Homemade Fine Dining

Mom and I love to cook for other people. Before the pandemic, we would have dinners every so often that we would plan elaborate menus for and cook amazing food to share with loved ones. Obviously, that isn't really happening. Scooter is considered an essential worker, so he's been going to work everyday and missing out on our twice-weekly lunches in the garden. He's been hearing me talk about what we enjoy at lunch, and I know he's been feeling a little left out. He needed to work on my parents' RV this last weekend, so Mom and I decided that we would give him a fancy lunch to enjoy after he was done working.

We planned a multi-course Italian luncheon with dishes that we could incorporate ingredients from the garden into. We used fresh herbs, different textures, different flavors, and made everything from scratch. Mom and I wanted to especially highlight our tomatoes, which are starting to arrive in earnest. We delved into our wine inventory to find perfect wines to pair with the meal. I carefully chose the silverware and flatware, the glasses, and the napkins with everything color-coordinated. To make it even more like a fancy restaurant, I used a Canva template to create a menu--in Italian of course. Collectively, it was an homage to the meals Mom and I had planned and shared when things were still "normal."

For the food enthusiasts, I'm posting pictures of all of our food. We like to pull out all the stops. If you are interested in a specific recipe, mention it in the comments and I can include it in a future post.

Bruschetta made with zucchini, shallot, and tomato (all from the garden),
topped with basil and fresh-grated parmigiano reggiano

Tuscan melon with prosciutto di parma

Black Krim heirloom tomatoes from the garden with fresh mozarella
and basil, with olive oil from family olive trees and balsamic vinegar

Squash blossoms from the garden stuffed with ground beef, chard from the
garden, fresh herbs, breadcrumbs, and parmigiano reggiano

Chicken cooked in Marsala wine with fresh garlic, shallots from the
garden, and mushrooms

Peaches from my aunt's tree drizzled with French peach liqueur

Starting in the upper left and moving clockwise: sheep's milk gouda
with truffle, honey-soaked goat cheese, cow's milk cheese soaked in
balsamic vinegar, and a sheep's milk cheese from the Basque region
in France

Homemade biscotti from my great-grandmother's recipe

Mom has dubbed this a "Super Saturday" and wants to do something like it once a month. The menus and "look" of the table and food will change, but it will continue to be a chance for us to enjoy each other's company and good food during these crazy times.

Buon appetito!

Not Your Average Garden Lunch

Mom and I have settled into a routine. Two or three days a week, we go out and work together in the garden. The whole garden is quite large, so the work is never-ending. There's always a pot with a plant we need to replace, or a long branch that needs to be tied up or removed. This has been a fantastic year for roses, so there's always more faded roses to remove. There's herbs to trim, and fountains that need to be refilled because the kitties keep drinking out of them. We weed, we talk about what we'd like to do, we rearrange pots, we water plants, we tackle small garden projects, we harvest, and then...we cook. 

Cooking from the garden has become almost a religious experience. There's something spiritual about picking tomatoes that you then go and use in a salad or a sauce only minutes after they were still attached to the plant. It has become a never-ending source of satisfaction to incorporate the literal fruits of our labor into the food we enjoy at lunch. Cooking has become more experimental, which has added even more joy to the process. The results have been exquisite explosions of flavor and texture that any restaurant serving haute cuisine would be envious of. Today was no exception.

We needed to make a trip to the nursery to get some more colorful flowers and a couple of herbs we wanted to add, so we started the morning by prepping the pasta sauce for the pasta we planned on for lunch. A good pasta sauce is layered. You shouldn't dump all the ingredients in the pot at once because the aromas and flavors will never fully open. Fresh ingredients are a must, and the old-fashioned methods are sometimes better than the modern ones. In my family, any good cook has a wooden chopping bowl for chopping herbs and garlic; my mother and I both have our own. The scent of the garlic and herbs wafting up as you chop is a heady perfume, a sign of good Italian cooking about to happen. 

Our pasta sauce started with olive oil and loose mild Italian sausage meat. We wanted a hearty sauce, hence the meat. If you're looking for something lighter, stick with just herbs and veggies. After the sausage cooked through, in went the diced onion. Next came the chopped garlic and herbs, including basil that we grow ourselves. In went chopped San Marzano tomatoes from our garden; this is a great tomato for cooking. Once those flavors opened up, it was time to get serious. And by serious, I mean wine, a cabernet sauvignon. The wine helps to deglaze the bottom of the pot and adds amazing body and flavor to the finished product (pro tip: don't use any wine in your cooking that you wouldn't drink by the glass--trust me!). Once the wine cooked down, we added the last ingredient: tomato sauce Mom made herself from a previous year's San Marzanos. We brought it to a simmer, covered it, and left it to slowly cook while we went to the nursery.

When we returned, we planted the few things we purchased, then went to work on the rest of our lunch. By the time we sat down, we had bruschetta, salad, porpeta (essentially patties made from ravioli filling), penne pasta with the sauce, and biscotti. As Mom is so fond of saying, "this is all we have." Each dish had something from the garden. The pasta had tomatoes and basil we grew. The bruschetta had our own tomatoes, shallots, and zucchini. The salad had our own cucumber and vinegar. The porpeta had our own herbs and swiss chard. Each bite had us in ecstasy, almost like some illicit form of dining. "This is soooo goooood!" "Oh my god, did you taste this?" And when we paired it with the wine that had gone into the sauce...absolute perfection. Food tastes so much better when you grow it and make it yourself. 

And for today's garden surprise, we discovered the parsley we thought we bought is actually celery. Looks like we'll be growing that too now! We've been gardening for years and were so confident at the nursery. I guess this is proof that even "experienced" gardeners can still be surprised. It'll be perfect in the box that currently has the last remaining sprigs of lettuce...

Cooking Librarian Remix

Day 1 of the veggie garden

My last post was made over 5 years ago. At the time, it didn't feel like I needed this blog anymore. So I started another one with a different focus, but that one didn't last long either. I wasn't feeling inspired anymore. I didn't feel like I had anything to say, anything worth sharing. Things felt...stagnant. Well, many things have changed since then.

As a cook, the source of my food has become more important to me as I get older and more experienced with cooking (and eating). To me, the connection between the garden and the kitchen table has never been more evident. Scooter and I make weekly trips to the local Farmer's Market, where I've found more aromatic herbs, juicier peaches, fresher lettuce, and tastier strawberries than I've ever been able to find in our local chain supermarket. To be fair, the supermarket has fine produce; what the Farmer's Market has is just better. As a bonus, I can also support the smaller farms and businesses in my area.

But relishing such delectable organic food got me thinking. My mother and I had always wanted to do a big vegetable garden that we would cycle crops through so we could harvest year-round. The thought of tomatoes, string beans, zucchini, lettuce, root vegetables, and others that we could grow and harvest ourselves was so very tempting. Since we both love to cook, it seemed like a no-brainer. The problem was finding the time to get the garden going and established. She was always doing something church-related, or chores around the house, or running errands with my dad. I had a full-time job, plus a year ago I started a teaching credential program. Neither one of us had the time or the energy to attempt such a project.

And then in March the world fell apart. The schools closed, so I suddenly found myself with some unexpected time on my hands. Everything else closed, so there was nowhere for us to go: no picnics at the park, no camping (or travel of any kind), no eating out. Everything. Stopped. It was a particularly difficult time for me. I missed my students dearly, I was worried about my dad (not related to COVID, but a story for another day), I was worried about Scooter who still had to report to work, shopping for food had suddenly become A Big Thing, and my mental health was starting to decline. Mom and I decided that now was the time for the garden. We needed something therapeutic, something positive we could do in the middle of all this negativity, and we would become more autonomous with sourcing some of our food. So we sketched out a plan, called up our local nursery--who was thankfully doing deliveries--and put in an order of veggies.

Back in April when we planned out the raised beds and planted all of our new, tender plants, we could not have foreseen the amazing things that have come out of this project. Every day in the garden has become a much-needed refuge, a chance to step back from the world and take a breath to regroup. We have poured hours and hours into our little oasis, and it has responded in kind. Our garden has become the perfect compliment to our mutual love of cooking, so my blog will be used to record our gardening and cooking "experiments." I don't work from a recipe much anymore, so I don't know if I'll be posting many. But I promise to share what I can on what I do in the kitchen and in the garden. 

Step into my oasis. A ogni uccello il suo nido è bello. Home sweet home. 

The Month In Review, Part 1

Do you ever have the feeling that you're drowning? Not actually drowning in water, but the sensation of drowning because life is throwing everything she's got at you and you can't keep up. I had thought that once the Spring semester was over, things would calm down and I would be able to take a deep breath and relax a bit. I'm still waiting for that to happen, and I feel like I'm trying to tread water in a fast and treacherous current. To help explain what has been going on, this will be the first of at least two posts about life, the universe, and everything. And no, the answer is not 42 (bonus points if you get the reference).

I went to spend some time with family after the passing of another great lady in my family (see my last post). It was a time spent talking and eating good food, and once again I was inspired by the healing that can be accomplished with family and a wonderful meal. It really is amazing how food can bring a family together. A meal becomes a time to share laughter, love, pain, sorrow, and joy. In its own way, family meal time can become a therapy session (although the success of such really depends on the family--a family divided may not find meal time to be very pleasant or healing). The first night I was at The Ranch, we went to an Italian restaurant in a nearby town. As proud Italians ourselves (on my mom's side of the family), we know good Italian food. This was good Italian food. The restaurant has this outside seating area that's a wooden structure with wooden tables and benches, and potted plants on the ground, the tables, along the walls, and hanging from overhead. In the evening, it's a truly lovely place to eat a meal as the sun dips behind the trees and darkness starts to fall. You can hear the breeze and the birds as you sip your wine and reminisce about old times. Which is exactly what we did.

And because the menu looked so good and it was so hard for us to pick, we chose several different things to taste--and boy did my taste buds have fun! Here's a look at what I got to try:

The roasted beets had such a wonderful and delicate flavor.

This is cuttlefish. Before this dish, I had never had cuttlefish, and I actually had to look it up to figure out what it was. What it was was tasty!

These are anchovies--not salty like the ones found in a can, but fresh and cooked with tomato, potato, and other fresh ingredients. It was surprisingly good!

Gnocchi and rabbit, an excellent pairing if I do say so myself.

Now this may not cater to everyone's tastes, but I found this tripe to be very tender and tasty.

This tiramisu was the only disappointment. My mom makes the best tiramisu that I've ever had, and I've never been able to find a restaurant that makes tiramisu that's as good or better than hers, not even at this one. However, I did like the presentation--having it served in a jar is a cute idea.

We lingered over our food and even though we got there long before the dinner rush, the sun was starting to dip behind the trees before we finished and left. It was calming to the body, mind, and soul to eat this wonderful meal in a charming setting and talk about Zia, the "good old days," the food, and anything else that came to mind.

The next night, we ate a wonderful home-cooked meal. My mom made baccala with olive oil, Italian herbs, and garlic, and polenta to go with it. Our cousin made chicken livers, and while I had only ever had liver in pate form, I did tentatively try them--and they were excellent. Our homemade dinner was just as good as the one we had at the restaurant, and once again our table was filled with not only incredible food but love and stories of the family told by Zio, our resident old-timer (who also wrote two books about his father, my great-grandfather).

It was good to be around family, and I returned home with a much lighter heart.