Photo: Fettuccini Bolognese, properly tossed
We made an Italian supper for great pals Sunday night. It's fun to cook Italian; it takes four hands so it's handy to have a spouse.
- Antipasto: Zucchini boats stuffed with shallots, onions, chopped zucchini, with Bechamel sauce and parmesan on top
- Primo: Straw and Hay (white and spinach fettucini with chopped mushrooms and mortadella with cream-parmesan sauce)
- Secondo: Pork tenderloin braised in wine vinegar with a ton of peppercorns and a bunch of lauro leaves, and sauteed spinach with oil and garlic as a contorno
- Dolce: Strawberries with balsamic vinegar
Yes, ya gotta keep portions small.
Italian food tips below the fold -
- Put your antipasti, whatever it is or they are, on a platter and pass it. It's just to whet the appetite with a little something tangy. Just some cheese, salumi, olives are fine although the stuffed zucchini boats are amazing. No crackers for the cheese!
- Primi: A primo piatta can be a pasta, gnocchi, risotto, a rice with something in it, a slice of onion pie, rice croquettes, polenta with a sauce, soup, or something like a small bowl of mussels with a few noodles in the broth. Italian-style is to serve pasta or gnocchi on a small plate or shallow bowl, not a bowl, and the portions are small, like about 40-50 gms of pasta (dried, or about 1 cup of cooked pasta) per serving so you are still hungry. That's why Italians aren't fat. Something really pleasant is gnocchi with a parsley or basil pesto. They'll give you about 8 or 10 gnocchi. Flavor, not volume. Pasta and gnocchi reminder: You don't put sauce on it - you put it into the sauce in the saucepan with a little of the pasta water to keep it moist and creamy. What is al dente? Chewy, just past crunchy. Lasagna is a heavy primo, just a 3" square is right.
- Secondi: Meat or seafood with or without contorni like spinach, roast potato, etc. Contorni are family-style, but on a side plate.
The traditional Italian large meal was lunch, not dinner, but that is changing. The whole enchilada would have a salad after the secondi, then a fruit course of some sort. In Italy, we never even have the three core courses - it's too much for us, so we share an antipasto or a secondi ("uno in due").
Truly, at home, in a restaurant, or in Italy, a full-course meal is too darn much food for modern people. Abbondanza was for the poor on feast days.
Eating the Italian way
Why aren't Italians fat? It's a question of pasta portion size
Italian meal structure
About the right-sized primo, before tossing - a fettuccini with parsley pesto:
