dinner party. I served it with huge grilled shrimp marinated in marjoram, garlic, and lemon, a nice fit but I could imagine grilled lamb or chicken kebabs just as easily.  I’m thinking the grill texture and flavor would juxtapose nicely with the gentleness of the gratin.

Happy summer cooking to you.

Recipe for a soft herb salad in the next-to-last paragraph below.

So far all my herbs look good. I knew they were starting out in that direction when in early spring my lovage came bursting out of the ground and grew huge in only three weeks. Lovage is a powerhouse herb, in growth but also in taste, like celery condensed into a speeding bullet. I use only a leaf or two when I cook a pot of beans or make a potato salad. I find it interesting that the herb I use the least of is the biggest thing in my garden. Although my fennel is also already gigantic. 

I planted a lot of other herbs this year too, some, like hyssop and za’atar, for this first time. They all look promising. I always lighten up when I see that my plants are starting to take. My father had the same early season gardening anxiety when he planted and tended his tomatoes. He’d be out in his garden at weird hours, chain-smoking and staring hard at the little seedlings, maybe trying to instill some fear in them. I’m not sure what his method was, but we always had good tomatoes. I go out to my herb garden and stare and worry and sometimes plead with them. It’s part of the process.

Up here in Dutchess County, New York, only a handful of herbs are perennial, and sometimes even the perennials get defeated by our miserable winters. But this year everything I hoped would come back did. In addition to my out-of-control lovage and fennel, all my various thymes and oreganos returned, as did my nepitella, winter savory, tarragon, sage, and borage, which is popping up all over the place. The lavender didn’t make it this year, and rosemary always gets freezer burn and needs a fresh start. That makes me sad, especially knowing how big and gorgeous those things can get in the right climate. This slate-riddled upstate soil, frozen for months each year, is obviously nothing like the Southern Mediterranean, but my Southern Italian blood pushes me to pretend it is. I just have to keep on top of things.

In the meantime, here’s something nice you can make with fresh herbs, whether you have five or six types or only a couple. It isn’t so much a recipe as a reminder that you can make a salad out of nothing but herbs. 

When I compose an herb salad I concentrate on leafy, soft, gentle herbs, avoiding piney, musty, and tough-stalked ones like rosemary, thyme, oregano, and sage. For this version I clipped Italian parsley, burnet, chervil, fennel fronds, a few sprigs of tarragon, and a handful of watercress, which I consider an herb. You can add arugula or sorrel, or lots of basil (my basil isn’t yet big enough to pick from). I prefer to dress an herb salad with my best olive oil, a tiny splash of rice wine vinegar, and a sprinkling of salt. I find a gentle vinegar best here, even better than lemon, which to my taste, can be too direct.

This salad is good to eat neat, but it also makes a nice, perfumed bed for something grilled, like shrimp, lamb kebab, or eggplant.

Recipe below: Ditalini with Shell Peas, Prosciutto Cotto, Cinnamon, and Basil

Ditalini goes into pasta fazool (or pasta e fagiole in proper Italian), and in traditional Italian-American land it goes nowhere else. It’s a soup pasta. Small. Compact. Pasta e fagiole is sort of a soup, or it can be one. My family’s version was a cross between a soup and a pasta. A soupy pasta with ditalini, cannellini beans, lots of celery and onion, bay leaf, sometimes pancetta, sometimes sage, sometimes rosemary or basil, and occasionally just Italian parsley. Always hot chili flakes on the side. It was special any time of year, but especially in the winter, because it was thick and rich. And I loved ditalini, the little tubes, mixed in with the beans and the heavy broth.

It’s funny how certain pasta shapes become associated with specific dishes and then get etched in stone. When I was a kid there was linguine with clam sauce, rigatoni with meat sauce, penne with pink sauce, and ditalini with pasta fazool. That was all correct, and back then I wouldn’t have dared contradict any of it. But now I don’t think that way. I’m out of pasta prison. So here’s ditalini with fresh peas. Not so different from the bean versions, really, but the entire dish is much lighter. This one’s perfect for those lovely few weeks when spring blends into summer.

I don’t love shelling peas, but I do it because I want the peas. Also it’s nice when your fingers stain green and the kitchen smells like a mix of grass and potato (that’s how raw peas smell to me). And then you’ve got a nice pile of shells to make stock with. I like simmering a handful in a light chicken broth. I used chicken broth for this dish, but you can easily make it all-vegetable by adding the pea shells to a soffritto of onion, celery, carrot, a few leek tops, fennel trimmings, whatever you’ve got on hand.

I’ve included a little cinnamon, which I find gives the dish a bit of a Renaissance feel, or at least what I imagine would be that feel. It also deepens the sweetness of the peas. And cinnamon with basil is a beautiful combination. If you’ve ever grown the herb called cinnamon basil, which tastes and smells exactly how you’d imagine, you already know how alluring this pairing can be.

Recipe below: Gemelli with Nettle Lemon Pesto and Mussels

The thing about stinging nettles is that they really do sting. I was surprised to learn this. I thought it was just romantic folklore. They don’t sting bad, just a little, but if you keep grabbing them without gloves, your hands will likely blow up and get red and itchy. You just need gloves, and then there’s no problem. And once the nettles are blanched their little sting is completely gone, never to come back.

The first time I ever ate stinging nettles was in Rome many years ago. They were in a beautiful jade green risotto, a little on the loose side. The taste was an earthy mix of spinach and potting soil. I loved it. I came back from that trip wondering if I could ever find nettles in New York. And I did find them, at the Union Square market in Manhattan. I tried to duplicate my Roman risotto. It came out pretty well and I was very proud of myself. And then years later, when I got my little house in upstate New York, to my astonishment I discovered a big patch of stinging nettles growing in the backyard. That was some huge excitement. Now I cook with them every spring.

Stinging nettles are called ortiche in Italy. They’re most common in the middle and north of the country, where the soil is moister. Since my Roman experience, I’ve eaten ortiche several times in Liguria, usually as an ingredient in preboggion, the wild herb mix that’s used to fill pansoti, a bloated little ravioli, and other nice things, like savory torte, soup, and frittate.  I’ve recently discovered that it makes an excellent pesto.

I originally made my ortica pesto using the classic Ligurian basil pesto formula, simply replacing the basil with blanched nettles. Last night I cut back on the cheese, replaced the pine nuts with pistachios, and added a good amount of lemon zest. I tossed the resulting deep green pesto with steamed mussels and gemelli. I think another mild seafood such as scallops or trout would work just as well. You could certainly serve the nettles simply tossed with pasta, no fish, but the mussel combo was, in my opinion, a success.

I really love the color of blanched nettles. They’re a deep, almost bluish-tinged green. You’ll really notice that when you’re squeezing them dry, when lots of lovely emerald water will cascade into your sink.

Recipe below: Asparagus with Anchovy Parmigiano Breadcrumbs

For many people asparagus tastes like grass. Like grass but sweet. I guess I’d somewhat agree, but what does this even mean exactly? Fresh mown grass, or cooked grass? Lawn grass or wild grass? Grassy is something people say when trying to describe the tastes of many green vegetables. It’s sort of like when people say that cheeses or mushrooms or dairy products taste nutty. I’ve even heard people say that particular nuts, almonds for instance, taste nutty. Which means I guess, that they taste likes other nuts, and that all nuts taste similar—which they don’t. Describing the taste of food is hard. Food writers struggle with it all the time. The frustrating thing is that you can’t convey a taste without comparing it to something else. How do you get around that? This spring I’ve been trying to concentrate on the taste and smell of asparagus. It’s hard. I mean green asparagus, not white or purple, which are variations I don’t find at spring farm stands. Raw asparagus has no smell, and its taste registers only a faint sweet bitterness for me. But cooking it brings out all kinds of tastes. Grassy? Maybe. But for me, I now realize, asparagus tastes like a cross between artichoke and broccoli. I’ve settled in on that description for now.

And what about asparagus pee? That aroma is really something special. I look forward to it every spring. It never fails me. It’s asparagusic acid that causes it, a chemical unique to asparagus and commented on since the dawn of the vegetable. The acid gets broken down in your gut into sulfur. Sulfur itself can smell disgusting, as in heavily cabbage-laced fart, but to me asparagus sulfur isn’t nasty. It’s a kind of sweet sulfur. It’s a marker of spring for me. And did you know that about 30 percent of people can’t smell their asparagus pee? The medical explanation for this is that some people break sulfur down better than others, leaving little left to smell. I have another theory: Some people just smell things better than others. I think I’m a super smeller.

Morelscapes by Don Huber

Recipe below: Braised Chicken with Morels, Tarragon, and Thyme

Last night we had a thunderstorm that lasted for more than an hour. It was the low rumbling kind but with hardly any lightning, so the night sky remained dark. The rain wasn’t heavy, which was a good thing, as in a heavy rain we often lose power and I wasn’t in the mood for that (sometimes I am). I sat in bed with the cats, listening to the entire show. The cats weren’t scared, but they were upright and alert, with big eyes. A storm like this one, without lightning, is odd to sit through, but it let my head wander to thoughts of spring food, of everything I was eager to cook again. I focused on morels, with their honeycomb weenie caps, dry texture, and hollow insides.

Yesterday I had gone out looking for morels, searching in the correct places, around the moist, decaying crud that builds up under elms, ash, and old apple trees. I’ve had this house in the Hudson Valley for seven years. Every April when morel season starts, I go a little apeshit looking for them, but I’ve never found any. A neighbor, Larry, brought me about a dozen huge ones several years ago, all about six inches long, that he found somewhere around here. He wouldn’t say where. I wasn’t furious with him, but I was definitely irritated, and he knew it. I sliced them all in half, lengthwise, checking for bugs, which are common in these mushrooms, but I didn’t find any, so I just quickly sautéed his mega morels in butter and splashed them with grappa. That is one of the best ways to bring out their earth flavor. And just so you know, you don’t want to eat them raw; their toxins need to be heated out and away.

Today, after last night’s rain, I figured I’d go out again, looking. But it’s still raining, so I guess I’ll wait until later, when things dry out a bit.

In the meantime I want to share with you a very good recipe for chicken with dish that I made the other night with morels I had bought at Eataly for $55 a pound. I swear that was the price. I bought exactly ten of them, and the bill came to $12. I justified the expense by telling myself that at least I didn’t get the golden morels, the lighter ones piled up next to the run-of-the-mill ones I did buy. Those were going for $85 a pound. I have a love-hate relationship with that store.

This recipe is a pretty straightforward braise. Morels, chicken, and tarragon are a classic French trio, but I decided to strengthen it by adding thyme at the beginning of cooking, as an underpinning, and then introducing the tarragon right at the end, so it wouldn’t lose any of its potency. I was really happy with the result, and it produced lots of rich, earthy sauce to flavor rice I served with it.

Morel season is just beginning up here, and I’ll continue to scout around, like I always do. I don’t have high hopes for success, but you never know. I might get lucky. I’ll keep you posted.

I think it’s important to look well groomed and neat. I like to feel clean even if I’m not clean.