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...

Bucatini All'Amatriciana

There's one more recipe in the cookbook that utilizes the guanciale that I labored over and I decided to do it on the same night as the last post and make it my main meal for the evening. 

Bucatini all'amatriciana is a classic Italian pasta dish from the region of Lazio. There are some minor ingredient differences around Lazio where you'll find it, but it always includes guanciale, tomatoes, and pecorino cheese. 

Bucatini is a hard durum wheat pasta, thick and shaped like spaghetti, but with a hollow center. The name comes from the Italian word 'buca' meaning hole. I had to use my trusty Amazon.com to find it seeing how it was absent from any of my local shops. The special UPS delivery is really not necessary because there is nothing wrong with substituting spaghetti for the bucatini. I wanted to stay true to the ingredients in the cookbook, and having never cooked or eaten bucatini, I figured it was worth it to order it at least once for the sake of trying it.  

The ingredient list is a short one, but there is a little prep work that will need to be done in order to make this dish come together. I already have the guanciale so that's taken care of. I will need to make another batch of Mario's basic tomato sauce, though. I'm not going to go into details about how it's made as it was the subject of a previous post, but I will show you my pot of sauce. 

I made a double batch in order to freeze some for future recipes, which reminds me that my basic chicken stock is getting low too. Better put that on the list soon. 

Now I'm ready to dive in. Once you're at this point, the dish comes together super fast. First I bring a pot of salted water to a rapid boil. 

I then add the guanciale to a sauté pan over medium heat, cooking until most of the fat has rendered out. The meat then goes on to a paper towel to drain off the extra fat while I discard half of the fat from the sauté pan. 

I turn the heat up on the sauté pan slightly and cook garlic, sliced red onion, and red pepper flakes. 

The guanciale gets added back to the sauté pan once the garlic and onions are cooked. Some of the basic tomato sauce is added and simmered for about ten minutes. 

While this is happening I drop the bucatini into the boiling water. It'll take a good nine minutes to cook, bucatini is a big pasta. 

Once cooked, the bucatini is added to the sauté pan and tossed with the sauce. It is finished with parsley and fresh grated pecorino Romano, the traditional sheep's milk cheese for this recipe. 

I plate a dish for myself and my wife. 

We had leftover peasant bread from the last post and gorged until our plates were licked clean. It's amazing how some of the simplest recipes are often the best. Babbo still has this on their menu and it's easy to see why. Do yourself a favor if you make it though, get real guanciale. Or better yet, make it like I did. Regardless, this is one of the easiest pasta recipes in the book. Until next time...

Duck Eggs Sunny-Side Up with Guanciale and Truffle Vinaigrette

I had the great fortune to attend a wedding this past weekend for my wife's sister Ashley in old Sturbridge Massachusetts. The ceremony was touching and we had a great time without any hangovers or food comas. Her new husband, Andrew, was my source for the duck eggs that I am going to be using in this next post. 

Andrew hooks me up with duck eggs every year once his prized flock at his farm starts to produce in the early spring. I tried them a few years ago and have been hooked ever since. They're obviously bigger than chicken eggs and have a slightly better flavor to my palette, although I wouldn't recommend baking with them. 

This appetizer is Babbo's version of the classic combo of bacon and eggs. It features homemade guanciale that I've been curing over the past month. Guanciale is kind of like an Italian bacon that is made from the jowl, or cheek, of the pig. Mario writes that it has a depth of flavor that is missing from traditional American bacon. 

This marks my first attempt at curing my own meat at home. It's a very Italian practice, delis and restaurants all over Italy always have meat curing and hanging from the ceiling. And it certainly fits the theme of nothing goes to waste. Curing preserves the meat, which was needed at a time when refrigeration was simply non-existent. But, if this goes well, I can totally see myself doing more of it in the future. Many modern restaurants in America are curing their own meat now. It's cheap, you can control what is and isn't in your salumi, and the opportunity to create something unique that no one else is doing is a great motivator to try it out. Plus, it's a great way to utilize those left-over less popular and miscellaneous parts of the animal.  

The hardest part though, like the preserved lemon recipe or making your own wine, is the long wait for the guanciale to be ready. In the recipe liner notes, Mario tells us that he makes fifty pounds of guanciale a week at Babbo. That's a lot considering the size of their kitchen. I'm not going to get that hog wild but I am eager to get started. 

Here are the pork cheeks:

My butcher had a lot of them and for $0.99/pound it's a steal!

To make the cure rub I mix sugar, salt, peppercorns, and thyme in a bowl. 

The jowls get coated very liberally with the rub. 

The jowls are then place in a non-reactive pan, covered with plastic wrap, and refrigerated for seven days. 

After a week the jowls are tied with butchers twine around their middle and are hung in a dry cool place for an additional three weeks. The area that you hang these should not be warmer than 60°. I have a mud room in the back of my house that isn't heated and has a door that I left the screen in to make sure the meat stayed cold enough. I also hung a garbage bag underneath them to catch any potential drippings that may have occurred. I have to thank my wife for being okay with my experiment and having to be greeted by pork every time she came home through the door from work. Once fully cured the jowls are ready to be sliced and used. 

Next on the ingredient list is the truffle vinaigrette that I need to make. It calls for canned truffle which I was able to find on Amazon.com (let's be honest don't they have everything?) by a company called Truffle Hunter. They're affordable and have a perfect pungent truffle aroma once opened. The black truffles and sherry vinegar are mixed in a bowl. 

Extra-virgin olive oil is slowly whisked in to finish the vinaigrette along with salt and pepper to taste. I'm following Mario's wishes and nonchalantly whisking the oil in to create a slightly 'broken' emulsion. 

The rest of the recipe is very easy and straightforward. I sliced the guanciale at work on the meat slicer to get thin, bacon-like pieces. I heat the guanciale in a sauté pan over medium heat until most of the fat has been rendered. When finished cooking, the guanciale is placed on a paper towel and the fat is discarded from the pan. 

In a large bowl, I add frisée, some olive oil, fresh lemon juice, and salt and pepper and make a quick salad. 

Then, using a nonstick pan, I melt butter over high heat until it stops foaming and crack a duck egg, cooking them sunny-side up. They take about four minutes to cook and then are seasoned with salt and pepper. In heat of the moment I forgot to take a picture of this step and I do apologize. 

I got some nice 'peasant' bread at the market that I will slice, cut on the bias, and use as toast points. 

I'm ready to plate. The salad gets plated in the center and topped with a duck egg, the guanciale gets placed around the center, and the truffle vinaigrette gets spooned around the plate. 

Wow. 

What a perfect appetizer. The duck egg was huge and paired perfectly with the truffle and guanciale, while the lemon juice that dressed the frisée cut through the fat in this dish to help balance things out. I mean, come on, homemade bacon, how could you not like it?

I kept this as an appetizer the night that I made this because I wanted to go guanciale-crazy, although there's nothing wrong with serving this for brunch. There's one more recipe in the cookbook the uses guanciale and while it was in my kitchen, I couldn't lose the chance to make that as well. Until next time...

Barbequed Octopus with Yukon Golds and Spicy Tangerine Citronette

This next post was finished last week with the two drink recipes, but I seemed to have had a struggle in finding any time to be able to write it out (Damn you Netflix and your Full House reunion!). I didn't want to rush through the writing either. I wanted to take my time in the explanations seeing how I ventured into new territory here with the cooking of this post. 

I've never cooked octopus before, much less ever tasted it. How many red-blooded Americans can say that they have? So I was excited at the opportunity to learn something new through the indirect guidance of our master chef Mario. 

As I've written about before, NYC is a tough crowd to please. With so many people and so many options everyday, a chef really has his or her work cut out to draw in new diners and to keep turning the tables in their restaurant. Mario talks about this in the opening preface of the book when he states 'I like using offbeat ingredients because NYC's voracious eaters want the intellectual stimulation of trying something few of of them will cook at home'. Octopus is probably not something that will make it to the table anytime soon in your neighborhood so I think it fits the bill.  

Yet, it is a sea creature, which if caught, would not have been discarded when food is scarce. It was relatively cheap to buy, only $3.19 a pound at my local butcher. And to be able to make a great dish using a scary looking or 'offbeat' ingredient palatable that few have ever come across is what, in my opinion, separates the chefs from the cooks. The bravado in saying 'Yup, we've got the only octopus in town and its on our menu, beat that!' may also have a little part to play in the growing popularity of obscure ingredients. 

This was the five-pound specimen that I brought home from my local butcher. 

Cute, I know. And plenty to feed a big family if you can find anyone brave enough to come over and try it. (I was not that lucky so it was just my wife and I)

The octopus was the most 'out there' ingredient in the recipe list as all of the other ingredients were readily available to me at my local Whole Foods. I know that I needed a wine cork to cook with the octopus to create 'some magical chemical reaction to make the octopus tender while retaining its leathery mouth feel' as Mario outlines in the recipe notes. Wine cork, hmm shouldn't be too hard to find one of those hanging around here. 

I start by preheating the oven to 300°. I take out my Dutch oven and heat some olive oil until almost smoking and add garlic and red pepper flakes. 

Next, I add the octopus to the pan and cook it on all sides over high heat until it has released its liquids, which was more that I was expecting, and has changed in color. I put in the wine cork, cover the pan with aluminum foil, and cook the octopus in the oven for about two hours. 

While that's cooking, I bring some salted water up to a boil. Diced Yukon gold potatoes get added to the pot with thinly sliced red onion. These are cooked until tender but still firm and then plunged into an ice bath to halt further cooking. 

I still have a little time before the octopus is ready so I make the tangerine citronette. I use a small saucepan to boil tangerine juice down with some red pepper flakes. It should be reduced by half. Now, you could juice the tangerines or do what I did and buy a bottle of fresh tangerine juice which is much easier. Your choice. 

Once reduced and cooled, I add champagne vinegar to the juice with salt and pepper. I whisk olive oil into this mixture, but Mario emphasizes not to try and make it a perfectly emulsified vinaigrette, that it should be slightly 'broken'. 

The octopus is finished cooking. I must admit it did make the house smell nice so let's see how it came out. 

The sliced onions and potatoes get tossed with diced raw red onion, red wine vinegar, olive oil, and salt and pepper. 

The potato mixture gets put on the plate. The octopus tentacles get cut and placed on the potatoes, and the citronette gets spooned around the center. Chives are the garnish here as per the recipe but aren't in the dish at all. They do go with the potatoes but if you wanted to leave them out it wouldn't be a huge loss. 

Now for the moment you've all been waiting for. The tasting. 

Hmmm.

Well.

The potatoes were good.

I love the citronette.

But I'm sorry the texture was just...wrong. I gave it a chance, and I can at least say that I tried it. But I won't ever eat octopus again in my life. My wife came to the same conclusion. That poor woman. I'm really shocked that she agree to try it. I give her props, but it was quickly spit out. Sorry Mario but I just think this one was over my head. 

It's not the end of the world. At least I have the guanciale to look forward to which will be officially ready tomorrow. There's a few recipes that use it in the cookbook and my goal is to try and do them both simultaneously. It will require some speciality ingredients that I'll have to look for online. But I'm dying to see how it came out. Until next time...

Anna 'Sta Notte

This next recipe is the last Prosecco based cocktail in the beginning chapter of the cookbook. I wasn't a big fan of the last drink so I'm hoping that this one will be slightly better. Limoncello is also featured in this recipe along with grappa. 

Grappa is a distilled spirit that is high in alcohol content and is made from the leftover grape skins from the final pressings when making wine. You have to hand it to the Italians in coming up with a crafty way to do something with leftover product. To me, on its own it's quite harsh, so hopefully adding it to the Prosecco will smooth it out a little bit. 

In an almost identical preparation as the last recipe, some grappa gets placed in a large spoon and a sugar cube is added. 

Once the sugar cube has absorbed the grappa, it gets added to the champagne flute. The sugar cube gets topped with limoncello and Prosecco just as in the last recipe. 

I liked this drink much better than the Amarina from the last post. However, it was a bit too sweet for me to have on any regular basis. It's really a perfect chick drink. I had to go solo with trying this recipe considering that my wife is pregnant and she couldn't have any booze. 

There are three more drink recipes left in this cookbook. There will probably be some time before you catch me mixing my next cocktail for this blog. The rest of the drinks are similar to each other as well, and they involve buying some specialty bottles of liquor that are quite costly to purchase all at the same time so I will be buying them a little at a time. If I had more dinner parties at my house on days off with drinkers that would appreciate them, then I can understand expanding my liquor cabinet stock. But that is not happening and I don't need to get them all right away. Instead I choose to tackle some more of the recipes in the book with obscure ingredients. 

Next up I'm going to be cooking with a fish that I've never cooked before in my life. Octopus. Until next time...

Amarina

These next two posts will be coming from the drink chapter of the cookbook. Both feature Prosecco, an Italian sparkling wine, as the main ingredient base of the cocktail. 

Both are very simple to put together, especially in a pinch when company comes over at the last minute, and will infuse some flavor into your Prosecco. 

This first recipe features limoncello, which is a spirit that is made in southern Italy from the peels of a lemon. Trying the limoncello on its own, I found it to be quite smooth, even for someone such as myself who tends to not like any hard liquor. As a sipped it, I felt as if I were in a villa overlooking the southern Italian coast on a warm summer day. 

To start, I place some Angostura bitters any large spoon and add a sugar cube. When the sugar cube has absorbed the bitters I put it into a champagne flute. 

The lemon cube then gets topped with the limoncello and Prosecco and it is ready to serve. 

I had to use the champagne flutes that my wife and I received as a gift at our wedding. I don't have my own champagne flute collection because I tend to drink the same type of wine at home, usually red. Hey, you like what you like.  

Overall, to me this drink was a little bit too bitter from my personal taste. I can't imagine having this drink without something to eat to go along with it, but maybe that's just me and my preference. I think the drink is a little bit too 'Real Housewives of Orange County' and I am a little bit too 'Duck Dynasty' for me to get into it. 

In the next post, I will make the other Prosecco based cocktail. Until next time...