Beet, sage, and ricotta agnolotti in a zucchini crema with asparagus and poppy seeds. Orange zest in the agnolotti filling gives this dish nice floral and citrus notes to go with the subtlety of the sage.

So my affair with agnolotti is apparently not over. A few beets and the remainder of the zucchini from my recent co-op box left me thinking of a way to use them up and use them together, and a ravioli seemed the natural solution. A quick search on Google confirmed that, as multiple hits for beet ravioli came back. While at first I thought I would just slice the zucchini to serve with the agnolotti, I soon remembered Marc Vetri mentioning zucchini as a substitute for the corn in the crema recipe I used for my steelhead trout. It was the perfect sauce for a beet ravioli with poppy seeds that I found on the Food Republic website, a recipe that they got from the CIA’s book “Pasta.” I made a few adjustments and used my own egg pasta recipe, and things turned out pretty well. A decent 2011 Pio Cesare Arneis played nice as a companion.

This recipe calls for braising the beets instead of roasting them to get them tender enough to blend. The method is to first sauté a diced medium yellow onion with 4 chopped sage leaves in 2 ounces of unsalted butter. When the onions become tender (about 4 minutes while stirring occasionally), you add 1 1/2 pounds of peeled and diced beets along with 1/2 cup water to the sauté pan, bring to a simmer, cover, and cook until tender. This took longer than the recipe for me, around 40 minutes. But the results were great. I let the vegetables cool a bit before blending, and to prevent having an overly wet pasta filling, I drained the blended mixture in a sieve lined with cheesecloth.

This step also kept me from having to use bread crumbs to potentially thicken the filling, as the recipe suggests. Another ingredient I left out of the filling was the egg yolks. I just went with the 3/4 cup grated Parmesan, 1/2 cup fresh ricotta, 1/2 tsp  finely grated orange zest, and kosher salt and white pepper to taste. Those ingredients were added to the beet mixture and combined in a bowl with a wooden spoon.

I made egg pasta sheets, doubling my recipe. With a batch this size, I used my stand mixer with a paddle and then the dough hook before finishing the kneading by hand. Folding the agnolotti is getting a little easier with practice, but it is still a time consuming process. I set the cut agnolotti on lined baking pans, sprinkle with semolina, and put in the freezer to harden before transferring to ziplock bags to be stored in the freezer for later use.

For the sauce, I used 3 cups peeled and diced zucchini sautéed with half of a diced onion in 2 tbsp olive oil, stirring often until tender. Next, I added 1 cup water and 1 cup heavy cream to the pan, brought the mixture to a simmer, and cooked covered for 10 minutes. The mixture is blended with a tbsp olive oil and seasoned with sea salt and white pepper. I also prepared asparagus by trimming and blanching it. All of these can be made in advance, storing the sauce and asparagus in the fridge and the agnolotti in the freezer. When ready to cook, get a pot of salted boiling water going for the agnolotti, and put about 1/2 cup (or more if you like) of the sauce per serving in a sauté pan over medium-low heat with asparagus tips (again, use an amount to your liking). Cook the agnolotti until they float, drain, and then add them to the sauce and asparagus, carefully coating them. You don’t want the delicate pasta to tear.  I served the agnolotti sprinkled with poppy seeds, and a little remainder of the pasta filling and freshly chopped sage in olive oil and freshly cracked black pepper as a garnish on the side of the dish with flake sea salt. The addition of the sage oil as a garnish helped to add a little more herbaceousness to this sweet-tending ravioli.

Ingredients:

Pan-Seared Steelhead Trout with a parsley-crispy kale-lemon gremolata, crispy sage and kale, sautéed zucchini, and sweet corn crema.

We recently became members of an organic produce co-op, and it’s been wonderful having loads of fresh and local fruits and vegetables in the house. It’s also been nice to have the surprise of the weekly share selections, which have forced me to think outside of my normal culinary box. This has been a week of inventive salads with beautiful kale and red leaf lettuce and romaine, using oranges and two kinds of tangerines as components in the salads and incorporated into dressings. Some gorgeous zucchini became the vegetable added to a simple tajarin pasta dish over the weekend, and the tomatoes and cantaloupe I found in this week’s box encouraged me to revisit my cantaloupe-tomatillo gazpacho. When I say cooking outside of the culinary box, I mean my personal habits and tendencies. Needing to do something with the ears of sweet corn from my co-op share and a little exhausted from weeks of heavy and braised meats, I came up with a steelhead trout dish and a modified version of a corn crema from Marc Vetri’s cookbook “Rustic Italian Food.” I rarely cook fish, but I have enjoyed making steelhead trout. The meaty texture and the flavor work well for Holly’s and my carnivorous-tending palates. The corn crema was going to contribute to the dish both as a starch and a kind of sauce, so I went with a simple (and keeping it Italian) gremolata to accompany the trout, using the remainder of my Italian parsley from the co-op box. I also had a lot of kale still to use, and it became a textural addition to the dish by making kale chips and by incorporating a little bitterness and smokiness to the gremolata. The kale by itself seemed weird, so I added crispy sage. More of the week’s zucchini become a base for the fish and something to help gather up the crema. A squeeze of lemon on the pan-seared trout (crispy skin intact) helped to balance out what I found to be a surprisingly complex and tasty dish.

The crema is made with 2 cups of fresh corn kernels, 1/3 of a large onion diced, 1 cup water, 1/4 cup heavy cream, 1/4 cup whole milk, 1 tbsp olive oil, and kosher salt and black pepper to taste. I started by sautéing the corn and onion in olive oil for a few minutes to soften, stirring occasionally to keep them from browning. Then I added the water, cream, and milk and brought the mixture to a simmer, letting it do so for about 10 minutes. Once the vegetables were softened, I let the mixture cool slightly before blending it. I strained it to smooth it completely. At this point, I adjusted the seasoning and stirred in the tbsp of olive oil.

The kale chips and crispy sage were made by coating the leaves in olive oil, seasoning with sea salt, and cooking on a lined baking sheet at 325 °F for 10-15 minutes. The kale leaves will need different amounts of time depending on how large they are, and some may require turning to finish. The gremolata is an easy and fresh tasting condiment of chopped parsley, lemon zest, and garlic. I added a little chopped roasted kale to the mix of 1/2 cup chopped parsley, 1 chopped garlic clove, and the zest of half of a lemon.

With this second batch of the cantaloupe-tomatillo gazpacho (recipe discussed here), I varied what I used as garnishes. In the version pictured above, I used toasted pumpkin seeds, capers, caperberries, heirloom tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, and basil. I also made a version with diced avocado, asparagus tips, toasted pumpkin seeds, heirloom tomatoes, and shaved Parmesan. For the asparagus, I trimmed one bunch and blanched it in salted water for about 5 minutes before shocking it in an ice bath. I removed the tips I needed and reserved what I didn’t use in the refrigerator for later.

Savory asparagus flan with a creamy Fontina sauce, Parmesan tuile, and julienned bell peppers. This dish, adapted from a recipe on Epicurious, tries to recapture a little piece of Piedmont.

Biking from Acqui Terme to Monforte d’Alba across the Monferrato and Langhe hills, I experienced subtle shifts in the landscape, the transforming hunks and shades of the vineyards and valleys, which reflected the variations in the Piedmontese wines and cuisine. For instance, how stretching west from Acqui, the soil great for Muscato and Barbera gives way to Barbera and Nebbiolo. How the higher in elevation the hills raised, the more hazelnut groves are passed. I mentioned in my previous post that each place we stopped at had their own salumi and cheese to go with their wines, but there were some constants, each given local and personal flair.

Beyond tajarin, Piedmont is known for its gnocchi, risotto, and agnolotti (or a folded ravioli). As with the tajarin, most preparations of these other pastas were simple but full of flavor. A big takeaway from all of the rustic Piedmontese cuisine I ate was that you shouldn’t mistake complexity with complicated. The dishes were complex in flavor without being unnecessarily complicated. The most involved primo piatto I had was a tajarin with a Bolognese. One of the best dishes I ate was in Turin at a restaurant called Agnolotti & Friends. I tried agnolotti stuffed with potato, mint, and ricotta that melted on the tongue. Seriously. The pasta had almost the same silky texture as the beef Carpaccio I had for an antipasto. The agnolotti was simply prepared with capers, lemon, butter, and Parmesan, and was ridiculously good.  I had to try to recreate it when I got home, and so I did.

Potato, mint, and ricotta agnolotti with capers, lemon, butter, and Parmesan. For the agnolotti, I made pasta dough Piedmontese-style with 4 egg yolks to 3/4 cup of “double zero” flour and a tsp each of kosher salt, water, and olive oil. The filling is three large Yukon Gold potatoes peeled and boiled and mashed, 3/4 cup ricotta, 1.5 tbsp chopped mint, 1 tbsp butter, and enough whole milk to smooth it out. It is seasoned with kosher salt and white pepper. The texture of this dough for the agnolotti is delicate and wonderful. For the sauce for one serving, melt 1 tbsp of butter in a pan, add the capers, a tbsp of grated Parmesan or more, a little of the pasta cooking water, a quarter of a lemon squeezed, and kosher salt and cracked black pepper to taste. Toss with the cooked agnolotti, which should be done after 2-3 minutes in salted boiling water.

In addition to the braised meats and salumi, we were served generous amounts of beef Carpaccio and dishes of thinly sliced or pounded cutlets of pork or veal that came topped with a mustard sauce, sometimes loaded with tuna brought over the hills from Genoa. Those dishes looked something like this link here to Gianni and Mina’s restaurant. Those meat and mustard-sauce dishes came as an antipasto. Another antipasto constant was a savory flan with a cheese sauce. We usually had either spinach or asparagus flan with a creamy and rich Fontina sauce.  These savory flans were such a novelty I wanted to see if I could recreate one. I found a recipe at Epicurious that is adapted from a dish served at a hotel in Turin. It turned out great. Since even halving the recipe made more flan than we could consume in one go, I used it as a side for a grilled pork collar with a cherry gastrique.

The flan made a nice side for a grilled pork collar. The cherry gastrique is a 1:1 mixture of granulated sugar and vinegar (half cider and half sherry). It is seasoned with fresh pitted cherries, red pepper flakes, and pink peppercorns.

A typical roadside attraction. Here, it’s a view in Santo Stefano Belbo.

It never hurts to finish with Barolo.

Homemade tajarin, which is the Piedmontese name for taglierini, served here with porcini, spinach, and a poached egg. The garnishes are salted capers, caperberries, toasted and chopped pine nuts, and chopped olives. Although the many dishes of tajarin I had in Piedmont were made with fresh pasta, dried “nests” of these noodles where available for sale all over the region. The pasta is an egg dough, but specifically egg yolks, which lends the pasta its color. It appeared mostly hand-cut to various thin widths nearing fettuccine. It almost came exclusively as a simple yet richly flavorful dish, served with only butter and Parmesan for a sauce, thinned with a little pasta water (I imagine), and either shavings of black truffles or asparagus or  with wilted spinach. This dish pictured served as the “primo piatto” for my first Piedmont inspired meal. I tried to evoke tajarin’s substance in this homage to the nests of dried pasta.

“Good poets borrow; great poets steal.” That nice morsel of a statement—attributed to T.S. Eliot and continually reanimated by creative writing workshops—has all the roundness of an aphorism that makes it just sound like wisdom. It’s a piece of advice I’ve enlisted on more than one occasion when trying to impress upon my students that it’s okay to have influences; it’s okay to be inspired. And I have to admit that the rhetoric of unapologetic thievery usually has enough rebellion in it to start shifting those self-identified individual geniuses over to the position that our art doesn’t come from some pure internal wellspring. When it comes to art, you get the ideas for your ideas somewhere.

Cooking, for me, is an art like any other. It is one for which I am an amateur, although enthusiastic, practitioner. I am always looking for inspiration, searching for what flavor combination, texture, or technique I can steal. The challenge for home cooks is how to incorporate inspiration into meals that feel natural and effortless for our limitations in skill, ingredients, and equipment. I don’t need to try to recreate the dish coyly but aptly called English Peas I had at Alinea, which was an absolute orgy of textures, temperatures, and techniques. (I found some pictures of what I ate here, and here, and here; it was a three-part dish.) I only have to take what I need, which in the case of English Peas was a lesson in using an ingredient in different ways on the same plate, highlighting various pleasures in mouthfeel.

The Piedmont nostalgia meal started with this cantaloupe, tomato, and tomatillo gazpacho. While the flavors are not truly Italian, we did have a chilled spicy tomato soup with pepitas on our last night in Monforte d’Alba that I was conjuring up, yet with a Texas flavor. I used three tomatoes and three tomatillos peeled and seeded. I seeded the tomatoes in a wire strainer over a bowl to catch all of the juices. I used a quarter of a cantaloupe; a quarter each of seeded red, orange, and yellow bell peppers; a quarter of a red onion; the juice of one lime; one jalapeno seeded; one cucumber peeled and seeded; 1/4 cup of olive oil; and a tbsp of chopped basil and a tbsp of chopped mint. Those ingredients were blended smooth and seasoned with kosher salt and white pepper. I topped the gazpacho with heirloom tomatoes, toasted pine nuts, salted toasted pumpkin seeds, and mint and basil.

What T.S. Eliot actually said was this: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn.” For the amateur, this is all relative. When I make a meal, my only hope is to be inspired enough to challenge myself, to make my cooking exciting to me and those I cook for, and hopefully tastier. I don’t need to take on the whole history of the art. That, unfortunately, is the kind of hubris I reserve for poetry.

This long preamble is all to say Holly and I went to Italy. We went to bike and eat and drink our way through Piedmont. The whole time, I was taking note of what I could steal for my own cooking. That contraband became this meal shown here in the spirit of Piedmont I made when we returned, a meal that was as much a celebration as it was a lament for the fact we were no longer sitting in village restaurants, drinking local Barberas and Barolos, while eating local cheeses and house-made pastas and salumi.

“Local” really was the theme of our gustatory pilgrimage. Many of the incredible wines we drank came from vines we could see out the windows of where we were imbibing them or had only recently passed on our bikes. The food was no different. When we turned down a steep road in the Langhe hills, following our guides to the beautiful and rustic restaurant, La Casa Nel Bosco, ristorante in famiglia of the gracious Gianni and Mina (Gianni serves the wine and food that Mina skillfully prepares) surrounded by gardens and tucked into a forest containing chestnuts, it was no shock to find asparagus and spinach from the garden incorporated into dishes and chestnuts poached in honey smartly garnishing a plate of beef carpaccio that opened the meal. Piedmont, after all, is the epicenter and origin of the Slow Food movement with its locavore ethos. Our guide Arien mischievously joked that to call it a “movement” there is kind of inaccurate, since local is just how things are done. I should add that Arien and our other guide Jimi were incredible, and the cycling trip the DuVine company created for Piedmont is spectacular. I can’t say enough wonderful things about DuVine. We were in excellent hands.

Our meals in Piedmont were always long affairs with many courses and many wines. The porcini tajarin was our second course, accompanied by a nice Arneis, a white wine not in much abundance here in Texas, which is sad. It’s a great wine and can drink like a light Chablis. I made the tajarin with four egg yolks to a 3/4 cup of “double zero” flour. The pasta is tossed in butter, a little pasta cooking water, grated Parmesan, cracked black pepper, and chopped porcini mushrooms. I wanted the poached egg to act as an additional layer to the sauce, which would be seasoned by the garnishes.

Piedmont is known for braised meats, and we enjoyed many such dishes. One in particular was a braised pork shank I ate in Monforte d’Alba that had a delicious crust of a glaze. It came with a simple side of perfectly fried cubes of pillowy potatoes.  Most of the second piatti we had would just be the meat and a vegetable. Asparagus was abundant on our trip, and we ate family-style many times. This course reflects that. I couldn’t find pork shank on the day I made this dish, so it is pork shoulder, but a small 3 lb bone-in shoulder. I braised the shoulder at 285 °F for 4.5 hours, and then finished it with the glaze at 450 °F for 10 minutes. The glaze is just a reduced cup of pomegranate juice mixed into a paste with kosher salt, brown sugar, and black pepper.

Piedmont is also known for hazelnuts, and with its hazelnuts, Nutella. A common dessert in the region is a hazelnut cake, and we had the extreme pleasure of eating in a family-run renovated farmhouse restaurant in Acqui, and the sweet and talented chef, Clara, gave us a demonstration on making homemade Nutella and even enlisted me in preparing a hazelnut cake. That night, we ate overlooking the vineyards where Clara’s son Guido grows Dolcetto, Barbera, and Muscato, and makes excellent wine, which he served us. I tried to recapture a little flavor of the area by making a chocolate bark with hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds, and sea salt. I got the idea for this bark from the wonderful food and poetry blog, Eat This Poem.

I served the chocolate bark over white chocolate mousse with a cherry compote for an end to the meal. We left Piedmont just at the start of cherry season. I wish we had had more time. To make the mousse, I found a very helpful video on YouTube.

The view from Clara and Guido’s restaurant.

Helping Clara with the hazelnut cake. She supplied the hat and the Muscato. Nice way to cook.

And yes, homemade Nutella in Piedmont with local hazelnuts is ridiculously tasty.

Potato, leek, chorizo, and truffled pecorino ravioli with sautéed mushrooms, spinach, tomatoes, and roasted purple carrots in a white wine butter sauce. For the homemade ravioli filling, slices of skinned and parboiled Yukon Gold potatoes were added to sautéed fresh chorizo and leeks. When fully cooked, I mashed the mixture and stirred in grated truffled pecorino. These were all pantry ingredients leftover from Holly’s “Chopped Challenge” birthday dinner. 

Of the host of criteria that Food Network’s “Chopped” judges use in their evaluations, one has been strongly resonating with me lately—transformation.

The contestants who seem consistently to do the best are those who not only make their dishes taste good but additionally transform their required ingredients into pleasures for the eye and mind as much as for the palate.  Creativity, skill, and intuition are rewarded as ingredients are broken down and reconstituted in ways that highlight something essential about them, or give expression to some immanent possibility. The form that expression takes could be a traditional dish or preparation but rejuvenated, or it may be some fusion of the familiar with the never before seen. In other words, a “Chopped” basket item must become more of itself, even if it takes making the ingredient in some way a stranger to itself.

Cooking is always an act of transformation: heating, cooling, combining, etc., in order to create textures and flavors and to make things not only palatable but in many cases even edible. Back when I was teaching writing for an associate degree program at a culinary institute, a student once provided me for an assignment a one-sentence definition of “cuisine” as “the art of transforming ingredients into a delight for your palate.” For her, cooking is more than a pragmatic task, more than just making food; it is a practice that gives us pleasure. This can be accomplished in the simplest of ways with a few quality ingredients, like a good steak frites.

For a recent meal, we had a simple and delicious steak frites with hand-cut french fries cooked in duck fat, steamed haricot vert, a blueberry-port pan sauce, and roasted garlic-thyme aioli. Sometimes you just want a steak, and this classic bistro combination never seems to disappoint or become dated. The blueberry, thyme, and duck fat are small touches to make the classic fresh.

 

Or it can be a bit more complex but still playing in concert with the traditional, like David Chang’s pork buns. Or it can be the crucible of radical transformation that is the “Chopped” kitchen.

It was Holly’s birthday last week, and we have a tradition of celebrating her birthday by me cooking an elaborate meal for just the two of us. This year she wanted something a little different: dinner and a show. Or a dinner that would be the show. She suggested that I do a home-version of “Chopped,” for which she’d choose favorite food items from her childhood for the basket ingredients. I didn’t know what I was getting into when I agreed, but the two things that guided me through the experience were knowing that Holly was thoroughly enjoying the surprise and nostalgia of those childhood flavors coming back to her in new guises and, secondly, channeling the “Chopped” dictum to transform. The night was fun but challenging mostly because the home-cook’s kitchen is not really equipped with the space and industrial tools of the real “Chopped” kitchen; you’ll find no blast chiller and anti-griddle here. Close to that challenge, however, was trying to use ingredients that a kid would enjoy. I think Holly must have been indulging in a little schadenfreude when she came up with her basket combinations, although she did sympathize enough to grant me a little extra time for each round.

Scotch egg for the appetizer round of Holly’s birthday “Chopped” meal. This was the first time I have ever made a Scotch egg, even though I enjoy them and have read about making them. I crushed the taco shells for a breading, made a ranch dressing rémoulade with chopped cornichons, quickly pickled the green beans for a salad, and ground the smokies in the food processor and added a little fresh Italian sausage to cover the medium-boiled eggs. I was grateful Holly let me put a decent pantry and refrigerator together, hence the sausage. At first I tried to make a homemade aioli for the rémoulade, but when it broke, I had to abandon that idea and use prepared mayo. The course was actually really tasty. Plating and flavor-wise, however, things went downhill from here.

 

For the appetizer, I had to use taco shells, green beans, a ranch dressing packet, and Little Smokies beef sausages. For the entrée, I was given chicken breasts, canned artichoke hearts, a box of cheddar and bacon potatoes au gratin, and jarred dried sliced beef. Dessert was probably the cruelest: ginger soda, chocolate chip cookie dough, chunky peanut butter, and Circus Peanuts. Holly was prescient with this last selection because Circus Peanuts made their way into the dessert round of the most recent “Chopped” episode.

For the appetizer round, we had Scotch eggs, which I’ll show here. The next two rounds were fine, but not nearly as successful. The entrée became a bacon-cheddar coated chicken using the au gratin mix with flour. I threw out the dehydrated potatoes and made fresh potatoes au gratin with pecorino, dried beef, and rosemary. I also made a fresh salsa with tomatoes, capers, scallions, artichoke hearts, and roasted mushrooms. This dish was nothing to write home about, but it tasted good. The dessert round was not very successful when it came to the finished plate, but transformation was definitely relied on. I made a trio of cookies: peanut butter chocolate chip, Circus Peanut chocolate chip, and a chocolate dipped chocolate chip. I tried to make a shaved ice with a ginger soda and Circus Peanuts syrup, but the syrup never got cold enough. All I made was a super sweet syrup drink. The best tasting components were two marscapone creams using fresh grated ginger: a peanut butter-ginger one and a chocolate-ginger-lime version. The dish looked like I made it with my feet. Still, being forced to think about transformation of these ingredients was a lesson I’ll carry with me beyond this spectacle.

Anticipating that the birthday meal may not be a complete success, I decided to make some good food for Holly’s pre-birthday birthday party we had with friends and family. For it, I made pork belly buns and bo ssäm from the Momofuku cookbook. I had to take the homemade buns for a test run before the party, which led to these hoisin pork shoulder buns with pickled vegetables and a chopped vegetable salad. The buns were delicious and a huge hit, as was the bo ssäm.

 

Sausage and mushroom ravioli with lamb ragù alla bolognese and pea purée.

Slow Food Italy’s call to protest through homemade sauces and pastas also came with the advice to make more than you need and freeze the extra for future meals. I followed along, and the lamb ragù alla bolognese from earlier in the week became the sauce for a homemade sausage and mushroom ravioli. I had leftover homemade Italian sausage in the freezer that I cooked off and used in a ravioli filling by mixing it with portobellos sautéed in butter and finely chopped in the food processor with grated pecorino and Italian parsley. The pea purée is two cups of fresh shelled English peas blanched in three quarts of boiling water with 1 tbsp kosher salt and 2 tsp sugar. I blended the peas in the food processor with 1 tbsp grated Parmesan, 1 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp chopped basil, 1 tbsp chopped mint, and a little heavy cream to get a smooth texture. I seasoned it with kosher salt and white pepper and pushed it through a mesh strainer. The garnish is pea shoots and shaved Parmesan.

Black Garlic Pappardelle with Lamb Ragù alla Bolognese, garnished with pea shoots, shaved Parmesan, and ricotta.

Yesterday, Slow Food USA shared a link on its Twitter feed to an article about Slow Food Italy’s creative response to the recent scandal of horsemeat-tainted prepared foods across Europe. Their idea: stuff your own pastas and make your own meat-based sauces in protest. Or in other words, know where your ingredients are coming from and what they are. In my own—not exactly selfless—gesture of solidarity, I made Pappardelle Ragù alla Bolognese. My dish was not traditional. First of all, I used lamb. I also added a mix of herbs with my dry bay leaf: thyme, rosemary, oregano, and parsley. I filled out the conventional Bolognese soffritto (onion, carrot, celery) with diced calabacita italiana, or Italian zucchini. The pappardelle is also a variation: I made it with black garlic. I love the Slow Food attitude that politics can perhaps be palatable.

Like one would do with spinach, I mashed the black garlic into the flour and egg as I was making my dough. I used five cloves, 1 egg, 3/4 cup flour, plus a bit extra, 1 tsp kosher salt, and 1 tsp olive oil.

 

In case the black garlic experiment didn’t work, I made a plain batch.

 

For the ragù, I browned 4 lamb loin chops and braised them with sautéed diced red onion, carrot, celery, calabacita italiana, and pancetta. The braising liquid is 1 cup red wine (reduced), 1 cup chicken stock, and 1 can San Marzano tomatoes, chopped. I tied a few sprigs of rosemary, thyme, parsley, and oregano together and added them with a bay leaf. I braised the meat for 2 hours at 300 °F. The meat is removed from the bone and chopped when finished, then added back to the sauce after the fat has been skimmed.

 

Black garlic shrimp in a mushroom and radish open ravioli with a white wine cream sauce. The shrimp is marinated in a mixture of black garlic, scallions, Italian parsley, lemon juice, and olive oil, seasoned with kosher salt and a little cayenne pepper. The sauce contains shallots, lemon juice, white wine, butter, heavy cream with kosher salt and white pepper. There are sautéed sliced baby portobellos, fresh sliced breakfast radishes, shaved Parmesan, and a chiffonade of basil.

The texture, taste, and versatility of fresh pasta have been qualities I’ve admired for a long time, so it surprises me that I’ve taken this long to attempt it. I’ve eaten many memorable meals in which it’s played a substantial role, like that spectacular fettuccine with a roasted red pepper sauce that I had once in Prague at a small neighborhood cafe whose chef had lived in Italy for years to learn his craft. I have eaten pasta in Italy, too, but something about that dish in Prague always returns to me. The particular way the pasta took up the sauce; the particular toothsomeness in each bite. Back in my Minneapolis days, I had a favorite restaurant that served a daily ravioli as an appetizer that was consistently ridiculously delicious. I can’t explain why I’d never tried making it myself, but this weekend, I decided to finally learn. After buying a pasta attachment for my KitchenAid and a trial run at fettucine, I made a two-course pasta meal, starting with an open ravioli, followed by a fettucine with homemade spicy Italian sausage. It’s nice to have a new background for dishes that is flavorful in itself. I still have Elizabeth Bishop on my mind from teaching, hence the title. There’s a wry moment in “Crusoe in England” when Bishop ventriloquizing through Crusoe asks, “Why didn’t I know enough of something?” Well, now I know how to make fresh pasta.

For my trial run, I used the KitchenAid to mix the flour and egg, but for the actual meal, I used the “well” method. I learned about both from videos on YouTube. The “well” method ended up being easier for me to control. The mixture I’m using is 1 egg for every 3/4 cup of flour, with 1 tsp kosher salt and 1 tsp olive oil.

 

Some of the pasta I ran through the fettuccine cutter, but I hand-cut some ravioli sheets as well.

 

Another picture of the black garlic shrimp open ravioli. I love the sweetness and subtle garlic flavor of black garlic.

 

The fresh pasta is delicate to work with, and I think I may be relying too much on extra flour. Yet, it seems like a process that will get easier with practice. Here is the cut fettuccine drying.

 

I broke out the meat grinding attachment for the KitchenAid and made homemade spicy Italian pork sausage for this dish. The sausage was sautéed with broccoli rabé, tomatoes, and spring onions. I deglazed the pan with white wine and added a little butter. I served it with shaved Pecorino and ricotta to work in as a sauce with the reduced wine.

 

Wine-poached sea scallops with a coconut milk-cucumber-basil broth and shaved golden beets, baby fennel, breakfast radishes, and charred scallions. For the broth, I brought 1 1/2 cups of unsweetened coconut milk to a boil with 2 tbsp of sugar. Once boiling, I turned off the heat and steeped the leaves from one bunch of basil for 30 minutes. I removed the leaves and blended the broth with a peeled cucumber and shallot in the food processor. It was put through a mesh strainer and seasoned with kosher salt and white pepper. The broth is served chilled. I cleaned four sea scallops and sliced each one horizontally into four discs. They were poached in Gewürtztraminer with pink peppercorns. One radish, a golden beet, and two baby fennel bulbs were shaved. Four scallions were charred on a grill pan and sliced. This makes four appetizer portions.

In cooking, I often take inspiration from failure. This was the case for a recent dinner I made in celebration and thanks for my brother being in town to show his documentary film and to meet with my students. The menu that I composed arose from my love of reacting to what looks fresh at the market and also my obsession with transforming previous debacles into successes. The culprit this time was a terrible dish of pan-seared sea scallops with a lifeless rutabaga purée that I cooked for Holly and myself a few weeks ago. Why rutabagas? It was a whim. Unfortunately, the purée was seriously lacking in flavor and its texture was off. The scallops were prepared fine, but I realized that I only ever seem to pan-sear them and line them up on a plate with some sauce. The way I used them was a failure of imagination. Deciding to cook a meal for my brother gave me the opportunity to get revenge on those culinary flops.

I have a friend who gives a kind of motivational lecture about writing poetry in which he insists that you have to permit yourself to fail spectacularly in order to create poems that have vitality and urgency. Of course this is for the drafting process, where you perform the work of risk and error that will eventually lead to the finished poem. It’s a hard analogy to make with cooking if we take a single meal as the comparison. When I screw up a meal, I may be able to adjust and salvage as I go along, but if not, the meal’s a bust. The “drafts” I create in cooking are those previous meals with all their successes and disasters that eventually inform new dishes, new menus. It’s important for me to have these trials and errors, and not only because repetition helps in training for technique. They are also essential to developing your palate and culinary repertoire.

Marinated mushroom and tomato salad with baby romaine lettuce, beet greens, and a white Balsamic vinaigrette. The mushrooms are hen of the woods that have been blanched in salted, boiling water and marinated with sherry vinegar, olive oil, kosher salt, cracked black pepper, coriander seeds, fennel fronds, and thyme. The meal started with this salad.

 

Maybe the analogy here is closer to what I heard another poet say recently about his creative process. He said that he likes to think of writing poems as something similar to the “Danger Room” of the X-Men comics. You’ve got to treat a draft as a place where you can safely practice your powers without the fear that you’ll irrevocably ruin the world around you. I wouldn’t recommend approaching every meal in this way, but it is important for me to have those in-between meals, those experiments and spectacular failures that end in exciting transformations.

My desire for a new way of preparing scallops led to poaching, although I have to admit that a crudo crossed my mind first. The rutabaga purée became a rutabaga-celery root-bleu cheese purée. Definitely an improvement.

A thick French-cut pork chop with a blood orange-apple-cranberry chutney; sunflower sprout coleslaw; and a rutabaga-celery root-bleu cheese purée. This dish was served as the main course.

 

The meal ended with this berry crostata.

 

Braised beef short rib chili, served with creamy polenta and spicy coleslaw. There is nothing traditionally Texan about this chili, but living in Texas definitely led to its inception. I typically make this around football season, but the rodeo had me thinking about Texas foods.

The Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo just left town, and in honor of its exodus, I cooked a batch of chili. It’s a version I’ve been making that is inspired by living in Texas, but it is definitely not “Texas chili” by any purist’s standards. In a roundabout way, it was Texas barbecue that opened my mind to the possibilities for chili, more specifically the benefits of slow-cooked beef. I’m a Midwesterner, so I have some experience with the provincial oddities and kitsch that accompany state fairs. Even so, I was still surprised at the spectacles and excesses of the rodeo. My initiation to the rodeo actually happened with a surprise. Years ago, on a Saturday morning, I woke to what I thought was a maniac loose on the street, screaming beneath my window. However, when I pulled up the blinds, I saw a stream of riders on horses and wagons, while an emcee in cowboy gear announced their names through a microphone. It was then I discovered I was living at the epicenter of the rodeo parade route.

The biggest surprises were still in store for me when I actually attended the rodeo. The runner-up has to be the chicken fried bacon, a delicacy out of Yoakum and Snook, Texas. Yes, I did eat it gratefully. But the blue-ribbon surprise goes to mutton bustin, an honorable tradition of putting toddlers in hockey helmets and life jackets and then placing them on sheep to see how long the kids can hold on while the sheep run. I remember a lot of tears and a lot of bewildered joy.

Breakfast tostada with eggs, bacon, onions, queso fresco, scallions, salsa,  sour cream, and Cholula hot sauce. Since I had the dutch oven  out to make the chili, I decided to fry corn tortillas for breakfast tostadas before the afternoon of chili preparation.

 

Moving to Texas was full of cultural discoveries like these, many of them inspiring ambivalence like my rodeo experiences did, yet, there were some unequivocally enjoyable surprises, like breakfast tacos and Texas barbecue. In Minnesota, if Mexican food was served for breakfast, it was usually some version of a bland flour tortilla rolled around eggs and cheese, dolloped with store bought salsa. Barbecue meant bratwurst and hamburgers if you were at home or the cabin. If you went out to eat, you might get pork ribs or chicken. I didn’t even know what beef brisket was before moving to Houston, and I regret all of those lost years. Same goes for real tortillas, flour or corn, and the genius of mixing eggs, salty meats, and cheese together to serve with those tortillas for breakfast.

Searching around for chili recipes a few years ago, I landed on the controversy over Texas chili, which some aficionados claim must be chunks of beef with chili paste made from dried chilies. Tomatoes usually aren’t welcome; beans, never. Looking at pictures made me think of chopped brisket, or my other favorite slow-cooked cut, the short rib. Since I’m an outsider and don’t need to be a Texas chili zealot, I could experiment. Giada De Laurentiis has a recipe for short rib chili that appealed to me, and it suggested serving it with polenta, which just made me think of Frito chili pie, so I had to try her version. I’ve since tweaked the recipe, substituting Young’s Double Chocolate Stout for the instant espresso coffee and dried chipoltes for canned, plus skipping her use of chocolate and adding tomato purée. I serve the chili with regular creamy polenta and spicy coleslaw.

Dried chilies are in abundance in Houston grocery stores. For my chili paste, I use a mix of 8 New Mexico chilies, 2 ancho chilies, and 2 chipoltes. They are seeded, sliced, and simmered in 1 1/2 cups of water until they are soft enough to blend with the liquid.

 

The 3 lb of short ribs are seasoned with kosher salt and cracked black pepper and browned in bacon fat. In the past, I have cooked off bacon in the dutch oven I use for the chili, reserving the bacon for a garnish. This time, the bacon became breakfast.

 

I love the flavor of Young’s Double Chocolate Stout, and since I only use 10 oz, there is a little left over. After the ribs have been browned, I cook one diced yellow onion and six chopped garlic cloves in the dutch oven, adding the stout once the onions are soft. I reduce the liquid almost completely before adding the 1 tbsp cumin,  1 tbsp oregano, a 10 oz can of tomato purée, 2 tbsp amber agave syrup, and 1 cup beef stock. The short ribs are added back to the dutch oven, and once the mixture is at a simmer, it is covered and goes into a 325 °F oven for 2.5 hours. Halfway through, I flip the short ribs.

 

When the short ribs are done cooking, remove the meat from the bone and cut off the tough membrane. The meat is chopped and added back to the chili after the grease has been skimmed. There will be a lot of grease. A can of black beans, rinsed and drained, can be added after the grease has been skimmed. Season with kosher salt and black pepper to taste. In the background is my sous-chef, Musetta, giving her best effort at a photobomb. 

 

The chili is served over creamy polenta, and I top it with queso fresco, julienned tomatoes, scallions, and spicy coleslaw. The coleslaw is half of a head of purple cabbage and half a head of green cabbage, shredded; two peeled carrots, shredded; half a yellow onion, sliced thin and quartered; 1/4 cup mayo; 1/4 cup brown sugar; 1 tbsp dijon mustard; 1 tbsp whole-grain mustard; 1 tsp apple cider vinegar; 1/2 tsp cracked black pepper; 1/4 tsp ground cayenne; dash of hot sauce (optional); kosher salt to taste.