The Omnivorous Fish

Well, last year, I fantasized about Easter dinner. 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.

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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

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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

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 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

I admit it: I am depressed. This is a fact. I am ready for f___ing christmas to be over. I want this gig over with, I want this holiday over with, I want to get back to my kitchen and back to my friends. I belong to a neat little community in Long Beach, and I miss them; and they miss me, or so they tell me when they call. And I went on a date with this guy, and I want to take him out again. I feel like a 16 year old girl, a little bit, just slightly, since, well… he’s kind of dreamy.

It doesn’t help that I had to do all my christmas prep in 2 days, running around an unfamiliar landscape in a rented car, much of which used to be farm and forest land that has been strip-mined into homes and strip malls as far as the eye can see. I’m broke (a relative term), which is a major cramp in my style, and since I waited til the last minute to shop in a basically ordinary place, my usual toy-shopping bacchanalia was pinched into the stressful last-minute nightmare that it is for most people throughout their lives.

The funny thing is I am in the midst of one of the happier periods of my life, I just want to get back to it. I had a lot going on when I left… and I feel interrupted. Oh well. Gotta head out for the 47 fish dinner. Why don’t we do an imaginary menu? Wait, I’ll do the real menu first:

Shrimp cocktail
Mussels in tomato sauce
Squid stuffed with breadcrumbs
Fried smelts
Lasagne with seafood
Spaghetti with clams
and we were supposed to have sweet and sour salt cod, but I forgot to buy the cod before it was too late to soak… so I blew it.

And let’s imagine what we might have:
Although I love salt cod, I would save the agrodolce (sweet-sour) treatment for octopus (see below), so I might make:

baccala (salt cod) in a salad with potatoes and fennel
baccalaccio

sweet-sour octopus cooked in red wine. This gets cooked for a long time with a fragment of cinnamon stick in it. Don’t laugh.
polpo agrodolce

roasted eel with cipolline onions
anguidda ai cipuddini

shrimp scampi- the real deal with sesame oil, not what they have at Red Lobster
ammari liguriani

clams in white sauce
vongole in bianco

pasta with whole crabs in marinara sauce
pasta ai granchi

panfried smelts with parsely
cicireddi al pitrusinu

Whatever you’re eating, have a good holiday.

This Easter, I’m working. All the time. What’s more, I still don’t have a kitchen (though I’m getting closer every day).

I drove down to my Mom’s house yesterday, I’m going to my sister’s for dinner, and then back on my head tomorrow at 8AM.

My sister is making ham, which will be fine. She bought it at Sam’s Club, but it will be fine, since ham, even at its humblest, is a excellent vehicle for salt. I don’t know what else there will be, except for the bottles of barbera I’m bringing, but it will all be fine.

But I can’t help but fantasize about what I would cook. Want to fantasize with me?

First, you need to know that Easter is the holiest day in the Roman Catholic Calendar, and is a Feast day (as opposed to Good Friday, which is a Fast day [as is Christmas Eve, where you eat more than almost any other day, which makes no sense, but there you go looking for sense in religion]). Italians, however, especially Sicilians, have retained a great deal of their indigenous rituals, mostly regarding curses and charms, but also unabashedly use Easter as a ritual of Spring, and the traditional foods reflect that.

What are the traditional foods, you ask? Ace #1 Italian Easter food, hands-down no question: eggs. In times before modern animal husbandry, Spring is when eggs began to appear in abundance, and have been associated with fertility and rebirth since man first broke a shell. Goat and lamb rank high, as do peas, artichokes and cheese. In Naples, they stew kid with wine, peas, hardboiled eggs and hard cheese. In Lazio the Roman influence is strong, and many brodetti make an appearance, that is to say soups thickened with egg, often including lemon and rice. Salami, ham, etc. also pop up, as people cleaned out the last of the winter preserves. Thus, the Easter “Ham Pie” of Italian-American fame: Pizza Chena (or Pizza Rustica).

This Ham Pie, of course, begins a long list of things that get eaten after Mass on Saturday night, and Easter morning (and about an hour after Easter dinner). To me, it is the ne plus ultra for Easter foods, but the first runner up is Easter Bread, which is not unlike a brioche, rolled into long ropes and braided together with dyed, hardboiled eggs.

All that aside, what would I cook for dinner?

Pea Soup. No doubt about it, if fresh peas are available. Leeks, peas, mint, stock, cream, period. Falanghina or Greco di Tufo would be welcome additions.

Fava Ravioli. Traditional, but contemporary, favas blanched and mixed with basket cheese and fresh mint, stuffed into pasta and tossed with butter, marjoram and fava greens. A light red wine would be the order of the day for me, or a ballsier white, but I would rather see a nice Barbera d’Asti or maybe the varietal gamay from Edmunds St John. Mmm.

Kid Leg Roasted with Rosemary, Potatoes and Lemon. Yes, kid, as in goat. I guess you could have lamb, but it wouldn’t be the same. I would garnish this with hardboiled eggs and an herb salad. Call me a crazy American, but I would want Ridge zinfandel with this. A heavier Barbera or Dolcetto could do the job here, too. Don’t be afraid of the lemon; it loses its teeth in the oven.

For dessert, a cheese cake of some order would be traditional, but I might be inclined to go with Riso Nero di Pasqua, or Easter Black Rice. This is a black risotto, not from squid ink, but from cocoa and chocolate, thickened with cheese, and garnished with rum-soaked fried figs. Labor intensive, yes, but it’s a labor of love. Very much a traditional animal from Sicily, it should be served with a nice passito, but be sure to leave room for agneddu pasquali, the marzipan lambs.

Whatever you’re eating, having a good holiday.

Another long stint between posts, and I don’t do a lot of trick photos of eggs in famous moments in musical theater history. No wonder nobody reads this thing. Well, except haddock and occasionally shuna. Oh, and the Agent, when I mention the blog and he feels guilty. It’s ok, though, I’ve never done anything for recognition. I do things for me, or for other people, not for recognition of me. Believe me, if I wanted that, I would have stayed in languages. I could have gone to school anywhere for foreign languages. The head of the language department of my high school never ceased to try and challenge me with a word or two here and there of a language I didn’t know. He never got me, although he did know a lot more German idioms than I. I was the foreign language beauty queen blah blah blah.

Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. The Agent and I are off to Philly where I will cook alongside Mamma for the first time in probably ten years. In between rounding out the Seventh Fish for Xmas Eve, seeing old friends and cooking Christmas dinner, I have to finish my Christmas shopping, so I may well not get to post until afterwards.

Here’s a sneak-peek at the menu, subject to change based on tomorrow’s greenmarket.

Christmas 2006

Crostini with Mushrooms and Dinosaur Kale

Cheese Pumpkin Ravioli with Sage Butter and Pecorino

Roast Pork Shoulder with Turnips
Braised Red Cabbage, Brussels Sprouts

The food is gone, mostly. The dishes are half done. The crowd is gone. The stragglers have stayed and gossipped and drank the dregs and left. The leftovers were sent home. The agent has already passed out.

I’m alone with my thoughts, about this party and the people who were here and the people who weren’t. This was my party for many years; now it’s ours. I’m ok with that, just getting used to the idea. I still hear the din and the glasses clinking and chirping and the faint whisper of christmas music in the background. The phantom party lives on in my mind.

Many people who were here will read this, and I want to thank you. Just like my work is nothing without an audience, so is my hobby. If you weren’t here, especially Nick, you were missed. When the show you work at changes, your surroundings change, the people in your life change. The moments that were really good live on in my memory and in this christmas party. Often, it’s the only time of the year I see the people who made those times special. They’re doing other shows, I’m doing other shows, that’s how it is. But tonight, I can offer a slice of ham and a glass of wine to damn near everyone I’ve ever met, and I love it. I eat a slice or two myself, and when I do, I think about some of the people who simply aren’t here anymore. Like the shows I did with them, they are gone from the stage, but not from memory.

The Christmas Party is next week. We’re having it early this year due to many scheduling conflicts in the past, and as a result, it has jumped up out of nowhere.

I am working two gigs this week, so the Agent and I sat down and divvied up what needed to be done. Since all of our good Xmas Music is on record, I did a little iTunes shopping for some holiday classics, and last night we went to Fairway and bought them out of torrone.
For those of you who don’t know me, it may come as a surprise that the menu for the Christmas party has changed exactly once in nine years. It’s the one party I give that’s less about the food and more about socializing, so I want to spend less time in the kitchen. This, of course, means crowd pleasers, like baked ziti and ham. (The one change was from bratwursts to ham, due to the inability to get decent bratwursts at a reasonable price.) Potato salad (with the martini olives from a jar), cheese and crackers, a green salad and Christmas cookies. That about does it.

Dinner dropped down to a meager 28, but we persevered and a good time was had by all. I saw my first tofurkey from a safe distance.

We only hit nine wineries on our trek through Seneca Lake, but I would have driven there and back for one taste of the late harvest riesling from Hermann Wiemer.

We have four cases to review and the Christmas party to get ready for. Meanwhile, we are still in Cincinnati, and I am going to a live taping of A Prairie Home Companion tomorrow!

I hope everybody’s holidays were a success, and much love to the rest of my family celebrating on Sunday.

The high holy days are upon us once again. What does this mean to me? Well, nothing, really, but it means something to the Agent and it’s an excuse to cook, so here we are. Monday was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and for some reason, you can’t eat and atone at the same time, so you fast from sundown to sundown. Afterwards, naturally, you break the fast- as soon as is humanly possible- traditionally with lots of carbs. The Agent’s experience has been that a broth type soup relaxes the contracted stomach and allows you to eat more easily after the fast. I don’t think I’ve ever gone twenty four hours without eating in my life, and I’m not about to start, so I’ll have to take his word for it.