Italian home cooking...beans, bruschetta, tiramisu and more!

Barb and I have definitely been putting our cooking skills learned in Italy to good use for our families. We both arrived home to our youngest children being extremely ill with pneumonia, and with my son's asthma, meant we were in a hospital for five days in a town forty-five minutes from home. The day after arriving home, I made homemade gnocchi with an amazing meat sauce, which was our last meal in Italy at the Palazzo Venturelli. I haven't even finished blogging about Florence yet, but I will get there!!
(I will have a blog on it separately when I take some photos too)...

Later in the week I made a dish we had at an olive grove, a simple bean dish with bread in it, with loads of olive oil. I plan to spice it up a little before blogging more about it, although I really loved it as it was, as such a simple dish. Steve was not a big fan, but he is a meat and potatoes kind of guy. This could be my new favourite comfort food, and next time I would add maybe some garlic and a bay leaf, but you could change it up with any herbs or flavours you wanted. (I'll play around with it and blog with some recipe variations next time).

Another dish that was probably my favourite thing at the Palazzo Venturelli were the meatballs, they were melt-in-your-mouth delicious, and since I'm not usually a fan, it was completely unexpectedly scrumptious. It might have helped that I think I bailed out of the kitchen duty that night (there tended to be a bit of "too many cooks in the  kitchen", I found, since we had a fairly large group of us, nine women, plus the two chefs, plus at any given time, one of the two group organizers, or the two owners). So I think I spent this particular kitchen prep outside on the terrace with Barb and her aunts Janet and Lise, while we chatted and Barb played the guitar. You know how sometimes when you cook for yourself, it's just "meh", (although, usually I prefer my own cooking, it's nice when someone else does it really well too :) So maybe it was just not having quite the same ingredients, or the fact that handling raw ground meat turns my stomach, but I found my meatballs not quite as spectacular, so I will finesse the recipe too for next time (I forgot to add SALT to the meat, shock, I thought it just went in the sauce, so that could have been a big part of the problem for me). Anyway, they LOOKED great! I served dinner in the Italian way, with the bean dish as the first course, followed by meatballs with bread. AND did you know the Italians have a WORD for scraping your plate with bread?!! It's called "fare scarapata", (this might be wrong, but that's what it sounded like, and "fare" means "do", and then I think that means scrape, but I couldn't find it in a translator...)  so not only is it totally acceptable to basically lick your plate clean this way, it is EXPECTED of you, when eating Italian food.

I also made bruschetta. Bruschetta simply means toasted bread with olive oil, and then toppings may vary from region to region. I think that the bruschetta most common here, with tomato and basil is a southern Italian thing, but in any case, it is delicious simply as toasted bread with olive oil, and sea salt. I also rubbed a halved garlic clove over each slice of toasted bread, just for added zing, (we also ate it that way at the olive grove too), and wow, this was my favourite part of my meal.

Barb and I decided to get together for Sunday dinner at her place, and I decided to bring bruschetta (see above), as well as dessert (tiramisu), and I also made deep-fried basil leaves. We ate deep fried leaves a few times in Italy, once it was just borage leaves that grew right outside the building, nestled beside a patch of thistles... but, as everyone knows, you could deep fry anything (probably even thistles), and they taste delicious. They mentioned then that you could deep fry basil leaves if they get too big....which sounded divine to me.

To make the deep fried basil leaves, you make a simple batter, with 1 cup of flour, and I used 1 1/4 cups of very cold sparkling water. (Next time I would use wine or champagne as part of the liquid). The olive oil heated up very quickly, so I found I had to keep turning down the temp. Medium temp. was fine for deep frying. Dredge clean, dry leaves in the batter and deep fry in small batches, and lightly salt (I used some rose-scented salt I bought in Italy, not sure if it made much difference, but in my head it does)! The result is a light crispy batter, and I was actually surprised that such an aromatic herb actually seemed to lose flavour after cooking, but hey, every last bit was eaten, so next time I will use home grown basil leaves that get really big, if I can actually manage not to use all the basil up first.

The tiramisu recipe I used was from Giada de Laurentiis' site, (Giada de Laurentiis' tiramisu), but I will repost it here so I can note the changes I made.

*6 egg yolks

3 tablespoons sugar

1 pound mascarpone cheese

1 1/2 cups strong espresso, cooled

2 teaspoons dark rum

24 packaged ladyfingers

1/2 cup bittersweet chocolate shavings, for garnish

Directions

In a large bowl, using an electric mixer with whisk attachment, beat egg yolks and sugar until thick and pale, about 5 minutes. Add mascarpone cheese and beat until smooth. Add 1 tablespoon of espresso and mix until thoroughly combined.

Milano biscuits worked out perfectly fine.

In a small shallow dish, add remaining espresso and rum. Dip each ladyfinger into espresso for only 5 seconds. Letting the ladyfingers soak too long will cause them to fall apart. Place the soaked ladyfinger on the bottom of a 13 by 9 inch baking dish, breaking them in half if necessary in order to fit the bottom.
Spread evenly 1/2 of the mascarpone mixture over the ladyfingers. Arrange another layer of soaked ladyfingers and top with remaining mascarpone mixture.
Cover tiramisu with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 2 hours, up to 8 hours.
Before serving, sprinkle with chocolate shavings.

Actually, the changes I made were based on availability of products in my store. We were out of lady fingers (Christie rep, you are in big doo doo, omg, can't believe I just wrote that), and the only dark chocolate (besides Bakers, which I didn't want to use as a garnish) was the Cadbury burnt almond, so I decided to use S-shaped Milano biscuits, and I substituted dark rum for Amaretto. Amaretto is not my favourite liqueur, but thought it might pair nicely with the burnt almond chocolate shavings. However you can use any alchohol you want, coffee liqueur, Bailey's, Marsala.... I also think Grand Marnier, or Frangelico would be good, maybe Amarula cream. (I will be trying them all). Since I had noticed in other recipes that alcohol was added to the mascarpone mixture, I also added 1 tablespoon of Amaretto to the mascarpone mixture.  I actually spooned more espresso over the biscuits after I dipped them, and also the top layer, I used up all my espresso spooning it over to make the most of the coffee flavour. I chose Giada's recipe because I liked the fact that she used fresh chocolate shavings on top versus the usual cocoa powder. It was REALLY good.

In Italy, the cooks rolled out their pasta with a giant rolling pin (pasta pin, Barb is going to get some into her store), and it makes for a nice rustic pasta. Barb made two batches, for the kids first, and then the grown up version included fresh parsley from her garden, sun-dried tomatoes, freshly chopped garlic, peppronicini (tiny HOT peppers, she used about six for the WHOLE dish, and it was perfect); some olive oil and truffle oil (it is amazing how pungent truffle oil smells, and yet is very delicate-tasting);  and SOPRESSATA; and it was all topped off with a feathery light cloud of freshly grated parmesan .

Soppressata  was a cold meat we had first tried in Italy, at Nerone, our favourite restaurant in Florence,  but despaired of ever finding here. Barb had wandered down to the Sunday Farmer's Market in our town, and what did she find, but an Italian vendor with Sopressata and prosciutto, and all kinds of wonderful things, and she texted me to come see her RIGHT AWAY, and I can honestly say that I would not have expected soppressata to be waiting for me. YAY. Her daughter Elinor, a budding foodie, declared it "buttery", and I have to agree, it is smooth, and light-tasting for a salami, and just so yummy. They also apparently make a hot version, which I can't wait to try, though it isn't kid-friendly. (Sorry kids, that's for the grown-ups!!).  By the way, pasta is so easy to make.... Make a well of about two cups of flour, beat in three or four eggs, a splash of salt, and mix it all up, incorporating flour into the egg as you go, until you can knead it. I'll have a pasta blog soon too. SO MUCH COOKING TO DO! I do love my pasta machine, but this is just as easy if you don't have one.

It was a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon and evening of a summery long weekend. We finished the evening just as dark was settling in, lolloping around in Barb's front yard waving sparklers (yep, that was us, the grown-ups, after the kids had had their fun too). Okay, so this blog entry ended up as two or three meals rolled into one....but can you blame me, Italian cooking is SO MUCH FUN!