Hooked!

Things are not always as they appear.

For example, and contrary to appearances, I am not a fisherman. In the twenty or so times that I have been fishing in my life, only once has a fish managed to wind up on a lure that was in any way associated with me. You're looking at it. A striped bass, of indeterminate weight and size; a beauty, my fishermen friends assured me at the time.

As you can see, the bass and I are on a lovely little island off the coast of Maine, just outside of a cabin that I used to like going to quite a lot but no longer. You might also have noticed that it is a beautiful summer's day, the kind of day that can shield a Mainer's thoughts from the winter that is coming.

All in all, one very fine afternoon in the northland. Made more so by the merciful end to a long and frustrating run of failed fishing expeditions spanning (literally) decades.

But here is what you do not see.

There is the thrown and broken beer bottle, of course (a full one if memory serves). And the newly reddened blue shirtsleeve, made so by the blood flowed out of my newly mangled right hand. Oh, and let's not forget the writhing-on-the-grass-in-excruciating-pain display that I so generously staged for the local island dwellers. Yes, that was fun.

So far as I know no pictures exist of any of those things. But would you really want to see that poor bass struggling to break free of the hook lodged inside its body so that it could just get back to what it was doing before I came along? Would you like to witness the moment when the fish jerked so quickly that all those dangling hooks not lodged inside it went piercing straight through one side of my hand and back out the other?

It wasn't pretty. I haven't held a fishing rod in my hand since. And, though I probably consume a lot more seafood than the average bear, I haven't eaten a striper either.

So, what are we doing here then?

The plan, you see, was to head over to my local fishmonger, pick out a couple whole stripers, douse them in plenty of extra virgin and a few fresh herbs, and quick roast them at about 650 degrees in the wood oven out back of the house. A simple enough plan, and one that might finally put the whole messy matter of this bass and me to rest. (It wasn't. At rest, I mean.) Hell, I even made it to the fish market and scoped out the talent. Not nearly as big and meaty and beautiful as my striped bass, but nice.

Except that after way too long a time pacing around the store (long enough for a very nice couple from New Jersey to mistake me for a person who worked at the fish market), I decided to not go through with it after all.

I'm not going all soft on you here. Creatures large and small, from land and sea, are no safer from my desires than they were before. It's just the stripers that appear to be. I caught one. It caught me right back. We're even. I'm just not as determined to get back on the winning side as I thought I was.

Maybe it wasn't just the fish hook that got inside me that day.

Oh, and I stopped by the butcher on the way home from the fish market. The oven was already fired up, and I had promised some people a special meal. I couldn't just come home with a fish story, could I?

Playing my guitar

Not exactly the image that comes to mind when you think about Mardi Gras, is it?

Me neither, but then I didn't get to spend yesterday (aka Fat Tuesday or Carnevale) in Venice or Rio de Janeiro or even New Orleans. I spent it in Maine, a place with little if any affinity for the annual period of pre-Lenten celebration for Catholics the world over. 

As New Orleans was long the home of an important member of my inner circle, it seemed fitting that I do something to mark the occasion. And since Louisiana and music are so tightly woven together, I decided that I might play the guitar for the lady. 

A stretch, I know. But romantic of me, yes?

It's a double-sided number, this instrument of mine. Well over a hundred strings in all. It takes some practice to master, but I can teach you how to play in about ten minutes.

You'll need a rolling pin, not a pick. Because we're making pasta here. And with a chitarra, not a Fender Stratocaster. (This is a food blog, after all.)

Chitarra is Italian for guitar and, considering its design, it is also the term for the pasta tool you see here. It's a very old-style tool, this chitarra, invented around 1800 or thereabouts (in Italy, but of course you knew that). It's made of hardwood and metal; not a single bit of plastic resides anywhere on the thing. The reason it has two sides is to accommodate two different noodle widths. On one side the strings are close together, so as to make spaghetti noodles (hence the term spaghetti alla chitarra); the strings on the other side are further apart, for more of a fettucine type noodle.

Speaking of the strings, they can be loosened or tightened by turning this knob, just as guitar strings might be adjusted, and the strings can also be replaced. (If you're interested in more information, or want to buy a chitarra, Fante's in Philadelphia is a good place to poke around.)

What the lady had requested on this particular evening was a simple cacio e pepe (cheese and pepper) with spaghetti alla chitarra noodles. The sheet of fresh pasta dough you see here? I rolled it out by hand, not by machine.

The idea here is to let the strings cut the noodles. You start by pressing down and moving the rolling pin along the pasta sheet; this scores the individual noodles.

As you go back and forth with the rolling pin the spaghetti strands will start to fall through the strings.

Often you might help the noodles along by running your fingers over the strings as well.

Until they've all been cut and have fallen through.

After working on a few sheets of pasta dough this is what I wound up with for our Fat Tuesday feast.

And the cacio e pepe, a simple dish that actually takes quite a bit of practice to master if I do say, was just what the lady ordered.

I think.

Here is the briefest of clips showing how one man uses a chitarra (mostly using his fingers). The whole thing is under three minutes, but if you want to fast-forward to the actual chitarra demonstration, it begins at about the two-minute mark.

And just so you know, Louie Prima provides the soundtrack, so if you're at work or in church or maybe pretending to be doing important research at the library, you may want to turn off the sound.

Me, I like a little music when I'm playing my chitarra.

Why a chicken?

I was out dining with poet/playwright/shyster lawyer friend the other night, at a pretty decent Indian place out at the airport-mall part of town, when nine words came rolling off of her raita-coated tongue that honest-to-God surprised me.

"I cook things from your blog all the time," she said sipping on a giant bottle of Kingfisher. "Why does that surprise you so much? It is a food blog, you know!"

It is at times such as these that I am reminded why I enjoy the kind and thoughtful poet/playwright side to this friend so much better than the in-your-face, facts-obsessed shyster lawyer from Jersey side.

"Uh," I stammered as if under cross in the Newark courthouse my companion once terrorized. "I guess... I mean... Well... You see..."

"Get a grip, would you," she objected. "I didn't mean to put you under so much pressure. Forget I said anything... Are you going to eat that nan?"

Just as she was reaching for the table's last morsel of bread our waitress delivered the Bengan Bharta (roasted eggplant) that I had suggested we order.

"I just made your eggplant parm the other night, you know," my friend offered. "It was delicious. Might have been better if I hadn't burned the eggplant, but still..."

I wish that I had said right then that her mistake was in waiting for the eggplant slices to brown on the topside instead of on the bottom. But I was too flummoxed. A person (of some accomplishment, mind you) had actually decided to plan and prepare a meal based upon my instructions. I didn't think people did that. Really. I didn't. I figured they only looked at the pictures and moved along.

I decided this would be a multiple-beverage kind of evening and ordered not one but two more Bass Ales to go along with the eggplant and the newly prepared breads being placed on the table.

This may be a good time for me to mention that none of this has anything to do with the chicken dish you see that I have prepared here.

It's chicken breast. Come on. What possible kind of story might I have woven around that?

Don't get me wrong, it's a really good dish, I like it a lot. Go ahead and try it if you want, you'll probably like it too. The reason it's here, though, is because of this friend that I've been telling you about. "Hey," were her exact words, should you have wondered, "you happen to have a recipe for chicken breasts? A recipe that isn't so boring that I'd rather blow out the right side of my left brain than have to make it, let alone eat it?"

I mentioned that she was a poet, right?

Anyway, I promised that I would get a good recipe off to her pronto, and so here we are at the intersection of Shyster Jersey Lawyer and Oven-Fried Romano Chicken. A circuitous route to a rather simple destination, I'll admit.

But I ask you, had I been yapping all this while about a couple chicken breasts that you stick inside the oven, would you still be here?

Okay, so what you have here is grated Romano cheese, freshly prepared bread crumbs, and seasonings (chopped garlic, rosemary, a hot pepper, salt and black pepper), which gets mixed together.

You take your boring chicken breast and give it a roll in the cheese-and-breadcrumb mix.

Give that a quick dip in egg before it goes back for a second roll in the cheese and breadcrumbs.

Line up the breasts in a roasting pan and into the (preheated to 350 F) oven they go.

About half an hour later you've got yourself a very nice-tasting hunk of white meat that I assure you will not inspire you to raise a firearm to your head.

The bread from Genoa

I think we need a bigger oven.

Because no matter how much of this stuff I make it never is enough.

This stuff is called farinata, a baked good made of chickpea flour. Depending on who is baking it, farinata could resemble a flatbread (dry and crisp) or a focaccia (puffed out and moist) or even a pancake (more dense).

Unless you travel to places such as Italy or France, it is unlikely you have come across farinata. And depending on where you travel, it goes by different names. If you are in Sicily, for instance, and you happen upon a street vendor in Palermo selling slices of panelle from his cart, you have found yourself a fritter made of chickpeas. In Tuscany, look for cecina, and in France, socca.

It is in Italy's Liguria region where farinata is enjoyed. And, believe me, it is enjoyed quite a lot. The first time I tasted farinata ("made of flour" is basically all it means) was in Genoa, on the Ligurian Sea, credited as the place where the bread first appeared. Strolling by myself one afternoon (killing time while a certain companion was having a lie down, no doubt) I noticed a line of people outside a bakeshop and joined them without even knowing what I was waiting for. Fifteen minutes later and I was at the counter, feeling brilliant for having secured a place in line.

The Ligurians use two ingredients in their chickpea flatbread that you will not much find elsewhere: onion and rosemary. They add them into the batter, but I've come up with a slightly different method: I put a layer of onion in the pan, then pour in the batter and sprinkle the rosemary on top. This may not sound like such a big deal, but if you did a side-by-side comparison you'd see that there is a difference, largely because the sizzling-onion layer at the bottom introduces a somewhat sharper flavor.

The traditional method of making  farinata is in a wood-burning oven. As luck would have it, I happen to have one of those on the brick patio out back.

The full recipe is below, but here's the entry into the Inferno. I use a 14-inch, well-seasoned black iron pan, which does a swell job with this dish.

After about ten minutes, at 650 F or so, this one was done.

Slice it up like a pizza and you're ready to roll.

Perhaps you see now why I might require a larger oven?

Farinata

The recipe

2 cups chickpea flour (garbanzos and chickpeas are the same)

2 tsp salt 

2 tsp freshly ground black pepper 

2 cups lukewarm water

4 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil

1 onion, sliced thin 

Fresh rosemary

Plenty of olive oil for the pan

Sift the flour and add in the salt, pepper and water

Whisk until smooth, then add the 4 tablespoons of olive oil (consistency should be thin, like heavy cream or half and half, no thicker; when in doubt err on the thinner side)

Cover and set aside (I let it sit a few hours at room temperature, but it's not necessary)

Preheat oven at 500 F (higher if you can; I do it at 600 or better in the wood oven), then preheat the pan long enough for it to come up to oven temperature

When the pan is hot pour in plenty of olive oil (enough to coat the bottom entirely and then some) and the onion and return to the oven

After a minute or so pour in the batter and sprinkle rosemary on top, then return to the oven

Cook until completely firm, then let cool a couple minutes before slicing

Serve warm

The long way home

When a person goes out of their way to make for you a very fine Italian pastry the least you can do is go and fetch it. So what if they live 320 miles away. You've got something more important to do? Than eat pastry?

Really!

Okay, so I was a lot closer than that when my Aunt Anna called to tell me about the pasticiotti she'd just baked. But I was already in the car when the cell rang, heading up to Maine after a long weekend back home in Brooklyn.

"Where the heck are you?" I heard Anna say. "You didn't go home yet, did you?"

(We do not subscribe to traditional forms of greeting in my family; we get right to what is on our minds.)

"Anna? That you?"

"No, it's your uncle. Who do you think it is, you lousy kid?"

(Nor, I should add, do we always speak delicately to one another.)

"Better lay off those steroids, Dominic," I barked back. "You're starting to sound just like your sister."

I could go on like this, but I'll spare you. Turns out that Anna, whom I'd visited only two days earlier, and who had made me one very fine lasagne and her wonderfully delicate meatballs, decided the prior evening that it was imperative she whip up a batch of pasticiotti (basically a tart filled with custard or, as in this case, cheese). She also decided that it would be a terrible shame if a few of the pastries did not travel home to Maine with her "pain-in-the-ass nephew," an endearment she has graced upon me since, oh, I'd say around the Reagan administration.

Hearing my aunt's enthusiasm come bursting through the headset, I knew right away what I had to do: Lie like hell. I thanked her extravagantly, said that, no, I was still at my brother Joe's place, and that, of course, I would drop by later on to pick up my pastry and to have another visit.

Except that I was in Connecticut already, on I-95 North. Still 270 miles from home, true, but 50 miles from where I'd started out an hour earlier.

What can I say, I love my aunt. I love her pastries too.

So I'd spend another night down there, so what, I told myself turning around. There are worse things than sitting around eating fresh pastries and sipping coffee with a family member you don't get to see all that much.

Not only were Anna's pasticiotti beautiful, they were right up there with the best I've ever had. The pastry was at once flakey and chewy, the ricotta filling just on the right side of sweetness. They were damn near perfect really. My aunt knew it. You can tell when a cook believes in what they feed you, and Anna definitely believed in these pastries.

"They came good, Annie," I said reaching for pasticiotti due. "Call me anytime you feel like making more, you know. Don't be shy."

Just as I was leaving her apartment Anna said that I should try making the pastries myself one day — "Put it on The Meatball" were her exact words — and when I laughed at the suggestion she showed me the book in which her recipe resides. It's a pamphlet really, put out by the Brooklyn-born Polly-O in 1977 as a way to inspire people to use more of the company's cheese products.

This got me laughing even harder, because I have the same booklet. It was my mother's. I had found it amongst her things after she passed and of course had to hold onto it. I look through it from time to time but can't say that I've ever used one of the recipes.

Here it is.

And here's the recipe that Anna uses for her pasticiotti. They don't call it that in the Polly-O booklet; they call it Pasticcini di Napoli, or Neopolitan Pastry.

Call it whatever you want. But if you happen to be making a batch while we're chatting on the phone one day, don't mention it before first inquiring as to my exact whereabouts. You will be saving me from myself, I assure you. I put too many miles on my car as it is. I don't need to be chasing down homemade pastries wherever they might be. No matter how good they are.

Pasticcini di Napoli

Recipe from the Polly-O "Cooking with Cheese Recipe Book"

Makes 8 to 10 pastries

For the pastry

2 cups sifted all-purpose flour

Pinch salt

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup butter, cut into small pieces

2 egg yolks

Zest from one lemon

For the filling

3 cups ricotta

6 Tbs confectioners sugar

2 egg yolks

Pinch cinnamon

1 tsp lemon zest

Sift flour, salt and sugar into a bowl. Cut in butter, then add egg yolks, one at a time, while mixing with wooden spoon. Blend in lemon rind. Work dough with hands until it is soft and manageable and clears the bowl. If necessary add a little water. Turn onto a lightly floured board and knead quickly until smooth. Wrap in wax paper and refrigerate 1 to 2 hours.

Roll out to 1/4-inch thickness on lightly floured board. Cut pastry into rounds to fit muffin pans. Grease muffin pans and line with pastry.

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Combine ricotta with remaining ingredients and blend well with wooden spoon. Fill prepared pastry sections. Cut leftover pastry into small strips and criss-cross over filling. Trim edges. Bake 40 to 50 minutes, then cool in oven.

Eggs, Uggs & airplanes

Don't worry. I'm not reviewing old Leslie Nielsen movies all of a sudden. I'll get to the food in a minute.

As it turns out, I was on a plane to Chicago a week or so back, en route to what can only be described as a gluttonous food-and-drinkfest with friends who ought know better than to plan such events in the dead of a Midwestern winter. (Sorry, guys, somebody had to say it.)

Being an aisle seat-except-under-extreme-duress kinda guy, naturally I was called upon to rise up whenever the lovely lady stage left found it necessary or desirable to leave her seat and move freely about the cabin. And the lady found it necessary and/or desirable to move quite a lot.

The aircraft, you see, an Airbus A320 to be tiresomely precise, was crawling with an especially high-spirited band of travelers: young female gymnasts and their mommies on their way to a very important gymnastics competition. A highlight, I am certain, of the girls' young lives.

I would not describe it as a highlight of mine.

Still, I learned many important things on this flight midway across the land. First, it is possible for one mommy to hold an entire conversation with another mommy seated on the opposite side of the aircraft, while at the same time reading "The Catcher in the Rye." Second, I should have invested in Uggs boots when (well, if) I had the chance, for all but four persons (two girls, two mommies) in a group of perhaps thirty were wearing the furry footwear. Three, there is a magnificent place on this Earth that I simply must, MUST visit before I expire; it is called American Girl, and there is something terribly wrong with me for being previously unaware of its existence and place in our culture. And, lastly, it had been far too long since last I viewed one of the most poignant five-minute slices of film that I believe I have ever seen.

This, of course, is where the eggs come in. Because on one occasion when I was asked to go vertical, so to speak, there I saw, framed inside a 13-inch laptop screen two rows forward, Secundo (Stanley Tucci) and Primo (Tony Shalhoub) unveiling their prize timpano in the over-the-top dinner party scene from the 1996 indie film "Big Night."

Considering the effort that goes into preparing one, the timpano is without doubt the rightful culinary star of this film. But it isn't to me. And never has been. To me the dish that is most alluring, most romantic, is a bunch of scramble eggs that Secundo prepares in near total silence just before the credits start to roll. I did not get to enjoy this scene on the Flight of the Ugg-Wearing Gymnasts, but then the setting wasn't quite right for that anyway.

If you're not familiar, Secundo and Primo are brothers who have emigrated from Italy in the 1950s. They own a restaurant together, but it is failing and only weeks from being foreclosed upon, shuttered. A special dinner event (the big night) promises to save the business, but doesn't, and the brothers have a terrible altercation, both verbally and physically attacking one another before each runs off in the early morning hours.

If you've got five minutes, here's what happens once the fireworks clear. (Cristiano, the waiter lying on the counter, is the singer Marc Anthony, by the way.)



And so the flight to Chicago, with all the noise and the furry footwear and the artificially flavored cheesy snacks and the up-and-down relationship with the seat I was assigned, turned out not to be so bad after all. A couple nights after getting home I figured it was probably time to check out the movie again. Watching the final scene, hearing the eggs crackle in the pan, seeing Secundo acknowledge, then feed and then hold his brother Primo, then Primo hold him back... Well, I wouldn't be much of a brother if I didn't think about one of my own at a time like this. Now, would I?

I don't eat eggs with my brother Joe anymore, what with how many years it took for the docs to finally get his cholesterol under control. I've never flown anywhere with him either, come to think of it, though I would gladly suffer through another flight just like this one if he were on it with me.

My brother did accompany me on the Cyclone in Coney Island last summer, though. For my birthday.

Which, to me at least, is about as close as you get to flying without a boarding pass and a tiny bag of peanuts.

The man in the pan

My father was a cook in the Army, not at home. The only thing I can remember him ever preparing was a crispy rice dish, sort of an Italian-American version of the Korean bi bim bap. He would line the inside of a well-oiled black iron pan with cooked white rice, let that fry a good long while, then layer in a variety of meats, cheeses and vegetables.

Not a man bound by orthodoxy, the dish, as best I can recall, never tasted the same twice. How could it? One day the meat might be freshly prepared sausage, another day leftover fried veal cutlets or pork rib meat from Sunday's gravy. Vegetables could be sliced mushrooms or ripe tomatoes or cooked carrots or what was left of the sauteed escarole we'd had the night before. Cheese? The only thing you could count on was that there would be some of it present, either mixed inside or grated on top.

After the rice had browned sufficiently, by which I mean after it had become crunchy hard, and all the other ingredients had either cooked, reheated or melted, my father would crack a couple eggs and slowly empty them over the fried-up mass. There the eggs would settle to cook, under a lid now, but not too much; a runny egg is better than a stiff one, at least to my father and to me.

Now, on this next point, I must admit that I could be terribly mistaken. Because I do not recall anybody else being around when my father prepared this dish. There is just him in my memory and, I'm guessing, a 10-year-old me. That's it.

I can see him at the stove, the one in the kitchen behind our fountain service store, and see myself nearby watching him as he cooks. I am also picturing us both at the little formica-topped table out back of the store while we ate the crispy rice. Crunch-crunch-crunching until the black pan was empty and our stomachs full.

But again, I am not at all certain that my memory can be trusted. When you lose someone before you have had time to grow a bit larger alongside them, it is possible that remembrances, such as this one, are more molded than recalled.

I would like to keep this particular memory intact, if I could. Otherwise, the crunchy rice dish that has comforted me for so long just would never, ever taste the same.

And I would miss that. Very much.