Suppli for Risotto Milanese

A couple of years ago, a good friend posted a Milanese Risotto recipe, with a little teaser for a suppli, or way to reuse leftovers that make them a bit different. We’d never made it until a couple of weeks ago, because leftover risotto doesn’t have a very high survival rate around here. Finally, we had enough left over to do it, when we finally thought of it. It works like this.

Scoop a tbsp or slightly more cold risotto, shape it into a ball (or disc, like we did since we pan fried), and dip it into a whisked egg, then give it a roll in some breadcrumbs. Fry until crispy and golden-brown. I’m not entirely sure what we’re supposed to with them after that, as far as serving them goes – they didn’t really survive much past getting them out of the pan. These are just that good. I think I dipped a few into some reheated tomato sauce, much like one would with fried polenta sticks, and thought it was ok.

St. Louis style Pizza

If you’ve ever had a St. Louis style pizza, you know they’re different. Generally, people either love it, or hate it, without much middle ground. I’ve only had St. Louis style pizza at Imo’s, a St. Louis chain that has a location in the KC area.

What is St. Louis style pizza? Basically, its a thin crust pizza, very crunchy, that utilizes a pasteurized-process cheese known as Provel. Yes. Process cheese. I know. Ick. Well, actually, Provel is pretty good for processed cheese, a darn sight better than the typical American cheese slices.

Provel is essentially a mixture of Swiss, Provolone, and white Cheddar, with a slight smoke flavoring.

St. Louis style pizza sauce is generally pretty sweet, but in this case I used sauce I had in the freezer. It was made with a 28 oz can of tomato puree, a couple tbsp of double strength tomato paste, 1 onion minced, and Penzey’s pizza seasoning – and possibly a couple pinches of sugar. If you don’t have a pizza sauce seasoning blend, basically you’ll want to start with a pinch of salt, 1/2tbsp dried crushed oregano, a pinch of time, and and pinch of basil.

The interesting thing about St. Louis pizza is that the pizza crust is unleavened, which means there’s no yeast, no rising time, no waiting.

Dough:
2 cups + 2tbsp AP flour
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
2 tsp oil (olive, canola)
2 tsp corn syrup (I used dark)
1/2 cup + 2tbsp water.

Mix ingredients until a stiff dough is formed. I found I needed more water, but not much.

Roll it out on a floured board, as thin as you can without breaking it.

Put it on a pizza stone or pan. I think ours is 18″ or so.

Preheat oven to 450.

Top the dough with around 1/4 cup sauce, and about 2 cups of Provel (I think I used around 1 cup of Provel, and 1 cup of mozzarella, since Katie isn’t a big fan of the Provel). Other toppings included fresh basil, oregano and thyme, as well as about 15 or 20 slices of turkey pepperoni.

Bake at 450 for about 10-13 minutes, so that the crust browns on the bottom.

Oh, and unless you want to be a St. Louis pizza pretender, cut it into squares, not those wedge shapes everyone else uses.

Our St. Louis style pizza

Grilled Swordfish with Pesto, Lemon capellini, and Sauteed Asparagus with Shallots

Tonight we wanted something different and fun, and since the weather was good, we decided to grill.

We found frozen swordfish that looked better than anything in the fresh fish section of the local megamart.
They got thawed and grilled over medium heat, after being seasoned with salt and pepper. Put on grill, close lid. After two minutes rotate 90 degrees, after two more minutes, flip. Two minutes later, rotate 90 degrees. Cook a final 2 minutes. Put on plate, top with about 1 tsp of pesto each, spread it out, tent with foil, let rest. Swordfish – done.
Obviously, you’ll hold off on cooking the swordfish until the capellini and asparagus is nearly finished, so it stays hot.

Asparagus with Shallots.
Trim 1 bunch asparagus as needed
Mince one shallot.
Melt 1 tbsp butter in a sautee pan and sautee the shallots a bit, then add the asparagus.
Salt and pepper it lightly. We used a bit of Penzey’s shallot salt as well.
Add a little water so that it’ll steam the asparagus a little and not burn the shallots once they have developed some color. We didn’t put a lid on to trap steam, just avoid burning the finely minced shallots. All told, this sauté takes probably 15 minutes – 3 to 5 for the shallots and 10-12 for the asparagus.

Serve with lemon capellini. Obvously, the cook time for capellini is shorter than spaghetti. We use somewhat more lemon juice and cheese, and about half the oil that Giada’s recipe calls for.

Meat, Mushroom and Cheese Manicotti

Tonight Chris and I found ourselves with an overabundance of Amish paste tomatoes from the garden, so we decided to make some manicotti. We wanted something a bit more interesting than plain cheese manicotti, so we decided to add some ground turkey and chopped mushrooms to the filling.

Sauce
~10 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and pureed. We threw the tomatoes we had on the grill for a couple of minutes, then put them in a couple of ziplock bags, which actually is easier than blanching for us.
1 small can of tomato puree (if ya want, you can use a few more tomatoes, but we ran out, hence the puree)
1 small onion
1/4 of a Italian Roasting Pepper, roasted and peeled (small note on these: we grew these this year for the first time, and were rather surprised at how warm these pepper are. I cut the first one we tried, and ended up with a capsaicin burn on my hands and face, even though I washed my hands after handling the pepper. That lasted a couple of hours, although it felt like a couple of years. Chris also burned his hands after handling the roasted peppers, even though they tasted more mild. I have no idea what we have in the soil around here, but it results in killer peppers. Tasty pepper, but dangerous)
Herbs
Salt and pepper

Puree the onion, and saute in some oil until nearly dry. Add the pureed tomatoes and pureed roasting pepper, as well as herbs and pepper. We got our most recent order from Penzey’s Spices, and we got some of their Tuscan Sunset seasoning, so we used that. Simmer until cooked. Adjust seasoning and keep warm.

Filling
1 lb Ground turkey
10 oz mushrooms
Herbs
Large container of ricotta
1 cup of mixed shredded cheese
1 egg

Brown turkey in pan, salt and pepper to taste. Once dry, remove and add the mushrooms to the pan. Add herbage (we used parsley and basil), and saute until nearly dry. Add to turkey and allow to cool slightly. Add cheeses and mix well. You’ll only need about two thirds of the mixture for the sleeves, so I beat the egg first in large bowl and moved a bit over half of the cheese and meat mixture into that, and mixed well.

Assembly
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cook the pasta according to package instructions, then drain and toss with a little oil to keep the sleeves from sticking to each other. Fill the sleeves with the meat mixture, and arrange in a baking dish. Pour the sauce over the sleeve, making sure it gets down between the sleeves. Top with some more shredded cheese, and bake for about 30 minutes until the cheese has browned and the sauce is bubbling. Remove and let rest at least 5 minutes before snarfing. Er. Eating.

These were some of the best manicotti we’ve had. The turkey is nice and lean and keeps the stuffing from getting too greasy, while still giving it a lovely flavor. The mushrooms also gave the filling a bit of earthiness and body without being overwhelming. The sauce was amazing as well. The pepper chunk we used gave the sauce a nice warmth, reminiscent of arrabbiata, but not quite as pointed due to the fruitiness and sweetness of the pepper as well. We are both sold on the Tuscan Sunset seasoning as well, as it has the balance we usually look for in Italian herbage (and is a great starting point to further refine the balance). All in all, a really tasty dish.

Cacciatore

A couple of weeks ago, we made some chicken cacciatore based on The Silver Spoon’s rabbit cacciatore recipe. It was wonderful.

Ingredients
2 tbsp butter
1 onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
1 carrot, finely chopped
1/3 cup prosciutto, chopped
1 chicken, quartered, skin removed
3/4 cup dry white wine
A few sprigs of thyme and oregano
1.5 cans small dice tomatoes
Salt and Pepper

Procedure
Saute the prosciutto, onion, carrot and celery until soft, then brown the chicken. Add herbs, spices and wine, cover and cook for 20 minutes. Add tomatoes, reduce heat and simmer for 1 hour (or until the chicken is cooked through and tender). Then, either uncover and reduce the sauce, or add flour to thicken. We served it over some mascarpone herbed polenta. The tomato sauce was really lovely, and the polenta added a nice contrast.

Mushroom Ravioli

After a rather lengthy silence, it’s past time we got back into the recipe posting game. To start things off, here’s a mushroom ravioli that we made a couple of weeks ago, after picking up a pasta machine.

Ingredients
Pasta Dough Recipe (any egg-based pasta recipe you like will work, we used the Professional Chef’s recipe) -as a side note, a stand mixer is a great asset in creating a nice smooth dough, as we found out the hard way.
1 tbsp each butter and olive oil
10 oz cremini (baby bella) mushrooms
1 package mixed dried mushrooms (about 2 oz)
1 shallot
1 -15 oz container of ricotta (if you are so inclined, mascarpone could work as well)
1 egg
Salt and Pepper
Thyme and oregano, or any herb you like

Procedure
Make the pasta dough, and let it rest while you prepare the filling.
Cut the dried mushrooms with kitchen shears and soak in boiling water for about 10 minutes. Meanwhile, mince the shallot and the cremini, and saute in butter and oil. After the dried mushrooms are reconstituted, drain (do not reserve liquid), and add to the shallot and mushroom mixture. Cook until little liquid remains, almost to a dry pan stage. Put this mixture in a food processor and process until smooth. Add the ricotta and egg, and process again until all incorporated. Add herbs now, if you want.

Roll out the pasta dough as per your machine’s instructions. For ours, we divided the dough into about four pieces (although in retrospect, we should have done about 8), and starting on the widest setting, start feeding the dough through the machine. We gradually decreased the thickness with each roll until we were at setting 3 on our machine. Cut the rolled dough into roughly 1.5″ square (or up to 2″), and deposit about a teaspoon of filling on half of the squares. Using water, brush the edges of the square, and place a filling-free pasta square over it, sealing the edges well. Once all the ravioli are made, you may either freeze them, or cook them in boiling salted water until they float, a couple of minutes.

To serve, we like to saute some shallot in butter with more thyme and some sage. Add the cooked ravioli and brown lightly on both sides (basically a brown butter sauce).

These were amazingly flavorful ravioli. The dried mushrooms gave the filling a richness and earthiness that was just fantastic.

Mountain Recipe 2: Canederli

After a few months’ absence, I’m back to present this second Mountain recipe, called Canederli (accent on the first “e”: CanEderli). This is a much-beloved dish in the Northeast of Italy–from the Brenta valley to the Sudtirol, and it’s also much appreciated in Austria all the way East to Styria.

Like other dishes that I have presented, it is a representative of the “cucina povera” and uses as a main ingredient yesterday’s bread–which would be sacrilege to throw away.

Ingredients for four people:

~ 14 Oz soft bread (white is my favorite)
~ 7 Oz bacon or “Speck,” cut into small cubes
~ 2.5 Oz flour
~ 2 eggs
~ 1 midsize onion
~ Parsley
~ Milk, best if whole
~ Broth
~ Olive oil, salt, pepper

Soak the bread in lukewarm milk for about 3 hours. Then strain it thoroughly to obtain a firm, dough-like texture. Prepare a sautee by placing the onion, finely chopped, and the bacon in a casserole with oil over medium-low heat.

When the sautee is ready, discard the oil and add the contents to the bread. Mix together with the eggs, flour, salt and a pinch of parsley, making sure the whole is firm and homogenous.

Use your hands to form balls a bit smaller than a tennis ball, making sure they are nice and firm. Then, place them in a deep pot of boiling broth (I really like home-made chicken for this) and cook them until they float to the surface.

Enjoy them in a deep dish halfway filled with broth, to which you can add pepper and grated cheese. Some prefer to cover them with butter and sage instead.

This recepie is wonderful for this time of year, and it is particularly enjoyable after a day in the cold weather. A nice dry Northeastern or German white will go fantastically with it–as will of course a good, hearty table red.

Please let me know how this turns out.

Barbaresco

Ossibuchi alla Milanese

Tonight, Chris and I decided to get a little adventurous and try the osso buco recipe from the Silver Spoon. Since veal is hard to come by around here, and the store didn’t have any beef shanks, we opted for a couple of lamb shanks we found. On a side note, we’ve finally found a store that stocks lamb regularly-ground, chops, shanks and a couple of other cuts. It’s about time-lamb is amazing. Anyway, recognizing that the end result was going to be stronger because it was lamb, we got to cooking.

2 lamb shanks
1/2 medium onion, chopped
6 tbsp butter
Flour (to coat shanks)
1/2 glass dry white wine
1 carrot, chopped fine
1 celery stalk, chopped fine
3/4 to 1 cup of veal or chicken stock (we used chicken)
2 tbsp tomato paste
Gremolata-1/2 lemon’s zest, 1 sprig parsley, chopped fine, 1 garlic clove, chopped fine.

Melt the butter over medium heat and saute onions until golden. Add flour-coated shanks, and turn up to high heat. Brown the shanks, turning regularly. Add wine, and stir until wine has evaporated. Add carrot, celery and stock. Bring to simmer and cover, for around half an hour. Because we had a few other dishes working at the same time, I think we ended up staying at this step for about 1 hour). Add the tomato paste, mixed with a bit of water or broth. Add gremolata and serve over Milanese risotto.

The end result was a very nice rich sauce that was magnificent with the creamy risotto. The shanks themselves were rather nice as well, although if we do lamb in the future, we’ll be sure to remember to get the nice people at the meat counter to cut them in half for us.

An additional note about the Milanese risotto. We finally remembered to bring a mortar and pestle back with us when we went home for our birthdays. grinding the saffron strands with the mortar and pestle gave us much better color in the final risotto than crumbling them up or cutting them. It was also much more effective than the pre-powdered saffron we used a couple weeks ago.

Pizza Dough

Chris and I decided that we were in the mood for some pizza tonight, and since we didn’t feel like ingesting the local cheap grease-bombs so popular in college towns, we decided to make some. We’ve made pizza several times before, but the crust had always eluded us. Tonight, I think I’ve hit on something that we can both live with.

Ingredients

1 lb AP flour (in the future I may be playing with a mixture of this and bread flour-since I usually am not prepping the dough 12 hours in advance, the extra structural help may be a good thing)
1 1/4 cups luke-warm water
1 packet of yeast
1 tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
1 teaspoon gluten (again, since I’m rarely organized enough to do this much in advance, structural assistance is a good thing)
2 tablespoons canola oil (olive oil works perfectly well here as well, but Chris feels that it leaves the crust with a kind of funky flavor, so I’ve opted for something more neutral)

Proof yeast in water and sugar, and set aside. Measure the rest of the dry ingredients and mix. Pour the yeasty-water and oil into the dry ingredients and mix until combined. Knead lightly, and place in an oiled bowl and let rise for around one hour, or until doubled in size. Divide in two parts and knead again. Let rise for an additional 45 minutes to 1 hour. Form a round with each of the dough balls, leaving the edges thicker than the center. Lightly dust a cookie sheet with cornmeal and place the round on it-one pizza per sheet. Brush with melted butter (again, olive oil works just fine here too, depending on personal preference), and top as desired. Cooking one at a time, put the pizza into an oven that has been preheated to as high as it will go (for me, that’s 500 degrees F). After 5 minutes, I turned to pizza around for even browning. They were done in about 9 minutes. Remove from oven, and let set for 5 minutes before cutting.

Although not exactly your typical college-student pizza, we both feel that it is certainly worth the effort. The result was a nice, thick, chewy on the inside, crunchy on the outside crust that browned nicely and evenly all the way around. There are still several things I want to experiment with, but for now, this is a good starting place.

Uova Strapazzate nel nido – Scrambled eggs in the nest

By its name, this is an Italian scrambled egg dish. Don’t worry, no nests were damaged in the making of this dish, and no twigs need be eaten.

Essentially, the nest is a mashed potato shell, filled with scrambled eggs.

You’ll need about 1lb of mashed potatoes to make four nests. The mashed potatoes should have 2/3 of a cup of Parmesan cheese grated into it, as well as one raw egg mixed in.

You’ll need five scrambled eggs as well. The Silver Spoon recipe calls for plain scrambled eggs, but we used the Uova alla Santelli recipe, and reduced it to 5 eggs.

Divide the potatoes into four equal amounts, and form those into four mounds, and then press out a nest shaped indentation into each one. Bake the nests on a buttered cookie sheet for 20 minutes at 350 degrees. During this time, make the scrambled eggs. When the eggs and nests are finished, fill the nests with eggs and serve. As a side note, the eggs pictured in the Spoon are very very very wet, and the text notes that they’re cooked for two minutes over low heat. I like my scrambled eggs runny, but this is pushing it a bit even for me. I’m certain my mother would have a fit of disgust just looking at how uncooked these eggs are (then again, if they’re not rubbery, she’s not sure they’re done).

On the whole I’m really very impressed with this dish. Its very different than a lot of typical American egg + potato type dishes, and the mashed potatoes make a really neat change from hashbrowns and so on. This is definitely something we’ll be making again.