Minestrone Soup is a Once in a Lifetime Experience

I always feel a little apprehensive when I post a recipe like this minestrone soup. It’s the type of dish I never make the same way twice, and the fear is that someone will watch and assume that this is my “official” version.

You don’t need a recipe for minestrone, just like you don’t need a recipe for a great sandwich, or an epic salad. To make minestrone soup precisely same way every time, using a very specific list of ingredients and amounts, is to trample on the soul of this Italian classic.

Having said all that, what if you happen to make it so incredibly delicious one time that you want to experience the exact same shuddering soupgasm in the future? That seems like a perfectly sound reason for why you should write down the recipe…except cooking food doesn’t work that way.

Your perception of how a recipe tastes involves so many factors above and far beyond the list of ingredients. Remember that time you made that super awesome whatever, and it was so perfect, and then you made it again, exactly the same way, but somehow it just didn’t taste as great? This is why.

So, I hope you give this amazing minestrone recipe a try soon…but only once. Enjoy!

Ingredients:
3 oz pancetta

2 tbsp olive oil

1 diced onion

1 cup diced celery

4 minced garlic cloves

4 cups chicken broth

1 (28-oz) can plum tomatoes, crushed fine

2 cups water, plus more as needed

salt and pepper to taste

1 tsp dried Italian herb blend (mine was thyme, oregano, rosemary, basil)

red pepper flakes to taste

1 cup freshly shucked cranberry beans (aka shelling beans)
2 or 3 cups chopped cabbage

1 (15-oz) can garbanzo beans, drained

1 bunch swiss chard, chopped

2/3 cup raw ditalini pasta

extra virgin olive oil, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and fresh Italian parsley to garnish the top

Gumbo

I decided today to end my new-recipe drought and cook something I liked the look of that I found in a colour supplement this weekend. It was a prawn and okra "gumbo" and it looked like my kind of thing. Stealth vegetables: tick. Spicy: tick. Easy: tick.

So after raiding Waitrose, I potato-sacked Kitty into her cot at 1pm, waved cheerio and thundered back to the kitchen with more enthusiasm than I've had in... months and months... to set about cooking this thing.

And it was - it still is, sitting down there greasily in its pot - DISGUSTING. It is like an orange glue-soup studded with chunks of raw onion and warmed-up red pepper. And the thing about red peppers is that they're fine raw and they're fine cooked long and hard, but anything in between is tastes like a microwaveable pizza from a service station.

Is that what gumbo is supposed to be like? Does anyone have a good gumbo recipe? I like the sound of it, mostly because the word "gumbo" is good. But this was just a travesty.

I'm racking my brains, here. I followed the recipe - from a staggeringly famous, usually terrific chef. I didn't shirk or get impatient or skip anything out. Just a bad, bad recipe. Maybe an error? A few of you may have seen it this weekend. Don't bother with it. I mean, like, FUCK I could have been asleep this afternoon! And what if I didn't have an alternative dinner?! What a waste of time and money; literally all going to go on the compost.

I'm in a simply foul mood about the whole thing. But at the very least you may as well benefit from this horrible misadventure, because I certainly haven't. 

On a lighter note these are amazing. No, they didn't send me any freebies, but if they'd like to, it would cheer me up enough to prevent me from sending Yotam Ottolenghi his gumbo back to him in the post. On fire.

Rum Baller, Shot Caller?

I was playing with some rum balls today, for a video next week, and the first one I pulled off the silpat left this perfect chocolate smiley face. That has to be a great sign, right?

Smoked Ham and Butternut Squash Spaghetti – Short on Daylight, Long on Flavor

I never film at night, since I don’t like the look of the video when I use artificial lights. Sure, I could actually learn how to use a real lighting kit, but it’s easier for my simple brain to just film during the day.

However, once in a great while, I’ll starting making something, like this smoked ham and butternut squash spaghetti, that looks like it’s going to be so good that I don’t care about lighting quality, and film it anyway.

Other than this less-than-subtle warning about the lighting quality, there’s not a lot to say about this simple and very delicious winter pasta. It will work with literally any type of ham or smoked sausage; and as I mention in the video, bacon would also shine.

Despite the rich and decadent mascarpone, the sauce is actually pretty light when you consider much of the sauce is really just chicken broth and squash. By the way, I didn’t add it, but I think a squeeze of fresh lemon juice at the end would have been a great idea. I hope you give this hearty pasta a try soon. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

14 oz package dry spaghetti

2 tbsp olive oil

4 oz thinly slice smoked ham

3-4 cloves garlic, thinly sliced

red chili flakes to taste

1 1/2 to 2 cups chicken broth, or as needed

3 cups diced butternut squash

salt and pepper to taste

1 cup mascarpone cheese

1-2 tbsp chopped Italian parsley

freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Know Your Cheese

As most of your know, I LOVE cheese, and two of the most commonly used varieties in my kitchen are fresh mozzarella, and mascarpone. In addition to this recipe, I’ve used mascarpone in several recent videos, and received numerous inquires as to which brand I used.

My usual go-to brand is Galbani, so I was thrilled when Michele and I were recently invited to an event hosted by Lactalis Foodservice. Along with Galbani, Lactalis owns many of markets’ top cheese brands, such as President, Sorrento, and Precious, just to name a few.

This Chef’s Table event was held at Farina, San Francisco, and not only did we enjoy a very nice meal, but we got to talk directly to the people making the cheese. One reason I love shopping at Farmers Markets is that you get to meet the people producing the food you’re about to cook, but it’s not often you get the same experience for a product you buy at the supermarket.

Here are a few highlights from the evening.

Pardon the poor quality photo, but I just had to show this Foccacia di Recco, featuring Galbani’s Bel Paese. It’s sort of like a stuffed pizza, which uses a very basic, unleavened bread dough that’s rolled, spun, and stretched very thin, before being stuffed with the creamy cheese. It’s baked in a very hot oven, where it puffs up, and gets crispy on the outside, while the inside stays soft and cheesy. It was awesome, and something I must figure out how to make!

Chef at Farina spinning the dough for the Foccacia di Recco. By the way, the videographer seen here is my friend Vincent McConeghy, a fellow western New Yorker, and author of the novel, Gastro Detective.

This was my favorite course of the night. A golden and red beet timbale with Istara Petit Basque and shaved black truffles. What glorious combination of flavors!

I want to thank Lactalis Foodservice for hosting such a fun evening, and the chefs at Farina for taking such good care of us! For those of you that requested more info about the mascarpone cheese, you can check out the official website here. Grazie!

On the Scene with Turkey Ballotine

I got a few of emails from people curious about how I ended up doing my turkey this year. Well, here you go! For the first time, I decided to serve a classic turkey ballotine. 

I removed all the bones, applied a generous layer of herbs and spices, and then some buttery, cranberry bread stuffing. I rolled, tied it up, and slowly roasted it until I had the crispy-skinned beauty you see below. It was so good!

Another highlight was this crisp and colorful winter salad of apples, pears, persimmons, pomegranate, walnuts, and Pt. Reyes blue cheese. When served with the meal, the green salad is usually lost in a sea of side dishes, and becomes nothing more than an afterthought. This time we decided to use it as a separate course to start the meal. It’s nice for doing toasts and giving thanks, since you don’t have to worry about food getting cold. After the salad, we took a short break while the rest of the meal was finished and served. 

I was so preoccupied with the food, I didn’t get many photos of the rest of the items, but we had a great dinner, and used several of the recipes you’ve seen posted on the blog. By the way, I’ll be back with a brand new winter pasta recipe video tomorrow, so stay tuned!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I want to take this opportunity to wish you all a very happy Thanksgiving weekend, and give my sincerest thanks for all the amazing support you give to this blog. I hope you're all fortunate enough to be able to enjoy a wonderful meal with your family today, and hopefully a few of our recipes found their way on to the table.

I'll be taking a few days off and getting away from the computer, so my apologies if I'm not able to respond to those last minute questions and comments. Have a great weekend, and as always, enjoy!

Christmas and fish pie (again)

I wouldn't say that I was panicking about Christmas - Dr O has put paid to the worst of my anxieties (and at only £120 an hour! Bargain!) - but I would say that it was definitely on my mind.

We are having everyone here. And when I say everyone I mean two sets of parents, two sisters, two infants, two cousins an aunt and an uncle. It adds up to 14 people. The fact that we don't have enough chairs for that many people is the least of my problems. I don't think we have enough glasses, either. Or cutlery.

We're so worried about the food that we are having a practise run on November 30th. We are doing the whole thing - brining the turkey, bread sauce, roast potatoes, the lot. I might even take the opportunity to put up a few Christmas decs to see how they look. I'm going for a very barnyard theme this year - all brown twine and chipped red jingle bells - you know the sort of thing I mean No tinsel, perhaps a bit controversially. I hate tinsel.

So I will report back after November 30th with top tips on how it all went.

For now, because I promised, I wanted to run through a childrens' fish pie recipe for a reader who requested it.

People make a lot of fuss about giving children fish pie - they think it's so marvellous and middle-class; but I do think that some children don't like it. Or at least don't like some elements of it. Very fishy fish, like salmon, is often not especially appreciated. And a proper fish pie is made with smoked haddock, which is very salty - so you might want to leave that out if you're touchy about stuff like that.

Personally, I make mine as bland as possible. When I was little I never, ever had to eat anything I didn't want to. I literally lived on baked beans, alphabites, scrambled eggs and spaghetti bolognese. My mother has a theory that small children can't digest brassicas (spinach, broccoli) very well and so that's why they don't like them. I'm not going to say anything pathetic like "It never did me any harm" because who knows?! But certainly I am very grateful to my mother for not being an "eat up your veg" nag. And I don't have a problem with vegetables now.

Anyway, I'm drifting.

Any fish pie is simply fish poached in a white sauce and covered with mashed potato or pastry and that's it. Anything else you add is entirely up to you and frankly, although it's not for me to tell you what to do with your child, I would be guided by any preference my child shows - eg parsley or no parsley, egg or no egg. I don't think you're supposed to give babies shellfish under a year but thereafter you could chuck in some brown shrimp. Yummy.

So the contents of a fish pie might look like this:

(makes several freezable portions)
1 quantity of white sauce (for recipe see "How to make a white sauce" - on this blog) - about 3/4 of a pint
1 quantity assorted white fish, eg haddock/cod/scallops - smoked fish if you want, salmon if you want
a few mushrooms if you like
2 eggs

1 Make the white sauce.

2 Chop up the fish into small chunks - about the size of dice (depending on child's age of course) and then plop into the white sauce. Let this stew together over a low flame for 15 minutes.

3 Hard-boil and chop your eggs, if using. Dice your mushrooms, if using, and throw those in too.

4 Decant this mixture into your bowls for freezing and top with either pastry or mashed potato. On re-heating defrost and cook for a good 25 minutes.