"Il bambino" makes a difference

When I began gathering recipes and researching wine lore for “The Wine Lover Cooks Italian,” I made several trips to Italy on my own, and a few with my wife,  but never got anything like the acceptance I did after we had a baby:

In Venice, at Alle Testiere, owner Luca DaVita was a subscriber to Decanter,  the wine magazine I write for, but when we asked  him for a recipe for red mullet, olives and pasta,  he said he wouldn’t give out recipes. Desperately, I  pointed to her stomach–“But she’s pregnant!” I exclaimed. Luca, who’s a dead ringer for Ben Kingsley, said with a twinkle, “I’ll give the baby the recipe.” A year later, we went back to Venice for a weekend and brought a photo of Patrick–we got the recipe.

In Urbino, we were in search of vincisgrassi, the world’s most luxurious lasagna. Killing time before lunch at Vecchia Urbino, we went to  the Ducal Palace, a museum in a huge and very grand villa.  The really valuable paintings are behind plastic panels meant to keep viewers a few feet back, but Patrick found he could crawl around and squeeze behind them, which set off the burglar alarms. The guards came around after a few minutes and shut  off the alarm, laughing. This happened several  times, and they thought it was funnier every time. We thought it was a good scenario for a heist movie. Down the hill, the chef wasn’t too forthcoming, till we told him the story. He gave us the recipe.

On the shore of Lake Bolsano, north of Rome, we went to Il Purgatorio, where we were told the chef did a lot of unusual pasta dishes. We got lost, and arrived as he was closing up–he waved us away, but his wife saw Patrick, smacked the chef on the arm and glared at him, then beckoned us inside. We ate a fabulous lunch, joined by them. We got some good cooking tips, and two recipes.

“The Wine Lover Cooks Italian” is dedicated to  Patrick, because I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have  done it without him. . . Obviously the moral of the story is, don't forget to bring the baby.

Beet and orange salad

Neither my son nor I are crazy about beets, but this recipe has somewhat changed our mind. The mild acidity of the orange balances the earthy sweetness of the beets, and the onion and parsley add nice grace notes. This offbeat recipe is from Franco Dunn, retired from restaurants in Sonoma, California, and now making sausages for sale in the many area farmers’ markets. It’s included in a small new cookbook, just out, that collects recipes from six chefs in Sonoma, one of California’s premium wine regions. The grassy-sweet-tart combination is perfect with a light red wine, such as Beaujolais.

2 lbs beets

2 oranges
½ thinly sliced red onion
2 Tbsp olive oil
2 Tbsp chopped parsley
Juice of 1 lemon

Roast beets till tender (about 45 minutes) Let them cool slightly, then slip skins off with your fingers. Cut beets into small wedges and cool completely. Peel the oranges with a knife. (Tip: Cut right down the sides of the oranges, exposing the flesh, then cut the wedges away from the membranes with a sharp paring knife and drop into a mixing bowl. Do this over the bowl, to catch more of the orange juice.) Toss all the ingredients together. Serve at room temperature or slightly chilled.

The book, called “Gatherings,” is available online from www.jacksonni.com.

Potato Mixta

I’ve seen variations of this dish in Sicily, Greece, and southern France, so I guess it’s truly “Mediterranean cuisine.” Certainly comfort food!
        Pre-heat the oven to 200 degrees C. In a large pan, boil water.
       Start with 1 pound of waxy potatoes*, peel or not, as you wish; I don’t. Cut into quarters. Add potatoes, parboil for just 7-8 minutes. Drain.
       Cut about two dozen good-quality black olives in half. Cut the same amount of small tomatoes (baby plums are best) in half or thirds if they’re a bit bigger. Cut three or four cloves of garlic in thirds. De-stem and seed a red bell pepper, chop into dice. Combine and set aside.
       In a roasting pan, put 50 ml olive oil and place in oven (hot oil won’t soak into the potatoes and make them greasy).
       Place potatoes in a large bowl, add olive-tomato-etc. mix. Scatter over it a heaping tablespoonful of dried oregano** and several grindings of black pepper, toss well.
       Add the potato mixture to the roasting pan and stir well to coat with olive oil (give it a good shake as well, to settle the mix). Return it to the oven and cook for about 45 minutes. Stir the mixture every 15 minutes.
       If you want a one-pan meal, brown chicken breasts in a frying pan, then place on top of potatoes to finish for the last half-hour; or lay boneless fish fillets on top for the last 15 minutes. *Any quantity will do, just keep the 50/25/25% ratio. **You could also mix in a couple of rosemary sprigs to the mix before cooking; remove before serving.

BAKED STUFFED PEARS

This is a hearty but elegant recipe I've been fond of for years, pried loose from a chef in San Francisco's North Beach; the flavors are pleasantly contrasted and satisfying.

6 large pears, peeled and cored (cut ¾-inch cavities)

1 oz. unsweetened chocolate, chopped

6 fresh small almond (not coconut) macaroons, crumbled

2 oz. heavy cream
panettone, sliced 1/2-inch thick
a scant cup sweet white wine (such as late-harvest Riesling)

2 Tbsp butter

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Select six individual baking cups, sized to hold each pear upright. Cut panettone slices to fit the bottoms of the cups, butter the slices on one side and put them, buttered side down, into the cups. Set a pear in each cup, and stuff each one tightly with a coarsely crumbled macaroon. Top with some chopped chocolate, until pear is filled to the top; spoon a little cream over all of this.

Pour the wine around the pears and bake, uncovered, for 50 minutes. Then, spoon a little more heavy cream over each pear and bake for another 10 minutes. Serve hot in the baking dishes; a splash of cold heavy cream creates even more contrast.Yield: 6 servings

From "The Flavor of North Beach Revisited," by Mary Etta Moose and I, now available from Amazon's Kindle Store.

Sweetness and Light: Apple Vanilla Tart

My boy is suddenly into baking. It started with some muffins from the Hummingbird Bakery book (still the standard text for him), then he graduated to lemon-drizzle cake, then a simple plum cake, and so on (all enjoyed by his classmates at school, where he can get even more applause than at home). He found this recipe of mine, and made it on his own, amazing and delighting us. (Tip: The best apples  are Pippins, Gravensteins, Granny Smiths, or Winesaps, anything but Golden Delicious, which are too bland.) The

Food memories: Fenway Park

I pretty much grew up in Fenway Park; at least it felt that way (for my mother, baseball was holy; when she retired, she moved to Arizona, and attended all the Spring-training games she could, happily extending the season). Early every Spring, my mother would get the advance schedule of Red Sox home games, and we’d sit at the kitchen table plotting our Summer, picking our way through weekend and night games with our favorite enemies (the Yankees were top of the list, of course). When those chosen days came, we’d go downtown and board a bus for the 50-mile ride straight to Fenway in Boston, loaded with other baseball fans, chattering madly.
 
Day or night, the first step in the ritual, even before we bought a program, was to get a hot dog, dribble mustard over it (never ketchup!), and then pack in spoonfuls of sweet relish. The mustard was the bright yellow kind we knew as “ballpark

Between meals: Some good reads

I’m entranced by a fascinating book called “Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War,” by Anna Ciezadlo. I can’t recall anything like it, and can’t recommend it enough. Ciezadlo is a reporter, married to a Lebanese reporter, and she covered the wars in the Middle East, in Bagdhad and Beirut, for several newspapers and magazines. Her story

Green-up time

I didn’t put the subject in the title, because I didn’t want you running away. It’s broccoli, but it’s OK, really, this is good. I got this tip, in the same month, from two very good chefs (Shaun Hill and Brett Graham), and it’s terrific.

I was taught that broccoli stalks were bitter and tough, and should always be discarded, so I did. Now that I know it isn’t true, I could weep over all the food I’ve wasted—this shows the virtue of tasting always, and challenging the

Onion Relish

We make a lot of this in the summer, to go with barbecue and burgers, but it came in very handy over the recent year-end holidays. It works very well either at room temperature or cold, with ham, roast pork, or turkey, or with leftover chicken or beef. It’s positively sensational on a juicy burger. The wine we use in it is usually whatever’s left over from a night or two (or even three) earlier. This can be made ahead and will keep for a couple of weeks in a jar in the fridge, although we usually get to the bottom of it before then.

½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 pound yellow onions, peeled and thinly sliced
2 large red onions, peeled and thinly sliced
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons tomato puree
12 oil-packed sun-dried tomato halves,
      drained and coarsely chopped
1 teaspoon dried thyme
½ cup balsamic vinegar
1 cup dry red wine

In a large, heavy saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add all the remaining ingredients except the vinegar and wine. Stir well. Reduce heat to very low, cover, and cook on very low heat until the onions have begun to brown, about 1 hour. Stir in the vinegar and wine. Cook, uncovered, until most of the liquid has evaporated and the mixture is a rich mahogany color, about 45 more minutes. Let cool. Spoon into airtight jars, cover, and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks. (Bonus: Your house will smell wonderful all day.)

Eat up!

My wife’s office is near an incredible farmers’ market. She likes to go and mooch around on her lunch hour, and often brings home goodies she found irresistible, fresh fruit and vegetables, odd cuts of meat, fish I’ve never seen before, and hand them over to me to deal with. This usually leads to a lot of frantic hunts through the indexes of my cookbooks, or, if it’s really exotic stuff, on-line searches. It’s sometimes exasperating, but it keeps me on my toes (that’s what she says, anyway). Now, though, I’ve got a new kitchen tool that puts me ahead of the game—Eat Your Books.

Eat Your Books is not a website of recipes, but rather a tool for finding

RECIPE: Zuppa Inglese with strawberries

This gloriously sensual dessert translates to “English soup,” for reasons no one is entirely sure of; it’s similar to the famous English trifle, but a considerable improvement on that sherry-drenched, soggy concoction, and a lot more vibrant than its upstart cousin, tiramisu. The best version is made with strawberries, an easy but modestly elegant way to end a

RECIPE: Tomato Essence

Here’s one to make ahead, and use in a variety of recipes as a quick, easy, and robust flavoring ingredient. Commercial sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil are often expensive, vary in quality, and don’t contribute enough flavor, but this one works well.

RECIPE: Coca-Cola BBQ Sauce

My son has been bragging about this one so much so that I was once obliged to cook up several dozen barbecued-chicken drumsticks for his class picnic. No problem: Any chance to be a hero to your kid is an opportunity not to be missed. Actually, it’s not my recipe. It’s from "Cooking of the South," by Nathalie Dupree, who has done so much to

RECIPE: Potatoes “Mediterraneo”

Most of our friends and relatives swap recipes, so we ran into variations of this one in France and Italy; seemingly endless variations are part of the fun. Also, it’s a good warm-weather potato dish, being fairly light. We used various potatoes, Charlotte, Rosevear, new potatoes, all worked well; for small ones, cut them in half or quarters, larger ones should be in 1-inch pieces. They taste better

Spring has sprung!

Our birthdays and anniversaries arrive in the Spring and, after four months of gray skies, cold, and rain, we celebrated by getting away to the sun and friends, in Italy and France. After that, the unpronounceable volcano in Iceland was a last bit of gray unpleasantness, and then the sun came out, and it’s finally Spring for real, and we’re back, overflowing with good cheer and tasting notes. More to come soon. . .

RECIPE: Fish Pie

Getting kids to eat fish can be a challenge. For a year or so when he was four, my son wanted nothing but fish fingers (the frozen kind, which only average about 60-70% fish). Then he went off them, and refused all substitutes for a few years, until he had salmon at a friend’s house and decided it was okay. I moved him along to halibut, also fairly bland and meaty, and I had some luck making

TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Potato Ricer

It resembles a large garlic press. When I was a kid, we had a metal one so heavy I could hardly work it, but these days, with stainless steel and high-impact plastic, they’re easy to use in many ways. You simply put cooked potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, carrots, butternut squash, whatever, into the basket and clamp down the lever, and through the bottom come light, fluffy bits of the vegetable—no lumps, airy, looking a bit like rice.

You can use it in many ways: Whip the “riced” potatoes with a bit of milk and butter, or olive oil, and you’ve

RECIPES: Upside-down cakes

Great ideas seem to arrive all at once, and that was certainly true in the 1890s, when two sisters in France named Tatin invented an upside-down apple tart, made with pie crust, and the Dole family in Hawaii created a recipe for an upside-down cake made with their new product, canned pineapples. (Until canning was invented, pineapples were a luxury, and eaten fresh; brought back from South America by Portuguese and British sailors,

Food memories: Cast iron guaranteed

All the best things in my kitchen, and the most indispensable, are the old things (no wisecracks, please). The big roasting pan that does the turkey or goose or salmon is a very old baked-enamel number, quite lightweight and efficient; the baking dishes and casseroles are glazed terracotta, mostly from street markets; the beat-up steamer baskets and wok came from a Chinese hardware store on Stockton Street in San Francisco a generation ago, before Teflon became

RECIPE: Almond Biscotti

This is a simple version of the cookies known as biscotti (or cantucci in Tuscany), that are served after meals, usually with a glass of sweet wine, into which they’re dunked to soften. (For my son and his friends, the beverage of choice is hot chocolate—they think dunking is really cool.) A good many variations of this recipe are