That’s my status on facebook right now, and it’s true.

If you drop the word “zeppole” into Google Translate, it comes up with “doughnut,” which is more or less what a zeppole is, but- like everything- it’s so much more.The word, by the way, predates the term “zeppelin” by several hundred years.

There are many occasions in the life of a yeast baker to have leftover dough: an extra pizza crust; or a too-full oven or baking stone; or maybe even an extra bit of dough saved for this purpose. I’ve never seen someone make dough specifically for zeppoli, though I am sure it has happened. Zeppoli are a happy accident of yeast baking. So what, exactly, are they?

A zeppole is a bit of yeast dough, anywhere from 1-3″ in diameter, fried and usually rolled in sugar. Sometimes a rolled up anchovy filet goes inside, or a dried fig, but usually they are plain. In sicily, the sugar coating is often cinnamon sugar, but vanilla sugar and jasmine sugar are certainly options (as is plain sugar). Vanilla sugar, I’m sure all you foodies know, is made by stuffing a whole vanilla bean inside a few cups of sugar, a great way to store your vanilla beans and get a freebie in the process. Jasmine sugar is made the same way, only with jasmine flowers, easy enough to get if you live in California. If you live in the east, I bet honeysuckle sugar would be awesome, too, though I can’t say from experience.

Pieces of dough are fried in moderately hot oil (325 neighborhood) until they puff and turn as golden as you like them: I keep mine a shade darker than beach sand. The darker they are the crustier the outside, which, if you ask me, becomes a diminishing return after about 2 minutes or so in the oil. After a quick rest on some paper towels, roll them in your sugar of choice. The sooner they’re eaten, the better.

As you might imagine these are an incidental goody more than anything else, so I hope some serendipitously find their way into your merenda, or afternoon snack. By the way, the memory of the fig tree is that of the one growing out of a crack in the pavement, that I’ve mentioned before.

Listening: Laurie Lewis, “Stealing Chickens” from the album Restless Ramblinbg Heart

You know what’s really hard to learn? Something you already know how to do.

What can you do? I’m very romantic- some would say quixotic- and I like the idea of an independent Sicilian culture, including its language. But the fact of the matter is that nearly everyone alive in Sicily speaks Italian, and if I want to travel there and see the shops and cook with people, I know more than enough Sicilian to figure out the local color- IF I speak really excellent Italian. So here I go.

I didn’t even hardly take any pictures.

But guess what, we’re moving forward.

Today on the California Report they were talking about how the new healthcare legislation is going to affect Central Valley farmers. I am sympathetic to all independent farmers, organic or not, but the outcry about their new burden is the wrong outcry. It makes me sick that we, as a nation, stare at the prices on supermarket shelves, nodding approvingly when they go down, squealing like stuck pigs when they go up even fractionally, without a thought to the true cost of that food. The billions of lost tax revenue for government subsidy and environmental cleanup could go to our schools, our bridges, our arts and our sciences: we are getting screwed for Monsanto. We talk about farm laborers, legal or not, like a commodity. We spend millions on fucking dog toys and we can’t acknowledge, as a society, that these human beings are entitled to a living wage and access to health care.

But chicken parts are 79 cents a pound, so it’s ok.

Listening: Radio Paradise: listen, and give them some money!!

My feet, my hands, my back; I’m tired.

I’m tired like restaurant business tired, but we got so much good stuff, and we got so much done.We went to Santa Monica Farmers’ Market at the crack of ass this morning and came back with sprouting broccoli, spanish onions, shallots, torpedo onions, green garlic, fennel bulbs, artichokes, fava beans, sage, savory, parsley, oregano, cilantro, celery, carrots (4 or 5 colors), beets, chard, potatoes, zucchini and god knows what else.

I have a few phots, but they will have to wait for tomorrow, as will the menu… too tired now.

Goodnight, moon.

It’s time, bitches.

The battaria di cucina is unloaded, and tomorrow we shop (at Santa Monica Farmer’s Market). Here’s the tentative menu, subject to change tomorrow, of course:

Pani Pasquali
Torta di Riso Liguriana
Pizza Chena Cilentana
Mafalda al Serpente
Panini di Pepe

Ravioli di Fave
Fava Ravioli with Sheep’s Milk Ricotta

Capretto Stufato
Kid braised with potatoes
Contorni

Pastiera Napoletana
Neapolitan Easter Grain Pie

Granita di Limone
Eureka Lemon Granita

The goat is butchered, and it’s in the fridge. BOO YA.

People are always asking me for recipes. They ask me for recipes, very often, that I don’t have, because I made something up at my house, or because I made some ancient dish that was passed on to me by my family or friends. This is what I mean when I say that cooking is more than a recipe. Cooking is a body of techniques, and one cuisine is distinguished from another not by recipes and often not even by ingredients: they are distinguished by their methods.

A few days ago, I posted a bit about the way many Italians make soup, that is to say, the technique involved in making such a soup. Tonight, I found myself alone for dinner, with a few potatoes growing eyes on them, and a head of curly escarole, or batavia, about to lose its luster in the fridge. Enter the joy of having stock in the freezer.

When I make stock, I try to make a lot of it. If I have chicken parts or bones left in a smaller quantity, I freeze them so when there’s 4 or 5 pounds of chicken bones (which is quite a bit), I make a lot of stock. Then I freeze it in deli containers, being sure to use a container that tapers towards the bottom. Why? So when there’s frozen stock in it, I can slip it out.

Back to the technique: I put the stock in a pan with some water to begin melting. Once it’s melted, taste it. If the stock is really strong, thin it with water. I tend to make my stock strong and freeze it in pint containers. I washed out the container with water and added it to the pot for a scant quart of liquid.

I cut up some lesser potatoes into chunks and once the stock was simmering, I added them. I cooked these for about 15 minutes or so, then I started the pestata (see link above).

After looking through the fridge, I had found some scallions, some celery, parsley and cilantro (no carrots, sadly). Two smaller ribs of celery, three scallions, a tuft of each herb and two cloves of garlic found themselves in the food processor. After a quick chop, I left the motor running and drizzled in a tablespoon or two of extra virgin olive oil- the only olive oil you should be cooking with, btw- until I had a paste, but not too liquid of one.

That paste then got fried in some more olive oil until it began to color.

I had some crushed up tomatoes in the fridge, so those were added to the pestata to cook a bit before the whole thing was mixed into the simmering soup.

After the pestata, went the escarole, cleaned (in several changes of cold water) and sliced somewhat thinly. This simmers together until the potatoes and greens are quite tender.

If I were serving this soup as an appetizer, I would use rice as a panade, good, short-grain rice like carnaroli. Tonight, I used a piece of bread, mainly because I added a poached egg to my soup, and egg and bread in soup is a winning combination. I toasted a day-old slice of bread and put it in the bottom of my bowl. I cracked an egg into the simmering soup for five minutes, then ladled the soup (egg first) on top of the bread, and sprinkled with some grated parmiggiano cheese, but you could certainly use pecorino romano or sardo or even ricotta salata. Sadly, I was so hungry I ate the egg immediately, but here’s a shot of my second helping, note the bread crust sticking out on the right.

Buon apetito.

Listening: A very powerful interview with Tony Judt on Fresh Air.

I have 5 doughs to percentagize, size, make shopping lists for – not to mention make. I have to work out the wines with Massi…and I have to organize the logistics across 2 cities and three kitchens.

BREATHE.

I’m making soup. I’m making Minestra di Pasta e Fagioli. This is a soup often known in the US as “Pasta Fazool,” because of the Neapolitan word for bean: fasulo. Whatever you call it, soup, pasta and beans are cooked together and separately throughout Italy in many preparations. There are many renditions of this soup in American restaurants and they largely suck, frankly, because they take a french or franco-american approach to an intrinsically Italian soup. They take beans and boil them with chicken stock, add a can of tomatoes and a bag of frozen vegetables. It’s a simmer-and-stir. Many delicate french soups are made this way (minus the frozen vegetables) and it’s a perfectly fine technique- but not for Italian soups.

Italian soups have 2 components  that will set them apart: pestata and pandade. Like everything in Italian, there are many different words that mean the same thing, but here’s what they mean: Pestata (or trito or mirpazza) is a paste of aromatic vegetables and fat- usually pork fat like back fat or salt pork, but could also be lard or olive oil. Garlic, onions, carrots, celery, parsely, rosemary- whatever is appropriate to the recipe (or your mood) are chopped together until very fine, and then the fat is added and chopped in as well (or you can do what I do- use a food processor). This is one of the traditional uses of the mezzaluna you got for christmas five years ago and lost in the back of the pantry. The paste is then fried separately and added to the soup once it’s lightly toasted.

Then there is the panade (or rinforzo) or thickener. In many recipes with beans, which have a natural affinity for them, potatoes are cooked along with the legumes until they’re cooked enough to be mashed, either in the soup pot, or taken out and mashed to a finer consistency and added back in. Bread can act in this role as well, and grains like semolina. Rice is generally not used in this way, since its consistency, like pasta’s, is considered sacred and is added only at the last moment to cook to its optimum point. The point is, unlike a roux or cornstarch, these add body and flavor, not merely viscosity.

And in the spirit of soup’s economy, after dinner which included a potato and radicchio salad, there was a little left, and into the soup that went as well.

I could hear my grandmother calling me a greaseball.

P, Secret Agent Gnocchi and Myself

And what’s more, you’ll see your comments more quickly, since I don’t have to wade through comment spam for 30 minutes every time I log in, thanks to Akismet, and other snazzy devices that I may or may not completely understand. The search feature works, the blog looks nicer and we now have the ability to post video and audio — the podcast lives! The blog is also easier for me to use, not that you care, but it means I’ll be able to upload more- and more interesting- content more regularly.

A few ghosts still haunt us:

Link and text formatting on old (2009 and earlier) entries

The old blog was entered in something called markdown syntax. This was a very fast and superior alternative to the text editor in drupal (the old content management system). Unfortunately, now that we’re in WordPress, if we load markdown, we disable other features that we really want to use, so for the time being, old posts are going to look strange and hyperlinks won’t work (although you can see the web address, you’ll just have to copy and paste it). Secret Agent Gnocchi and the Gnomes are working on this, but if this problem is going to be permanent, I will update the text in the more often-visited posts.

WordPress has human-readable URLs

When I post an entry or a photograph, it becomes an entry in a database. Drupal would just number them as they were created, so if you looked in the address bar, it might look like this: http://omnivorousfish.com/node/199. WordPress, however, takes the node’s title into consideration, and the same article’s URL becomes: http://omnivorousfish.com/gnocchi-the-finer-points/. Why do you care? Well, unless you link to or have bookmarks of any specific posts (not just omnivorousfish.com) you don’t care. If you are linked to me and I know about it, I will email you the correct links when I get around to it. If you’re looking for something you had bookmarked, the Search feature actually works now.

Comments prior to July 2009 are gone for the time being.

Yeah, we have no idea WTF happened on this one. They just disappeared. This really stinks, because a lot of the pasta posts had great dialogue in them, not to mention the fact that a lot of blogging luminaries showed up over the years to grace my little site with a comment, and now those comments are gone…and those people may not come back. I’m hoping they’re in an Uh-Huh video somewhere, and will come back in shaky pencil animation.

Older Photos are too wide for the new page format.

Again, this is a migration bug, and really a very minor one. If there’s a photo at the top of an old post, it impinges on the right block. No biggie.

Other than that, we are back on board with a new look and a new commitment to the slaughter of sacred cows in the food world. If you have any questions, please email us at make pasta at gmail dot com.

But that’s ok, the pumpkin ravioli are ready, there are 5 dozen in the freezer. I didn’t take any pictures, like a dumbass, but I’ll walk you through the basics. Special thanks to Billy for making the rest of the ravioli while I cleaned up the kitchen.

The dough: Pasta is predicated on the formula of one egg, or 1/4 cup of water, per 1/2-2/3 cup of flour. Most people add salt, and some olive oil, although what oil contributes I have never been able to ascertain. Water can be a matter of economy- although that economy can become tradition- or a matter of gluten development. Ravioli like a stronger dough, unreachable when using high-protein eggs as a liquid source. I have seen ravioli made only with water, a tricky proposition, since, unlike bread dough, there are no yeast and rising forgiving anything left behind in the initial mixing. Want to know the truth? It’s a matter of taste. I think the egg pasta matches the richness of the pumpkin filling, so I use all eggs for this particular recipe. I have also seen ravioli made with dough whose only liquid was **yolks**. Once you have a little practice, you can make whatever you want. Starting with a mixture of eggs and water is probably a good idea. For 6 dozen ravioli, let’s say 4 cups (20 oz) flour, 4 eggs, ½ cup water and 1 teaspoon salt. Let me caution you here, again, not to add all the flour at once. Hold back ½-3/4 cup, it is much easier to knead in flour than to add water. If you’re making it by hand, which I recommend for your first five or six times, start with the flour in a mound (in a bowl, if you’re skittish) and make a deep indentation or “well” in the top. In small bowl, beat the eggs, salt and water together and pour into the well. With a fork or your fingers, stir in flour from the walls of the well, making a thicker and thicker paste until all the flour is incorporated. When dough is a more or less a cohesive mass, it should be dry to the touch. If it feels very wet, continue to knead in the remaining flour as needed. Knead until the dough becomes smooth, homogenous and elastic, about 10 or 15 minutes. Wrap in plastic and rest for at least thirty minutes in the fridge, until an indention in the dough doesn’t bounce back.

The filling: Anything used to fill pasta should be drained. I don’t care if you’re using peanut butter, there’s water in there you don’t need. Pumpkin is bad, but other squashes are even worse. I already gave you the recipe.

The technique: Cut your dough into 6 equal pieces; use a scale if you’re paranoid. Work with one piece at a time, keeping the others covered with a plastic wrap or towels. This is a great application for a pasta machine, where you’ll want to end up with a 5” x 30” rectangle. If you’re doing it by hand, use twice as much dough to make a 10×30 rectangle, and cut it in half to follow these directions. This piece of dough is going to make 12 ravioli, so scoop packed tablespoonfuls of filling 2-1/2 inches apart along the long side of the dough, 1” from the edge. Brush the surface of dough not covered by filling (including in between) LIGHTLY with water and fold the dough in half over itself, so you end up with 12 still-connected ravioli in a row. Press down along folded edge, up to the filling; then press in between ravioli. Finally, push any air out of the ravioli through the last open seam, then seal that seam. Cut the ravioli apart with a round cutter, pastry wheel or, my grandmother’s fave, a juice glass. Usually I do them square because I like the extra pasta while I’m eating them. Also, they’re faster and generate less waste than round varieties (though you can salvage enough waste for a small serving of fettucine when you’re done).

Now comes the fun part: the first time you do this, they’re going to stick to the table, no matter how much flour you’ve put on them. Loosen them with something THIN and METAL, like a bench scraper, icing spatula or even a butter knife. You could also work a piece of dental floss underneath them, but be careful not to tear them.

Obviously, this all assumes you’ve worked with pasta dough before, or at least some kind of dough. Don’t be skittish with the flour your first time. You can freeze them flat on cookie sheets lined with floured towels, once they’re solid you can put them in bags.

Listening: Watching a Law & Order rerun