Pasta with zucchini, saffron and smoked pancetta

 

I do not showcase pasta as much as I probably should on this blog, given that I live in Italy and we all love it in any shape or size. The reason is that more often than not, we throw together a pasta on a Friday night, while opening a bottle of wine to unwind, using up the last wilted greens and limp vegetables left in our fridge, and embellishing it with some pantry favorites (tuna, anchovies, smoked pancetta, olives...). No recipe, no amounts, no pre-planning. Just a relaxed, last-minute family meal made even better by the endless possibilities of the whole week end stretching ahead of us.

Granted, pretty much all of the recipes I blog about are easy and foolproof, but pasta somehow always just seemed too obvious to write about. That is until I started thinking about all the times I look up techniques or recipes  that are extremely common, staples in many households, especially when they are dishes from different cultures. If I look up how to make an authentic curry or how they cook rice in Japan, there must be someone in India or Japan wondering how much to salt their pasta water or how to get their pasta dishes creamier without adding butter or cream.

 

 

 

What may be obvious and second nature to some of us, isn't necessarily so for others. Sometimes we just need basic guidelines or flavor profiles to boost our confidence when trying to cook something new.

Persian rice Tah Cheen (or Tah Chin) style, step-by-step tutorial

 

 

The other day, while we were having dinner, my son asked me why nests don't fall off of trees.

Besides the basic grasp - if not understanding - of physics (balance, gravity and all that jazz) behind the question, which surprised me to a degree, it once again made me realize how much more for granted we take things compared to the average four year old.  

 

He usually asks the best questions at the table.

 

Once he was staring quietly at his hands with great interest. He then proceeded  to ask me what the lines were, pointing at the wrinkles on his knuckles.

 

Another question he asked me recently at the table that made me smile: why do they put plastic on eggs? He was eating sunny side up eggs and pointing at that transparent film that forms around the edges. Basically he had been eating it his whole life convinced it was Saran wrap (or cling film for those of you non Americans).

 

Not to mention he calls all meat chicken, so a normal enquiry at dinner will be: from what animal does the chicken we are eating come from?

 

 

 

I guess we can all agree that the questions a four-year old asks are priceless. But us adults have questions too. One of the things I always wondered about was how Persians make that delicious crunchy layer on their rice.  

Roasted vegetable lasagna with saffron bechamel sauce

My mother is in the process of moving and while we were visiting this summer, I went through some of her old books and picked a few to take home. I chose one in particular that I had seen in her bookshelves for years but had never given a second glance, not realizing what it was about. Its English title - I have the Italian translation - is Great Cooks and Their Recipes: From Taillevent to Escoffier and was written by Anne Willan, founder of the prestigious cooking school Ecole de Cuisine de La Varenne, back in 1977.

Now, anybody who knows me knows that I am mildly obsessed with history. Not really dates and wars and rulers, more like everyday life in all periods, but particularly the Middle Ages. I have always been intrigued by people's domestic life through time. I love visiting museums that illustrate the lives in cities, towns and homes of the past and have read many books on this subject. In law school, I have to admit to being more interested in the case studies of Ancient Rome than in most other subjects because it gave me an insight on how people actually lived on a day to day basis at the time. My friends tease me because whenever we drive down roads in the middle of nowhere or at night I say things like "I wonder what it would have been like to live here in the Middle Ages, without seeing a soul for months"; or I wonder what life would have been like in one of the many Medieval towns scattered throughout Italy.

It turns out this book, with its yellowed pages, is filled with information and illustrations about food, eating habits and cooking from the Middle Ages on.  Some of these facts were known to me, others weren't, but they are all fascinating. Did you know, for example, that in the Middle Ages people were not served large chunks of meat or whole roasted animals as we like to imagine? Meat in those days was incredibly tough (especially from larger animals), it was often salted, dried, smoked or pickled to preserve it in the winter and most of the time it was way past its prime so it was common to break it down as small as possible, often puréeing it, and to smother it in sauces and spices to cover the unpleasant taste. A meat dish was considered excellent when you couldn't tell what part of the animal it came from and even more so if you didn't even know what animal you were eating. And did you know that sugar was commonly used on savory dishes? Or that banquets were public and subjects were allowed to watch their sovereigns, the rich and the powerful feast as a means of entertainment?

It was also interesting to read that one of the most ancient forms of pasta in Italy were lasagne, already present in Roman times and prepared in one form or the other throughout history. I think all this reading of the Middle Ages unconsciously inspired the dish I made for my guests over the weekend, a lasagna with no trace of meat or tomatoes but rich with the warm color and flavor of saffron.

This lasagna was a first for us and it turned out to be a success, besides being extremely practical.

First of all, you can prepare it ahead of time so you won't have to cook while your guests are in the other room having fun and drinking all that good wine. Second of all, it is the perfect way to use up the various left over vegetables in your fridge. Last and not least, it is a great vegetarian meal.

There are no exact amounts, ingedients or techniques for this recipe. You can use pretty much any vegetable you like and fill the lasagna however you think appropriate. These are just general guidelines.

Ossobuco alla milanese (or braised veal shanks)

He sat on the scaffolding suspended from the cupola and shook his wrist for a few seconds, trying to ease the cramping of his fingers. He had been working on this window depicting St. Joseph for an hour, or maybe more he decided looking through the beautiful stained glass at the sun, which had moved considerably higher since he had last checked. Vincenzo had arrived from Leuven, Flanders with many others from all over Europe to work in the Venerable Factory of the Duomo, the construction site for the enormous gothic cathedral that was being built in the wealthy Duchy of Milan. The colors of his glass were renown because they were particularly striking, especially the yellow inserts. His secret was that he always added a touch of saffron when preparing the glass.  He decided to stop for a quick lunch, suspended in the air because there was always much to do and little time to climb down and chat with the others. He had brought a bowl of rice, which grew plentiful in the countryside surrounding the city and was cheap to buy, to work. He untied the knot in the cloth that he had wrapped his lunch in and just as he was moving his work utensils to the side, a fellow worker hollered from the scaffolding above.

"Perfundavalle! Buon appetito!".

Startled, he knocked over a tiny jar of the precious saffron he carried with his tools at all times and a little fell into the wooden bowl of rice. Vae! he mumbled in Latin, this was not good. So much waste of prized saffron and a ruined lunch! His stomach grumbled as he thought about what to do. He decided to taste the rice anyway, he was too hungry to wait till sunset and he had some wine to wash it down with. After all, saffron was a plant, how bad could it be? He stuck his fingers in the bowl, took a few kernels of rice, closed his eyes and stuffed them in his mouth. He chewed slowly, ready to spit out the offending bite. He chewed some more and sides of his mouth turned up into a big smile. This was delicious! Who would have ever thought saffron was so good? And the rice looked as beautiful as it tasted, with its yellow hue.

That is how the legend goes, regarding the birth of Milan's most famous dish, risotto giallo or allo zafferano. It is a versatile dish that can be eaten many different ways, as a first course or as a main course served with ossobuco, like the recipe I posted. It is always good to make in abundance so you have leftovers for riso al salto the next day, a crunchy, thin, pan-fried version of the rice beloved to all Milanese.

As you may or may have not have noticed, it has been a while since I last posted. I was offered a very interesting work opportunity last week that I couldn't turn down, despite the deadline being atrociously near, the amount of work being quite daunting and the fact that I have a full time job and pretty noisy children. This job involves writing, translating, researching to a certain extent. I am reading a lot on historical and artistic facts about the Duomo, Milan's cathedral.

It just so happened that when I received the file on the Duomo in my mailbox, I had 4 ossobuchi defrosting in my fridge. The more I read and wrote about the past glory of this town and the immense human and artistic effort made for decades, even centuries, to build the cathedral, the more I was excited to be preparing this dish for my family. Besides being one of F's favorite dishes, it somehow just made sense with its perfect timing, it made me feel connected to this city that often seems unattractive but that has some beautiful hidden secrets if you are willing to scratch a little beneath the surface. And so here is my ode to Milan, Oss bus a la milanesa con gremolata.