Tag Archives: Italian

Cooking in the Time of COVID – A Mediterranean Melange

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Instagram Post 5/30/2020

 
👨‍🍳 Cooking in the Time of COVID 👨‍🍳

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A Mediterranean mélange in the service of using up the last bits of saladworthy candidates from the pantry and fridge. Of primary significance, I’ve finally finished off the last of the dried chickpeas! 🙌

The slightly smaller spheres are Lebanese moghrabieh which are similar to their more diminutive Israeli couscous cousins. These wonderful starchy pearls deserve far better than the short shrift I’ve given them here – I almost wish I had left them in the pantry to star in some future culinary legerdemain. There’ll be a next time. In this case, I toasted them first to bring out their latent nuttiness; toasted almonds and currants made a considerable contribution as well.

From the refrigerator, I exhumed some jarred red pepper strips, Italian fried green peppers and agrodolce sun dried red peppers along with Moroccan pickled eggplant, Greek black olives and creamy feta cheese. Plated the medley over baby arugula and dressed it with olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, za’atar and sumac.

Tasted so much better than it looked!
 
 
Stay safe, be well, and eat whatever it takes. ❤️
 
 

Cooking in the Time of COVID – Pizza-ish

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Instagram Post 5/11/2020

 
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Today’s adventure in Polish sausage swap-ins (see my last post) was this:

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Looks a lot like pizza, doesn’t it? I already had mozzarella, mushrooms, and homemade tomato sauce, but I wasn’t about to invest energy in making pizza dough (quarantining is frustrating enough), so I resorted to my package of trusty, versatile flour tortillas.

I sprinkled some corn meal onto a jelly roll pan and laid in a tortilla, topped it with the thinnest possible layer of mozzarella, and sandwiched that with another tortilla. The idea behind this experiment was that the mozz would act like a laminating glue to yield a base with enough heft to support the toppings. Stuck it into a hot oven to melt the cheese – essentially to see if the theory would work.

Added sauce…

…mozzarella…

…and mushrooms.

Sautéed some country style kielbasa wiejska, tossed in a little fennel seed to trick it into thinking it was Italian sausage and topped this doppelganger with a sprinkle of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano and a drizzle of trompe l’olive oeil. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

To give you an idea of the thickness of the “crust”:

In its native habitat.

 
 
Stay safe, be well, and eat whatever it takes. ❤️
 
 

Cooking in the Time of COVID – Sausage & Peppiz!

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Instagram Post 5/9/2020

 
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When I was researching adding a Greenpoint, Brooklyn ethnojunket to my repertoire of neighborhood food tours, I bought too many (of course) Eastern European sausages in order to evaluate which would be best (as Melania would have it). There are still a dozen or so in the freezer. Sounds to me like another use-whatever-I-have-on-hand-without-venturing-out-to-buy-more-stuff challenge.

So we’ll start with the most obvious substitution, a sammich endemic to NYC affectionately called Sausage & Peppiz. This one was easy. I already had onions and peppers on hand so I fried them up with some swojska kielbasa adding my not so secret ingredient, fennel seed, which makes everything it comes into contact with taste like Italian sausage. A hit of Parmigiano-Reggiano and bada bing bada boom, Sausage & Peppiz! Mangia!

(All I needed was “the wine with the peaches” as they say at the San Gennaro Festival! 😉)
 
 
Stay safe, be well, and eat whatever it takes. ❤️
 
 

Cooking in the Time of COVID – Lasagna

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Instagram Post 3/31/2020

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👨‍🍳 Cooking in the Time of COVID 👨‍🍳

These days, I find myself preparing a lot of comfort food and that invariably involves a plateful of starches, an extravagance of calories, and a mountain of regret on the bathroom scale the next morning. I try to use ingredients I have on hand so when I do make the now infrequent trip to my local supermarket, I grab just a few items to support some ad hoc recipes and then make a quick getaway. I had a finger of amazing Albanian suxhuk, a dry beef sausage, in the freezer; this particular link was extraordinarily spicy and I reckoned its best use would be as a component of some concoction rather than a straight up snack.

On my way to the market, visions of comfort foods (not the least of which was lasagna, TBH) danced in my head – although my goal was to supplement whatever I had at home frugally, not to open up a whole new can of worms. But that damned lasagna relentlessly persisted in invading my thoughts. Long story short: “just a few items” became several pounds of mozzarella, ricotta, and lasagna noodles, some fresh basil, and a jar of tomato sauce I particularly favor. I rationalized my obsessive compulsive behavior by averring that I could dice the bit of suxhuk and toss it into the sauce. And beyond that, I had some fennel seed at home in the spice rack that I could use to depatriate the suxhuk from Albania to Italy by adding it to the dish.

I’m pretty sure that’s not how the strategy is supposed to work.

Now, you probably think I’m going to end this tale with feelings of remorse because I consumed too much lasagna in the first sitting alone. But no. My first thoughts after the cooking frenzy subsided were that if I could squeeze even a few moments of joy from this blimpifying violation of my own guidelines, it was worth it.

The moral? It’s okay to be a little self-indulgent during the time of COVID. Reward yourself for being able to follow all the new shelter-in-place social-distancing rules with aplomb. Eat whatever it takes.

Stay sane. We’ll get through this together.
 
 

Chicago’s Pizza With-A-Twist

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Instagram Post 2/28/2020

If pizza is a romance between Italian and American cuisines, then I guess that would make Indian Pizza a ménage a trois. And, yes, it’s a thing in India too. (Indian pizza, that is.) Chicago’s Pizza With-A-Twist is a franchise with at least 45 locations in the US, one of which is 259-07 Hillside Ave in Floral Park, the focus of this post.

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You’re looking at a half Butter Chicken, half Tandoori Paneer model; other toppings include Paneer Tikka Masala, Curry Paneer, Aloo Chaat, and Palak Paneer (with pesto sauce, of course) among many more.


Isolating a slice of each (chicken left, paneer right) reveals a disappointing similarity that I had tried to avoid though considerable deliberation when we were ordering; I don’t know if alternative choices would have mattered. The dominance of red onion, garlic, ginger, cilantro, and tomato overwhelmed any subtleties that the two mild sauces and toppings might have brought to these slices. Don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t bad at all, I was just after a little more variety at the time.

(I do know about Korean pizza and other international suitors, but that’s a story for another day. 😉)
 
 

Lower East Side Ice Cream Factory

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Instagram Post 2/26/2020

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Easily identified as an outpost of the Chinatown Ice Cream Factory by the insatiable dragon logo, the Lower East Side Ice Cream Factory also produces delicious high quality ice cream in Asian inspired flavors like durian, ube, and lychee as well as “exotic” ones like vanilla and chocolate 😉. I particularly like the fact that the LES offspring features exclusive flavors that give a nod to the neighborhood’s roots like Rainbow Cookie and Horchata.

One of the two flavors in this cup was rainbow cookie. I don’t know if it’s always available or if it was an experiment; pretty good, but I wish it were more intense and had more pieces of rainbow cookie in it.

That horchata tho! For the uninitiated, horchata is a luscious beverage that can be made from tiger nuts or jícaro or rice (as in Mexico) depending upon the provenance. This rendition actually had actual grains of actual rice in it and it was outstanding! Find it on the street level of Essex Market, 88 Essex St, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
 
 

Insalata di Frutti di Mare

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Instagram Post 2/1/2020

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More home cookin’. Since I shared a few photos of selections from our Thanksgiving feast recently, I offer one from our traditional Christmas table. For some reason, our celebration skews Italian with meats, cheeses, and panettone from that corner of the globe (but no photos since I didn’t actually make those – and can globes have corners anyway?) so here’s my personal rendition of Insalata di Frutti di Mare (seafood salad).

The foursome of shrimp, calamari (squid), polipetti (baby octopus), and scungilli (conch) playing equal roles (sometimes with mussels fifth wheeling) plus various veggies for crunch and zest is augmented by a harmonizing dressing of EVOO, lemon juice, herbs, and more.

PS: Hopefully, photos from Chanukah, Kwanzaa, and Russian Orthodox Christmas festivities next year! 😉
 
 

Brooklyn’s Homeslice Pizzeria

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Instagram Post 1/30/2020

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Having gone to college in New Haven, I admit to harboring a wee bit of prejudice regarding pizza (you might hear “ah-BEETS”) since there are none better. Anywhere. But sometimes you just can’t travel two hours to stanch a craving. Of course, I also know that there’s some fine pizza to be had in Brooklyn (and if any Queenza aficionados want to hang out sometime and introduce me to their faves, I’m totally game). Which leaves us to consider the local neighborhood pizza joint, you know, the one you sail past on the way home, some of which are, um, less than stellar.


But others of that ilk have a signature move that, if not unique, give their handiwork a bit of an edge. And indeed, it’s the edge of this pie from Brooklyn’s Homeslice Pizzeria at 567 Vanderbilt Ave that grabbed my attention. Those are panko crumbs and they provide a crispy crunch that succeeds in making this slice a cut above.


With its thin, flavorful crust, easily folded over on itself (as pizza is meant to be consumed), a slender but sufficient layer of cheese (the kind you used to peel back as a kid) and a naturally sweet and tasty tomato sauce, some would identify this as classic New York Style (but I’ve heard enough definitions for that phrase that I’m not going anywhere near it. Even if I agree. 😉)

And yes, I’ll be back to try the toppings (I always go plain for the maiden voyage). Besides, Ample Hills Creamery is less than three blocks away. Win-win.
 
 

Oy Benne!

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Instagram Post 6/22/2019

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I’m not certain about the linguistic prowess of the folks from Oy Benne!, the Queen’s Night Market Italian-Jewish comfort food vendor, but I am certain about their cooking prowess. “Oy”, of course, is a Yiddish interjection, but were they trying for the Italian “Bene” meaning good? I was so taken with their culinary concept that I neglected to ask.

[1] Their gastronomic fusion idea is not lost in translation, however. Matzo Brei is a savory dish made from softened pieces of matzo soaked in beaten eggs and fried, the Jewish kitchen’s answer to French toast if you will. Traditionally accompanied by sour cream and applesauce, here it gets a sweet bacio from Italy by swapping in ricotta for the sour cream and cherry preserves for the applesauce, along with a few other tweaks to the canonical recipe.

[2] At the Queen’s Night Market press event, Oy Benne was featuring chopped chicken liver made with duck fat instead of schmaltz (chicken fat), unexpectedly served with a sweet, fruity topping. Matzo never had it so good. Check the QNM schedule to see when they’ll be there next.

Che geshmak!
 
 

Cuccio’s Bakery

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Instagram Post 5/5/2019

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Stumbled upon at Cuccio’s Bakery, 320 Avenue X in Brooklyn’s Gravesend: slices of rainbow cookies wrapped around a dense, fudgy chocolate rum ball.

Ya know ya wanna.