*A new addition in my Links & Friends!*

Experiencing Umbria

Discover the joys of Umbria through culinary tours, villa rentals and photography workshops.
Nestled just outside the tiny town of Cannara, the Villa Fattoria del Gelso is a fully restored 17th-century farm villa that is available for rental and that serves as headquarters for fabulous food and wine tours led by owners Bill and Suzy Menard, who also own Bella Italia, the popular Italian specialty shop in Bethesda, Md.

In addition, the villa hosts the annual spring and fall Umbria Photo Workshops, led by husband and wife photographers Frank Van Riper and Judith Goodman, co-authors of the internationally bestselling book Serenissima: Venice in Winter.

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AFTER THE GIANTS GAME

It occurred to me the other day that I cook primarily by eye.
It occurred to me the other day that I cook primarily by eye. If a thing looks right, it’s usually right. I suppose other cooks depend on their taste buds or their nose or the touch of their finger, but I seem to be an eye guy. This all came up when I was sautéing some brussels sprouts last Sunday after the Giants game.
Jill and I set out for the farmers’ market on Columbus Avenue around noon. I knew I wouldn’t make it back in time for the kickoff, but if I miss some of the pre-game hype, that’s a plus for me. I figured we’d shop with the farmers, Jill would scamper off to the park for a walk and I’d sneak back with the groceries and set up in front of the TV around the middle of the first quarter. It was a perfect Sunday plan – especially because the Giants won.
The farmers were winterly sparse, as expected, but the brussels sprouts looked like they were the deal of the day. I got a bagful of the sprouts, some shiitake mushrooms, a few big, dirty radishes and a leek or two. I was all set to make Jill a vegan pasta after the game. Well, after the second game, which was Pittsburgh vs. Denver.
I cleaned the brussels, stripped off the outer leaves and sliced them in half vertically. Then I flash-fried them – cut-side down first – in olive oil that I had infused with a clove of garlic as it was heating up. Here’s where my eye came in: the sprouts caramelize very quickly in the hot oil; I didn’t want them to get black but on the other hand, I didn’t want any hardness in them. It was all about the look – a little char, but still glistening with toothy succulence.
Then I hot sautéed the shiitakes and put them aside with the brussels sprouts. In the big pan where I would eventually assemble the pasta, I slowed sautéed the peeled and thinly sliced radishes and the chiffonaded leeks with a clove of minced garlic. I used a farro pasta that I find at Eataly. When it was done perfectly, I drained it but not completely — leaving a little water in it to give the pasta a creamy look I stirred the pasta into the radishes and leeks and tossed on the brussels sprouts and shiitake mushrooms – a feast for a vegan king! Or queen.

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TWO MEALS

The holidays are over! Now I can trim my sails, get off the party circuit, eat less, exercise more and whip myself into shape!

Yeah, dream on, fatso. It never stops. Today we’re booked for two meals – lunch with some friends from out of town and pizza later with the kids. If I’m lucky I’ll only gain three or four pounds.
We first met Julia and Christian in Vienna when we went for the opening of Carol Venezia’s photography show. They’re now in New York for a week with their kids, so we called the Venezias and asked if they wanted to join us for lunch. The six of us went to Danji, which I’ve written about before. I wanted our out-of-town guests to have a New York experience – a restaurant that serves food that they could never find in their hometown of Salzburg. Danji fills the bill. It’s basically Korean food, but cooked with remarkable imagination and flair. This was my fourth visit and I’m sure there will be many more.
We started with the crispy tofu with ginger and scallion – one of the great dishes in all of New York. The texture of this tofu – not so different from perfectly rendered sweetbreads – has a narcotic effect –the more you taste, the more you want. From there we went to sliders – both beef and pork belly – crispy calamari, pork noodles … and on and on. Not a diet lunch.
For dinner, we went back to another old favorite of this blog – Capizzi on Ninth Avenue between 40th and 41st. I love this place – for the pizza certainly, but also for the décor, the friendly service and the great selection of Italian wines.
I’ve long held that there are only two kinds of pizza – good and bad. New York has plenty of both. Good pizza starts with great crust, which is the very soul of pizza. It has a bit of char from a wood or coal- burning oven; it has a bit of chew; it has a bit of crunch; it has a bit of yeasty odor rising up as it’s removed from the intense heat of the oven; it has a bit of salt – don’t forget salt. That’s a great crust.

capizzi's pizza

From there, it’s all about the freshness and authenticity of the various toppings – mozzarella made fresh on the day, sauce made from the best San Marzano tomatoes, house-made sausage and salume, garden-fresh herbs and vegetables. Plopping on old, stale toppings can ruin even the best of crusts.
And that’s about it. Pizza is simple – but like many simple things, it’s not easy. Capizzi knows what they’re doing. Give it a try.

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THE SEVEN FISHES

We had friends and family over to celebrate La Vigilia, which is a traditional Christmas Eve feast that had its beginnings in the south of Italy. It celebrates the wait for the birth of baby Jesus. Vigilia – the wait. Traditionally the meal is comprised of seven fish dishes – including shellfish, of course – and it can be one of the great feasts of the year. It can be a blowout, actually, un cenone, which means a very large and very long dinner.
We decided to go another way. Yes, we would do the seven fishes but we would take it easy on ourselves – just three courses instead of seven – plus dessert at the end, of course — and we split up the work load between four cooks: myself, the eminent Don Michele di Sicilia, our daughter, Alison and her beau, Shannon. So it was a kind of BYOF – bring your own fishes.
We had twelve people for dinner. We started with one of my favorite appetizers – anchovies on sweet-buttered bread. That’s it – as simple as you can get, but the combination of the briny fish and the sweet butter is one of the great single bites of all time. We served that with chilled prosecco for the boozers and Perrier with lime for the teetotalers. There was also a bowl of cheddar cheese goldfish to reinforce the theme.
Then we sat down to the first course – a perfect plate of frutta di mare – marinated seafood — cooked to perfection by Don Michele. There was gamberi, calamari, scungili, polpa, vongole, cozze e capesante – that’s shrimp, squid, conch, octopus, mussels and bay scallops – each species cooked separately so that they retained their individual taste and texture. As cooked by Don Michele, this is one of the world’s great dishes.
Next was my spaghetti vongole.
Since I’ve already given you the secrets of this dish, I won’t bore you again. It went down well.
The main dish was roasted branzino with leeks and Meyer lemons, elegantly prepared by Shannon. He promised to give me the recipe.
Dessert was a scrumptious pecan tart in the shape of a fish to close out our theme dinner.
As always, once the food started coming, everyone started to dig in and completely forget to take any more photos. We apologize for this lack of visual support. The few we do have were taken by the eminent Carol Venezia.

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THE 104 BUS

We saw VENUS IN FUR at the matinee on Saturday. It’s great, by the way -don’t miss it. After the play, we looked in vain for a cab on Eighth Avenue and then decided to walk to the bus stop. The 104 was along in a minute.
I love the 104 bus, especially after attending the theater. Everyone on the bus has just seen some play or other and because they’re Upper West Siders, they all have opinions. Riding the bus is like a group therapy session. We ran into an old friend, a wonderful actor, who had seen the same play and the three of us plunged into discussion about it. Jill had by far the most compelling interpretation.
We listened to her in awe, embarrassed at how dumb we had been. Then two women across the aisle who had also seen the play, wanted to hear Jill’s theory and the discussion widened to the whole back section of the bus. Jill is the queen of the 104.
So, in celebration, when we got home I cooked a dish fit for a queen – my vegan queen. I’ve given up trying to make something that works for both of us. Such a recipe does not exist. It’s always a compromise for one or an accommodation for the other. Not that I don’t enjoy the occasional quinoa with green beans and prunes. I totally do. But it isn’t … you know … a lip smacker. And although Jill is always a good sport about picking around the bacon bits, she’s not really in ecstasy about it. So separate dishes is the order of the day.

sautéing the veg

I saw a Mark Bittman piece about vegetable main courses – veg paired with a whole grains and/or beans – like a vegetable stew. He said to improvise, fly without a net, cook without a recipe. I had recently made a carbonara in Italy in a similar frame of mind, assembling the necessary ingredients and the rest – how much? how many? how long? how hot? – was left to instinct and desire. So off to the Fairway I went – yes, the same market I trashed in my last blog. I have no shame.
I found some nice radishes, baby carrots and tiny grape tomatoes in the organic section upstairs. And a nice bulb of fennel. Downstairs was celery, some small potatoes and a couple of handfuls of flat beans, which looked pretty good. Onions and garlic, of course. And some rosemary. Also upstairs, in the organic bin section, I half-filled a plastic bag with some split bulgar wheat and downstairs again, I found a jar of already cooked Italian cannelini beans. I was all set.
Bittman advises dealing with the hard stuff first – like life. So I sautéed chunked up carrots, radishes, potatoes and celery in a little olive oil until they started to soften; I threw in some rosemary and salt and kept stirring; then I added onion and fennel – also chunked – a couple cloves of garlic, chopped fine, and the flat beans cut into thirds. I turned the heat down to medium and continued to stir until I got the feeling everything was getting to just the toothy resistance I like in a vegetable.

Just before the garlic started to brown, I added the jar of cannelini beans that I had drained and a handful of the tomatoes. Both the beans and tomatoes release enough liquid to stop the browning and begin the stewing. Then I added a big handful of the bulgar wheat – maybe ¾ of a cup? — and about a cup and a half of water and stirred the mixture into a stew, scraping any sticky parts off the bottom. The amount of water is to the eye. Keep thinking stew, not soup – the liquid should become like gravy. You may want to add more water as the stew comes into itself. My stew needed more time than Mark Bittman took for his, but I think maybe my chunks were bigger. Everybody’s different.
Jill loved the vegetable stew and agreed it was fit for a queen. I ordered a pizza.

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