Trofie alla genovese

Trofie are a type of pasta typical to the Liguria region of Italy, and in this dish, which you can find throughout the region, they are served with pesto, potato, and green beans.


Lately, basil has been all over the marketplace and I simply cannot resist a fresh bunch of basil. Unfortunately, you generally can't buy it in very small bunches, and even though I'll eat some pretty much every day, I inevitably end up with extra. So of course, the solution is to make some pesto!

I made a bunch of pesto last week to go with some potato gnocchi, and I still had a bit left over. I was planning to just put it on spaghetti or something, but then at the market today I saw a lovely bunch of green beans and was reminded of the genovese style of serving pasta with pesto. Though I had never made the dish myself before, the preparation turned out to be quite simple, and the end result was very rewarding! The only difficult part was actually finding trofie, which are not very common here in the U.S. I suppose I could have used some other type of pasta, but I wanted to be really authentic and so ended up shelling out $8 for the bag at my local Italian foods store. Ridiculous, I know, but it was just this once, and the trofie actually are really good - dense but small, so the balance of pastaness ends up being just right.


Ingredients (given per person):
75 g. trofie
1 small potato or 1/2 a medium potato per person
75 g. green beans per person
Pesto - you can get it from stores, but it's usually much better if you make your own, as described here

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Peel the potato and chop it into smallish cubes. When the water is boiling, add salt and then the potato. Let the potato cook about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

While the potato is cooking, wash the green beans and chop off the very ends. Chop them in half. After the potato has cooked 10 minutes, add the green beans and the trofie. Let cook another 15 minutes or so, stirring from time to time and testing to make sure not to overcook anything. When done, the trofie and green beans should be tender but still have some bite to them.

Drain the pasta, potatoes, and green beans, reserving a couple spoonfuls of the pasta water. Dilute the pesto with the pasta water to make it easier to spread over the pasta, and then mix everything together. Serve immediately.

Aloo gobi

This mixture of potatoes and cauliflower is one of the most popular and well-known Indian dishes, and if you ever make it, you'll understand why. It's simple, satisfying, and it fills your kitchen with delicious aromas while it's cooking!


The thing about Indian recipes is that there's almost never just one authoritative version. Everyone has their own particular mix of spices that they add, and the amount and type of spices used define the dish and make it unique to its creator. While this is great, it means that if, like me, you're a novice at making Indian food, you just have to experiment a bunch of times to figure out what spice blends work best for you, and you may run into some less-than-perfect combinations on the way!

It took me three tries to come up with a version of this that I really liked, and in the end it was the simplest version that won out. However, if you're up for it, I encourage you to experiment with your own spice combinations to figure out which Aloo Gobi is your favorite. If not, I can assure you that the recipe below is a good one and is unlikely to offend anyone's taste buds!

Ingredients:
2 medium potatoes (the aloo)
1 head of cauliflower (the gobi)
1 smallish onion
A couple cloves of garlic
A knob of fresh ginger
1 spoonful of cumin seeds
1 small spoonful of coriander seeds
1 spoonful of turmeric
1 small spoonful of garam masala*
Salt
1 small spoonful of ground red pepper (optional - I left it out this time and then ended up adding some pepper later because I didn't think the dish was spicy enough)
Olive oil or other vegetable oil - olive oil isn't very traditional, but I tend to use it for anything and everything that I can
A spoonful of lemon juice

*Garam masala is a spice mixture that I like to add to just about every Indian dish because it tastes so good. Though you can buy it in many stores, I highly recommend making your own, as it will generally be more flavorful and last longer. To make mine, I dry-roasted some cumin seeds, coriander seeds, cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, cloves, chopped nutmeg, black peppercorns, star anise, and bay leaves, and then ground them all together. I used my coffee grinder for that and so I had garam masala-tasting coffee for weeks afterward. Not so bad, really!

Rinse the cauliflower and fill a large bowl with cold water. Add the lemon juice and place the cauliflower, head down, into the bowl. Let soak for half an hour. This step can probably be omitted, but if you're worried about your cauliflower being dirty, it's a good way to get all the bugs out. Gross, I know, but not as gross as finding a dead bug on your plate...

Grind the coriander seeds to a powder and set aside with the turmeric and chili powder. Peel the garlic and ginger, mince them and then crush them together into a paste. The garlic-ginger paste is very common in Indian recipes and often has green chili peppers added as well, though I didn't add them here.


Peel and dice the onion, and then peel the potatoes and dice them as well.

In a large pan, heat some olive oil. When the olive oil is hot, add the cumin seeds and let them cook a few minutes until they start to sizzle. Once they start sizzling, add the onion and cook until it's translucent and soft. Add in the garlic-ginger paste, let cook a few more minutes, and then add in the potatoes and the turmeric, ground coriander, and chili powder. Let cook a minute or so on medium-high heat, and then add the garam masala. Add in enough water to cover the potatoes, let the water come to a boil, cover the pot, and turn the heat down to low. Let the potatoes cook about 10-15 minutes while you prepare the cauliflower by washing it and dividing it into little florets.


Once the potatoes are halfway cooked, add in the cauliflower, cover the pot again and let cook another 10-15 minutes, stirring every so often, until the cauliflower are tender, but not mushy. Add the salt, stir, and let any excess water boil off.

Serve warm with roti (Indian griddle bread), rice, or whatever else you please. Also tastes very good after being refrigerated and reheated, so make even more than you think you should!

Tortilla de patatas - Spanish omelette

Like revenge, this is a dish best served cold.


At least, that's what I think. Lately, I've had a lot of things going on in the evening, so I've been looking around for things I can cook ahead of time and then let sit in the refrigerator for awhile so that when I get back home exhausted at 9 or 10 I don't have to do anything except get out a plate and a fork!

The tortilla de patatas fits the bill perfectly. In fact, sit around seems to be what these omelettes do best. Walk into any bar/café in Spain and chances are very good you'll see a large hunk of tortilla sitting around on the counter, just waiting to be sliced up for the next hungry customer.

It's actually sort of surprising that these tortillas aren't as popular in other countries, but they certainly are ubiquitous in Spain. People eat them as snacks, tapas, smushed between bread into a sandwich and on and on. They are really good - very satisfying, and very simple to make with just a few ingredients - the hardest part is flipping them!

Ingredients
2-3 large potatoes
1 yellow onion
4 eggs
Olive oil
Salt

Dice the onion and set aside. Peel the potatoes, cut them lengthwise into halves and then cut each half into thin strips. In a large pan, heat some olive oil and then add the onions and the potatoes. Let them cook over medium-high heat for a minute or so, add in a spoonful of salt, stir a bit, and then turn the heat down to medium and cover the pan.


Let the potatoes and onion cook about 15-20 minutes, until the potatoes are soft. In a large bowl, lightly beat the eggs and then add the potato-onion mixture, stirring just enough to mix everything together, but no more.

Let the eggs and potatoes sit for 5-10 minutes (I use this time to wash the dishes I've dirtied), and then heat some olive oil in a frying pan. If possible, use a smaller pan to make the omelette than you used to fry the potatoes, as that will get you a thicker omelette, which is essential for nice layers of potatoes.


When the oil is very hot, pour in the egg-potato-onion mixture, and after about a minute, turn the heat to medium-low. Use a spatula to push the omelette away from the sides of the pan and to test to see how cooked the bottom is getting. As soon as the omelette starts to set on top, remove the pan from the stove, cover it with a large plate, and flip the pan upside-down. Hopefully the omelette will land right on the plate without any problems - lifting the bottom away from the pan with the spatula beforehand will help.

Slide the omelette back into the pan so that the other side can cook and return the pan to the stove. Let cook a few more minutes, just until done. You want the omelette to stay rather soft in the center, so don't overcook.

Let the omelette sit until it cools, then cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for a couple hours. Remove whenever you want and eat - goes especially well with a glass of sangria!

Baked Samosas

I love samosas, but I definitely do not love deep-frying, so for those who share a similar fear of the messiness, perils, waste of oil, etc. involved in deep-frying, these baked samosas offer a perfect solution!


The story of how it even occurred to me to make samosas is rather long and winding. You see, I have a sort of New Year's resolution to start cooking from a wider variety of cuisines and particularly to cook more food from various Asian and Middle Eastern countries. Since I absolutely adore Indian food, it seemed like a good place to start, and so I went out and bought myself a lovely Indian cookbook.

Though the recipe I used for these samosas does come from the cookbook (with a few tweaks by me, including the baking vs. deep-frying bit), they were sort of an accident. I had originally been drawn to a recipe for grilled Paneer Tikka, which involved making paneer, stuffing the paneer cubes with mint coriander chutney and then grilling them. Well, I slaved over that recipe which required me to make not one, but two masalas (a masala is a complex spice mixture), the chutney, the marinade, and the paneer, and when it came time to take my paneer out of the refrigerator to stuff it, I discovered, much to my dismay, that instead of being a nice firm block of cheese, my paneer was a soggy, mushy mass that was not likely to go into cubes, support any sort of stuffing, or stay on a skewer.

Sooo, I ended up just sort of mixing everything together (it still tasted good), but, and this is the point of the whole story, I ended up with a lot of leftover mint coriander chutney, and my cookbook happens to recommend serving mint coriander chutney with not just Paneer Tikka, but also with samosas!

So, to use up my chutney, I made these lovely samosas, and they were much easier and much more satisfying to make than the Paneer Tikka, though both dishes tasted wonderful.

If you do not cook a lot of Indian food, you will probably need to buy some special spices for these - since the time I bought my Indian cookbook, my spice collection has at least doubled! I definitely recommend buying the spices though because without them, the food doesn't really taste like Indian food anymore, and it's suddenly just mashed potatoes and peas, which isn't very exciting at all.

For the dough:
About 200 g pastry flour
50 g softened butter (or ghee if you want to be really authentic)
A small spoonful of salt
A small spoonful of ajwain (carom seeds), which my cookbook describes as tasting like a mixture of caraway and thyme. The cookbook suggests using thyme if you can't find any ajwain, but if you have a Whole Foods near you, the Spicely line of spices carries it along with tons of other interesting spices (and yes, I do have an unfortunate tendency to stand in front of the spice selection trying to convince myself that I do not really need to buy vanilla beans and saffron threads, while other shoppers grumblingly push past me)
Cold water

For the filling:
2 smallish yellow potatoes or 1 large one
About half a cup of peas, pre-cooked if frozen
A couple spoonfuls of oil
A small spoonful of salt
A small spoonful of cumin
A small spoonful of ground red pepper
A small spoonful of ground turmeric
A larger spoonful of ground coriander
*My cookbook's recipe also calls for mango powder and green chili, but I can't find mango powder anywhere, and the green chilis I've seen at this time haven't looked particularly appealing

Begin by making the dough. Crumble or cut the butter into the flour, mix in the salt and ajwain, and then mix in the water, a bit at a time, until you have a nice firm dough. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let sit in the refrigerator for half an hour.

While the dough is resting, prepare the filling. Peel the potatoes, and bring a large pot of water to a boil. When the water is boiling, salt it, and add the potatoes. Let the potatoes cook until soft enough that you can stick a fork right into the center, about 20-25 minutes depending on the size of the potatoes.

When the potatoes are done, remove them from the water with a slotted spoon and place in a large bowl. If using frozen peas, add the peas to the boiling water and let them cook about 5 minutes. While the peas are cooking, mash the potatoes up until there are no large chunks.

Drain the peas and add them to the potatoes, along with the oil, salt, coriander, turmeric, red pepper, and cumin. Mix everything up and let cool.


After the half hour is up, take the dough out of the refrigerator and preheat the oven to 360ºF / 180ºC. Divide the dough into two sections, keep one section wrapped up, and roll out the first section. It should be quite thin when rolled out. Cut the dough into circles about the size of a fist. I use a small bowl turned upside down to trace circles in the dough, which I then cut with a knife because the bowl is not sharp enough to cut the dough. Any sort of a jar or cup will work for this.

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and place the dough circles on the parchment paper. Spoon the filling onto the circles, making sure not to put on too much (it's always tempting to try to stuff the samosas as full as possible, but this often results in them breaking, filling oozing out etc. while they're baking, which is not much fun). Fold one end of the circle over the filling and then the other end, to make a sort of triangular shape. Pinch the dough together all around to make sure the samosa is completely closed up.


Repeat with the second half of the dough, pulling together any scraps left over from circle-cutting to make a few final circles.

When the oven is hot, put the samosas in and let bake about 10 minutes, until crust is a golden brown. Let cool slightly and serve warm with dips, chutneys, yogurts of your choosing!

Pizza with potatoes and olives

Potato is not something you usually see on pizza here in the U.S. - at least, I've never seen it, though I have friends who claim they have, so I suppose it does exist somewhere in the country. In any case, it's definitely not as common here as it is in Italy, where, after my initial surprise, I soon got used to the sight of pizza with cubes or, more frequently, thin strips of potatoes on top.


I never actually tried pizza with potatoes while I was living there, partly because I was still a bit suspicious of the idea, and partly because my normal lunch spot served a version of pizza with potatoes and brie, and I'm not particularly fond of brie.

However, I was back in Italy over the holidays, and I took advantage of the opportunity to eat many many pizzas, one of which (well two largish slices of one), eaten on a particularly cold day outside the train station in Bologna, was a pizza with potatoes and olives. I think it was the freezing weather that caused me to order it - something about warm potatoes on pizza just seemed incredibly appealing that day in a way it never had before! And it turned out that all my previous hesitation about eating potatoes on pizza was unwarranted - the pizza was delicious. And so of course, I had to try it on my own back at home, which brings us to the recipe for one very tasty pizza with potatoes and olives!

For the dough:
150 g bread flour (though I usually use at least some whole wheat flour, I thought that a pizza with whole wheat flour and potatoes would just be too much, so I stuck with plain white flour for this one)
A spoonful of sea salt
1/2 package active dry yeast
A spoonful of olive oil
Warmish water

For the toppings:
Half a can of tomatoes in their juice. If they're in season, of course, fresh tomatoes are fine - in either case, I strongly recommend using San Marzano tomatoes. I was able to find several cans that had been imported from Napoli, and they are wonderful, so get them if you can!
A dollop of triple-concentrated tomato paste*
A spoonful of salt
A small spoonful of sugar
About 50 g pizza mozzarella
1 potato
5 or 6 black olives
Oregano
Olive oil, if desired

*An Italian friend and fellow pizza-maker gave me this tip about adding the triple-concentrated tomato paste to the sauce to make it extra flavorful. Unfortunately, I don't know if you can find the stuff here in the U.S, so if you can't get it, just use double-concentrated. In Italy, you can buy the triple-concentrated paste at the supermarkets (the brand is Mutti), so I made sure to get myself a tube on my most recent visit!


About an hour and a half before you plan to eat your pizza, make the dough. Dissolve the yeast in a small amount of tepid water and let sit until activated (a sort of film should form on top). Pour the flour into a large bowl and make it into a fountain-shape with a well in the middle. Sprinkle the salt around the edges. Pour the yeast-water mixture into the middle of the flour, along with the olive oil, and start to mix the flour together with your hand, incorporating flour from the sides of the well. Add the water a bit at a time, until the dough forms a not-too-sticky mass that separates from the edges of the bowl.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured surface and knead for about ten minutes, until the dough resists when you push down on it. When the dough is ready, spread a bit of olive oil on the inside of a clean bowl, form the dough into a ball, and place the ball in the bowl, rolling it around to coat it with the oil. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set it in a warm non-drafty place, like a closet or under a bed, for an hour.

If you have a baking stone, place it in the oven and preheat the oven to approximately 500º F/250º C. If you don't have a baking stone, just preheat the oven.

Peel the potato and chop it into cubes or strips, whichever you desire (this pizza was also an opportunity for me to make use of my wonderful stocking present, pictured below).


Bring a pot of water to a boil, salt it, and add the potato. Let the potato cook until fairly soft, though not mushy - 10-20 minutes. Test it with a fork to check - the fork should go through the potato pieces, but the pieces shouldn't break apart. When the potato is done cooking, drain the water and let the pieces cool.

If you're using fresh tomatoes, peel them and seed them, squeeze out all the watery juice parts, and then chop into smallish chunks. If you're using canned tomatoes, just chop them, and even that may not be necessary if they're pre-crushed. Place a small saucepan over medium heat and add the tomatoes, the dollop of tomato paste, the salt, and the sugar. Cover and let cook about 10-15 minutes, turning the heat down to low once the sauce starts to boil.

Chop the mozzarella into small bits and rinse the olives, pit them if necessary, and chop them into halves (I learned the hard way that this is an important step - non-chopped olives have a tendency to roll off the pizza and onto the baking stone where they become little black charred pieces of gunk).

Have all your toppings ready when you make the pizza - you don't want to let the pizza sit around a lot while you're putting stuff on it because that increases the chances it will stick to the pizza peel, which tends to lead to disaster.

After the pizza dough has sat for an hour, take out the bowl, and turn the dough out onto the floured pizza peel. Lots of people use cornmeal on the peel to keep the pizza from sticking but I really don't like the way it tastes on the bottom of a pizza, so I just use flour and try to be very careful! Of course, if you're not using a baking stone, just place the pizza dough on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper or some such thing and put that in the oven when ready.

Punch the ball of dough down and then flatten it out to a disc. Place the disc on top of your fists and cross them, bringing the right one in front of and across the left. As you uncross your fists by bringing the right fist back, the dough should spin a bit, stretching as it goes. Repeat this, even tossing into the air when you can, until the dough is nice and stretched out into a thin disc. You can finish it off by rotating it on the peel, pinching the edges as you go. Once the pizza dough is formed, make sure it isn't sticking to the peel by bouncing it around a bit or blowing underneath it.

Spoon the tomato sauce onto the dough, leaving plenty of space at the edges, especially if you like crust! Sprinkle on the mozzarella, then add the potatoes and olives. Drizzle on a bit of olive oil, if desired, and sprinkle the oregano over everything. Quickly transfer the pizza from the peel to the baking stone by giving the peel a sharp jerk (try to have it as horizontal as possible while you do this).

Let the pizza bake for 8-10 minutes, until the crust is golden-brown. Remove from the oven, and eat immediately!

Potato Gnocchi

I remember the first time I ate gnocchi, I was amazed that anything could possibly be so good! I was even more amazed when I realized I could make them on my own, and it's not even that difficult. If you've never made your own gnocchi, I strongly suggest you try, at least once, just for the fun of it!


You will need:
1 large potato per person
100 g flour for every potato

You want to use yellow potatoes that are nice and starchy. If you can't find good potatoes, it's not really worth it, so wait until you see some nice ones.


Place the potatoes in a large pot of water and bring the water to a boil. Let the potatoes cook for a long time until they're nice and soft (test with a fork).

When the potatoes have softened, drain them and run some cold water over them very briefly, just so that you will be able to handle them. Peel off the skins and mash them up thoroughly.

Dump the still-warm potatoes onto a well-floured board and mix the flour in with them, kneading for a few minutes. Though most recipes call for plain old white flour, I've used both whole wheat and semolina, and I liked both quite a bit. Another note here is that many people also mix in an egg with the flour and potatoes. I generally don't, and I think the gnocchi come out well either way.

After you've kneaded for a bit, roll out portions of the dough into long cylindrical strips, about the width of a finger.


Chop the strips into little squares with a knife. If you have a rounded cheese grater, press the gnocchi against it to get little patterns. You can also use one of those wooden boards with horizontal ridges on it to get striped gnocchi. As I had neither of these tools at my disposal this time, I just rounded out the gnocchi by pushing into their centers with my thumb, but here are some whole wheat gnocchi I made back in Milan when i did have a rounded cheese grater:


After you shape the gnocchi, put them on a well-floured plate or towel. At this point, you can let the gnocchi sit until it's time to eat.

When you're ready to cook the gnocchi, heat some water in a large pot. When the water is boiling, salt it, and then add the gnocchi, making sure not to crowd the pot (add them in groups of say 15-20 at a time, adding one group after you're removed the previous one). As the gnocchi rise to the top, ladle them out with a slotted spoon and place them in your serving dish.


Serve with the sauce of your choice. I like to make my gnocchi with tomato sauce (I also added sage to the sauce this time) and then grate a healthy dose of parmesan on top, as you can see here.


Eat warm and enjoy!