Warm Mussel Salad with Gaeta Olives and Oranges

Still no baby so it's back to the kitchen with The Babbo Cookbook in hand. The weather has been beautiful this past week with a few days even making it near 80° so a light salad out of the book will be my dinner for the night. 

The warm weather also prompted me to head to my local Home Depot to buy garden supplies. I bought some seeds and a few seed starter kits along with soil to get things going. Last year my work schedule from my previous job made it impossible to have a garden, but this year will be different. 

I plan on having quite a few tomato plants, tons of lettuce, a separate herb garden, and a few miscellaneous veggies that I'll try growing including some Babbo specific varieties that just never seem to be in my local Whole Foods. Opal basil? Never. Cardoons? They've never head of it. Making salami was one thing but how many people would grow their own produce for a cookbook? It's certainly a first for me but I'll do what what it takes to finish the book. 

But back to my meal. Mario mentions in the recipe liner notes that he loves warm seafood salads. This one was simple to make and has all of the components to be a great dish so I'm going to get right into it. 

The star of the meal, the mussels, were fresh and of the Prince Edward Island variety. I scrubbed them clean and de-bearded them before starting. 

In a sauté pan I boil chopped onion, thyme sprigs, and white wine. I add the mussels, cover them with a lid to trap in the steam, and cook them until they open. This takes about five minutes. 

Once cooked I set the mussels aside to cool and remove them from the shell. 

While the mussels were cooking I brought orange juice to a boil and reduced it by half. When reduced I cooled it and whisked in olive oil and more orange juice to make a citronette. The citronette gets seasoned with salt and pepper to finish. 

Now it's time to make the salad. In a mixing bowl I add frisée, radicchio, scallions, orange segments, olives, and sherry vinegar. 

The warm mussels get added, are seasoned, and tossed to coat. 

I plate the salad, drizzle some of the citronette around the greens and plate, and top with freshly grated orange zest. 

It looks like I was right. The salad was amazing. One of my favorites so far. 

Quality of ingredients plays a key role in this salad again but everything works. It's simple enough for anyone to replicate. My wife and I finished off the rather large serving that this recipe yielded. 

Baby watch continues. I promise to post pictures as soon as she is born. She's a little late, and we are more than ready to welcome her into the world, but it's really just a waiting game at this point. Meanwhile I will keep cooking Babbo. Until next time...

Date and Walnut Delizie with Orange Fiore Di Latte

Well here I am back from a brief early spring break. My wife and I didn't travel anywhere or even take any time off from work, we just had a lot of baby prep going on and my weekends have been spoken for lately (nope, no baby yet). She has officially hit the 9-month mark and we're ready to give birth at any minute. So while I have the opportunity to get back into my home kitchen and dive into The Babbo Cookbook, I am going to take full advantage. 

It's starting to get harder to find recipes to cook now that most of the simple ones are finished. This is also a tough time of year weather wise to source the produce that I need to complete these recipes. Many of these recipes are what I like to call 'restaurant recipes' in that they have everything but the kitchen sink added to them. This is fine for a restaurant in NYC that has access to anything imaginable, but to the home cook it involves longer trips to the market or several markets with the cookbook in hand to make sure that they have everything. 

The recipes are detailed and complex I get it. But as a forewarning for anyone who is attempting to cook heavily from this cookbook, some recipes require a lot of produce and specialty items, some of which only becomes available at certain times of the year. This is why at this stage I bring the book with me to the market because I often find myself one or two ingredients shy of any particular recipe. This was one of the common complaints for those that did gripe about the cookbook on review sites. But the positive side is that you learn more about the seasonality of your food and you become like a modern day hunter and gatherer. 

This next recipe is a dessert that I have passed over many times while flipping through the book. It's not that anything in the recipe sounds off putting and its not like something that I wouldn't try, but it was never on my 'OMG I have to eat this' list. As I have discovered many times when making something from this cookbook I am usually pleasantly surprised by the recipes that I don't think that I will be into. 

Delizie means 'delight' in Italian and it was quite a delightful dessert to make in its ease of preparation and overall great taste. By now with the amount of desserts that I've made for this blog, you should have a pretty clear picture of how Mario approaches his dessert making at Babbo. It closely mirrors my preferences on desserts as well. I tend to like a dessert that's a little smaller of a portion, that's not overly sweet but yet at the same time I want to feel like I'm eating a dessert. 

This little date cake could easily pass as a midday snack or a sweet little muffin like breakfast on the go. It almost has this "grandmas banana bread" quality to it without the addition of the sweet cream on the side. Add in the orange scented cream on the side and now you've kicked it up to full desert status. Let's get started with the preparation. 

The oven gets heated to 350°. I then take walnuts and toast them lightly in the oven. This should take about 15 minutes, then once they are cooled I give them a rough chop. 

While the nuts are in the oven, I grease foil cake molds for the batter that I am about to make. 

Dates get put into a food processor with milk and pulsed to make a chunky purée. 

In a separate bowl I sift flour, baking powder and soda, and salt and set it aside. 

Using the kitchen aid I'm ready to make the batter. Eggs, granulated sugar, and brown sugar get beaten together until light and airy. 

Vanilla extract and melted unsalted butter get added next. 

Next the dry ingredients get added, and I scrape down the sides of the bowl. 

Lastly I add the date purée, the walnuts, and heavy cream and mix until combined. I fill the molds about 2/3 of the way with batter and bake until brown and set. This took about half an hour in my kitchen. 

The sweet cream that accompanies these cakes is really simple. I take creme fraiche, sugar, orange zest, and ricotta and whip it together until stiff peaks form. 

The cakes are plated very simply with the orange cream. 

As I've eluded to in the beginning of this post, this was a winner. The cake was flavorful on its own, but the cream really turned this into a more composed dessert. The recipe serves 12 but I was able to get 14 when using the handy disposable foil baking cups that Mario recommends. My wife and I brought over the extras to the family and our Aunt Lynnie, a long-time subscriber to the blog and occasional taste-tester, confiscated most of what was left. 

For the next post I'm going back to the savory side with a salad that features mussels. Until next time...