Summer Semester '10: Squash Flowers are in Season

Figure 46.u - Behold, the mighty squash flower!

Squash blossoms are what I consider the ultimate seasonal food. Unlike even the venerable pomegranate (formerly only available around Thanksgiving, now seen in grocery stores year-round) you can only get squash flowers over a few weeks at the end of spring and the beginning of summer.

I'm lucky enough to have a family friend who sends me a beach-ball sized bag every year.

These edible flowers have a taste that's unlike anything else like them. They are very un-floral in taste, and not perfume-y at all. They have a very delicate, vegetal flavor with just a slight sweetness. So, what do you do with them? Traditionally, they are dredged or battered and fried. I have seen them on restaurant menus stuffed with cheese. When I get sick of frying them, I've been known to top pizzas with them, and I'm thinking about baking them into a quickbread in lieu of regular zucchini. My mom recently made a frittata (read: thick italian omlette) out of them, and it was better than a regular zucchini frittata she made the same day.

If you happen to have your own squash plants, make sure you only pick the male flowers, which grow on long stems. The female ones will eventually develop into the actual squash itself. Don't pick too many at once, or there won't be enough male flowers around to pollinate all the female flowers in the first place.

Traditional Squash Flowers

• As many male squash flowers as you can get your hands on, long stems removed. Leave the green leafy part at the bottom, though.
• A glass pie plate full of all purpose flower
• Another glass pie plate with 5-6 eggs, cracked and whipped up with a fork.
• Vegetable oil for frying.
• Salt to taste

Wash each flower thoroughly, making sure to rinse out inside the petals, as ants and other critters may have haplessly fallen in. Dredge each flower first in flour then in egg and fry at medium heat. Flip once, when golden brown. Remove to a plate lined with paper towels to absorb any extra oil, salt to taste and eat hot. In my house, these never make it farther than the paper towels, never mind a serving plate.

Figure 46.v. - Ready to eat, hot out of the pan.

Next week we have a cool dish for a hot night.

Tony's Mom's Food 101: Roasted Red Peppers

So according to my tag line, I'm an Italian Boy. This is both by heritage (100%, by the way) and by the old adage "You are what you eat." I grew up eating Italian, because that's what my mom knew how to make, because that's what her mom knew how to make, ad infinitum. I was also fortunate enough to have a grandfather who, in his retirement, kept a huge vegetable garden. Every spring, summer and fall were filled with fresh produce grown only one town over from my home. Locavores, eat your hearts out. Therefore, I am a product of my parents and so is my minor obsession with food, as well as my innate ability to cook American-Italian food (Figure 12.p).

Fresh produce only lasts so long, though. What did we do with bushels of peppers, cucumbers, tomatoes and squash? A good deal of it was given away, especially towards the end of each season. The tomatoes were stewed and canned in the traditional style, and then made in to red gravy (what people of non-Italian descent would refer to as red sauce, spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, marinara, or pizza sauce). My mom's red gravy is a jealously guarded secret, which of course will never be published on this website. What I will write about is what we used to do with the red peppers: roast them (and subsequently freeze them - more on that later). She has actually shared this recipe publicly a couple of times, once given to me to give to a college friend who was compiling a dorm hall based cook book, and once to my parents' local paper, a picture of my mom holding the finished product included. Needless to say, I won't be "off-ed" or "whacked" or any other stereotypical Italo-American slang term for "assassinated" for sharing this recipe - I'm just sharing it with more people than before.

Figure 12.p - My parents. Me taking a picture of them taking pictures of each other = meta-irony. Not really.

I know what you're thinking, you can just buy roasted red peppers in a jar in the grocery store. I tried that once, and I almost threw the jar out because they tasted like crap compared to the peppers I'm used to. Comparing these home made roasted reds to the grocery store jars is like saying you're going to serve Spam with cloves in it on Christmas. It would work if the people you were serving it to had only ever eaten Spam and had no clue what a real roasted and glazed ham tastes like. Spam and roasted red peppers from the jar are a proverbial slap in the face to people who know what the real thing is like. So, without further hesitation, here is my mom's recipe for home made roasted red peppers.

Roasted Red Peppers

• 8 red bell peppers - preferably grown by your own grandfather like mine are, but that's not mandatory.
• 1/3 cup of water.
• olive oil - you're using it raw here, so haul out the good stuff. Extra-virgin only. Cold-pressed highly suggested, unfiltered preferred.
• one clove of garlic, minced.

Wash your peppers, cut them in half length-wise, remove the green core and every single seed. Place them in a roasting pan or a deeper-sided cookie sheet face down in a single layer, coat the bottom of the pan with the water. Move your oven rack to the second-from-the-top position and set the oven to broil. Broil for about 20 minutes, until the skins are totally black. Remove the peppers from the pan and place them in a large mixing bowl. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and a clean dish towel. This will make them steam (since they're still hot) and will cause the burnt, black skin to peel away from the lightly caramelized flesh. Let them do this for one hour. Peel the skins off and throw them away. Cut your newly skinned peppers lengthwise into long strips.

At this point, you have one of two options. Either dress them with olive oil and garlic, place them in the fridge and allow the flavors to marinate for a while, or freeze them and bring containers to your adult son who is too lazy to do this whole process himself as often as you do. They freeze and thaw just fine (Figure 12.q) . Either you or your adult son can use them however you would presumably have used the awful ones from the jar - in antipastos, on pizzas, or tossed with pasta. The best way to eat them is on a sandwich made with crusty Italian bread and a slice of Provolone cheese.

Figure 12.q - Un-dressed roasted peppers in their natural habitat. This specimen is post-thaw.

Until next week!

Tony's Food 101: Italian Wine Biscuits

So as a general rule, I don't bake. I have to hear about enough science at work, I prefer my food to be more of an art. Maybe "craft" is more of an appropriate word, actually. But as with medicine and with everything, there are exceptions to every rule. Every once in a while, the spirit moves me, I get out my measuring cups and make an Italian biscuit. There are three types of biscuits you'll find in the Italo-American bakeries of my native Southern New England: Pepper, Egg and Wine. These are the foods I was raised on, along side red gravy (what most of the rest of the U.S. calls "pasta sauce") and crusty Italian bread. Among my mother and her two sisters, each of them excels at one biscuit. My mom makes pepper biscuits, her sister Donna holds claim over wine biscuits, and every Easter my aunty Elaine churns out enough egg biscuits for the whole family. I guess this is generational; my brother makes pepper biscuits that would make any Nonna cry tears of shame that her's aren't as good. Egg biscuits are way to sweet for my tastes, so I decided to take on the partially sweet, partially savory wine biscuit*. This is a recipe that I ripped off from an OLD very Italian Catholic parish's fund raiser recipe book that my mom had lying around.

* I tried making a batch for a road trip I'm going on this weekend, and apparently I'm a little rusty. The pictures I took of the process are fine, the end result looks nothing like the biscuits I've been making since college. Rather than rising, they totally flattened out into cookie-esque shapes. Another reason I prefer to avoid baking: if you don't do everything exactly right, it doesn't work.


Italian Wine Biscuits

• 4 cups of flour


• 2 cups of granulated sugar


• 4 teaspoons baking powder


• 1 cup of really bold red wine. I like Chiantis. Pour your self a glass to drink, this will make the process more bearable if you're a bake-hater like me.


• 3/4 cups vegetable/corn/canola oil.


• (Optional) One egg yolk, seperated from the whites. Save the whites and make an omlette for yourself tomorrow for breakfast. Tomorrow you will be grateful.
  

Prehead the oven to Bake 375. Mix together all of your dry ingredients, then stir in your wet ingredients. You will end up with an un-appealing purple mass. Incidently, this is the exact color of the first batch of risotto I ever made, and hence why my roommates wouldn't touch it (Figure 6.a).

Figure 6.a - An aerial view of something you probably don't want to eat just yet.

Pick up clumps of the dough and roll them into pencil sized pieces, like a kindergartener making snakes out of Play Doh snakes. (Figure 6.b).

Figure 6.b - Pencil sized Play Doh snakes - okay, it's a fat pencil.

Fold these in half and twist them into ring-shaped knot forms. If you're interested in having your biscuits shine like justice, brush the tops with egg yolk or milk. I used egg yolk this time around. Place onto a greased cookie sheet, or even better parchment paper on a cookie sheet and bake for about a half an hour. Give them some room, as they will rise... and expand sideways. Try to roll thinner pieces than I did, so that your biscuits look more like knots and less like turds (Figure 6.c). After they're done baking, allow them to cool so that they harden and turn really crunchy. When they're done, the purple color will have gone away, and they'll be light brown (Figure 6.d).

Figure 6.c - More like knots (bottom right) and less like turds (top right).

Figure 6.D - The finished product... which looks nothing like I had hoped for.

Store these in an airtight container to maintain crunchiness. This recipe will make about 30 biscuits, depending on how tired you get of making snakes and therefore how much longer and fatter than a pencil your snakes turn out to be.

Sorry about the missed post last week, and the lateness of this week's post. Life's been kind of hectic lately, but stay on board. Things will pick back up as scheduled next week!

Tony's Food 101: Mushroom Risotto

Risotto and I have a long history. Despite growing up in an Italian household, I never had risotto growing up (or polenta, for that matter, but that's a whole different story). Fast forward to my college years - my roommate and I in our first apartment away from our parents, cooking dinner every night and forcing our other two roommates to clean up after us, in the name of nutrition and cuisine. My mom, ironically, had sent me a recipe for risotto out of our local Little Italy's newspaper. My roommate and I decided to take it for a spin, however, it turns out that this particular ride was sort of a lemon. There was a single typo in the ingredients list: one cup of red wine. This aberrant cup of wine wasn't included anywhere in the instructions portion of the recipe. Was it put there accidently? Were we supposed to drink the wine while cooking the rice? Was it supposed to say "white wine"? Although not one of the great mysteries of the modern world, we were still confused by this inclusion. We put the red wine in the recipe anyway, unsure as really where it even fit in to the order of how to make this stuff. We ended up with a huge pan of tasty purple rice, that our other roommates absolutely refused to touch. We did our own dishes that night.

My next risotto memory happened maybe 5 or 6 years after the first. I'd had my entire senior year of college and four years of medical school to right the wrongs of the purple risotto and come up with my very own mixture of add-ins. I was on my very first date with my girlfriend, and some how (right, "some how") I started talking about food. She asked me what I usually made, I said I leaned towards Italian because of my heritage. She asked for examples, I offered risotto. She'd never had it before. Needless to say, over a year later we're still together. She'll tell you it was my home-made salsa that sinked it for her, I think it was a little dish of creamy, savory rice, cheese and mushrooms.



Mixed Mushroom Risotto

- One or two cloves of garlic, depending on your tastes, chopped fine.
- One large white or yellow onion, chopped fine.
(optional) One quarter to one half of a bulb and stalks of fennel (a.k.a. anise), weird frond-leaf things removed.
- A few glugs of olive oil.
- A generous pat of unsalted butter.
- A pinch of salt.
- As much fresh ground black pepper as you, your significant other, your children or your guests can stand.
- One cup of Arborio rice. I've used Carnaroli, however I was unilaterally unimpressed compared to mostly any Arborio I've used. Carnaroli is too long of a grain for this dish.
- Half of a little grocery store tub of sliced white button or baby bella mushrooms, washed THOROUGHLY and diced. Nobody likes dirt in their risotto.
- Either one grocery store tub of shiitake mushrooms, diced,
OR- one of those little packages of mixed fresh wild mushrooms (usually shiitake, enoki and portabello),
OR- assorted dried mushrooms that I usually buy at Ocean State Job Lot but you can sometimes find at asian markets and rarely at Trader Joes, reconstituted per package directions, diced and water they've soaked in reserved,
OR- assorted fresh actually wild mushrooms, like from your yard, but only if you're an accomplished forager or an old school Italian like my dad, also diced,
- 1 cup of white wine that you should plan on drinking with the meal.
- 6-8 cups of chicken (or veggie stock) warmed up. If you're a vegetarian (I'm not) and you don't like your local canned/cartoned vegetable stock (I don't), feel free to use the flavorful liquid left over from soaking the dried mushrooms - especially the shiitakes. You'll have to add a little salt to make up for what's missing in the stock.
- About 1/2-3/4 cup non-hard Italian cheese. I usually use Fontina, but lately I've been on a kick where I use Trader Joe's Italian Truffle Cheese. It has black truffle in it, which enhances the whole mushroom theme of the dish (and tastes awesome). Either shred this with a grater, or cut it up into small cubes.
- An equal amount of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Use the real thing, folks. Save the green can for... well... you should probably just throw the green can away. It's gross. The best stuff has the words "Parmagiano Reggiano" written in little pin holes in the rind.

Okay. Mix your aromatics (garlic, onions and maybe fennel) with the oil and butter and sweat over medium heat. When a recipe author tells you to sweat something, they mean put it over the heat until little beads of moisture form, but nothing has turned brown yet. Maybe a little golden, but not definitely not brown. Add in the rice. Yes, into the hot pan with oil and no liquid. This is how you make every risotto, not just mine. Allow the rice to cook until the sides of the rice are clear and the very middle is still white. Now add in all of the mushrooms, and then the wine. Stir frequently, allow the rice to absorb the wine. Once things are relatively dry again, add in a cup or two of stock. Allow it to absorb. You will repeat this step more times than you think possible. After about 4-5 cups, just add in one half a cup at a time. Do this until the rice cannot absorb any more liquid. Once you've reached this stage, the rice should have a creamy texture from all the starches it's let out during cooking. Feel free to taste it, the rice should have just a little bit of hardness to it. It should not be mush. If you've added too much liquid, not to worry. Just let the rice sit for a couple of minutes and the excess liquid will cook off and maybe absorb a little more than you thought it would. Last but not least, stir in your cheeses. The rice should already be creamy before any dairy is added, the cheese is more for flavor than texture. If you have any left after your meal (you may not, trust me), risotto makes mean left overs. I won't even get into the sweat-shop-style labor that goes into the best way to eat left over risotto: arancini. I'll save that for another posting.

I actually just made this for dinner last night, but I forgot to take pictures. Sorry folks!