We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
One of my daughters and her pal caught 12 Porgies this morning from the boat. It is Porgie season in New England.
Last night I made a bowl of Peach salsa from our peaches to accompany Indian take-out, and Mrs. BD made a peach pie (yeah, she always makes her own crust - rolls them out with her grandma's rolling pin).
Thing about peaches is, for cooking, best if they are firm and far from ripe. For salsa, not ripe but slightly softer and crunchy like an apple. A skewer of hard peach chunks on a grill makes them perfect.
For fresh peach chutney that you don't want to bother canning (I am done with canning - it's a pain), you want to use unripe fruit. Just cook it up and put it in the fridge. Peach salsa and peach chutney go with everything, but especially shrimp and fish. And Porgies.
Readers know that we love Italy and Italian cuisine but we do not much care for pasta dishes as Primi - with a handful of exceptions. For one thing, I find tomato sauce to be close to disgusting which might make me a food snob and, for another, I find pasta to be a generally unpleasant experience except in very small amounts. I deserve some credibility because we have eaten our way through Italy from the Alps to the southern coast of Sicily.
Truth is, the cuisine of the Mezzogiorno is not exactly wonderful. Sicily, unlike southern Italy, is not big on pasta (more couscous and rice), but they make a few pasta Primis that are not bad: alla Norma, con le Sarde, and con Vongole (in order, with eggplant, with fresh Sardines, and with Little clams or cockles.
(The northern Italian pasta Primis I have liked have been Pappardelle con Funghi (only Porcinis) and alla Bolognese. Given a choice, I'd often prefer a gorgonzola risotto sprinkled with a red wine reduction instead. Or a small bowl of steamed mussels with wine and herbs.)
Reminder: In Italian cooking, Pasta and tons of other things serve as Primi, meant to be small amounts of tasty first courses before the meat or fish Secondi.
When I think of Sicilian food I think first of eggplants, lemons, grilled pork and seafood, and couscous.
Sicily grows lots of eggplant and it is used in lots of their poverty cooking. Many people think alla Norma is wonderful but I think it is just OK, in small amounts.
Over the years, we have tried to inform our readers about regional Italian food.
I guess we usually refer to "northern Italian" as north of Rome, but that covers plenty of cultural diversity. This episode is from the most northern part, where there has been plenty of milk, butter, potatoes, cabbage, and beef during the good times. Also, maize.
I've never had anything made with chestnut flour, but chestnuts are found all over Italy. The amazing roasted chestnuts on the streets of New York are all from Italy, and they are darn good.
One of the tastiest salt-water critters of the eastern half of the US coast is the Blue Crab.
When they moult (to grow) they are soft-shelled. Much as I love real Maryland crab cakes (all crab, no bread crumbs etc), my favorite is a sauteed soft-shell. You eat the entire juicy thing, feathers and all.
The are alive and kicking at the fish market, but Mrs. BD has them kill them by cutting off their faces before she takes them home.
It's Shad Season now in the Northeast. Just had my first shad roe dinner of the season with pals last night. They made it with a caper and mushroom sauce with chopped bacon on top, on a bed of spinach, with roasted potatoes. It should be fully pink in the middle but crusty on the outside.
Many of us in Yankeeland welcome this brief season - mainly April-May, when the Shad migrate from the ocean up the rivers to lay and fertilize the eggs, with the females filled with their delicious egg sacs we call Shad roe.
If you drive over the Hudson River, the Connecticut, or Housatonic bridges, you will see the shad fishermen's nets spread out right now.
The roe, cooked with bacon, is as good as food gets. Do not overcook it - it is Shad caviar. But the meat of the Atlantic Shad (a large type of herring, I believe) is underestimated. It requires an expert boner which makes it expensive, but it's as tasty a fish as exists. The Shad is full of crazy bones.
It's a brief season for Shad, and there are Shad Festivals all over the Northeast.
Photo above is Shad roe. My Mom loved it, and so do I.
Looking good is an Italian thing. It doesn't have much to do with food, but these guys visit Liguria looking for food. Yes, mashed potatoes in nothern Italy. Towards the end, how to make make and serve basil pesto.
On our two trips to Sicily we saw very little pasta, except al vongole. Which was delicious, of course. We never hung around Palermo but only because of our scheduling. We missed the cathedral bcause it was closed to visitors on Sundays.
Are Sicilian women beautiful? Like the food, a mix of Arab, Spanish, French, and Greek. Some Italian too.
Brits love Sicily.
Last time, we landed in Palermo and drove around the entire coast, and up into the mountains too. Ended leaving from our lemon farm B&B to the airport in Catania at 3 AM, arrived with the sun rising over Etna. Just an amazing place.
Stay for lunch. It'd just be a bite, she said. Scraps, mainly. The manservant with the striped jacket came and went. He brought meaty moist proscuitto crudo slices and a dark rucchetta salad. Rich Venetian oxtail stew with slices of fried polenta. I like it best like that, said Marta Marzotto, heaping our plates. Slices off a huge pink Mortadella. You must have some of this, said Marta. A present from Pavarotti. The mortadella looked not unlike its donor, minus beard and teeth. There was a subtle chicken and lemon casserole. The most beautiful gorgonzola I'd ever seen. Entire, hacked open and voluptuously spilling out its creamy blue guts. The countess offered wine from an unlabelled bottle. A fine fruity white wine that was drunk even less than the food was eaten. We ate with massive, weighty cutlery made for real hands, and drank from Marta's fantastical colored goblets of Murano glass. Then a gloriously substantial coffee semifreddo. Have some more, said the countess generously, shovelling semifreddo on to my plate. It's warming up.
That is an Italian luncheon. Until halfway through the book when I decided to google her, I had thought that Marta was fictional. Nope. She befriended the author. While married to Count Umberto Marzotto, she managed a long affair with Sicilian artist, movie-maker and famous Communist Renato Guttoso who figures prominently in the book. A close pal of Picasso. Colorful people, adding a lot of life to life. La dolce vita, so different from life in Yankeeland.
Garum was a condiment made from the drippings of fermented fatty fish that was popular in Ancient Rome. Many of the anchovy-based condiments that we use today—including colatura di alici and Worcestershire sauce—can trace their development back to the popularity and flavor profile of garum.
They needed something tangy.
Italian, and European food in general, was bland stuff before Columbus' followers brought good plants from the New World. It is funny to me to imagine Asian food without peppers, especially chiles, but that's the history.
My list of some the imports to the Old World and Asia from Central and South America:
Maize (corn), potato, all squash (summer and winter squash, including pumpkin), all peppers, peanut, avocado, every kind of bean (except Fava), Sunflower, Cocoa (chocolate), Tomato, Pineapple, Papaya, Vanilla, Sweet Potato. Also, turkeys.
Of course, the New World brought plenty of good foodstuffs from the Old World: Most grains, cattle, sheep and goats, pigs, Strawberries, apples, Honey Bees, etc etc.
I learned from one of those Italian cuisine Youtubes that "fresh" pasta, ie still not fully dried and packaged, is a waste of money. The comment was that "You're paying extra prices just for the water weight."
Not a big fan of pasta, really, because it feels like filling, empty calories to me. Sure, rare exceptions like when in Italy. Come to think of it, though, I do eat Thai noodles about monthly in noodle soup or Pad Thai, so there's that.
The point remains, though, that pastas were invented for food storage, carb storage like dried beans. They are made to be dried. Sheesh, years ago Mrs. BD and I made fresh homemade lasagna with a pasta machine. Worth doing it once to see what it's like, but after that a waste of time.
It has an interesting and pleasant flavor. There is no alcohol in it. All you do is to put a splash into plain bubbly water, with some ice. Very refreshing.
When I grew up, "Italian food" meant various forms of wheat (no egg) pasta with red glop on top, and maybe meatballs or eggplant. That, plus pizza and Italian grinders. Also, Lasagna I guess, made from an American cookbook.
They don't make grinders in Italy, and their pizzas aren't any good in my view. (I gave up on them. American wood-cooked pizzas can be pretty good, though. Crust has to be half-burnt.)
This was because most of the Italian immigrants to America were from a poor southern Italy with Neapolitan food traditions. To tell the truth, I do not care too much for that stuff but I am willing to eat it if I am starving. I do like a good Pasta Fagiole but I can make the best one you have ever had, and I will have a Bolognese on Tagliatelle. Call me a food snob.
Our best Italian meals have been in Umbria, which is where Romans take dining expeditions by the busload - so they can drink and gorge on wild pig, and get a ride home. No good Italian food tastes wonderful without wine. If you're on the wagon, it's not so wonderful unless it includes truffles or Balsamic. They do not use much wine in their cooking because you are supposed to be sipping it as you eat. Wine is expected to be an accompaniment, blending in your mouth.
I had a fine Lasagna in Verona for lunch, in a sidewalk cafe near the Arena. No red sauce, heavy on the nutmeg which makes sense, given the history of being part of the Venetian Empire for a while. One Italian dish I really wanted to try in Italy was Vitello Tonnato - Veal with Tuna Sauce. Mrs. BD makes an excellent version, but somehow we missed it on our last trip. Also wanted to try their Chicken Liver with Balsamic, but missed that too. That's OK - food isn't everything - and we know some great Italian restaurants in NYC.
Serious chefs travel with a packet of their personal knives, but the all-purpose knife is the Chef's Knife, aka Cook's Knife. My chef friend only uses Gunter Wilhelm knives, but chefs are cooking all day.
I guess the high-carbon, high-maintenance ones are the best, but whatever. I like the ones with a curved blade so you can rock it when chopping garlic, parsley, etc. Maybe you only need two knives: a bread knife and a chef's knife.
You can sometimes find used high-carbon chef's knives on eBay.
Except for Blueberries. There is no reason to even think about this topic unless you want to lose weight, or unless the physiology is interesting to you. Fruit is a fine dessert because its main nutritional ingredient is sugars. Especially Fructose. There is nothing "healthy" about fruit or fruit juice.
Fructose is metabolized in a different way than is Glucose.
The very short story is this: All sugars are not created equal. Fructose is metabolized into fat. Glucose in moderate amounts is turned into glycogen for energy. Table sugar is Sucrose, which is metabolized first into its components of Glucose and Fructose.
It's a Primo. A platter like that is to serve at least 2 people, maybe 4. I can be an annoying stickler about Italian food but there is a tradition to it and a logic to it too.
A big bowl of pasta is not a meal and, in fact, it would be a terribly unwholesome meal. A small plate of pasta, like the Bolognese recipe (the correct recipe) featured today is an excellent Primo preceding a meat and vegetable course (the Secondo). Bolognese is a beef-flavored sauce. Some tomato sauce flavor. Typically, less sauce than shown in the photo.
Italians seem to reserve their 4-course meals (Antipasto, Primo, Secondo, Dessert - sliced fruit usually) for special occasions. It's just too much food and puts you to sleep.
However, when we are in a food paradise like Norcia, Mrs. BD and I do their 4-course dinner (around 1 pm is dinner there) we just order one plate per course and share so we get all the tastes. Restaurants don't mind that at all.
Main rule for pasta? Dump the wet undrained pasta into the pan with the sauce with the heat on, and swirl around. Add some pasta water if a sauce is too dry or not creamy enough.
The use of peanuts dates to the Aztecs and Incas. They supposedly made a paste out of them too. Wow. Another New World food that I missed on my list of European appropriations of native New World foods: Squash, corn (maize), all peppers, tomato, potato, sweet potato, beans, vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, avocado, cashew, walnut, etc.
One of my daughters and her pal caught 12 Porgies this morning from the boat. It is 
Works even better with Sarsaparilla if you have some around your cabin.
The main issue is what kind of cheeses to use. Many choices for that, but supermaket white bread, cooked in lots of butter, is required.
Readers know that we love Italy and Italian cuisine but we do not much care for pasta dishes as Primi - with a handful of exceptions. For one thing, I find tomato sauce to be close to disgusting which might make me a food snob and, for another, I find pasta to be a generally unpleasant experience except in very small amounts. I deserve some credibility because we have eaten our way through Italy from the Alps to the southern coast of Sicily.
One of the tastiest salt-water critters of the eastern half of the US coast is the Blue Crab.
It's Shad Season now in the Northeast. Just had my first shad roe dinner of the season with pals last night. They made it with a caper and mushroom sauce with chopped bacon on top, on a bed of spinach, with roasted potatoes. It should be fully pink in the middle but crusty on the outside.
I learned from one of those Italian cuisine Youtubes that "fresh" pasta, ie still not fully dried and packaged, is a waste of money. The comment was that "You're paying extra prices just for the water weight."
It has an interesting and pleasant flavor. There is no alcohol in it. All you do is to put a splash into plain bubbly water, with some ice. Very refreshing.
Pic is a Northern Italian classic: Veal Tonnato
Serious chefs travel with a packet of their personal knives, but the all-purpose knife is the 
Except for Blueberries. 
