Vegan Sushi

As a vegetarian who doesn’t eat fish, sushi has never had much appeal. But a few months ago I ate at a Japanese restaurant in Ubud, Indonesia called Minami that not only changed my mind about sushi, but on Japanese food in general. It was subtle. It was salty. It was pungent. It was sweet. I had an udon noodle dish displayed with each vegetable and condiment piece by piece with a totally un-european aesthetic. So I’ve been working on these flavors at home, mixing them up with ingredients that are also found easily in my kitchen, and making others that aren’t.

The following is a vegan, semi-raw version where instead of rice I grate jicama and then strain it through a nut bag. It turns out crispy, clear and healthy tasting. I mix in a bit of lemon juice, salt, good local rice wine vinegar (from Sari Organik) and some sugar so it tastes like sushi rice. I’ve experimented a bit with nori (the sea vegetable sushi is rolled up in) and I find that it’s best to buy the untoasted version if you can - it’s greener rather than black. Light your stove and pass it over the top a few times to toast and it’s ready to use.

I then put the jicama “rice” in the center of the nori, and top with sliced sundried tomato, cucumber, and avocado. I slice some home made pickled ginger thinly and add that too. To make your own pickled ginger, slice it thin and salt it, then rinse off, dry, and put in a sterilized jar. Heat some rice wine vinegar in a pan and dissolve sugar into it, then pour over the ginger and in a few weeks it’ll turn pink and will be ready to eat.

All is then rolled up tight and sliced. To avoid tearing the nori, wet a towel and wipe your knife every so often before the cut. I serve it with some tamari and sesame seeds.

Pane Casereccio

A few friends have asked me to have them over to make bread together, but for one reason or another, it hasn’t happened. Probably because that’ll mean spending 5 minutes making the dough and then trying to find something else to do for 2-3 hours instead of watching it rise. So as a substitute, here’s our secret recipe for making great bread at home without a bread machine - and when I say great, I mean that you’ll feel immoral buying it anymore. If you live in the US, where good bread costs a fortune, this is essential. It’s a no-knead, long rise technique that is so simple, I would be shocked if anyone failed to make it turn out better than most store-bought bread.

Sometime in the afternoon, put 3 cups of flour in a fairly large bowl. I use 2 cups of regular 0 or 00 flour and 1 cup of whole wheat flour, but you can change those portions however you like. Add 1 teaspoon of salt and stir it up. Dissolve 1/4 teaspoon of dry yeast (we use lievito di birra naturale) in 1.5 cups of warm water. Once it’s dissolved (about 2 minutes), pour it into the flour and stir well until all the flour is wet. It will be a very wet dough.

And that’s it! Cover with plastic wrap and let it sit somewhere for 12-20 hours. The longer you let it sit the more it will taste like sourdough. So if you’ve done this about 3-4 pm or even 7pm, then the next morning, put a few tablespoons of flour into it and stir it up, which will also compact it again. Let it sit at least 1 hour while you preheat your oven to 230 degrees celsius. This second 1 hour rise is what will make it light and airy with lots of pockets.

I have a baking stone that I put in the over while it’s preheating. A baking sheet will work too, or even an oven proof pan. I then sprinkle a good deal of polenta (corn meal) onto the stone or pan so that the bread won’t stick. I pour in a few more tablespoons of flour and stir it up so it comes away from the bowl and I pretty much just let it flop onto the baking stone, all messy and wet. I then put some water on the top of it (by just wetting my hand and rubbing it on the top, and then bake for 40 minutes, or longer if you want a really thick crust.

If you want a higher bread, like a pagnotta, bake it in a sauté pan or something similar. If you have a terra cotta casserole dish, that would work great as the restricted diameter will make it puff up higher and become more round. Just make sure it’s oven proof and that you either use baking paper or corn meal so it doesn’t stick.

Try it and let me know your results.

Lasagna revisited

I never liked the American version of lasagna with the packaged noodles all ruffled around the edges and dry, tasteless ricotta cheese. When I first came to Italy and had real lasagna, made with besciamella, I was an instant convert. Lasagna is a quick seller at the cafe and, much like everything else we do, it’s never really made the same way twice. Things get made based on what needs to be cooked and maybe bits and pieces of what’s left over from a previous shift. Laura, when she first started, made a radicchio, hazelnut and gorgonzola lasagna that really blew me away - the crushed hazelnuts on top added a texture and sweetness that I’d never imagined could work - this is an example of the fact that when it comes to certain dishes, we’re not afraid to break the rules.

And this brings me to my most recent experiment. Having come back from Bali recently I’ve been trying to incorporate coconut more into my dishes. I’d had rice dishes with toasted coconut and a wonderful smoothie of banana, ananas, dates and coconut. When I came in for my shift the other day there was a note from Laura saying that there were a bunch of carrots that needed to be cooked and a lasagna to be made. I decided to make a velouté of the carrots, blending in some coconut and coriander seed. To offset the sweetness I alternated with swiss chard, cooked in garlic, oil and peperoncino, and some fresh sheep’s milk cheese.

Normally I send a lunch menu out to the nearby office workers around 11 and they come to eat around 1pm. My lasagna came out of the oven at about noon and was pretty much gone by about 3pm. Italians don’t like to see their traditional dishes massacred by Americans - but a coconut/carrot and chard lasagna sounded too interesting for them to pass up. Ultimately I have to say that it worked well and we were all pleasantly surprised at how well the flavors balanced. As I said, it’s rare we make things exactly the same way twice, but this is a dish I’ll be repeating next time I find a surplus of carrots.

Inspector P’s Peach Crumble

Just before Passo Corese, heading south on via Salaria from Rieti there’s an enlarged shoulder on the left hand side with 3 or 4 local fruit/vegetable vendors. On the way home we bought a 10 euro crate of some of the best white-flesh peaches I’ve ever tasted. Even after eating a handful of peaches every day, we still had a bowl full in the fridge that was starting to get too soft. So Paloma and I set out to make something sweet with them.

First we cut all the peaches and Paloma tossed them in a pie dish. I splashed some white wine and lemon juice on it to bring out the flavor and then we mixed a crumble topping made of flour, raw sugar, brown sugar, some mashed almonds, cinnamon and butter. We smushed the topping on and tossed it in the oven and then went to play with a new “Crime Scene Inspector Kit” that she received as a belated birthday present. As the crumble baked we put fingerprints on glasses and then dusted and removed them, placing the new fingerprints in special baggies marked “evidence” that could be compared with a magnifying glass. We taped off the dining room table as a crime scene while Paloma continued to play Inspector and gather enough evidence to prove that her sister Giulia had drank her juice even though she claimed not to.

I could smell the pie. It looked particularly good and so I asked Paloma to help me remember what we’d put in and write it out as a recipe so we could reproduce it. The following is the recipe in Inspector P’s secret code:

Fresh figs

One of the first cookbooks I ever bought was Patricia Wells’ “Bistro Cooking”. I still have all the tags I put in it to mark the pages of the recipes that interested me. For one reason or another I only ever made about 10% of the things I marked and don’t have any recollection of how they turned out. Mostly I just liked to read her meal suggestions and imagine that I could throw together something similar for a spontaneous picnic. Despite having not adopted many of her recipes to my repertoire, I still use an adapted version of her pâté brisée for quiches and crostate, and I have very strong memories of being deeply effected by her recipe for a fig clafoutis.

Now, I grew up mostly in Colorado. We don’t have figs in Colorado. And we surely don’t eat clafoutis. So I had no clue what a clafoutis would look or taste like and although I knew what a fig was, they were pretty foreign and exotic to me too. Nevertheless I was convinced that I’d love them. They were basic and ancient; pure and sexy. The thought of a fig clafoutis evoked images of an accomplished and sophisticated chef.

I made the clafoutis a few times. It wasn’t bad. I’d buy incredibly expensive mission figs from the Chalet Gourmet in West Hollywood and as per the recipe, the figs were cut in half and sautéed lightly in butter after being dipped in honey and cinnamon, then a pancake like batter was poured over the top and it was baked in the oven until it all puffed up. I liked the dish but never new whether my results were accurate since I’d never had one before. Perhaps I liked the idea of the fig clafoutis more than I liked the actual dish.

Flash forward about 13 years. We have a huge fig tree at home in our garden (that unfortunately doesn’t bear fruit) and a small tree at the Beehive that lately has been working overtime. Perhaps it was the rainy Spring - whatever the case, I pick a bowl’s worth every few days and often find a way to put them in our dishes.

In Puglia, there are so many fig trees just bursting with fruit that there’s no point in selling them at the market. If you want figs, just stick your hand out the window while driving down the street and pick one off. At the house we were recently at for a week’s holiday in July, I’d go and pluck some in the morning for breakfast and eat them on the spot - about 6 or 7 until I’d had my fill. One night we made crostoni (thick, crusty, baked bread) with figs, gorgonzola and walnuts. It was an incredible mix of intense flavors. Another favorite of mine, an idea ripped off from a small vineria near Pienza, Tuscany, is baking the bread on one side, then flipping it over and putting a piece of pecorino fresco (fresh sheep’s milk cheese) and either fresh figs or dried figs, then baking again until the cheese is melted. Fresh out of the oven I drizzle some good honey over the top. With a little salad, this is a meal that I would have drooled over in Bistro Cooking a decade ago.

This weekend we were in the countryside at Monteleone Sabina, hanging out with friends and playing in the pool with all our kids. We came back to Rome for the day, ran some errands, and will go back up tomorrow. On our way home we passed by the Beehive to collect some mail and on my way back outside I noticed a few figs were bursting on the tree, so I plucked about 8 of them and threw them in a plastic bag. The following is a quick dessert I made this afternoon to bring back to Monteleone tomorrow to share with friends. I have no idea what it’ll taste like, but I can tell my love affair with the fig is still strong, even if the mystery is gone.

For the crust:

- about 1/3 cup whole wheat flour and 2/3 cups regular flour in a bowl
- pinch of salt
- couple tablespoons of sugar
- bit of lemon zest
- about 100 grams of butter cut into cubes and worked into the flour mixture until it’s like grated parmigiano
- 1 egg and enough cold water to bring it together to form a dough

For the filling:

- place about 8 sliced figs over the crust, sprinkle on some cinnamon and drizze some honey
- bake in the over at a high temperature until the crust is golden