"I had to learn the price of everything - because I could never afford it - when I came to the city on my own as a sixteen-year old apprentice: hunger taught me the prices, and the thought of freshly-baked bread rendered me weak in the head. In the evenings I would often wander through the city for hours on end, with only one thought in my head: bread. My eyes ached, my knees were weak, and I felt a wolf-like longing in me - bread. I was addicted to bread, just as you can be addicted to heroin. I frightened myself, and I kept thinking about a man who had once presented a slide-show at the apprentices' hostel about an expedition to the North Pole, and who had told us that they had torn apart freshly-caught fish and eaten them raw. Even now, when I have collected my pay and then walk around the city with my coins and notes, I am still often overcome with that wolf-like fear of those early days, an I buy which I see lying freshly baked in the bakers' shop window: I will buy two which look particularly good to me, then another one in the next shop, together with small crispy brown rolls, far too many of them, which later I will put in my landlady's kitchen because I cannot eat even a quarter of the bread I have bought and the thought of all that bread going mouldy fills me with horror."

Heinrich Böll, Das Brot der frühen Jahre (The Bread of Those Early Years) 1929

Overnight Pork Shoulder

A friend of mine endearingly refers to this as Pork Fantino, or Pork F. for short. She recently made a big batch for her wedding and small dusty rolls and her guests made their own pulled pork sliders. I can't remember why I first put cinnamon in this recipe now but it's precisely what makes it so hauntingly delicious.

Pork Shoulder (6lbs or so) (bone in)

8 cloves garlic, peeled

1/2 bunch rosemary, chopped

2½ tsp cinnamon

1½ teaspoon cayenne

1 teaspoon coriander

2 star anise, broken up

Salt

Lots of Pepper

Oil, peanut oil is best, but grapeseed is good too

With a paring knife stab the pork shoulder repeatedly all over, making deep incisions. Slash the fat side with long criss-cross lines. Next, with your finger probe each stab wound open so that it can be filled. Fill each wound with one clove of garlic, or if you wish, cut the cloves in half lengthwise and insert half a clove. Next. Rub lightly with oil, just enough to coat all sides top and bottom. Sprinkle liberally with the powdered spices and chopped herbs, these are guidelines and you should feel free to load it up with more. It may seem like a lot of strong spice but the mass of meat on the inside is essentially unseasoned, so go big. Do the same with the salt and pepper, Place the shoulder on a sheet pan or hotel pan or roasting pan (whatever you have that is large enough to hold it) FAT SIDE UP. Scatter the star anise petals and pieces on top of the fat side.

Meanwhile you’ve preheated an oven to 250-275F. Place the roast in the oven and let roast for about 8 hours (overnight). The fat will crisp up into an unctuous dark bark and the meat should be tender when you poke a fork into it.

A nice variation is to slice a few oranges and limes and place them on top during roasting.

Insalatta di Dente di Leone

My grandmother used to point out dandelion to me when we'd go on walks around the neighborhood, she explained that she used to eat them a lot as a girl but she warned me not to eat the ones she was pointing at because dogs pee on them and cars belch their exhaust on them. I remember thinking that maybe the dogs were more courteous in her day and that perhaps there were no cars. My grandmother thought the whole world was little more than a big pile of germs. So it was extra weird for me to think that she grew up on weeds.

Dente di Leone, "Teeth of the Lion" is what the Italians call dandelions, and you can see the English word in that delightful phrase. Lions Teeth has a way of catching the imagination especially considering Italy is a country without lions. Fangs are such fierce imagery. Italians should have been given the task of labeling the universe.

In the summer of 1993 I found myself driving a small truck thru the Californian desert en route to Las Vegas for a friends wedding. The truck was completely innocent of air conditioning and entertainment was provided via the AM radio. Somewhere out there, though I can hardly believe it, was a Greek restaurant, the whole experience seems more like a heat-stroke hallucination or mirage to me now. So unlikely a place and for no reason at all the food they served was remarkably good. Half dazed I ordered their dandelion salad. It was a family run affair with an old looking man and his wife and two daughters, I was the only one there and we all watched eachother nervously as if we were expecting a gunfight at any moment. The finished plate was passed thru each of their hands first the father, handed it to his wife and nodded his head towards me and she summoned one of the girls who took the plate and gave it to her sister who finally delivered it to me, no more than ten feet away, with a cheerful though nervous smile.

Suspicions slowly melted away when I tasted it and then with quickening pace, devoured it, within a few minutes they were seen smiling and nodding and I smiled back with little green flecks between my teeth. I have still never had a more quenching sensation than that salad, the heat and dust from the road had nearly done me in yet this salad was some kind of corpse reviver. Later I learned that it is packed firm with potassium and a handful of other vitamins and minerals.

I like to wait for a heat wave to sweep thru and make this salad as an afternoon lunch with good crusty bread. I have replicated it totally from memory from that peculiar restaurant out in the middle of nowhere that oppressively hot summer day.

I blanch the dandelion greens in plenty of well salted water for several minutes until the thickest stem is soft and tender then I drain them and let them cool. I squeeze out as much water as I can and lay them on paper towels while I get everything else ready. Then I assemble the leaves onto a chilled plate and top the heap with thinly sliced onion, rough chopped kalamata olives, the best feta I can afford, fiery hot Calabrian chile peppers, I anoint everything with a squeeze of at least half a lemon and plenty of the best extra virgin olive oil I can get my hands on. Lastly, I scatter a pinch of dried oregano and a few twists of black pepper.

I like to twirl the strands of dandelions with a fork as if it's strings of spaghetti, catching all the condiments along the way, that way every bite has a little taste of everything.

In my opinion Waverley Root is the best kind of food writer, though this generation has consistently ignored him. I'm brushing up on Bouillabaisse and in his over ten pages on the subject he says this:

"The easiest, and least subtle, way to provoke a discussion guaranteed to end a lifelong friendship forever is to bring up the issue of lobster. There are two chief schools of thought about this. One is that a man who would put lobster in a bouillabaisse would poison wells. The other is that a man who would leave it out would starve his children."

- Food of France; Waverley Root, 1958

räksallad dröm

boned rolled tied feathered and tarred

This is one of my favorite things to cook.

Start with a chicken you feel good about. I find some of the wording slightly suspicious, the use of the phrase "open air" in particular, I'm not sure what they are getting at. But I appreciate that there are no hormones or antibiotics and, most importantly, no added water, however that's done. The "all natural veggie diet" is not totally clear to me, I bet you it's still cornfed, which is a pity really, besides that I believe that chickens would be happiest if they could eat a couple of worms here and there.

Anyway, this recipe is slightly adapted version of one of the very many things I learned under the wing of Carlo Middione, a thinking-mans chef. when I first learned this recipe it was done with a Capon, which, in case you don't know, is a castrated rooster. I don't really know where to get a capon these days, now that I am no longer a chef, so I found this bird and selected the largest one I could find. Mind you, I tell anyone who listens that smaller birds are the better birds, yet for this particular dish you need a monster, and it feeds something like 12 people rather comfortably. Instead of giving precise measurements I will give you the basic idea of this wonderful dish, the exact recipe is mostly the property of Carlo Middione, though he might not totally approve of some of my additions (ie. cinnamon and clove).

It's a lot easier than it looks and it's surprisingly economical, especially considering how many people it feeds. The chicken was rather special and cost about three dollars a pound and weighed in at five whole pounds. The other ingredients are rather cheap, except for the dried porcini mushrooms, but you really don't need a lot of them.

Obviously the trickiest part is deboning the chicken. Tricky but not really that terrifying so long as you have a sharp tipped knife and a puzzling imagination. The object is to completely debone it leaving the skin intact. Inexperienced cooks often end up with skin tears and such, but if you work carefully it's really easy to achieve. Without being too gruesome, I started with an incision along the spine and started prying my way in from there.

The ingredients at the top are Pepper, fresh thyme, sea salt (ignore that lemon balancing there), Olive oil, (the bottle of Beeren Auslese is there just because it's awesome, but none is used in the recipe); in the small green bowls: toasted, chopped walnuts, golden raisins soaked in brandy, dried porcini mushroom rehydrated in marsalla, squeezed dry and chopped, sauted with minced garlic and salt and pepper, frozen chopped spinach, also squeezed dry and sauteed with diced onions, salt and pepper.


Basically you just evenly distribute everything.


I rolled it up very carefully, my technique is to roll the breast part first so that the outer layer is thigh meat, my belief is that it will stay moist and not dry out. After it is rolled I tie it, you don't have to pull the string too hard it's just there to gently hold the shape. Otherwise you end up with something not unlike the Michelin Man. The roll is then placed onto a large sheet of parchment paper that has been rubbed with whole butter. Drizzled with marsala and brandy (the same leftover juice from the soaking of the raisins and mushrooms) and I am pretty generous with thyme. I also crushed a couple of juniper berries and grated a little bit of cinnamon bark as well as a clove or two. The trick with cinnamon is that if you can detect it then you used far too much, but if you can't tell it's there it quietly haunts everyone who eats it.


This is probably the most difficult step to describe, yet the easiest to do. It's what's called "Drugstore Wrapped" in this case twice, meaning two layers of parchment. It's simply a mater of folds and creases and the way the ends are tucked under ensure that the whole thing is pretty much air tight. I love cooking with parchment, this method allows the skin to actually brown thru the paper and yet keeps everything inside, juices and aroma. It's a weird combination of steaming and roasting.


I actually went over by several degrees because I got sidetracked. It's best to aim for about 165°F (which I think is something like 73°C). I was worried that I'd overcooked it but when I got to the next few steps I discovered that it was perfectly cooked. It might be that my thermometer is miscalibrated, I hardly ever use it anyway.

At this point you call it a night. Let the roast cool, do not be tempted to unwrap it. When it is cool enough, put it into the refrigerator overnight.


The next day, unwrap it. You will find a wonderful rich lustrous deep brownish liquid that is thick with natural gelatin. Thick and wobbly because it is cold. There is the tiniest amount of fat (mostly from the butter) that has risen to the top. Because it is cold it is solid and simply remove it with your fingers, meanwhile scrape all the luscious gelatinous jus into a bowl and set aside. You will notice that I neglected to photograph this bit, sorry about that. Slice the roast into thin even slices.


Next, bundle up the slices onto a new sheet of parchment also rubbed lightly with butter. I used more thyme, and a few more scrapings of cinnamon (I found I used too little). Put the gelatinous jus on top or around it. Then rewrap it, "drugstore wrap" method. By the way, it's called "Drugstore Wrap" because in the old days before plastic and tape/stickers, all meat used to be wrapped this way to carry it home.

After this I carried it up the street to a dinner party I was invited to. When I got there I popped it into their oven at about 350°F for about a half hour, and in the meantime I drank just enough wine to totally forget to photograph the finished product. My apologies. You'll have to use your imagination. It was unctuous and glistening and the jus, when hot, was liquid but with a slight viscosity that made it unbearably good.

Say hello to my little pastamaker

Yesterday I was fitted with this little gem of a machine. The city's foremost pastamachine specialist, Emilio, sat with me over a small batch of fritto misto and lemony aioli and plied me with something like twenty questions of what I was looking for and in the end he declared he had exactly the machine for me. He disapeared for an hour to retrieve it, and in the meantime I made a batch of pasta dough. There was a slight panic when I realized that the restaurant doesn't actually have the right mixer attachement for making pasta, a flat-beater it's called. We just have a dough hook at the moment which is exactly what you need to do pizza dough but exactly what you don't need to make pasta dough. So I had to improvise. The moment the eggs hit the semolina though a memory awakened in me, there is a subtle damp aroma that pasta dough yeilds and I had nearly forgotten it. And when I got my hands into it I knew I was going to be alright.

Every now and then I am reminded that all art, all art that I can think of, is just hand movements. If you assemble every artist you can think of; painters, musicians, sculptors, writers, cooks, and take away their tools and their objects you'd see that we're all doing a series of very intricate hand movements, some things, like drumming and fencing use other body parts as well, but if you really think of it in these terms we are all tai chi masters. And over the years, through the generosity of at least two very kind mentors, my hands learned exactly what to do, how to feel, what crumbly texture to aim for, which balance of wetness and dryness. By the time Emilio returned with my new Imperia machine he started to rolll out my dough and he exclaimed like three times what an excellent dough it was. The two things about Emilio are that he does this for a living so he knows a good one from a mediocre one, and he also is a no-nonsense kind of guy who doesn't fling around compliments just to make you feel good.

I had to make the dough slightly differently than the old days because where I used to work there was a monster of a machine, it had humungous rollers and it did all the work for you, little Imperias like mine in the picture need a slightly moister dough and require more folding and rolling, but the end result was very delicious.

I took a pretty girl out to a little place called Flour + Water last night. I have not been completely seduced by their pizza, maybe I'm biased but I think ours are so much better, a month ago I tried two of their pizzas and found them to be a little too dusty for me to enjoy and also underseasoned, but I have heard no such thing as a bad review of the place and I have to say it's rather perfect in so many other ways. Also, it could have been just mine that were served that way. Last night though we dined mostly on pasta and both of us were going nuts at how ridiculously good our two dishes were. Definitely go there if you can, and don't bother listening to what I was just saying about their pizza, I am full of opinions and personality, can't help it. The room is small, yet very stylish, with two paintings on the walls, one of which is very beautiful. Little glass chemistry beakers hold votive candles, the tables are made of a soft and comforting wood. The bathroom has a giant curio cabinet arranged with shells and bones and other objects. I'm a sucker for curio cabinets.

Flour + Water's dessert was much better than I could have done. A Rosemary Panna Cotta with a very loose blackberry compote accompanied by two dainty cornmeal cookies. I don't know about you but rosemary never fails to make me happy, and the way it innoculated the panna cotta was very interesting and the wild foresty berries partnered perfectly. The cornmeal cookies though, I didn't think much of them. I was reminded of my former Chef, Carlo Middione's recipe for Venetian Zalletti, which are much more delicate and light, with a subtly haunting lemony goodness to them.