Maggie's Farm

Eggplant is such a ubiquitous food in Sicily that you would not expect that the name, in Sicilian dialect "moolinyan", would also be a disparaging word for those with dark skin.

We had eggplant in Sicily at least three ways:

- We were served it as part of antipasto plates at least twice, sliced fairly thin with skin on and wood grilled and blackened a bit the way I like grilled vegetables.

- We were served it in the form of caponata as a bruschetta, again as part of an antipasto plate. It was served on wood-toasted bread. Fire-toasted bread is the best.

- We were served it at least three times as a pasta sauce. It's a peasant staple. Annoying that they sometimes do it with skin on, but they do. Sometimes they add chopped olives to that, or spicy pork sausage meat or zucchini. Pignoli or raisins, too. It's pretty good but not great. The only great southern Italian and Sicilian foods are their fish. Just my opinion, of course, and I do eat all of this stuff sometimes even though I am not a big fan of pasta courses.

Here's an all-purpose eggplant caponata.

As in the different parts of Italy, in Sicily they use whatever sizes or shapes their local sub-regional version of (non-egg, in S. Italy and Sicily) pasta happen to be, which is made fresh daily at the corner market. It's generally sold out before it's fully-dried. In northern Sicily, a preferred pasta is Busiata. It's a thick, curly, hand-made and hand-curled pasta. There's a career: Busiata-curler.

True story: I broke a front tooth on a hard piece of busiata and spent the rest of the trip with a missing front tooth. I told Mrs. BD that I was imitating a Brit, but also threatened to superglue a pebble in there. "Al dente" indeed. In Italy, they do serve pasta quite hard, pretty chewy with some hard and dry parts. I've broken a few front teeth, the first one playing hockey.

(A reminder about pasta: the authentic Italian way is not to put sauce on top, but to throw the pasta into the saucepan and to just lightly coat the pasta with the sauce. There is never very much sauce, just the flavoring really. After all, it's just a primi, pasta is a flavor-delivery system, but if you are a farmer you need those carbs.) I'll post on some very unusual Sicilian pasta dishes that we had, in the future. Some were more like soups.

My sis asked me to post our favorite carrot recipe. It's Italian.

Peel a mountain of carrots. Cut them into roughly 3 inch lengths, then quarter them lengthwise - more than quarters for thicker ends of thick carrots. Regular carrot sticks, like a pile of split logs, with enough consistency of thickness to cook evenly.

Toss into lightly salted, lightly-sugared boiling water for several minutes until firm but no longer crunchy. When at the exact right point, toss them into ice water to arrest the cooking, and drain.

Sprinkle the carrot sticks first with red wine vinegar, then sprinkle to your taste with finely chopped garlic (I use a LOT - such that each carrot stick has 5-10 little pieces of garlic on it, but most people don't like garlic the way I do), then toss gently with good olive oil. Marinate thus in the fridge for several hours, or preferably overnight, then serve at room temperature with fresh chopped parsley on top.

It can also be done more properly, and less intensely garlicky, by holding off the chopped garlic and simply burying a bunch of halved or quartered fresh garlic cloves amongst the carrots to marinate with the oil.

Another fine kiddie chair from my Mom's stash of furniture: a kiddie potty chair from the olden days. Of course, you put an old pot under it but it had already been adapted to a regular kid's chair when I was a lad.

Thanks to Mom for having saved all of this old stuff.

I wonder whether any readers know anything about the history of this one.

Tuna and anchovy have a natural affinity. For those who enjoy intense Mediterranean flavors, here's the spaghetti sauce I made the other night:

Season and sautee in butter (to pink inside) a couple of fresh Bluefin Tuna filets

Dice an onion and sautee in plenty of olive oil until soft. Add 3-6 canned anchovy filets. Throw in a tablespoon or so of diced garlic. If the pan gets dry, throw in a 1/2 cup of the pasta water: you don't want the garlic to brown, you do want the anchovies to dissolve, and you want a sauce. Cut sides from the pit up to around 1/2 cup of Italian olives and toss them in, along with a tablespoon or two of capers. Season. Simmer for a bit, adding pasta water if needed to make sure you have a sauce. Then toss the tuna filets into the saucepan and crumble roughly with a fork to 1-1/2" chunks. Mix and serve over angel hair pasta with a good sprinkling of fresh chopped parsley on top.

You can also use the same sauce as a sauce for tuna filets themselves. Some might add a little tomato paste to the recipe, but I think tomato and tuna don't mix.

Photo: Sicilian Anchovies in oil

A Florentine Steak is generally considered the ultimate of Secondis in Tuscany cuisine, but it can be had in provinces close to Tuscany too.

It's usually a Porterhouse cut, but it's huge because it comes from the Chianina cattle - the tallest and heaviest breed of cattle. One steak feeds several people. They are all free-range, and no feed-lots, so they aren't as juicy as American steaks.

Florentine steak is cooked over a wood fire, and flavored with fresh Lauro - the Mediterranean Bay leaf which is nothing like the American Bay Leaf - and salt and pepper. Simple, and served rare.

Hungry yet?

At dinner with friends last weekend, a pal said to me "When it comes to important things like health and education, I'd rather have Washington make the decisions than my dopey neighbors."

I replied "But is that Washington's proper role, given our inheritance of supposedly limited central government? "

He said "All that really matters is what is effective."

I said "All that really matters is our dopey neighbors. In America, we're all somebody's dopey neighbor - and the dopiest end up in politics."

Anyway, I dropped the topic, but felt like I was not conversing with an American. I do like the guy otherwise. Yes, he is a Progressive.

A re-post -

Wine tasting, and taste in general: a quote from Do You Taste What I Taste?. at Slate:

It was less encouraging to discover how easily the nose can be led astray by the eyes. For his next stupid human trick, Wysocki produced two jars, one labeled "Food," the other "Body." I was told to sniff each. I actually was one of the few people not fooled by the experiment: I said both jars smelled like vomit. In fact, both jars contained the same chemical compound, butyric acid, which can be perceived as vomit but also as perspiration or Parmesan cheese. Wysocki told me he often conducts this test at seminars and that, on average, 60 percent of the people in the room will claim they enjoy the aroma in the "Food" jar, with most saying it's redolent of Parmesan cheese; but when he asks if anyone found the "Body" jar pleasant, no hands go up the participants invariably claim that it smells of puke or body odor. He mentioned similar work done with wine by Frederic Brochet, a French cognitive psychologist. Brochet has shown that people given a white wine that has been dyed red will describe it exactly as they would a red wine. He has also found that if he serves the same wine in two different bottles, one labeled a cheap vin de table and the other a pricey grand cru, people invariably lavish praise on the latter and scorn the former. Brochet has dubbed this phenomenon "perceptive expectation."

I have no interest in being a "super-taster." I want to continue to enjoy red wines under $25/bottle.

Althouse's post on ticks reminded me of the Kit Cat clock I had on my wall as a kid. It was a Christmas present, as I recall. I wanted a clock in my room, and kids did not have watches in those ancient days. Did its tail and eyes move and did the eyes and numbers glow in some radioactive way, or am I remembering wrong?

That memory of my Kit Cat clock was like a Madeleine to the sentimental Proust in me. I see my room, the window overlooking my Mom's hosta garden, my bookshelf-turned-rock-and-fossil collection, the Revolutionary War prints on the wall, my little desk and chair with my chemistry set in one of the drawers, my first precious little transistor radio, the big aquarium set up with rocks and sand for my various lizards, and my bed that I hid my forbidden Mad Magazines beneath to read with a flashlight after lights-out.

And I remember Question Time as a young lad.

Every night, at lights-out time, my Dad would stand silhouetted in the doorway to invite one question. It would be things like "Why do snow crystals vary when quartz crystals don't?" or "What's this new Continental Drift idea?" or "How do birds navigate?" or "How do sails work?" (We sailed quite a bit.) Being a Harvard guy, an MD, and highly curious about everything in this world, he usually had an answer.

Oh, I also remember asking "Where do babies come from?" (My parents were constantly making annoying new babies, it seemed.) The answer, as I recall, sort of freaked me out but he always did - and still does - say it straight. Except when he doesn't want to. When he was young, he looked like Gary Cooper, was 6'3, never tolerated fools, had Commie politics, and was inner-directed to a fault. The latter three still apply to the laconic and enigmatic old Yankee guy, who would be still working today if his eyes and ears hadn't worn out.

But back to the clock. Remarkably, you can still buy them, but the new ones need batteries. The originals plugged in, which made much more sense because time marches on whether you can find any C batteries or not.

A friend of mine loves these things:  New Balance MT00 Minimus Trail Running Shoes

He claims that after you've run in them, regular sneakers feel like snow boots. However, they come in crazy colors.

A fine old New York carnivore's delight, on W. 36th St. since 1885.  Actually, it was a club before that, back when Herald Square was NYC's theater district.

Keen's is famous for their mutton chops (photo). How do you like your mutton done? (don't say "Dressed as lamb").

I'm getting hungry. Need to get back there soon. Remember when manly pubs were termed "watering holes" and hearty meat-eaters were termed "trenchermen"? The good old days, before wimpy metrosexual scaredy-cat men, and before we had a President who eats arugula. (Confession: I like arugula, and dandelion greens too, but I could happily live the rest of my life without salad or vegetables.)

Everybody in the NY metropolitan area has his own favorite steakhouse, and NYC has tons of them. It's a guy thing. Wives prefer their favorite Italian or French bistros, and those are fine with me too.

I have a buddy who will not eat roast chicken, or any poultry, without homemade Cranberry sauce on the side.

I understand that. I love roast chicken, but it needs some zip. Readers know that I freeze many bags of fresh cranberries in my freezer every fall.

My Dad, who loved to travel around Scandinavia, was a Lingonberry fan. When we cleaned out his house, we found his stash of around ten jars of Ikea Lingonberry preserves. They are as good as cranberry, tart and lively.

Amazon has them, and of course Ikea does.