pasta and fennel meet balls
05 Apr 2008 2 Comments
in bell pepper, mushrooms, pasta, recipes, tomato, vegan, vegetarian Tags: cooking, david bowie, italian cooking, Italy, meat balls, movies, radical muffins love good food, sicily, spices, tomato sauce, wine, winter
uncork a bottle of respectable red table wine. Pour a half a cup into a wine glass with a generous bowl, swirl. Enjoying your wine, read this recipe entirely:
slice two yellow onions and one red bell pepper. Smash, peel, and mince five cloves of garlic. Setting aside the rest for your sauce, two of the cloves and a handful of the onion are for your faux meat balls.
mince this onion finely. In a mortar with a pestle, crush two teaspoons of fennel seeds with 2 teaspoons of coarse sea salt. In a big bowl, add these spices and a teaspoon of black pepper to the onions and garlic. Add a handful of quick cooking oatmeal and one egg. These are made with egg in a nod toward my grandfather’s original recipe, but you can omit the egg and the oatmeal and have tasty balls (note: the oatmeal or bread or cracker crumbs, is a good extender to make more balls for cheaper). Let this all rest together while you get on with the sauce. Stick it in the fridge if you are neurotic about leaving out egg at room temperature.
in a hot pot—a large stock pot with a heavy bottom, heated over a medium flame—toast a proportion to taste of hot and sweet paprika and red pepper flakes. I used about two teaspoons of sweet paprika and one teaspoon of hot paprika and red pepper flakes. Pour olive oil into the pot, about three tablespoons, bring to hot and pour the red pepper and onion and garlic into the pot. Cover and cook over medium-high for five minutes: in a series of 3 x 5, every five minutes for a cycle of three times cook and stir and cover the spicy pepper mix. Add sea salt and black pepper.
as this base cooks down, rub clean a pound of crimini mushrooms, ranging from a quarter in diameter to fungi the size of an egg. De-stem them, and slice the heads into threes, making fat slices. Add them to the pot, and do another round of 3 x 5 cooking and stirring.
stir in three tablespoons of tomato paste. Pour in two large cans (28 ounces each) of crushed tomatoes. By all means if you come by this recipe in the heart of tomato season then boil & peel and crush a whole pile of fruit, but in early spring in Brooklyn, the cans are fine and preferable. Add a smaller can of diced tomatoes. Bring to a slow, popping simmer and cook for an hour or longer.
about half an hour before you want to eat, put a big pot of water onto boil.
add a tube of ground beef style soy “meat” to the big bowl of eggy, spicy slop, and mix it together well with your hands. Roll tablespoons of mixture into balls.
heat a heavy skillet and when it is hot, add a few tablespoons of olive oil. Fry the balls until brown on all sides.
pour a few generous slugs of wine into your sauce and stir. Add your fried meet balls. Bring the sauce back to a simmer.
add a box of noodles to the boiling water: spaghetti is Italian-American classic; fettuccini is seductive; and penne, somehow, feels domestic and family-like. Cook until al dente and drain. Pile noodles on a plate or in a bowl as appropriate, top with sauce. Somewhere in this cooking, maybe put together a nice salad. Now sit down with you, and whomever you dine with if you are dining in company or family, and polish off the wine.
as it simmers, you can also read this blog:
http://thyme-for-herbs.blogspot.com/
and maybe, watch a little more labyrinth:
too cold to follow the rhythm
12 Feb 2008 Leave a Comment
in narrative Tags: bliss, Brooklyn, brunch, guiliani, heaven, Italy, leg warmers, poems
following the rhythm tonight is one for a long run, but mercy on me, no, it is too cold in Brooklyn. At the office today, all the ladies were comparing layers of stockings and cable knit tights and leg warmers and skirts and slips and boots and scarves. I mean, the tart brigade ladies not the ladies in high end fully lined wool suits.
The Broadway bagel-man in the metal cart announced in puffs of white breath—my fingers! my fingers! bending them stiffly like slammed in a door sore, his thick fingers in thin white latex gloves. they barely…work. He had my coffee in the bag before my dollars were out from under my frozen bag flap.
At the coffee shop on the way home, the night manager wrapped his grey hoodie tighter around his scrawny self. He smiled real big and asked about my weekend. I had brunch twice with friends. That’s a really good weekend, right? So I smiled real big. He said, Yeah—that’s a great weekend. Brunch is great. We should have brunch every day. Mandatory brunch.
Yes—brunch and siesta. It would be blissful. It will be heavenly. It is Italy.
green peppers & egg sandwiches
12 Feb 2008 2 Comments
in bell pepper, eggs, vegetarian Tags: breakfast, Chicago, cooking for one, eggs, italian cooking, Italy, olive oil, sandwich, skillet
This is one of my favorite sandwiches because I can get everything local and because it is something my family made for breakfast, lunch, and dinner when I was growing up. My grandpa and great uncle grew up in a Sicilian family who immigrated via New Orleans to Chicago. Uncle Ronnie was a butcher, so these sandwiches followed dinners of Italian sausage and peppers and the leftovers went with the eggs. Now they follow sausage-free meals when I sauté an extra pepper or two or they emerge on their own, worth the work of slicing a pepper.
For two sandwiches or one generous sandwich (a good idea):
slice 1 green pepper into strips and sauté in olive oil on medium-high heat until soft and slightly charred about 15-20 minutes. Scoop the cooked peppers into a bowl
slice a hand’s length from a loaf of Italian bread (or baguette) and cut that in ½ lengthwise.
rub the cut sides into the oil in the skillet and fry till toasted. Weighing down the bread will flatten it and more deeply toast it. I often use my tea kettle or another cast iron skillet.
whisk an egg or two with a little cream and a little salt & pepper. Scramble in the skillet.
assemble eggs, peppers on the baguette and sandwich. Eat.
If you are upset by how the egg and pepper squidges out the sides, try hollowing out your bread a little.
