An Apulian Feast (and more from the Farmer's Market)

First things first, I went (of course) to the Farmers Market today. Saw Julie Bowen buying stuff with her family, that was cool, she seemed really nice and I wouldn't have known she was a celebrity if I hadn't recognized her. I really wanted to tell her how much I worship Modern Family, but I digress... For $24 I got a ton of cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, cucumber, grapefruit, snap peas, a red cabbage, and a couple of white nectarines. You know, if they made perfume that smelled like white nectarine, I'd totally buy it. I also tried some sirloin tip steak from the grass fed beef guy. It looks pretty good!

Anyway... a while back I was reading A Year in the World: Journeys of A Passionate Traveler, by Frances Mayes (of Under the Tuscan Sun fame). I am not sure how she brought it up but she mentioned a cookbook all of recipes from the Apulia (Puglia) region of Italy. It so happens that I am hopefully planning to try to hit that region on my next trip. Mayes mentions a dish of fried artichokes layered with tomato sauce and cheese, so I said UH WHAT! Luckily, the LA Public Library system had the book and I requested it: Flavors of Puglia. It has some amazing recipes in it, but this "Carciofi Parmigiana" recipe stuck out to me, as did a few with olives (no surprise there).

So for the artichokes, first you clean and soak them in lemon water, then make a batter of flour, water, and olive oil. Kind of like tempura I guess. Then you fry them.

Til "golden and crisp" - looks like it to me!! (and honestly, they were good just like this.)

but no, not done: one layer of artichokes, mozzarella, sauce, and parmigiano:

then another layer and it's ready for the oven:

And while it's baking, I started the sauteed olives. I used fresh tomatoes instead of canned, but otherwise it's just garlic, olives, tomatoes, a pinch of oregano, and some parsley. The olives i used were a combination of Apulian Peranzana olives and Ligurian taggiasche olives:

Then the big moment when the parmesan comes out of the oven. OH YEAH BABY!

And the finished meal. Apulia, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Gramigna "all'amatriciana"

I had some tomatoes from the farmers market and I wanted pasta... I had brought a bag of Gramigna home from Bologna last fall that I still hadn't touched, so I decided to make an "all'amatriciana" like preparation. I boiled the tomatoes for a minute to peel them easily (one plum tomato and one yellow tomato), diced them, and put them in a saute pan where I had been cooking pancetta cubes, diced red chile peppers (that I had frozen - convenient!) and diced garlic in olive oil. Sauteed it all for maybe 10-15 min til it made a sauce. the pasta cooks in 6 minutes. Nice. I took a bit of the pasta water to put in the sauce and then dumped in the pasta. It got super super creamy for some reason, and it was pretty great. Add some parmigiano-reggiano and delicious fast easy pretty authentically italian dinner!

Note the steam still rising up from the bowl......mmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!

Pizza (can never have enough.)

Yesterday, I made the starter doughs per the recipe in Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads. Today, I put them together and completed the dough. Froze 5 of the balls and let one sit in the fridge for tonight's dinner. This time, instead of making 2-3 ounce balls of dough, which makes like one pizza, I made 5.5-6 ounce balls of dough so I can have leftovers each time. Yay!

I also made fresh tomato sauce last night since I was almost out. Today, I also wrestled with my food processor to shred the mozzarella. I refuse to buy pre-shredded cheese because it's got other ingredients in it to keep it dry and separate, plus it's never made with whole milk cheese. And that is the difference between ok pizza and awesome pizza, I have decided. Put it all together and it's ready to go into the oven. Here it is on the pizza stone...

Out of the oven....I made the crust *slightly* thicker than usual, which made it so much easier to handle.

Ready for eating......mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.......in Italy, they serve it with raw prosciutto, so, what kind of wannabe Italian would I be if I didn't serve it the same way ;)

Castelvetrano Olives

I had these amazing olives in Italy from Florence's Mercato Centrale. They were called "Dolce" (sweet) and from Sicily. So mild and crisp and tasty and a kind of strange color of bright green, I knew I had to find out what they were! Last week or so I discovered that they are Castelvetrano olives... and it seemed like the only place to find them was to order from an Italian deli in NYC or something.

But today I decided to check out the LA Farmers Market because there's a crazy expensive, but cool, market in the back called Monsieur Marcel that has a ton of olives in tubs of brine, etc. I had filled up a little cup of various olives - picholine, gaeta, etc. and saw peeking through a label, bright green olives. Then I saw the price....... then I looked at the label and saw they were imported from a city named..... Castelvetrano...... so I bought them...... I took the plastic labeling off so you can see what they look like



They are wonderful but let's just say they'll stay in the fridge and come out for special occasions or when I really need a mood-lifter ;)