tomato_kumato

All this talk about comfort food from last month’s book of the month (stay tuned for this month’s, coming up shortly), has started me thinking about what comfort food means to me. It’s actually always kind of been an obsession of mine… finding out what other people’s comfort foods are. It has a lot to do with what we were raised with, and it’s usually served hot. Comfort food also usually not good for you, but whatever… it’s good for the soul.

I always thought my comfort food was spaghetti and meatballs… and on some days, it is. But I think that skirts the definition of comfort food, which, to me, is something that makes you feel better no matter where, no matter when. And for me, that’s lasagna.

To break in a new house, I always make a huge pot of tomato sauce. The thing is, when I live alone, I don’t end up eating as much pasta as I thought I would, so my vat of tomato sauce excursion is almost always immediately followed by a lasagna-making extravaganza. After years of doing this, lasagna has slowly become my comfort food… easily grabbed, reheated, and served with extra tomato sauce and parmesan cheese on top. Preferably eaten out of a bowl… I have a thing about bowls. I find them far superior to plates. Come to think of it, I like spoons better than forks… only the little ones though. But I digress… (and make very frequent use of the ellipses…)

For the past two years, all of my friends were vegetarians, so I made lasagna with a layer of spinach instead of meat. In Paris, however, meat is definitely fair game, and so I’ve started making traditional meat lasagna… the way my mom makes it. And it’s even better with fresh basil from my basil plant scattered over the top.

Remember my sad attempt at recreating my brother’s pizza? Well, as I was reading Brilynn’s post over at Jumbo Empanada’s about what real food was, I started thinking about what real food meant to me. While I found her insights that all food is real food interesting, in the end, I had to disagree. Yes, I suppose anything you put in your mouth, chew, swallow, and digest can be considered food, but real food is something more. Real food is something with more sustinence, something that provides more nourishment than calories alone. Real food is about feelings and family. Which brings me to the pizza.

I created pizza in my kitchen a few months ago to try to replicate this pizza, but this is the real thing. My brother at the pizza oven, wielding his pizza paddles, my mother and aunt in the kitchen, assembling pizzas from fresh ingredients, and me, barefoot, running back and forth from the kitchen through the rain with raw pizzas to deliver to my brother, who had created a shelter for himself under an umbrella propped up next to the oven, and back with the freshly cooked ones, cheese still bubbling on top, to be quickly sliced into little pieces and devoured steaming, burning tongues and fingers.

Mac and I didn’t get any until the last pizzas were coming out of the oven. I had to steal a few pieces and carry them out, tossing them back and forth between my hands. The crust was chewy and delicious, nearly burned on the edges, just like we like it. The pepperoni was under the cheese so that it didn’t burn, a trick we’ve picked up after years of experimenting. The sauce was homemade, tasting of the last fresh tomatoes of summer. I’m sure some restaurant pizzas are better, more symmetrical, with higher quality ingredients, but I wouldn’t trade this one for anything.

My brother’s pizza is and always will be my favorite. It reminds me of my childhood, which I suddenly felt was ending this June upon turning 20. It reminds me of my family, who I miss more and more the farther I chase my dreams in Europe. It reminds me of summers running barefoot on the grass in the rain.

Siena… che città bella! Especially for food. Siena is in the heart of Tuscany, home of bistecca fiorentina, ribollita, papardelle al cinghiale, and of course, the famous Chianti. Siena is heaven for a foodie like me, and one would think that having spent five days there last month, I would have tons of tales for my readers of the gourmet meals I enjoyed.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. With temperatures of at least 35 degrees every day, the only food I could even consider consuming was ice cold melone straight from the ice box and of course gelato. Lots and lots of gelato. I got creative with flavors after awhile… after all, when you’re eating gelato two times a day, you need to try for a bit of variety. That left only one problem: the coffee factor.

As everyone who has ever met me knows, coffee is my way of life. I cannot exist without my morning coffee, my afternoon iced coffee, and my evening espresso. But even for me, 35 degrees is too hot for hot coffee or espresso, and iced coffee is nearly impossible to find outside the continental United States (I once had a waiter in Toronto stare blankly when I ordered iced coffee, and then watch in awe as I poured the hot coffee he brought me over the glass of ice I had requested). So what’s a girl to do?

The answer came in the form of a granita. Though I usually scoff at sugar in my coffee, turning to milk or nothing, this slightly sweet frozen beverage was welcome in the heat. I want to compare it to a frappuccino from Starbucks, but it seems sacrilegious to compare this Italian masterpiece, with real espresso coffee, to a mass-produced American conglomerate. At any rate, it became my new drug of choice… as you can see, I was double fisting them by the end of my stay there (though even I couldn’t muster the courage to actually order two… I just finished my friend’s.)

Comfort food means different things to different people. It’s tied to memory, to home. For my father, this means spaghetti and meatballs, like his grandmother, who barely spoke English, used to make. For my mother, it’s all-American Thanksgiving dinner, complete with cranberry sauce, which she has made for her family every year since she was fourteen. For my best friend from high school, it’s fresh corn on the cob, like she ate every summer with her cousins in Michigan.

Even for me, comfort food can mean many things. Often, it’s simple macaroni and cheese, baked with a breadcrumb topping. Other times, I mimick my father and go for hearty spaghetti with rich, red sauce. On cold winter mornings, however, my favourite thing in the world is maple polenta.

Polenta is comforting in and of itself: I have a theory that anything slow cooked on the stovetop with a wooden spoon is automatically comfort food. Polenta takes time and patience, but it’s worth it, especially when stained with a little bit of pure, Canadian maple syrup and some sweet butter.

I don’t make maple polenta often: I’m of the morning coffee camp and generally don’t eat until around noon or one. But a few days ago, when Toronto was dusted with just a little bit of white powder, I knew that it was a maple polenta kind of morning.

My brother and father would kill me if they knew that this was my excuse for pizza: a few years ago, my father built a pizza oven in our backyard, and it and the breadmaker are the only items in the kitchen that my mother doesn’t dare touch, for fear of facing the wrath of “the men.”

My brother and father, like most men of Southern Italian descent, take pizza very seriously. While sometimes we pick up a few balls of pizza dough from our local pizzeria, my brother likes to make his own, complete with semolina flour and a cornmeal crusted bottom, in the breadmaker. We head to Sonny’s, our favourite Italian pork store, or sometimes even to Mike’s Deli in the Bronx, and my brother carefully selects the best prosciutto di parma, arugula, pecorino romano, and of course, “fior di latte:” mozzarella.

Back at home, my mother contributes her famous San Marzano tomato marinara sauce, thickened with extra tomato paste, and the girls begin our job of assembling the pizzas, which my brother and father bake in the backyard, in the oven that has been heating all day.

As compared with my father’s signature pizza, with prosciutto, mozzarella, and an egg lightly fried, topped with fresh, raw arugula that just barely wilts on top, my pizza is a bit of a sad excuse. With a store-bought whole wheat tortilla as a crust, tomato paste and my own tomato sauce, tasting faintly of tin because of the inexpensive tomatoes I used from the local Rabba, melted mozzarella and cheddar mix that is the all-purpose cheese for quesadillas and grilled cheese in my house, and a few leaves of basil on top, I feel like a bit of a failure as far as pizza making is concerned.

But if I close my eyes, the oregano I add to the sauce somehow makes it taste a little bit closer to home. The tortilla lacks the flavour of my brother’s semolina crust, but none of the texture. And fresh basil is very hard to screw up. I may never match the men in my family: I have no room in my house for a pizza oven, and neither the patience nor the time to make a pizza dough every time I want a light supper for myself, but pizza is good in any form, and I have the memories of those summer days eating hot pizza barefoot in the grass, mozzarella stringing with every bite, the dog hovering for scraps, and the burst of a barely cooked egg yolk, soaked up with my brother’s homemade crust.

In the winter? I know… but sometimes I want pasta primavera before the primavera. It’s a little more wintery than usual, with just zucchini and onions and spinach pasta. I tossed all the veggies in Extra Virgin Olive Oil, salt, pepper, and cayenne before throwing them in the grill pan.

And then mixed them up with some spinach spaghetti and lemon juice. Yummmm….

I am still sans camera, so the words in this post are going to have to do. I may come back and edit in some pictures later. Hopefully I’ll have my little baby back and functioning soon!

This weekend, I took a nice walk from my apartment to Kensington, taking advantage of some of the last nice, sunny days. I did most of my grocery shopping, but the butcher I usually use was closed, and considering the fact that one of the other two smelled like a farm, and the last one was very poorly stocked and didn’t have what I was looking for, I went down a few more blocks along College to Little Italy.

When I first moved to Toronto, last year, one of the first things I did was to hit the city’s website (toronto.ca) and look for Little Italy. I’ve always felt that no matter where I go, the Italian neighbourhood of a city will always feel somewhat like home.

I spent a lot of time in Little Italy last year, mostly because it was so close to home. I did most of my grocery shopping at the Magnolia Specialty Foods Store, which I sadly discovered this weekend was closed. A little more expensive than most grocery stores, Magnolia made up for it in quality. All of the name brand olive oils I recognized, San Marzano canned tomatoes from Italy, and beautiful produce filled the small store, and I know it will be missed by the entire neighbourhood (a lady who was reading the notice with me shared my sentiments).

That is one of the nice things about Little Italy; much like the country it’s named for, the people who live here are friendly even to strangers. People are known to hang out in Caffe Diplomatico and meet random strangers while enjoying a piece of pizza or an espresso and biscotto.

I finally arrived at my destination, Grace’s Meat Market, at Grace and College to procure ground veal. I walked up to the counter and asked about it, and the woman behind the counter looked at me, pondering, and then called into the back in Italian. A man in a white butcher’s coat came out and looked at me, repeating my order, “Ground veal?”

“Yes,” I answered, worried that I had come all this way in vain.

He looked at me one more moment, then rolled up his sleeves and asked, “How much?”

The fact that this tiny meat market will grind meat to order for customers, even such a paltry amount as I needed, reminded me why I love this community. I brought my wares straight home and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening making my bolognese sauce, canning most of it, but serving some over some artisinal orecchiete that I picked up at Grace’s.

Orecchiete Bolognese

As with most recipes that have been passed down, there is really no exact recipe to this. Taste as you go, and if something doesn’t taste right, adjust. Here’s a jumping off point, to get you started.

Brown half a pound of ground veal in extra-virgin olive oil in a sturdy dutch-oven or similar large pot. Remove the veal and keep it warm. Sweat one sweet onion, finely chopped, and one carrot, also finely chopped, in the same pot, until very tender and sweet. Season with salt, pepper, dried oregano, and dried red pepper flakes. Use a pair of kitchen shears to cut up the contents of two cans of whole San Marzano tomatoes and add them to the pot. Add a tablespoon of tomato paste and a teaspoon of sugar. Bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat to low and cook, uncovered, stirring from time to time. Once the tomatoes have mostly broken down, add the cooked meat, and cook for an hour or two. Sauce can be stored in tupperware in the fridge for a week, or canned and frozen (or kept in the cellar).

When ready to serve, heat the sauce in a saucepan while your pasta cooks in salted water. Add a little bit of cream to the sauce, and stir in the hot pasta. Serve with grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese.

For my first restaurant review, I thought it was only appropriate to review the restaurant where I work, Dee Angelo’s. So maybe I’m a little biased, but I also know the inside scoop.

Dee Angelo’s is owned by Dee Perfido and Lenny Angelo, and is located on Main Street in Westhampton Beach, NY. The name of the restaurant comes from Pleasant Avenue in the Bronx, where Lenny grew up.

The cafe is very small, with only nine tables inside, and ten outside. We serve both brunch and dinner at the cafe. Brunch is served from 9:30 to 3:00 on weekends and from 11:30 to 3:00 on weekdays. As opposed to a typical brunch, the menu is really breakfast on one side, lunch on the other, with the whole menu being served all day. The breakfast side of the menu consists of various egg dishes including frittate, omelettes, and eggs benedict, and the house specialties, Lemon Ricotta Pancakes and “Italian” toast, French toast made from panettone, an Italian holiday bread which originated in Milan.

Sidebar: There are many stories about the invention of Panettone, but this is my favourite. A boy working for the local town baker, Toni, in the 15th century fell in love with the baker’s daughter. To win the baker’s approval, the boy invented a sweet bread with fruit and orange peel baked inside and named it after the baker: Pan di Toni.

The lunch side of the menu is mostly panini and salads. Lunch in general is pretty low key. Most people like to sit outside on Main Street during the day, or out on the side deck under the umbrellas if it rains. Lunch is generally about 14 dollars per person including a non-alcoholic drink.
At dinnertime, both the menu and the atmosphere of the restaurant change dramatically. The menu features salads and traditional Italian appetizers like Fried Calamari and Artichokes “Al Guidea,” pasta dishes, and Italian and Italian-American “secondi.” As far as specials are concerned, the chef utilizes all of the fresh fish and produce from the area to create lobster and crab dishes to combine the traditional seafood of Long Island with the typical preparation styles of Italian cuisine.

Every restaurant has its high points and low points. The highest point of Dee Angelo’s is most definitely the food, which is probably the best meal you can get in the area. As for complaints? I mostly hear three: 1. The portions are too big, 2. We don’t take American Express, and 3. Our reservation policy is… confusing. We “don’t take reservations,” but anyone who is a regular knows that they can call and reserve any table, any night. It helps if your name ends in a vowel (i.e., You’re from the boot.) What else can you expect from Italians?

Today’s post was influenced by my job. I work summers waiting tables, which generally is a bad thing for foodies. I speak from experience when I say that waiting tables can sometimes make you hate food. I watch so many rich and delicious dinners go in and out of the kitchen, but I tend to spend a lot of evenings “eating” a 7-11 slurpee for dinner at 11:30.

Tonight, one of my many tables pointed somewhat guiltily at the Insalata Caprese and asked me what buffalo mozzarella was. As an Italian, I was astonished. I explained as simply as I could, that buffalo mozzarella was mozzarella made from the milk of water buffalos, and while my response probably ended this exchange for my customers, it started me thinking about the differences between what “mozzarella” means to different people.

I was raised in an Italian family, on platters of prosciutto and salami with roasted red peppers, lightly battered and fried zucchini flowers, and bocconcini (small balls of buffalo mozzarella) marinated in olive oil. Larger buffalo mozzarelle was reserved for special occasions, like Christmas, Easter, and my grandmother’s birthday, which, coincidentally, falls tomorrow.

Buffalo mozzarella is the king of mozzarella, made from the rich milk of water buffalos. The best buffalo mozzarelle still come from the area around Naples, where the first mozzarella was invented in the 1600s. The name “mozzarella” comes from the Italian “mozzare” meaning “to cut,” which describes the process of making the cheese: the cheesemaker kneads the cheese until the proper consistency is acheived, at which point the mozzarella is pulled into strands and cut into pieces.

With a slightly firm exterior skin covering the incredibly soft, almost spreadable inside and a delicate yet complex milky flavour, buffalo is a far cry from the processed “mozzarella” that most of America is familiar with, and even quite distinct from the “Fior di Latte,” (flower of milk) which is the Italian term for cow’s milk mozzarella.

Buffalo mozzarella is expensive, but is now fairly widely available. It should be used within 24-48 hours of purchase. Although some like to use buffalo mozzarella on pizzas and in pasta dishes, I personally think it is best served alone, or with tomatoes, olive oil, salt, and pepper. However, if you do wish to encorporate it into a dish, this is one I use time and again to use up buffalo mozzarella before it turns.

Mozzarella and Tomato Orecchiete

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Add two cups of dry orecchiete. Cook, stirring occasionally, until “al dente,” (about 6 minutes). Drain the pasta and toss lightly with olive oil. Add two ounces of mozzarella, diced, and stir to encorporate. Add two Roma tomatoes, chopped, and a chiffonade of approximately five basil leaves. Salt and pepper to taste, and serve immediately.

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