STINCO WITH HARISSA

The Moro Cookbook has a recipe for roast chicken which has been marinated in harissa and the other day, it occurred to me that this should work with stinco of pork.  Stinco is the shin cut and it is much beloved of Italians for Sunday lunch. Some of my friends just marinate it in red wine - preferably a Nero d'Avola, they all say - and herbs, then cook it slowly in the oven.  I decided to liven it up a bit and this is what I did:

Rub about 1 tablesp harissa all over a stinco. Put it in a bowl, season, and sprinkle a little dried oregano over it.  Leave in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.

Line a small roasting tin with foil and put the stinco in the centre. Slice 3 largeish, unpeeled potatoes and 2 carrots. Cut a red pepper into strips. Put the vegetables around the stinco and add about 6 unpeeled garlic cloves.  Season the vegetables and add some sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme.  Pour 3 tablesp olive oil over the vegetables and drizzle a little over the stinco.  Pour the juice of 2 - 3 lemons over the vegetables, too.

Cover the tin with foil and put it in the oven at 170 C for 1.5 hours, turning the vegetables over half way through the cooking. Then take the foil off, add a little more oil and cook for another 20 - 30 mins.  Watch it carefully during this time.

Slice the stinco and serve with the vegetables.

This will serve 3 people. If you want to serve more hungry folk, you can always add another stinco!

Buon appetito.

SAUSAGE STEW WITH A KICK

The recipe for a sausage and vegetable stew in the November edition of the Conad supermarket chain's Bene Insieme magazine turned out well:  the stew contains mushrooms, carrots, tomato pulp, rosemary [only I didn't have any so flavoured it with sage], onion, vegetable stock and, as you would expect, sausages. I added some pumpkin and potatoes [unpeeled] because I had them. The recipe tells you to add some white wine and rum but I didn't have any rum and can't stand the taste of it in any case; I did, however, have some Calvados in the cupboard so chucked a drop or four of that in. I found it did the trick!

PEPERONATA WITH POTATOES

When I arrived in Sicily for the first time - exactly twenty years ago today, as it happens - one of the dishes my good friend Giovanna made to welcome me was peperonata with potatoes.  This is my version:

3 tablesp olive oil
1 large red onion
5 peppers - I happened to have red and green but use yellow and orange, too, if you can
500 gr potatoes [a bit more if you like]
6 vine or other flavoursome tomatoes, halved
1 400 gr can cherry tomatoes with their juice or a box of passata
chilli pepper flakes if liked
seasalt
fresh basil

Chop the onion finely and soften in the oil in a wide pan or wok. Deseed the peppers, cut into fairly large  pieces and add to the pan. A Sicilian would peel the potatoes but I only ever do that to mash them so I don't. Cut the potatoes into chunks and add them too, stirring everything well. When the peppers have softened, after about 15 minutes, add the fresh tomatoes [peeled and desseded if you have time or prefer] the contents of the can of cherry tomatoes or passata and stir.  Sprinkle over some chilli pepper flakes if you like them.  Add seasalt to taste, then stir the mixture well, put the lid on the pan and leave to simmer for about 35 mins.  Strew some torn fresh basil leaves over and serve.

Buon appetito.

TREAT OF THE WEEK - 14

What with all the Ferragosto inconveniences last week, I found myself much in need of comfort food and what could be more comforting than mashed potato?  In this heat, I also wanted something cold so I was pleased to find a recipe for a cold, mashed potato zuccotto in this month's La Cucina Italiana. The potatoes are mashed with olive oil, seasoning, grated lemon zest, basil and parsley and the filling contains chopped, roasted tomatoes, chopped rocket, chopped green and black olives and, in my version, capers - these last for no better reason than that I like them. [I substituted them for the onion in the recipe.]  The sauce around the zuccotto is the sieved juice saved from the tomatoes as they were deseeded prior to roasting.  A good old British pudding basin was called up for zuccotto mould duty.

AN INVENTION AND A SICILIAN BARBECUE

A couple of weeks ago I had some bought pasta sfoglia [puff pastry] left after I'd made my "beauty parlour dessert" to take to a barbecue in the Ragusan hills.  This is the idea I came up with to use it:

Mashed potato parcels

Mash some potatoes with butter, a little nutmeg, a tablesp of grated ragusano or Parmesan cheese  and stir in some cumin seeds.

Next, line a baking tray with foil and then baking paper and lay the puff pastry on it. Cut the pastry into squares.

Sprinkle a little pane grattugiato [fine fresh breadcrumbs, which we can buy in packets in Italy] on each square and then dollop about a teasp of the potato mixture on each one.  Draw up the corners of each square to form little parcels, press the edges together as best you can and then brush the parcels with beaten egg.

Bake at 180 C for 20 mins.  Serve warm rather than hot or at room temperature, sprinkled with a few more cumin seeds.

I thought you would like to see the rest of the barbecue food:

Spring rolls made by a Japanese friend.

Where there's my friend Roberta, there are yummy sausage rolls!

There were quiches

and several varieties of rice salad

plus a colourful couscous salad.

There were grilled aubergines.

Focaccia is always good but when it's hot and made by Grazia,
you know it's going to be extra-good!

There was also piping hot pane condito.

It wouldn't be a Sicilian party without chicken cotolette

and a barbecue means that there will be Sicilian sausages.
These were flavoured with red wine and fennel.

Now for the dolci:

There were several crostate

along with this delicious concoction.

There was cheesecake

and, of course, tiramisù.

You've got to be quick if you're photographing food at a
Sicilian party and this choux pastry creation
 was half-gone before I managed it!

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you -  my "mashed potato parcels" were popular!

CHICKEN WITH LEMON & GARLIC

This excellent recipe is in one of my favourite cookbooks, La Cucina del Sole by Nancy Harmon Jenkins.  I altered it in only one detail by adding a little cut-up lardo [white bacon] with the potatoes.  The result was better than ever!

PORK CHOPS WITH MUSHROOMS

To make this pork dish I followed [more or less] a recipe in the November edition of Alice Cucina.  The sauce is made with red wine, passata and just enough balsamic vinegar to give it an interesting tartness. Sage, bay, onion, garlic and juniper berries also flavour the dish and mushrooms are added towards the end of cooking.  I added potatoes because I was hungry and couldn't be bothered to mash some as an accompaniment as the recipe suggests.

BISTECCA D'AUTUNNO

It's always nice to be taken out to lunch and this is what you get when you order a small steak with potato croquettes at Modica's Vecchio Caffè - delicious and just what I needed.

GARLICKY LAMB WITH SUNDRIED TOMATOES

Yes, another lamb dish for you tonight.  This is because I had frozen some of the chop-like lamb pieces I found in the supermarket the other week and, as the weather is getting colder, I cooked them last night.  I was in need of comfort and that means potatoes!   One of my favourite ways of cooking potatoes is in the oven with lots of garlic and rosemary but last night, being out of pazienza,  I decided to see if I could get a similar effect by adding the potatoes to the dish on the hob.  The answer turned out to be "Yes" but obviously they were softer.  I got the idea of adding sundried tomatoes from a recipe in the October edition of Alice Cucina but otherwise, the recipe is my own:

Heat 4 tablsp olive oil in a fairly deep pan and add 8 unpeeled garlic cloves or, if the cloves are small as mine were, 12. When they are golden add about 1 kilo of large lamb pieces and cook until browned all over.  Then add 3 - 4 unpeeled potatoes, cut into chunks.  Stir everything, then add c. 200 gr sundried tomatoes which have been preserved in oil, drained. [Sundried tomatoes are cheap in markets here and I put them in oil myself, with some basil leaves.]  Season with coarse seasalt and black pepper and add some sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme.  Add 300 ml red wine, stir everything again, put the lid on the pan and simmer for 1 hour.  Serve the dish with a green salad.

LAMB WITH OLIVE PÂTÉ

As I've mentioned before, it is not always possible to find lamb cuts here and even rarer to find any that resemble a British lamb chop.  However, the costate available in the supermarket last weekend were pretty near so I decided to buy some to try out a recipe idea I had:

Long ago, when, back in Britain, I cooked my way through Valentina Harris's Southern Italian Cooking, I learnt that lamb and olives are a good combination and for a while now, I've been wondering if I could use black olive pâté, which we can buy cheaply in tubes here, in a lamb dish.  This is what I did:

Heat 3 tablesp olive oil in a fairly deep pan and cook the lamb chops on all sides.  [I used 6 for 2 people as there tends to be less meat on the cuts available here.]  When the lamb is brown, add a roughly chopped red onion with 2 chopped red peppers and continue cooking until these soften.  Then add 1 tablesp black olive pâté plus 1 tablesp 'strattu [tomato paste, not purée] and stir everything around until both are dissolved.  Now add 5 ml white wine, two or three large, unpeeled potatoes, cut into cubes, and season to taste.  For me any dish containing lamb and potatoes also has to contain rosemary so I added a few sprigs and some fresh thyme while I was at it.  Put the lid on the pan and simmer for 1 hour, stirring now and then and adding a little water if necessary.

Serve with a green salad to which you have added fresh mint.

AUBERGINE & PEPPER POTATO CAKE

For those of you who are in Italy, the inspiration for this recipe came from some potato cakes featured in the September edition of Alice Cucina.  However,  I did my own thing with it, as follows:

Boil 500 gr  peeled,  sliced potatoes in salted water until soft enough to mash.  Meanwhile, slice an aubergine as thinly as you can and cut the slices into strips.  Cook these in olive oil until soft and drain the slices on kitchen paper. Chop half a red pepper and slice 150 gr provolone cheese thinly.  Drain the potatoes and mash with as much butter as it takes to get a dreamily soft mash. [After many fights with a potato ricer, I now use my hand mixer for this.]  Add 150 gr grated ragusano, parmesan or grana cheese to the mash and mix well.  Now oil a not too shallow flan dish or ovenproof mould - I must say I have become a fan of the bendy silicone ones - and sprinkle pangrattato or breadcrumbs over the base. Spread about half the mash over, then arrange the aubergine slices on top and season them.  Now add the cheese slices and sprinkle the chopped pepper on top of these.  Cut up a couple of slices of cooked ham and add these, together with a few torn basil leaves and then spread the rest of the potato mixture over.  Level it with a palette knife.  Pour 2 tablesp olive oil over the top and cook at 180 C for about 45 mins.  Remove from the oven and leave for about half an hour, then unmould the cake:  the only way is to take a deep breath, quickly dump it top-down onto a plate and then put another plate on the base, pray and flip it back over.  It may not come out perfectly but you can shove any runny bits from the side back in with a fish slice.

Serve with salad and enjoy.  [It's good cold, too.]

ANTIPASTI OF POTATOES AND PEPPERS

I love antipasti and was pleased with the result when I tried this recipe from the August edition of La Cucina Italiana. These contain some of my favourite ingredients - potatoes, peppers, capers and grated grana cheese:

CHICKEN BOCCONCINI WITH OLIVES AND RED ONIONS

For those of you in Italy, the basis for this was a recipe in last week's Donna Moderna but I think I have changed it enough, mainly by adding potatoes and more herbs, to be able to give my version here.  I haven't suddenly relented and started peeling potatoes, by the way, but can I help it if supermarkets here are now selling chilled packs of peeled, new ones?

First of all you will need a whole, boned and skinless chicken breast which, as I've explained before, means asking for one breast if you are in Italy but two if you are in the UK.  Cut the breast into bite-sized pieces.  Slice two or three red onions.  Heat three tablesp olive oil in a wide pan and cook the chicken in this until sealed on all sides.  Add the onions and cook for a minute or two.  Now add the amount of new potatoes you want,  seasalt and black pepper to taste, some fresh basil leaves, sprigs of rosemary and some dried oregano and continue cooking for about five minutes.   Throw in a handful of black olives, give everything a good stir, put the lid on and simmer for about 15 minutes.

Buon appetito.

AROMATIC APRIL CHICKEN

I kind of invented this the other day and was pleasantly surprised by the result:

3 tablesp olive oil
6 bone-in, skinned chicken thighs
10 very small onions, peeled but left whole
1 leek, finely chopped
handful of baby carrots
c. 500 gr new potatoes
a few sage leaves
sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme
c. 10 ml red wine
seasalt & freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a wide pan.  Add the leek and onions and cook, stirring for about 5 mins.  Add the sage leaves and stir around a bit.  Add the chicken and brown on all sides, then add the carrots and swirl them around.  Chuck in the potatoes, seasoning, rosemary and thyme.  Stir everything well, then add the wine.  Simmer for about 50 mins.

Buon appetito.

UNIFICATION DAY LUNCH

When I went to university to study French and Italian in 1968 I had an Italian lecturer who always used to remind us that Italy had only been a unified country for just over 100 years.  Little did I think that, almost a half century later, I would be sitting in a Sicilian garden celebrating the 150th anniversary of that unification!  

On our morning stroll, Simi and I had seen that all along our street people were sitting outside the bars enjoying the sunshine and the holiday atmosphere.  The town's pastry chefs had come into their own and Bar Cicara was displaying these lovely swans and other pastries with a patriotic theme:

I decided to take one of these special desserts along to Linda's but first let me show you the other lovely fare:

There were delicious antipasti

followed by homemade ravioli with a tricolore theme:

They are filled with aita [a kind of chard] and ricotta:

Then there was spezzatino of sausage, chicken and potatoes:

Of course, it would not be a Modican party without trays of dolcini:

And now here is the dessert of choux pastry buns covered with tricoloured  crema pasticcera that I found at the Pasticceria Delizie d'Autore which has recently opened in our street:

A worthy ending to a celebration meal, don't you think?

NATALE DA GINA

I was lucky enough to be invited to spend the main celebration, late on Christmas Eve,  and Christmas Day lunch, with my friend Gina and her family.  As regular readers will know, Gina is a wonderful cook and when her mother-in-law is there too, the feasting never ends!  So without further ado, here is what we all ate over Christmas:

Christmas Eve began with a choice of red pasta

or white pasta with mushrooms but of course, we all had both!

Then there was fried baccalà [salt cod].  [I can't eat this because I am allergic to fish.]

Whenever Gina's mother-in-law presides, there is a wonderful polpettone

and Gina had made this steak pie:

There were condimenti of dressed peppers

and patate al forno cooked with rosemary:

There were fennel and green salads too [not shown] and then there was fresh fruit to clear the palate

before we embarked upon Gina's homemade torrone

and her mother-in-law's delicious almond biscuits:

Finally there was panettone [not shown] and then it was midnight and time to open the presents.

A good night's sleep and suddenly it was time for Christmas Day lunch, beginning with this delightful antipasti arrangement:

Then there was pasta al forno

 followed by special sausages

and this dish of meltingly tender lamb with potatoes.

After the salads, there was gel al limone

 and of course there was a tray of Sicilian pastries

followed by panettone which could be cut into star shapes:

If you're wondering if I can still stand up after that lot, the answer is just about!  Thank you, Gina and family for a wonderful Christmas.