Stephencooks

Tuna Livornese

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his dish is named after the Italian fishing port Livorno, site of one of the annual spring tuna harvests, and the recipe's not carved in stone tablets anywhere: a quick Google session will reveal that there is a wide range of interpretations being presented as "Tuna Livornese."

As usual, I went to Elizabeth David's Italian Food, and found that her version is typically succinct: "Fry slices of ... fresh tunny in oil. Drain them. Stew them for 30 minutes in a fresh tomato sauce flavoured with garlic. Garnish with plenty of parsley."

Mulling over all the Googled versions and Elizabeth's, I decided that the basic ingredients are  tomatoes, onions, garlic and the tuna. Basil, surprisingly to me, is apparently not one of the usual suspects for this dish. Other additions range from olives to capers to red pepper flakes, and the sequence and methods of cooking are all over the map.

Working with Elizabeth's outline, the first thing I realized was that I'm not that big on stewing fresh tuna for 30 minutes...so I made a fresh tomato sauce -- skimping on the garlic, which I feel can overpower the fresh tomato and delicate tuna flavor, and adding basil, which I feel enhances both -- and then I seared the tuna steaks and brought the fish and sauce together on the plate.

 

This was an easy, quick (for me) and very successful combination of several of my favorite fresh local ingredients, with satisfying results.

Paper Chef #11 Starts October 7

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he always-busy Owen, of Tomatilla! has asked me, as last month's winner, to not only judge the Paper Chef competition this month but also write the roundup for the 11th edition of this now-classic foodblogging web event...and I'm really looking forward to it!

Paper Chef #11 has ended - CLICK HERE to go to the round-up and results!

The Paper Chef Competition was founded by Owen and the first of these monthly events was in December 2004. Owen explains the rules and runs down the history of the event HERE.

To see the current list of nominated ingredients, please see the update posted 10/4. If you want to contribute to the list, please leave a comment on this post with your additional suggestion before next Friday, October 7 (one per player, per Owen's usual rule).

I'll be posting the final ingredients list and theme at Noon Pacific Time on Friday, October 7, and the entries, subject to Owen's lax rules about about lateness, will be due on Tuesday, October 11 at Noon Pacific. (There's a holiday in the US on Monday -- Columbus Day, in honor of our "discoverer" -- so in keeping with Owen's tradition, an extra day is allowed for the competition.)

I'll post the winner and the round-up on Friday, October 14.

A Note on the Judging....

Since I'm wearing the judge's hat this month, I'm going to try a "scoring" approach, which I've been bugging Owen about in emails over the last couple of months.  I think this will enhance the competition by making it more of a learning experience for all of the competitors, but of course I'm looking forward to hearing what people think about it when it's all done.

By the way, I'd like to recruit a couple of other judges to broaden the scope of the judges' point of view, so if you'd like to help with that (and disqualify yourself from this month's competition) EMAIL me as soon as possible. I promise that, as is done with DMBLGIT, the scores will not be attributed to a specific judge, and judges may remain anonymous if requested.

Judging Criteria...

Clearly, judging this competition is a purely subjective exercise, which means that the judges' food experience, cultural outlook, and personal likes and dislikes are the major determinants of the outcome. Given that understanding, I came up with the following two major criteria, each of which will be scored on a 1 - 10 scale:

Eatability (borrowed from the DMBLGIT photo competition). How strongly am I feeling that I would like to cook this dish, or perhaps have it placed in front of me on a plate?

Creativity. Originality of recipe or presentation or both. Degree of surprise, whimsy and/or esthetic achievement.

Extra Points... 1 - 4 points may be awarded for each of the following:

Use of ingredients. Using the four target ingredients in one dish in a natural or inspired way; or, if more than one dish, the pairing or grouping makes particular sense.

Integration of the food and presentation with the theme of this month's version of the competition.

Degree of difficulty. I like labor-intensive cooking and slow-food approaches, so I'm rewarding more difficult, involved approaches. I know, some people like quick and easy, but they're not the judges this month!

Anyway, enough words! As Owen has decreed, the Paper Chef is "for absolutely only the fun of it and for no other reason whatsoever," so let's all get ready to get into the kitchen and have fun with it.

Roasted Butternut Squash and Sage Carbonara

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mmm...! Something about fall seems to just say SQUASH! Though they're available in supermarkets year round these days, I seem to never notice the squash (other than summer squash, zucchini and their softskinned cousins) until Labor Day's gone and the crisp golden days of September move in for their too-short visit.

Anyway, due to whatever primeval forces are at work -- stars, the tides, the moon -- I found myself picking a nice hefty butternut squash the other day, with no idea at all about what I was going to do with it.

E asked if we could have pasta, and that focused my thoughts a little, and then I remembered that one of my goals this fall is to use up as much of the rather huge sage crop I have this year. A little rummaging around in the freezer didn't turn up the sweet Italian sausage I was hoping for but there was a chunk of pancetta and my course was clear.

This pasta was yummy. I think the fettucine was the perfect choice of pasta shape for it, although other long, sturdy shapes would work (spaghetti, linguine). Shells and other formed shapes might be okay, though with so many chunky things in the sauce I like the pasta to be long...smoother sauces that can nestle into the nooks and crannies of shells and orecchiette are better for those shapes. Delicate shapes like pappardelle wouldn't stand up to this hearty sauce at all.

By the way: this preparation, with a little less moisture used, would be a perfect ravioli filling, too!

Herb / Lemon Roast Chicken

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usually roast a chicken about every ten days or so, because we like it and because having leftover cooked chicken in the fridge is a good thing.  Of course my favorite method is on the charcoal grill (see Tuscan Wood Roasted Chicken) but often, due to weather or laziness, I do them in the oven. Over the years I've tried all sorts of methods, temperatures, flavorings, etc., and I'm always tinkering, but this is my current favorite, because the skin is nice and crispy and the herbs and lemon flavor the meat subtly.

Horseradish-Herb Encrusted Pork Tenderloin with Apples

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n the fall apples always start to push their way into my menus, and the combination of roast pork, apples and onions is a classic that I love. Add rosemary, mustard and horseradish and we've got a perennial favorite. This dish is easy to do for a crowd too, since it can mostly be done ahead.

Connie's Pizza - with Gorgonzola, Walnuts, Rosemary and Sopressata, presented for Slashfood's Pizza Day

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lashfood declared today Pizza Day, and since every Friday for about the last 8 years has been Pizza Day in my kitchen, I couldn't be happier. Making a pizza a week, and trying not to repeat myself too many times, I cast far and wide for ideas and this favorite of ours is a good example. 

Connie's Pizza is named for our mysterious friend Constance, who sometimes lives in Boston and sometimes in Italy. She slips back and forth between her two worlds without fanfare, so we never know where she is. Sometimes when she's in Boston she drops-in (she's the last of the in-droppers, I think) with some sort of goodie from her kitchen. This pizza is based on a pasta sauce she stopped by with a few years back, which I then reverse engineered into one of my most popular pizzas. Gorgonzola and walnuts, rosemary, garlic, basil, tomatoes and sopressata: how could I miss!

Check out more pizzas...! •Perfect Sausage Pizza
•Lobster, Zucchini, Corn
•Calamari Goat Cheese
•Eggs Florentine Pizza
•Sausage & Scallop Pizza
•Smoked Salmon Pizza
•Shrimp, Sausage, Oregano

1/4 C walnuts, rough chop, toasted
1/4 C rosemary, minced
1/4 C basil, minced
3 oz Gorgonzola, cut in small chunks
4 oz sopressata sausaage, cut in sticks about 1" long
15 grape tomatoes, sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
olive oil
1 pizza shell (see below)

Stretch dough into pizza shell shape. Allow to rise 30 min. Mix nuts, sausage, 2/3 the garlic and most of the herbs. Mix the rest of the garlic with the tomatoes and 2 tablespoons oil.

When the shell has risen 30 minutes, spread a couple of tablespoons olive oil on the shell and then the nuts / meat mixture. Bake 10 minutes on a preheated stone in a 450º oven. Add the tomatoes and cheese, turn the oven down to 400º and bake about 10 minutes more, until the crust is starting to brown. Scatter remaining herbs over the pizza, slice and serve immediately.

Tuscan Cinghiale / Porcini Burgers with Basil Aïoli

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n our last trip to Italy, we spent ten peaceful days in a thoughtfully converted farm structure in the middle of a vineyard just outside San Donato in Chianti, about 15 miles south of Florence. It was October, and as the sun came up through the mist over the vines we could hear the dogs and shouts, and occasional rifle shots, as the men of the village hunted wild boar - cinghiale - in the vineyard's hills and adjacent olive groves. In the little restaurant in the village we had the product of the hunters' labors, roasted over a wood fire: succulent slices served alone on a plate, in its own juice, in the Italian tradition of a separate meat course. The relationship of the cinghiale to pork, its industrialized cousin, was distant and distinct: a rich, complex, satisfying meat, as opposed to the bland, bred-to-be-lean pork we have to doctor and sauce and flavor elaborately to make interesting.

This is another in the series of experiments with the basic burger that I went through this summer, in a sort of mini-rebellion against the boredom and repetitiveness of cooking beef burgers on my grill for decades. This rich mixture of wild boar meat and earthy porcini mushrooms, with the flavor deepened by other vegetable ingredients, red wine and herbs,  was particularly successful. It has a complex flavor, more like a rich stew or interesting country paté, while still retaining the texture and heft of a burger.

The basil aïoli, fresh mozzarella, tomato and basil leaves -- and the use of focaccia squares for buns -- transport this burger from the realm of American backyard fare to Tuscan delicacy, especially since the meat is cooked on a live fire, as the cinghiale usually is in Tuscany.

There's no doubt this is a LOT more work than dividing up a lump of chuck into burgers and slapping them on the grill, but what I was out to do was to bring the flavor of more interesting, complex foods to the fun of the backyard burger. With the burgers made ahead, some fresh corn on the cob, a salad of baby greens fresh from the garden and a bottle of Chianti classico or two, this makes an elegant but still casual cookout for a few good friends.

Cured Bluefish, Gravlax Style

Once more with the bluefish!

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ravlax is a glorious creation: wild salmon, firey orange-red to begin with, is cured with salt, sugar and herbs. The meat firms and achieves a kind of translucence, and the color deepens. A thin perfect slice of gravlax on a dense dark slice of rye, with a dab of sour cream and maybe a caper or two is a wonderful moment in food.

"Gravblue" is the poor cousin of the lordly gravlax, and since I caught bluefish, not salmon (pretty rare in these waters), I'm making gravblue, not gravlax. And though I love gravlax, I'm pretty happy with the very tasty gravblue. Bluefish has oily, dense grey-brown flesh, similar except for the color to salmon, which is what led me to try the gravlax method with it in the first place, and so the method is basically the same. 

Visual appeal aside, there are a number of satisfying ways to serve gravblue. It works well as a canapé, in thin curled slices on dark bread with a dab of sour cream and some capers. It's also superb in a sandwich, as pictured, with red onions and mustard (and thin-sliced dill pickles, if you like), or served in thin slices with some scrambled eggs and a bagel, again with sour cream and onions.

As mentioned, the method for gravblue is the same as for gravlax: a salt and sugar mixture is spread over the fish, herbs, pepper and and onions added, and other flavorings as desired. The fish is wrapped, weighted and kept under refrigeration for 48 - 72 hours, with a turning and basting every 12 hours.

Alanna's Nana's Peroghies

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ecently Alanna, of Veggie Venture by Kitchen Parade, and I were having a wide-ranging discussion by email and somehow we got on the topic of "carrying on the tradition" of family cooks and treasured recipes.

 

Alanna (who, in partnership apparently with her whole family, has published a cookbook based on her grandmother's cooking) mentioned her Nana's peroghies (Alanna's family uses the alternate spelling, peroghies, which is apparently Ukranian; for reference, the more widely-used spelling is the Polish pierogi)....I asked her if I could have the recipe and she generously sent it along. She also gave me permission to publish it, so her original MS Word file is available by clicking HERE .

I tried it this week and I have to say, even though two of my grandparents were born in a village on the Polish-Ukranian border, this was one of the more humbling experiences I've had in a kitchen. Alanna's recipe is quite thorough and filled with "get-it-right" tips, but still there were a thousand twists on this road! They were good to eat, in the end, but I don't think I made even one that looked exactly the way I think they should look.

I'm not a huge perfectionist in the kitchen, as you can probably tell from the pictures on this site, but there is a certain way these little guys should look: nice little half moons, not too big, nice and plump where the filling is and thin, delicate edges where you can see 6-8 depressions made by the assembler's fingertips. Without going into too much detail, none of mine achieved all of these characteristics at once.

Smoked Bluefish Tomato Cream Pasta

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friend who heard about my having smoked 8 sides of bluefish (about 12 lb before cooking, probably about 9 after) the other day asked me what I was going to do with all that smoked fish. Fair question, and here's the answer:

3 sides - gave to one of the other fishermen on the trip
1 side - sandwiches for a lunch
1/2 side - snacks for a cocktail hour get together (future post)
3 sides - smoked bluefish paté, apps for another group - some still in fridge (future post)
1/2 side - Bluefish Tomato Cream Pasta (below)

The heads and tails from all the fish, by the way, along with some striped bass heads and tails and 4 or 5 lobster bodies from the freezer, went in a pot to make fish broth (see below).

The pasta dish is below. If you have the broth on hand, or a reasonable substitute, it's very easy and good.