23 Sep 2016 9 Comments
in Pork, Recipes Tags: Bologna, Emilia-Romagna, Italian cuisine, Massimo Bottura, mortadella, Osteria Francescana, salumi, sandwiches
I wasn’t much of a bologna — baloney — kid when I was young. While my friends pined for white bread with bologna and mayo, I found it rather bland and uninteresting.
In my teen years, working at an Italian deli, I would discover that the origins of this pale, flaccid meatstuff was actually a salumi called mortadella (the American version was named after the central-Italian city from whence mortadella originates, Bologna). And my opinion would change. More
25 Sep 2015 16 Comments
in Recipes Tags: humor, Italian cooking, Italy, Massimo Bottura, Osteria Francescana, risotto, seafood, sizzling rice soup, Venice
I’m a big believer in the ol’ saying, “If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.” I often spring it on my children when something hasn’t gone the way they were hoping, and they roll their eyes at me.
One lemon that life keeps giving me over and over again is burnt rice. About one out of every three times I make sushi rice, I space out and forget to turn it off and it burns.
Crispy shrimp risotto fake out
If it isn’t too burned, I’m able to salvage most of the rice and it has a nice woodsy nutty smoked taste that works well with sushi. Also if it’s not too burned, the “burnt” part comes off with a wrist twist of the spatula in crusty golden brown strips. If you put it in a 200 degree oven for 40 or so minutes, it dries out and becomes the hard stuff the Chinese fry to drop into sizzling rice. More
21 Aug 2015 20 Comments
in Cookbooks, Recipes Tags: Chef's Table, el Bulli, Ferran Adria, Massimo Bottura, Netflix, Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef, Noma, Osteria Francescana, Phaidon, Rene Redzepi
My ever-generous big sister, Andrea, sent me two cookbooks for my birthday. One was a simple and useful book on tacos and Mexican snacks; the other, a coffee table volume of the most complicated Italian cooking on earth called “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef.”
Mossimo Bottura
I love cookbooks from the art press, Phaidon, of which the latter is one. They are beautifully designed, with full page spreads of food you would never cook, as they tend to honor the world’s most daring chefs. Such is the case with “Never Trust a Skinny Italian Chef.” The subject is Modena chef Massimo Bottura and his acclaimed restaurant, Osteria Francescana, which inevitably lands in the Top 5 of the world’s best restaurant lists, though never seems able to unseat previous #1 El Bulli and current #1 Noma (both subjects of multiple Phaidon titles). More
skinny girls & mayonnaise 