I Zeppoli

If a food could be a moment in time, one of those moments would be a strong, sweet thimbleful of coffee with a hot zeppole; since we taste with smell, I have to include the breeze and the fig tree.

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

F—ing Stouffer’s Lasagna

When I was a wee lad, I discovered that not all restaurants had the same integrity when it came to preparing the food they served. I learned this in a small town in North Carolina when someone I was working with exclaimed, “Awesome, this is Stouffer’s.” And I said, “It tastes like Stouffer’s lasagna?” How disappointing, I told myself. “No,” he corrected me, “this is fucking Stouffer’s lasagna.”

And it was.

Years later, I saw the package of Stouffer’s lasagna that diners and coffee shops the nation over serve as their own. And let’s face it, as inauthentic lasagnas go, Stouffer’s is as good as or better than what your average crappy diner would come up with. So I ate it.

It turns out that Stouffer’s has a whole institutional division, facilitating all of America’s favorites: macaroni and cheese, meat lasagna, salisbury steak, chicken pot pie, christ only knows what else. Who knew?

When I was a kid on the road, those diners and coffee shops became more to me than food; good thing, too, because the food was awful. They were like little families I could fall into for a week, a day, a night. And they served terrible coffee that I drank too much of; provided ashtrays, which I filled to the brim over and over; and had beautiful, rock-hard old women in identical orthopedic shoes and grotesque masks of makeup, which served both to be pretty and to hide the years of disappointment. They were nice to that unique breed of lonely men that congregate around the counters of diners, and the drunks and the nit-picking old ladies filling plastic bags with the cheese bread. They laughed and popped their gum and smoked extra-long menthol cigarettes and growled out ‘Thanks, hon,’ as they dropped the check on the table.

I don’t eat like that anymore- much. Sometimes, though, grilled cheese with rock hard tomato or chicken soup with chunks of bouillon cube still floating around in it- or fucking Stouffer’s lasagna- take me back just far enough to remember I never want to go there again.

California

I’m in California. Southern California to be specific, in other words, I’m in hell. Ok, that’s a lie, it’s actually very nice (although I wouldn’t want to live here) here in Long Beach. I’m visiting several friends who have moved out here in the last two years, two of whom just had a baby (pictures to come). Now we’re headed to the local [farmers' market](http://www.harborareafarmersmarkets.org/) to pick up some provisions for our trip up to the cabin at Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains.

Last night we had delicata squash, crimini mushrooms (which are white button mushrooms plus 3-4 weeks) and swiss chard on farfalle with some surprisingly good but ethically horrible processed pecorino-style cheese from the supermarket.

I have [mentioned before](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/32) my discomfort with supermarkets, and all this reading and research I have been doing about the USDA lately (more to come on that) has made it even more so. I look at bags of chips and jars of salsa like they are about to explode with hazardous materials, and maybe they are. The meal we ate last night was fantastic because it was more than the sum of its parts: the friends, the wine, the beautiful home and the atmosphere; but the simple fact is that the food from the supermarket just doesn’t taste as good. The swiss chard was bland and unvibrant, the mushrooms past their prime and don’t get me started on the squash.

OK, we’re off to the market.

Listening: Cats thumping on the stoop, blue jays and Michael nattering on the phone. Organic music.

Lunch: Sici Soul Food

Zucchini alla Sara

The word Siciliy, in Italian, is pronounced see-CHEEL-ya. The way people actually say it in Sicily is more like see-JEE-ya. The “L” is annunciated, but rolled, sort of like Latinate “R”s. It’s almost aspirative, but the breath doesn’t really resonate the way it does with, say “pit.” Long story short, things that are Sicilian are often referred to as “SEE-jee” by Italians and “SIH-jee” by Italian Americans. (Sometimes Sicilians will also refers to things as *al isola* or *isolata*, meaning more or less “from the island.” I think this is archaic now, however.)

By ethnic extraction, I am half Sicilian, but most of my family of that side had either died or become completely Americanized by the time I was old enough to be cognizant of such things. My real immersion in the culture happened when I got into the pizza business, and worked with three different owners and their families who were direct-from-the-mountain Sicilian, two of whom were from the same town. I worked literally thousands of hours with these families, and learned a lot about Sicily past and present from them.

Two things that I took away from cooking with them (cooking for ourselves, not for the *christiani*, or customers) were freedom from tomatoes (although I love them) and a deep and meaningful respect for and admiration of vegetables. I once watched my first boss’s wife, Sara, slice an enormous zucchini, the likes of which I had never seen before, and had come from her garden, salt it in a colander and weight it with cans of tomatoes, a treatment I had only ever seen for eggplant (by my mother for her absolutely ethereal eggplant parmigiana). After a few hours (the lunch rush), Sara unceremoniously dropped these limp, wet slices of squash into the deep fryer, creating a cacophony of gurgling and splattering that was the antithesis of everything I had learned to want from safe deep frying. It was magical. Once they emerged, she sauteed some garlic in olive oil and we ate the whole mess on pasta. Specifically dry spaghetti, only occasionally did we eat short pasta, and fresh pasta was infrequently seen and reserved for more refined sauces.

The zucchini slices were tranformed into mahogany-bubbled crispy-mushy pieces of heaven. They were sweet and savory and salty and greasy, in a good way. That meal has stuck with me the way few have. The way it was “Italian food,” which I had been eating all my life, but was completely alien to me, the care Sara took preparing it and the warmth with which she included me in her family’s meal.

We have kitchens in the hotel here in Greenville, SC, and I went to the ["Bi-Lo"](http://www.bi-lo.com/) with my boss when we got here. It’s pretty unremarkable as chain supermarkets go, and it was actually kind of bizarre to be in one. The only supermarkets I ever go in in are Whole Foods or [Fairway](http://www.fairwaymarket.com/), which are by and large unlike most supermarkets (at least the Whole Foods on 24th and 7th in Manhattan). So I bought all these groceries, including the [aforementioned eight-ball squash](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/27) and was stranded at the hotel this morning, so I decided to cook. As a point of information, the recipe below will require about 40 packets of salt and about 5 of pepper, if you’re making it in a hotel room.

Pasta con Zucchini alla Sara
amply serves 2 for lunch, 3 if one of them is an anorexic actor

1/2 pound dry pasta, short or long (I used Barilla rotini)
1 large eight-ball squash (8-10 oz)
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil, approximately

3 or 4 cloves garlic, chopped (about 1.5 tbsn)
1/2 small serrano chile, chopped finely (about 1 tsp)
1 small tomato, diced (about 2/3 cup)

salt and pepper
grated (or chopped) hard cheese, such as sharp provolone or romano (this is an instance where the richness of parmesan cheese would be inappropriate), for sprinkling on pasta

Slice the squash in half through the stem and trim it away. If the squash is very seedy, you can scrape some of the seeds away, but try not to lose any/much flesh. Slice the squash into half-moons (or crescent moons, if you’ve seeded) and layer into a colander set over a sheet pan or plate, salting every layer thoroughly. Invert a plate over the zucchini (one of small enough diameter not to be impeded by the colander as the zucchini level lowers) and place weights on the plate, such as cans of tomatoes or gold bricks. If your arrangement is such that there is any chance of the zucchini or its juice contacting the weights, wrap them in plastic wrap just to be safe. Let this sit for at least an hour, until the zucchini are softened and the drip of moisture into the sheet pan is no longer noticeable. This will vary a lot on your squash.

Bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil and add 1 tbsn salt for every 2 quarts. (I once heard someone say that it mattered whether you salted the water before or after the water boiled. That’s ludicrous. [My mother claims that the salt makes the water boil faster. There's no scientific basis for this that I'm aware of, and informal kitchen experiments tell me this is not, in fact, true.])

Meanwhile, lay the zucchini out on paper or clean cloth towels to drain. Heat a saute pan over medium-high heat and add extra virgin olive oil until it is about 1 cm (3/8″) deep in the pan. Test the oil by dipping the corner of one zucchini slice in the oil. If it sizzles violently, it’s ready. Add the zucchini slices in a single layer, working in batches if necessary. If you end up between batches without a full pan, adjust the heat so that the oil doesn’t darken and smoke. Fry the zucchini until darkened and blistered all over its surface, about 2 minutes per side. When turning the zucchini, turn it away from you, so if the oil splatters it splatters away from you.

As you take the zucchini out of the oil, put it on a plate and grind black pepper over it (or shake your packet). Do not drain on paper towels, this zucchini-olive oil will become the sauce.

Add the pasta to the boiling water, stirring occasionally. If your stove sucks, like the one at my hotel and can’t keep the water at a vigorous boil, cover the pot about half-way. DO NOT cover it completely. Dump out the oil you’ve cooked the zucchini in (unless it is really clear and flawless) and add 2 tbsn fresh oil to the pan. Add the garlic and the chili and saute until the garlic barely begins to brown around the edges. Add the zucchini and heat through. Add the tomato, stir and take off the heat.

Cook the pasta until just barely *al dente*, or “to the tooth,” meaning when it has softened, but still needs to be bitten through. It should be neither crunchy nor mushy. Keep in mind the pasta will continue to cook after it has been drained.
Take some of the pasta water out of the pot with a pyrex or metal cup and reserve. Drain the pasta. With some water still clinging, add the pasta to the zucchini and toss thoroughly. If the sauce seems a little “tight” or if you like it liquid, add some pasta water. Keep in mind, however, this does not make a sauce like you might me used to. There are three autonomous components to the dish: pasta, vegetables and lingering juices.

Put the pasta in bowls and sprinkle with grated cheese. Serve immediately.

Listening: *Dogs Among the Bushes* by the Chieftans from the The Best of the Chieftans