Waxed off: the perils of root veggies.

Katie and I made another batch of the Turkish root veggie soup today. I know, I know, its bloody hot out and its summer, not exactly root veggie time. Still, we wanted it, so we made it. It was wonderful, of course, as it always is. Anyway, we bought the veggies at Hy-Vee, which is a big supermarket chain here in the NE part of KS and Western Mo, and much to our surprise when we got home, the parsnips and turnips were covered in enough wax to make a year’s supply of candles for a new-age store. In all seriousness, these veggies must have had a good 1/8th of an inch coating of wax on them, and the bags said something like “Wax will come off when you peel the veggies.” No? Really? I thought it would stay on and I’d somehow peel the veggies without disturbing the wax. I’ve *never* seen anything like this before. The Dillon’s stores (a local chain which is absolutely *huge* in Kansas, now owned by Kroger) doesn’t have veggies like this at all. Sure, there might be a bit of wax on the apples to make them shine, but not on the root veggies.

Frankly, this waxed veggie thing is gross, and it made the whole peeling of veggies process rather unpleasant.

I generally really like the Hy-Vee stores, and I think that the rest of their produce is far nicer than the other places here in Larryville, as are the meat, cheese, and deli counters. That said, we’ll be getting root veggies elsewhere in the future.

Is this a preservation thing, or just a devious plot to make people think that food shaped candles are being sold in the produce dept.?

Cappuccino

Tonight, on a whim, we decided to open up the tin of espresso that I’ve had since the last Dean and Deluca’s sale. It came in the Italian cooking kit I managed to snag, and until tonight it sat on a shelf in my kitchen. This interest was prompted last night after a disastrous cappuccino experience where the waiter brought out a partly filled, luke-warm cup of coffee-based drink, and said “Um, sorry, but our foamer is broken…they said this should taste the same…is it ok?” Yeah, it wasn’t…it tasted ok, but just not the same as a nice frothy cup of hot cappuccino that I was looking for. After that, I was jonesing for something involving espresso and milk. We drug the espresso machine out of the closet (yep, I’m a college kid with her own espresso machine…:-) ), and popped open that tin of espresso (it’s from the Danesi company, and imported from Italy, but I don’t know enough about the various espressos to really know what’s considered good or bad…for my part, I like it… it’s certainly nicer than many other bean-based beverages I’ve had). The espresso portion was easily managed, but the milk proved a little more troublesome. After a few failed experiments, we (ie Chris) managed to get a lovely foam on the milk. Now, about halfway through my second mug (guess who’s not sleeping tonight!), I’m looking forward to future experiments with that espresso machine. I’m just disappointed that it took me three years to get up the courage to start experimenting with that machine. Any advice, notes, cautions, stories, recipes, or any other help you may have is very welcome, as I’m pretty new to all of this.

Panzanella

Panzanella is essentially an Italian tomato and bread salad. I grew up eating panzanella at Savute’s in Wichita, before the person who made it passed away and took the recipe with him.

Anyway, Panzanella is, according to one of my cookbooks, a method, not a recipe, and from discussing it with a couple of friends, this seems to be the case in practice as well as theory.

We used 5 tomatos, chopped in about 1 inch pieces (for 4 people, with some left over). Add to the tomatos a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, and around 1/3 of a cup of balsamic vinegar (the cheap stuff, not the 50 year old stuff, obviously), a little salt and ground black pepper, and probably about 10 leaves of basil, chopped. Mix the ingredients together and let sit refrigerated for at least several hours. Oregano would work nicely instead of the basil, indeed, I think that was probably what the Panzanella I grew up with used.

Many panzanella recipes call for using stale bread, rehydrated either by the dressing from the tomatos, or by an elaborate process of soaking the bread in water, squeezing it out, crumbling it, etc.

What we did instead, was to slice about 1″ thick slices of French/Italian bread, drop it in a bowl, cover with about 1/2 cup of the tomato salad and a few tablespoons of the dressing, grate a little parmigiano over it, and serve.

Pork chop sauteed in Butter and Sage.

Last night, Katie and I wanted to make Giada’s lemon spaghetti for dinner (link posted previously, somewhere on the blog), but didn’t know what we wanted with it. I wasn’t in the mood for shrimp, which does go nicely with it, and we happened to have a package of pork chops in the freezer, a bit over 1lb.

In the Silver Spoon, I found a recipe for pork chops sauteed in butter and sage. I decided this sounded good, but I really didn’t want to try to sautee thick pork chops in a cast iron skillet in an apartment and risk smoking the whole place up. To solve the issue, I sliced the pork chops into strips (as one would do for pad thai).

I sauteed them in 3tbsp of butter, a little salt and pepper, and about 2 tbsp of dried sage. Melt the butter, add the sage, let it cook/rehydrate in the butter for a couple of minutes. It should become quite aromatic. Fresh sage would be better, 4 to 6 leaves or so, minced, but we had dried and I didn’t feel like going to the store. Add the sliced pork, salt, and pepper, and sautee the pork until nicely browned. Serve over lemon spaghetti. The sage works fine with the lemon, but we did omit the basil or parsley that normally goes into the spaghetti. I think that parsley could be used without any problem, but basil might clash with the sage.

The pork turned out really nicely, and did go well with the spaghetti. This is definitely something we’ll do in the future.

Steak Pizzaiola

A couple days ago, we raided my parents’ freezer and came up with a couple of packages of round steak. Round steak isn’t amongst my favourites by any means, but its a solid cut of meat that will work for a lot of things. We decided to make pizzaiola.

First, we made a batch of Barbaresco’s tomato sauce, which is posted on the blog here, and modified it slightly. We had fresh tomatos from my parents’ garden as well, so we used those to make the sauce. Katie blanched, peeled and seeded the tomatos, then ran them through the food processor to achieve a puree. We probably had about 4 cups or so of puree. We put a bit of olive oil in the pan, and cooked half a finely minced yellow onion and a couple finely minced garlic cloves, until they were very soft. Then we added the two round steaks (not tenderized) and seared them to a nice brown color on both sides, and finally added the tomato puree, salt and pepper, and a tablespoon or two of dried oregano, and simmered it for about a half hour or a little longer. We served it with spaghetti.

In all, it would be a nicer dish with nicer steak, but this worked pretty well, really.

Uova alla Santelli

Italo Santelli was an Italian fencing master, who spent most of his career in Budapest, where a scrambled egg dish, or a frittata, depending on the specific recipe, was named for him. Italo taught his son Giorgio to fence, and Giorgio in turn taught my master. Katie and I ran across this recipe on the web, and checked with our Hungarian food source (Hi, Anna!), who confirmed that she’d heard of it but never had it.

Anyway, last night, we made the dish as a scramble, it was amazing, easily the best scrambled egg dish I’ve had.

Ingredients:
8oz. Polska Kielbasa, sliced thin. (original receipe calls for Drebecen sausage, but its not available here).
10 eggs, beaten (we added a couple tbsp of milk)
5 or so slices of bacon, chopped into small pieces.
1 green pepper seeded and cut into strips (we used an Anaheim, rather than a bell, and I think it was a good choice)
3 tbsp (approx) of chopped tomato
4oz grated parmigiano cheese.
salt and pepper

Method:
Cook the bacon in a large pan until crispy, pour off most of the fat, save perhaps for a couple teaspoons. In it, cook the sausage, green pepper and tomato. When the green pepper has gone limp, add the eggs and cheese, and scramble or let set up as a stovetop frittata.