Cucina I

Homemade food porn, anyone?

Eating out in a big city like Rome is so ridiculously easy (and mostly affordable) that it may come as a surprise to many that I am stubbornly, resolutely sweating in my own kitchen as often as possible. 

Of course, it may come as no surprise to those who know me best.  Give me great materials for a new project, and I get a little excited.  And I have been known to stubbornly fixate on making something properly, which can require multiple attempts.  The Spouse is a good test subject - especially if the test involves ham.

And Italians know the ways of pig.  

For me - and my friends will easily attest to knowing this about me - cooking is a creative act that is sometimes more accessible than diving into the studio to make drawings and paintings.

Cooking has an obvious end game; there is a time at which things must be completed, and an expected outcome.

The challenges are usually surmountable.  Usually.

In some ways, there is a gamified quality to the enterprise:  you have a set list of ingredients you must obtain, and often they are not all available from the same source (especially here!).  Select tools are required.  Rules are paramount, but also potentially broken for interesting results.  I sometimes have a great teammate to assist, and then at other times I am left completely on my own.  After an enlightening visit to my vegetable vendor, I can 'Iron Chef' something new that he's pressed me to try. Alternately, I am enjoyably forced to adapt a unique cut of meat I didn't quite expect to have to use.  (And for all my vegetarian readers, I'll try to warn you before you wind up reading a separate blog post all about Italian butchery).  

As I anticipated, Rome's food and wine markets are my new art supply stores.

Here are some of the things I've been making since we arrived in late June.  The earliest of these items were made with the least sophisticated tools, since I didn't have my full kitchen 'toolbox' until mid-August. 

stuffed (with an herbed risotto) tomatoes, buttressed by roasted potatoes (Barb Shadomy - this one's for you...I'll explain below)

I know I have to work on my food photography.  The lighting in my cucina is really awful.  And when we got a loaner fridge that was bigger than the Barbie-and-Ken Dreamhouse fridge we were first granted in this apartment, we gladly sacrificed some window light.  Sorry if some of these items don't appear to be as appetizing, color-wise, as they were in my (equally poorly lit) dining room.

pasta carbonara (a simple, WWII-era dish, where the pasta is tossed with rich egg yolk, dusted with parmesan and liberally dressed in black pepper - hence, the 'carbon' in 'carbonara')

sliced ham and eggplant rolls, dressed with chunky tomato sauce
(note the exotic Embassy-loaner dinnerware)

half Caprese, half Greek salad

I am happy to report that my diet here is far more enhanced by vegetables, generally speaking.

caponata on crostini- a spicy Sicilan topping made of eggplant, peppers, olives and garlic (and thanks to Sicily, I shall never want for eggplant as long as I'm here)

broiled salmon with veggie risotto
(cue the arrival of our own dinnerware - because just about everything looks good on black)

ravioli con funghi (mushrooms)

chicken cacciatore with sauteed spinach

Lest you imagine me as a walking encyclopedia of Italian recipes, here is my small arsenal of resources in printed form (sometimes when you have to 'Iron Chef' a new ingredient, you do break down and Googliama that thing instead):

Top to bottom:
I am a ruthless believer in (and thanks to a generous mother-in-law, a subscriber to) Cooks Illustrated, so I like to keep their little publications handy.  They issue bi-monthly magazines (sans advertisements!), country-specific collections of recipes that are slightly thicker than the bi-monthly issues, and also full-blown cookbooks.  Of course, you can also watch their shows on PBS.
The Gourmet Slow Cooker (yes, I got a 220 volt Crockpot, and I'm very happy about that) has one chapter devoted to Italian recipes (as well as English, Greek, French and Mexican). NO cans of cream of mushroom soup in these recipes.  I wish I had the sequel that was published some years ago.
The Tucci Table is handy because it appeals to the place we're living in AND it includes recipes for the home of The Spouse's soul (Tucci's wife is English).
Urban Italian is finally more fun to use because I'm in a place where I can access ingredients for Carmellini's pretty authentic recipes.  I didn't even know what bottarga was until I came here.  This chef is an amusing storyteller, too.
Tasting Rome is a recent gift from two very kind sisters-in-law, and the source of the first recipe I created in our time here (see the stuffed tomatoes above). Lots of small essays about Roman food, traditions and culture.
And finally, The Silver Spoon is allegedly the resource that is often given to Italian brides.  Consider it an Italian 'Joy of Cooking' equivalent.  I got the first edition.  Get the later editions for greater clarity and specificity in translations and labeled photos.  It is extremely thorough, and a great big-picture view of how streamlined and straightforward Italian cooking can be.

People who are trying out cooking on their own for the first time wind up often resorting to Italian cuisine because it is pretty straightforward and simple.  You boil pasta - and how can you screw that up? - and you put something on it, and then you put cheese on that, and you can deem it a Success. 

Italian cuisine can be very forgiving, also.  I have featured a sauce (pasta alla puttanesca) below that I enhanced with what I had...which could be considered true to the original mindset of the dish, if the original maker of the dish had more money than she might typically have had. 

 

Some individuals resolutely feel that any Italian dish can contain no more than 5 ingredients.  While I think that this is technically untrue, I would instead state that Italian fare truly celebrates ingredients. There are few fatty sauces or elaborate processes for a food item to endure before being considered 'done,' because both would cloak the Good Thing(s) and their very essence.  Just stick to showcasing the wonder of what's in season, and allowing it to be front and center. 

And here is a rule one should always observe in Italian dining: conversation at the table should be about those Good Things, or other good things, like an upcoming journey, art of any kind, or pleasure as you happen to define it.  Leave work out of the picture.  

Because it's true:  you will enjoy what you're eating much, much more if you are talking about eating.

(probably not so Italian) skillet corn from the cob, with peppers, zucchini and onions

rigatoni con salmone

spaghetti alla puttanesca ('pasta the way a prostitute would prepare it' - in a sauce with black olives, capers, hot pepper and enriched with sausage) with a more-than-healthy topping of fresh grated parmigiano-reggiano (because CHEESE)

sauteed asparagus with portabellas (and those meaty/creamy portabellas are a REVELATION here...I don't know why)

And my crowning achievement (only because I failed to shoot my first frittata, mind you):
my first - ever - whole roasted chicken.
I've always found it tough to work with chicken skin.  It's slippery and fragile.  Kind of flabby, too.  It's tough to keep it on the bird or - if the recipe calls for it - completely remove it. But it turns out that I was struggling with American chicken skin.
Italian chicken - on a smaller, more compact bird, to begin with - is dressed in a more substantial skin that is not too wet or fatty.  And so, when a recipe like this one called for a nice pouch of sauteed herbs and garlic to be inserted between the skin and breast (that's the large dark spot you see on the top of the bird), I could actually pull off making the slit in the skin and inserting the mixture with no trouble.  TA-DAH. 

I didn't include images of 'Clean Out the Fridge Pasta' or a few other inventions here, but rest assured, this is just the beginning of what will happen in this cucina.  Just keep thinking cool thoughts for me, as I've got no a/c in that room - just a ceiling fan, a strange little 5 burner stove (pictures to come later) and 1.5 fridges.

Oh, and a fierce determination to find butternut squash.