Here Comes Peter Cottontail, Again

Well, [last year, I fantasized about Easter dinner](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/133). This year, **I’m doing it**. I made 120 ravioli and did mise* for 3 easter pies plus bread tomorrow. 15 ladies and gentlemen are coming to eat all this stuff sunday, and I am **psyched**. If only I had had time for landscaping. Living in an apartment, you forget that there even is an outside to your home. It’s an amorphous concept, like Detroit.

Well, here’s the menu, if you can’t wait to find out. It’s a mixture of Neapolitan, Sicilian and Southern Californian influences, with nods to tradition, availability and pragmatism. And no, unfortunately, I did not find a goat.

*Pizza Chena* Easter “Stuffed” Pie in the style of Acqua Bella, Campania: A rich yeast dough with butter and eggs, filled with basket cheese, ham, pecorino romano and herbs.

*Torta di Zucchini* Another Easter Pie, this time Filo filled with a custard holding together Salame Napoletano, zucchini and spring onions.

*Pane Pasquali* A festive yellow bread dough braided with whole eggs, covered with poppy seeds and baked.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ravioli of Fava Beans with tuma cheese, sauced with butter, olive oil and marjoram, with caciocavallo cheese

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Lamb Leg *Cacio e Uova*: Braised Lamb with onions and white wine with an enriched sauce of eggs, lemon and cheese

Braised artichokes
Roasted potatoes with rosemary

Arugula Salad with Lemon

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

*Pastiera Napoletana* Easter grain pie

*Risu Niuro* Sicilian Black Easter Risotto (with cocoa, not squid ink, you knucklehead)

So, as you can see, I have to get back to work. I hope you all have a *great* holiday.

Listening: NPR, [Fresh Air](http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13)

Pascha (Pasqua) [Easter]

Well, Easter is almost here, and for the first time in about ten years, I have off. And we’re getting into it.

I’m only partly Sicilian by extraction, although most of my cultural exposure was with Sicilians, but a lot of my family traditions are *cilentano*, that is to say from Campania, which is to say Naples, the capital of Campania. That means *pastiera*, or grain pie, a sweet pie made of hulled wheat berries. It also means *pizza chena*, or *pizza piena*, which means stuffed pie (the former the Neapolitan word, the latter Italian), a yeast-raisd dough stuffed with any combination of salumi, cheeses, herbs and boiled eggs. The “ham pie” of my childhod is a simple animal made of ham, hardboiled eggs, fresh ricotta (basket cheese) and parsley.

Strangely, we never had lamb on Easter, but then again we never had lamb ever because my mother doesn’t like it. In fact, the first time I had it, it was in a restaurant when I was 12 or 13, and I ordered it mainly because I knew my mother didn’t like it. And even though it wasn’t phenomenal and it came with irridescent green mint jelly, I knew that there was something to this whole lamb thing.

What we did have was ravioli. In fact, I made my first-ever ravioli for easter, when I was 9 or 10. My mom thought I was nuts (she still does).

So I’m working on the menu, but I’m trying to hit all the traditional bases: favas, cheese, eggs, peas and artichokes. We’ll see how the markets treat me.

I’ll tell you, it’s not easy to find a lot of specialty Italian products in Southern California. In New York- or even Philadelphia- imported and artisanally made products are everywhere, **especially** around Easter. But here, not so much. I did find tuma, a somewhat obscure sicilian cheese, in this little deli near my house. If you’re in long beach, I recommend [Angelo's](http://www.yelp.com/biz/angelos-italian-deli-long-beach) highly. But it seems like I have to go back to mail order, well, internet order, which I haven’t really done since the Food Network Revolution. That and, of course, I need to start adapting recipes to available products, just like the immigrants did. But for this year, I’m sticking to the originals as much as I can.

Listening: “I Palindrome I” Apollo 18 They Might Be Giants

Agro and Dolce

Sometimes you just get a taste in your head. Like a bad song from high school, no matter what you do, you know there’s only one way to get it out, which is how you came to find yourself in Best Buy at nine o’clock at night trying to decide between “Becoming X” and “Best of the Sneaker Pimps.”

Well, a couple of months ago, a very specific flavor rolled into my head: the sicilian sweet and sour flavor. An amalgamation of wine, tomatoes, sugar, vinegar and sometimes honey, it’s a singular taste that can’t really be explained. It’s richer than what Americans think of as Chinese sweet and sour, much subtler and infinitely more complex. Imagine a tomato sauce a little on the sweet side with an astringent background note that doesn’t quite make you pucker, but stays with you nonetheless. The subtlety comes from long cooking, and often one or more of the sweet and sour components disappear completely, like in *polpo agrodolce*, sweet and sour octopus, which has tomatoes in it, but you’d never know.

Sometimes the sauce is left slightly out of balance, and ingredients are added at the end to shift it one way or the other, like currants or raisins for sweet, or fresh vinegar or capers for sour. You could cook just about anything agrodolce, probably, and get away with it; though squashes (summer and winter), sprouting vegetables and shellfish seem to have an especial affinity for the treatment.

Last night, I finally scratched the itch with an old-school *pasta al cavolofiore*: pasta with cauliflower. It’s a typical agrodolce dish, garnished with toasted breadcrumbs rather than cheese, which would be at odds with the complex and poignant flavor of the sauce. I took some poetic license this time and used panko breadcrumbs, mainly because I didn’t have any dry bread lying around, and the panko seem to keep their flavor better in packaging than regular breadcrumbs and their larger size mimics fresh.

It’s a big recipe; it will sauce at least two or three pounds of pasta, but it is **fantastic** spooned over polenta and would be equally at home stirred into or poured onto rice or plain risotto. You can pretty much substitute winter squash, broccoli or brussels sprouts directly into this recipe. For zucchini or yellow squash skip the initial blanching, and for eggplant a quick saute in peanut oil should replace the blanching altogether.

I’ve only made this with white cauliflower, but I’d imagine that other colors or [romanesco]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanesco_broccoli) would be equally good, though for romanesco I would only blanch it very briefly.

The pictures of this didn’t come out terribly well, but I included one anyway so you could see the texture of the finished sauce. Don’t let the look of that pic fool you: this sauce is boss.

**Pasta al Cavolofiore Agrodolce**
Pasta with Sweet and Sour Cauliflower

1 head very fresh cauliflower, about 1-1/2 pounds

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
5 or 6 cloves of garlic, peeled
2 28 oz cans of whole peeled plum tomatoes, san marzano or bel roma if available
1 to 2 teaspoons sugar, to tase and depending on the tomatoes
2 tablespoons red or white wine vinegar, plus more to taste
1 tablespoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon black pepper, plus more to taste
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes, or to taste
1 teaspoon dried oregano, with the blossoms if using branch oregano
2/3 cup dried black currants or golden raisins (or plain raisins)
1/2 cup pine nuts

2 cups homemade (or packaged Panko) breadcrumbs
salt and pepper to taste
1/2 cup or so extra virgin olive oil
2 teaspoons minced fresh rosemary or other herb

Set a large pot of salted water to boil. If cooking pasta, do NOT use the same water to cook the pasta and the cauliflower. The pasta will end up tasting like funky old cabbage.

Heat the oil in a deep pot (at least 4 quarts) and add the onion. Cook over medium heat until softened, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and add the garlic. When the garlic just begins to turn golden (NOT brown) add the tomatoes and all their juice. Rinse out the cans with some water, but don’t add more than 3/4 of a cup or so to the sauce. Add the sugar, vinegar, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes and oregano. Bring to a gentle boil and cook for ten minutes, stirring occasionally.

After ten minutes, lower the heat to medium and start breaking up the tomatoes with a spoon. Don’t worry about the texture at this point, just pop each tomato so they’re not keeping their seeds and juice separate from the rest of the sauce. Cover partially and cook for thirty minutes or so, somewhere between a lively simmer and a gentle boil. Stir it regularly, as the tomatoes will want to stick to the bottom. If you’re not using a very heavy pan for this, you might want to use a flame tamer (or my ghetto flame tamer, the lid from the tomato can). If it seems that the sauce is too liquid, remove the cover.

Meanwhile, break off the leaves from the cauliflower stalk and cut around it to separate the florets. Trim them into inch or so pieces, then pare away the outer layers of the stalk and slice what’s left (do not throw this part away on any vegetable, including heads of lettuce). Blanch the cauliflower for about 5 minutes, until it is barely softened, but still retains some crunch in the middle. Drain the cauliflower in a colander. Don’t use this water for anything else; it tastes kind of funky.

Put the breadcrumbs into a skillet and season them with salt and pepper. Pour in some of the olive oil, just enough to moisten them. Don’t put so much that there is oil pooling in the bottom. Put this over medium low heat and stir it often, so that the breadcrumbs turn a toasty mahogany color, but don’t let them burn. If they burn, start over: there’s no saving them. When you think they’re getting close, add the rosemary so it perfumes the crumbs. Transfer to a plate when they’re ready.

Cover the raisins with boiling water. Toast the pine nuts in a small, heavy skillet over medium heat, tossing regularly, then transfer to a plate to cool.

After thirty minutes, the sauce should taste more or less like a marinara sauce: bright and fresh, but a little bit sour and a little bit oniony-sweet. The tomatoes should be pretty coarse by this point, but break them up with a spoon to a chunky but regular consistency. Add the cauliflower and lower the heat so the sauce simmers gently. Cook the sauce and cauliflower together for about ten minutes, stirring occaisionally.

Drain the raisins.

After ten minutes, add the raisins and pine nuts to the sauce, adjust the seasoning with salt and pepper and maybe some fresh vinegar if it’s needed or desired. Cook the sauce for five minutes more.

Serve over pasta or polenta, sprinkled with the toasted breadcrumbs.

Finished Sauce

Pasta Sauces: Salse e Condimenti

You’d be amazed at what Italian people don’t put on pasta.

What I mean by that is good pasta requires something more like decoration than a sauce in the franco-american ideology. Basically, pasta dressing falls into one of two categories: salse and condimenti. Salsa is the familiar beast: tomato sauce, alfredo sauce (a mainly American animal) or pesto. These things, although appropriate, should be used sparingly. You might be skeptical to hear that I wouldn’t put more than three or four tablespoons of tomato sauce on a serving of pasta, less of pesto. These things should meld into the pasta, co-mingle in the fabric of the noodle, and hide in the ridges, cracks and tunnels you have gone to such pains to choose. These often, but not always, fall into the alla category: alla bolognese (Bologna), alla cacciatore (hunter), alla prostituta (like it sounds, aka puttanesca).

More common, though, is the condimento. This is, usually, one or two ingredients, cut somewhat small with some seasoning, moistened with pasta cooking water and served, distinct from but harmonious with the pasta that surrounds it. The names of these dishes usually invoke con (with): pasta con patate (potatoes), con piselli (peas), con cicireddu (bait fish), con limone (lemon), yes lemon. Very often, these things have a ladleful of tomato sauce thrown in them, but that has as much to do with the ubiquity of a simmering pot of pumaruoru (tomato sauce) as anything else.

As you can see in the picture in the previous post, these condimenti are barely there, secondary to the glory of the pasta. As an added bonus, if you’re cooking store-bought dry pastasciutta, you can assemble 90% of condimenti tradizionale in the time it takes for the water to boil and the pasta to cook. I use the word “assemble” intentionally; many of these sauces don’t really cook at all: some minced anchovies and olive oil from the can stirred in the bottom of the serving bowl will warm up nicely when the hot-off-the-presses pasta and clinging pasta water are dropped on top and mixed together. Soft butter and grated parmiggiano or romano cheese will do likewise. Pasta all’estate (in the summer) is a raw tomato sauce: fresh tomatoes, basil, oregano and some chopped red onion are warmed only by the heat from the pasta.

I don’t speak Italian well enough to know the hows and whys of the use of the word con in these dishes. Indeed, pasta al burro (with butter) or alla panna (with cream) uses a, yet it’s con broccoli. Is this because broccoli is solid? If anyone knows, please comment.

Here are some traditional dishes, then I have to drive to Philly. The dishes with 2 names have the sicilian name and the italian name. I’m feeling instructional.

First the classic: Pasta all’aglio e olio. I know, that’s a lot of Is ad Ls together. A Tuscan might pronounce that “al AHL-yo eh OH-lee-o,” but I’ve never heard it pronounced anything other than “EYE yoy” or “EYE YOY-yo.” This is olive oil with very thinly sliced garlic, just barely caramel colored around the edges, NEVER brown. Herbs can be added to this (like parsley, a classic Sicilian “aô pitrusinu” (prezzemolo)), or whole small fish “con cicireddu” or anything you have lying around the fridge. In a lot of Italian-American households, this last dish is known as “alla frigidaire.” No kidding.

Pasta con patate: Potatoes, anchovies and capers

Pasta con vruccoli (broccoli): Broccoli blanched, then sauteed with oil and garlic, sometimes served as a very thick soup

Pasta con sparaceddu (cavolofiore): Cauliflower, boiled, then sauteed with onions, tomato sauce, pine nuts and currants (halfway between a salsa and a condimento)

Pasta con sfrizzoli: Pork or chicken skin, rendered and fried until crisp, then perfumed with a small amount of garlic (cracklings with garlic)

Pasta con piselli: Butter, cheese and a handful of freshly blanched or defrosted frozen peas. Before you go all apeshit, remember that when peas are picked they immediately begin to convert their sugar to starch, so unless you can get crazy-fresh peas from the market, frozen is the way to go. I have never gotten an edible fresh pea from the supermarket.

Listening: In a bizarre moment of iTunes random, 10,000 Maniacs was followed by Persian Ghazal, then the decidedly Jewish Klezmatics. World peace brought to you by Apple.

10,000 Maniacs “Hey Jack Kerouac” In My Tribe
Ghazal “Between Dawn and a New Truth” As Night Falls on the Silk Road
The Klezmatics “Russian Shers” Shvaygn Egel Toyt (Silence Equals Death)