Casarecce alla maltese

Though I'm just at the start of my Maltese culinary adventures, one thing I have learned about very quickly is the ftira maltija - basically the Maltese sandwich. It's made with ftira, a crusty round bread unique to Malta (as far as I can tell), tomatoes, tuna, olives, and of course capers, which grow wild on the islands. I decided to turn the sandwich into a pasta dish, and the result was quite good, maybe even better than the sandwich!


I used casarecce because I happened to have a bunch on hand, but you could probably substitute almost any type of pasta here. I think both long and short types would work, so spaghetti, farfalle, maccheroni, whatever. The casarecce I used were whole wheat, which I think goes well in this dish, as there are a lot of strong, salty flavors.

Ingredients (per person):
75 g. whole wheat casarecce
1 small yellow onion
1 large clove of garlic
1 small can good-quality tuna
4 large green olives
A handful of fairly fresh capers
Crushed tomatoes/tomato pulp
Extra-virgin olive oil
Oregano
Pepper

First, bring a large pot of water to a boil. While it's heating up, prepare the other ingredients. Peel and chop the onion; crush the garlic, peel it, and then chop it up a bit into even smaller bits; and rinse the olives and capers. Crush the olives with the flat side of a knife to remove the pits and then chop them up. Drain the olive oil from the tuna and break it up a bit with a fork.

When the water is boiling, salt it, and add the casarecce, stirring them every so often to keep them from sticking. After a few minutes, heat the olive oil in a frying pan and when it's hot, add the garlic. After about 15 seconds, add the onion too. Once the onion has turned soft, add the olives, capers, tuna, and tomato pulp, and turn the heat down to low.

When the casarecce are al dente, drain them and add them to the sauce. Sprinkle with oregano and pepper, stir up, and serve warm. Especially serve warm if it's a gray, rainy day like it was here today - in Malta, there don't seem to be gutters, so just a bit of rain makes the streets get crazy flooded!!

Fillet of sole with lemony leeks and capers

Light fish with capers and lemon is a combination that will never fail you. It's one of those dishes that seems almost too easy, and yet it tastes just as good as any more complicated recipe.


Here, I added some leeks to round things out, but other than that I kept things nice and simple - a great meal for a day when you don't feel like cooking too much, but you still want a nice satisfying dinner.

Ingredients:
One fillet of sole per person
1-2 medium leeks
A spoonful of capers - it's easy to overdo it with capers, so be sparing here
Juice of half a lemon
Half a glass of white wine
Salt
Pepper
Flour
Olive oil

Remove the outermost leaves from the leek(s), trim off the top green parts, and rinse. Slice the leeks down the center and wash again under cold, running water, making sure to get in between the leaves to remove any dirt particles that might be hiding there.

Slice the leeks into ringlets and set aside. Heat a large pan over medium-high heat, and, once it's hot, pour in a few spoonfuls of olive oil. Add the leeks and let cook a few minutes, until soft. Pour the white wine over the leeks and sprinkle some salt over everything. Let cook until the wine has pretty much all evaporated, and then cover and turn the heat to low.

Let the leeks cook 10-15 minutes, and then start preparing the fish. Rinse the capers, and let them soak in the lemon juice. Wash and dry the sole fillets and cover each side with salt and pepper, and any other herbs you feel like adding. Spread some flour over a plate and then rub the fillets in the flour so that it covers both sides.

Heat a pan big enough to hold the fillets, and add some olive oil to it. Put the fillets in the pan, and let cook until golden-brown on the bottom, about 5 minutes. Turn the fillets over and let the other sides cook the same amount.

Transfer the fillets to the pan with the leeks, pour the lemon juice and capers over everything, and mix to cover the fillets. Serve immediately.

To fill out the meal, I made some couscous, and of course a glass of white wine is always a great accompaniment for fish!

Pizza Napoletana

This pizza falls under the category of pizza rossa which literally means "red pizza" in Italian and refers to pizzas that use tomato sauce, but no cheese (there is also pizza bianca - white pizza - which has cheese but no tomatoes). Though I have seen some recipes online that call for mozzarella, the type I usually saw on pizzeria menus in Italy did not have any cheese, so I stuck with that version.


Though Naples is most famous for being the birthplace of the classic Pizza Margherita and to a lesser extent the Pizza Marinara, I think this particular pizza, whose origins are not as clear, gets to be called 'Neapolitan' because its ingredients are very typical of Southern Italian cuisine.

Many non-Italians do not realize just how regionally diverse Italy is, but the fact is that up until its unification in 1861, there wasn't really an 'Italy'. There were city-states like Florence and Venice, kingdoms like the kingdom of Naples, and all sorts of other territories and republics, but there was no Italy, either politically, culturally, or even conceptually.

The gaping differences between regions, and particularly between the North and the South are still largely apparent to anyone who spends even a few days in the country. Ask any Milanese person about the South and they'll immediately go into a long tirade about how nothing ever works there, how nobody seems to care about things like rules and laws, and how everyone is consistently late for everything. Similarly, ask a Neapolitan about the North and you'll get an earful of how cold the Northerners are, how they just can't sit back and enjoy life and how they are always worrying and rushing off to do silly things like work.

The differences extend beyond cultural attitudes into almost every aspect of life. For example, while Italian is the official language of the country, almost every region has its own dialect (sometimes several), and these dialects differ from each other far more than say, a Scottish accent does from a Brooklyn one. A large number of these dialects are actually incomprehensible to Italians who did not grow up speaking or hearing them. When I saw the movie Gomorra, which was about the Neapolitan mafia and was almost entirely in Napolitano, the Neapolitan dialect, it had Italian subtitles from start to finish, and it's a good thing too because without them I would have been completely lost!

The diversity and richness of local traditions in Italy is also apparent, and very important, in its cuisine. Every region and often every city or town has its own proud menu of traditional dishes - the Ligurian trofie al pesto, ossobuco and risotto alla Milanese in Milan, bucatini all'amatriciana in Rome, bistecca alla Fiorentina in Florence, burrata and orecchiette in Puglia, and spaghetti al bolognese from Bologna (unsurprisingly) are only a few of the thousands and thousands of regionally celebrated dishes.

The pizza napoletana presented here may not actually be from Naples, but its ingredients are certainly more typical of Southern Italian cuisine. When I think of the food of Southern Italy, I mainly think of three things: tomatoes, seafood, and spiciness. In contrast, Northern Italian food often tends to be richer and creamier, using butter where Southern dishes use olive oil, or risotto where Southerners use pasta, and certainly using a lot less peperoncino!

This particular pizza, while it does not require the use of peperoncino (though you can add it if you so desire), is very very salty. Make sure that when you sit down to eat it, you have handy a large glass of water, or better yet, wine!

To make it, you will need:
About 150 g flour (I used whole wheat as always)
Yeast
Water
A pinch of salt
About 100 g of San Marzano tomatoes, peeled and crushed to just pulp (I actually just use canned tomatoes for pizzas, since my unstrained tomato sauces tend to come out fairly juicy and would probably get the dough sopping wet)
A handful of black olives, with the pits removed
A smaller handful of capers
5-6 anchovies
A few leaves of basil
Oregano
A spoonful of olive oil

First of all, you need to make the dough. If you are using active dry yeast as opposed to instant yeast, activate it by putting it in a small bowl with some tepid water. Sift the flour into a large bowl, add in the yeast first, then the salt and the water, a bit at a time, and stir until everything is well combined, and you have a moist but not overly gooey ball of dough.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead for about 10 minutes or until it is springy and resistant. When the dough gets to this point, place it in a floured bowl, cover with plastic wrap or a cloth and leave in a warm, non-drafty place for an hour to an hour and a half.


At least 45 minutes before you plan to bake the pizza, preheat your oven to 500º F / 260º C. If you are lucky enough to have a pizza stone, put it in the oven before you start to preheat it.

If you are making your own tomato sauce, peel the tomatoes and strain them to get nice solid pulp. Otherwise, just open the can (but if you go with canned tomatoes you should still buy canned San Marzano tomatoes because they are the best).

Prepare the toppings by washing the olives and capers and tearing the basil into little bits. When you have all your toppings ready and after the dough has doubled in size, take the dough out of the bowl and gently shape it into a flat circle, making it as thin as you can. If you haven't yet mastered the art of spinning pizza dough into the air and elegantly catching it on your fists, just try bouncing it back and forth from fist to fist (no nails!) and then stretching it out further on a flat surface, pinching the ends a bit.

Transfer the pizza to an oiled baking sheet (if you're not using a baking stone) or a pizza peel (if you are using a baking stone).

Spoon the tomato sauce in an even, not-too-thick layer over all the pizza except the outermost rim. Distribute the olives and capers evenly over the pizza, and then place the anchovies on in strips radiating out from the center. Sprinkle everything with the basil and oregano and add just a drizzling of olive oil.

Put the pizza into the oven as quickly and as carefully as you can. Let bake for 7-8 minutes, remove, and serve piping hot!

Penne with Red Snapper, Tomatoes, and Capers

When it comes to cooking fish, my experience before tonight was just about zero. Apart from canned tuna, I don't think I had ever once prepared a dish that involved fish. It's not that I don't like fish, because I do, quite a bit. It's just that I have a strange aversion to dealing with any kind of raw animal flesh and so I end up eating almost all vegetarian meals when I cook for myself, though I'll happily eat meat that other people have prepared!

However, I have been going through Harold McGee's "On Food and Cooking" which I highly highly recommend to anyone who ever cooks or is at all interested in knowing what's going on in all that stuff you put in your mouth, and I just arrived at the fish section. Reading all about fish muscles and fish preparation made me quite curious (for some reason I find myself fascinated by all the descriptions of the chemical processes involved in the breakdown of muscle by heat). Then at the farmer's market this morning, I noticed a stand with some nice fresh-looking fish fillets. Since I wanted something easy to prepare, I decided this was perfect and, after peppering the fish vendor with questions about the different types of fish, I decided on a fillet of red snapper.

I had some San Marzano tomatoes I needed to use up, and I always like capers with fish, so after going through all sorts of fish recipes online, mixing them all up, and adding a few of my own personal touches, I came up with the following dish, which turned out quite nicely for a first fish-dish!

You will need:
1 fillet of red snapper (or other fish that cooks well in a pan)
80 g penne
4-5 San Marzano tomatoes (you can substitute other smaller tomatoes like cherry tomatoes here, in which case you should use about 10-12)
A couple spoonfuls of capers
1 onion
A couple cloves of garlic
Lemon juice
1/2 small glass of dry white wine
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Fresh parsley
Fresh basil

If you're using San Marzano tomatoes, begin by boiling them for about 30 seconds, running them under cold water, and then peeling and seeding them. Cut the remaining pulp into thin strips and set aside. If you're using something like cherry tomatoes, just cut them in half, leaving the peel intact.

Bring a large pot of water to boil for the pasta. While you're heating the water, chop up the onion and crush the cloves of garlic with your hand or the flat edge of a knife.

When the water starts to boil, salt it and add the penne, stirring a bit to make sure they don't stick. In a frying pan, start to heat the olive oil. While the oil is heating, take the red snapper fillet, rinse if necessary, and cover with lemon juice. Then chop it into small pieces.

Once the oil is hot enough to make a few water droplets spattered onto it sizzle, add the garlic. After about a minute, add the onion. When the onion has become tender and translucent, add the red snapper. Sprinkle salt and pepper over everything, and let cook a few minutes, stirring frequently.

Pour the white wine onto the snapper, and let it cook until all the wine has evaporated. Once the wine has evaporated, add the tomatoes and the capers and let cook a few more minutes, again stirring quite a bit.

Drain the penne, and quickly throw them onto the mix of snapper, tomatoes, and capers. Turn off the heat, stir everything up, and then chop or tear up the parsley and basil and sprinkle over everything. Give it all a good last stir, and serve piping hot!