Recipe: Osso Bucco with Orange

For years I've ignored the traditional Osso Bucco recipe - which uses tomatoes - in favour of a version Bugialli calls 'alla Novese', which is a 'white' recipe, where the usual combination of tomatoes and aromatic vegetables is replaced by lemon and garlic, green olives and white wine. Light and delicious, it has always seemed to me preferable to the indistinct mess of tomatoes and chopped vegetables that risks being mistaken for the base of a second-rate pizza. I've now discovered that the simple addition of orange to the traditional ingredients changes all that, however, and the citrus flavour more than adequately counter-balances the bland sweetness of the tomato. Well worth trying.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 Osso Bucco; 150g Carrots; 150g Onions; 100g Celery; 200g tinned tomatoes; 8 tbs Olive Oil; 30g Butter; grated zest of 1 Orange (or 1/4 teaspoon Orange Oil); 1 sprig fresh Thyme; 100 ml White Wine; 2 cloves Garlic, minced; 4 tbs Soy Sauce; approx 500 ml Chicken Stock; Seasoning. Chopped Parsley, for garnish when serving.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 180 degrees C.

2. Heat half the Oil in a sauté pan and brown the Osso Bucco on both sides.

3. Remove the Osso Bucco pieces from the pan, add the Butter. Peel and dice Carrots and Onions, and dice the Celery. Add 2/3 of the Carrots and Onions to the pan, along with half of the Celery, the Orange zest (or Oil) and fresh Thyme. Sauté until the vegetables have completely collapsed, about ten minutes.

4. Add White wine, raise heat and cook, stirring, for about two minutes, then add Tomatoes, Garlic and Soy Sauce. Mix everything well together, then return the Osso Bucco pieces to the pan. Cover with Chicken Stock, put the lid on the pan, and put into the pre-heated oven for about one and a half hours.

5. Towards the end of this period, lightly sauté the remaining diced vegetables in the remaining Oil - they should be tender, but not entirely collapsed. Season lightly.

6. Remove Osso Bucco from the oven. Put the meat to one side, strain the cooking liquid and discard the vegetables. Reduce the sauce to a coating consistency, then return the Osso Bucco pieces to it, along with the sautéed vegetables, and re-heat gently for about five minutes. Check and adjust seasoning before serving.

Sprinkle with freshly chopped Parsley, once plated.

Quote of the week...

Nothing whatsoever to do with food, but probably the reason why I end up having so many arguments with the security morons at the airport:

"However good a law is, it is invariably clumsy. This is why its application should be disputed or questioned. And the practice of doing this corrects its clumsiness and serves justice."

It comes from John Berger's excellent novel 'From A to X' - a perfect gem, which I've just finished.

And the other book which rates highly on my list, currently, is Raymond Blanc's 'Blanc Vite', which forms the underpinning to our ongoing weight-loss regime. I've had a copy for many years, and a number of recipes from it have been regulars on my list for some time. It was written after Blanc had had a mild heart attack, I think, and focuses significantly on healthy eating. In practice - and if you can ignore the tedious pontifications of his attendant dietician which pepper the text - it works excellently within a low-carb diet. Where he uses fructose, I substitute Splenda, and in place of marscapone or crème fraiche I use double cream. The recipes are good and interesting, and it means being able to eat well even as the pounds fall off - which they appear to be doing. He's a little one-noted when it comes to desserts in this book - many variations on stewed fruit, in practice - but it's easy enough to vary them in menu planning by the inclusion of dietarily sound things like soufflés and phyllo tarts and mousses. So highly do I think of the book that I've bought a second copy to take with me back to Italy next week - amazingly, the going rate for a second-hand copy (of the paperback!) was £104 on both Amazon and Abe, so I was pleased to be able to snaffle a copy on ebay for a tenner!

All the indications are that Massimo has indeed worked magic re the contract for the fourteenth century farmhouse in Pisa - although the situation was much more complicated than we'd realised, and has involved a convocation of the church curia, and the demise of Pisa Football Team (with much wailing and gnashing of teeth from its loyal fan base). All being well, we can sign a lease next week, once a few final legalities have been dealt with...

Tonight's dinner:

Sweet & sour salad of Cucumber and Prawns, with toasted Sesame seeds.

Blanquette of Lamb. Cavolo Nero, sautéed with Garlic.

Strawberry Soufflé.

Recipe: Peppers, with Rosemary & Balsamic Vinegar

Another one from the master, Bruno Loubet. Originally, he paired this dish with his splendid recipe for Cod wrapped in Parma Ham - but in fact, it will work just as well with any fleshy white fish fillet, or even with something like a plain grilled chicken breast or a piece of roast pork. Although a great deal less work than ratatouille, this is more than just a poor man's version of that; the flavours here of rosemary, basil, and balsamic vinegar are beguiling, and give to the finished dish a first class status all of its own.

For four.

Ingredients: 4 Peppers (Capsicums) of assorted colours; 1 tablespoon Olive Oil; 2 cloves Garlic, minced; 1 teaspoon capers (cut up, if large); the needles from 1 sprig Rosemary, finely chopped; Salt, to taste; 4 large, fresh Basil leaves; 2 tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C. Halve the Peppers, discarding cores and seeds, and place cut-side down in a roasting dish; brush the skin of the Peppers with Olive Oil and roast in the oven for twenty minutes or so, until they begin to blacken and the skins are visibly swelling.

2. Put the Pepper halves in a bowl, along with all of the juices in the bottom of the roasting dish, and cover with clingfilm. Leave for twenty minutes or so, then remove the skins from the Peppers and cut each one into four slices.

3. Put the sliced Peppers into a saucepan, along with their cooking juices. Add all of the remaining ingredients apart from the Basil and the Vinegar. Cover the pan and cook over a medium heat, stirring from time to time for about thirty minutes. Just before serving, stir in the Balsamic Vinegar, and the Basil leaves, finely sliced.

A new arrival...

The mini-four-footed has been born!

On June 12th, to be precise, at around 10.30 in the evening. Mother and puppies - all five of them - are doing well, and we're heading off to Hampshire tomorrow morning to inspect in person. Of the five, three are bitches and two are dogs - and although there's no requirement at this stage to choose which of the dogs we'll take, I suspect we'll start bonding on the spot, and the decision will take itself...


Tonight's dinner:

...is in Clerkenwell, somewhere. A new discovery by the Brancolis-in-London, so they're making all the arrangements.

Manna from Heaven.

Hand-made cumbrian fudge, from The Toffee Shop in Penrith. Wonderful stuff...we dished out boxes of it as stocking-filler presents at Christmas, several years ago, and it has been spoken of ever since in awed tones by the various recipients. Last time we were in London, we stocked up on supplies (from the traiteur on Chelsea Green, who sometimes carries it) to have on-hand as gifts when going to dinner parties in Pisa. Which was why we happened to have some lying around last week, which the Technical Department thought might be just the right sort of thing to give as an offering to the octagenarian Monsignor who is our new landlord for the storage lock-up in Via Sant'Andrea which we've just leased.

We'd gone along to his den last Monday, to sign the rental contract, on which occasion the Monsignor had sat, on a large ecclesiastical throne, through the entire proceeding reading 'Oggi' magazine, and every so often pointing out interesting articles to his one-armed (and almost octagenarian himself) major domo - seated at his right hand, on a smaller ecclesiastical throne - who'd been deputed to deal with the practicalities of the matter. The Monsignor seemed a jolly old cove, generally delighted with life, and inclined to make long and rambling jokes, the point of which were way out of our reach - but it seemed polite to laugh anyway, and the whole affair was jovial all round.
So, when he telephoned later in the week to say that the registered copy of the contract was available for us to collect (he managed to drop the phone in the process, and then pressed the wrong buttons on his phone console, so that after he thought he'd finished the phone call he could be heard for several minutes afterwards saying querulously to somebody else that he thought he'd done something wrong as the phone didn't seem to work any more) the TD suggested we take him a box of fudge as a gesture of goodwill. With surprising results.
Since the Contessa hasn't yet favoured us with a response to our offer re renting her Palazzo on the lungarno, we thought we'd ask, in passing, if the church had any property that might be appropriate for us to rent instead. The initial answer was a regretful 'no', that all of their property was spoken for...which turned perceptibly into a 'but, then again, maybe', after presentation of the box of fudge.

And the 'but, then again, maybe' turned out to be a fourteenth century farmhouse nestled under the eaves of the church of Santa Catarina, with beams and exposed medieval brickwork and the whole nine yards....oh, and a couple of acres of garden, looking out onto fields beyond, and not another house in sight. And all within the middle of the Centro Storico, five minutes walk from the leaning tower...

Pinching ourselves in disbelief, we've come back to London, leaving Massimo to work his magic on contract negotiations. It's tempting fate to say more about it before the ink is dry on the paper, so I won't...

Tonight's Dinner:

Smoked salmon tiède, on a soubise of onion & basil

Grilled duck breast, with bay leaves and garlic; fava beans in parsley sauce.

Peach tarts (made with white peaches from the garden - incomparable!)

Recipe: Chocolate & Cherry Clafouti, with Grappa

I read recently an article by Harold Magee, which in turn was quoting the fact that Heston Blumenthal uses vodka as 50% of the liquid content when making batter in which to fry fish. He maintains that it produces a much crisper result, and the fact that the alcohol will evaporate more quickly than water clearly supported the hypothesis. Since I believe that frying battered fish is best left to commercial establishments with a ready supply of newspaper and malt vinegar, I wasn't interested to follow his advice directly - but since batter is batter is batter, it seemed worth experimenting with a clafouti recipe to see whether what he says is indeed corrrect. Any relatively flavourless 'white' alcohol will work in the same way as vodka, and so - having industrial quantities of it lying around, I substituted grappa.

It certainly works. The cooked batter was light and held together very well, with a beautifully crisp top. The flavour of grappa was definitely present, and - as the Technical dept said - the combination of grappa with cherry and chocolate produced an all round 'very grown-up' result. If, like me, you make the batter in advance and then give it a final whizz just before putting the clafoutis in the oven as the main course is going to table, then leave it until this point to add the grappa - if you do it earlier, the volatiles within it will just evaporate as the batter sits around.


For two individual clafoutis:

Ingredients: 24 cherries, pitted; 1 egg; 40g butter; 40g flour; 1 tsp vanilla essence; 1 tbs chocolate powder; 50 ml milk; 50 ml grappa; 30g sugar (or Splenda); icing sugar, to serve (optional).

Method:

1. Arrange the pitted cherries in two greased egg dishes.

2. Heat the oven to 180 degrees C.

3. Melt the butter in a small saucepan and allow it to cool. Add this to all of the other ingredients in a blender jar and process for ten seconds or so, to produce a thickish homogenised batter.

4. Pour the batter over and around the cherries - try and do it so that the cherries remain fairly evenly spaced and don't all get pushed to the edge of the dish.

5. Bake for about 25 minutes, until the batter is puffed and crisp.

Dust with icing sugar, and serve immediately.

Days of the Week...

One huge difference between Italy and London is the structure of the days of the week. In London, it's very easy to lose track of which day it is, since - apart from the changing schedule on Radio 4 - there's very little to distinguish one day from another. The shops are always open...everything is always available...it's terribly practical, but it doesn't do a lot to give rhythm to everyday life.

In Pisa, things are completely different, and if you don't get a grip on what happens at what time, then it can all get very frustrating. There's a complicated structure to it all, which requires a specific choreography in order not to waste a lot of time and energy, not to mention risking regular disappointment!

To buy flowers, you have to remember Wednesday and Saturday mornings - Wednesday, when there's a flower stall in the market in San Martino, and Saturday, when the San Martino Market also operates, but there's a much better choice from the man who sets up shop halfway down Borgo Stretto. On Saturdays, it's important to be up and at any of the the shops early, since the army of italian Mammas - intent on preventing their families from starving before Monday - descends like a plague of locusts, and if you haven't got everything you want by 9.30, you risk being stuck in queues for the rest of the morning! Everything shuts every day at 1.00 for lunch...everything...and you're then stuck if you get caught short in the kitchen until the shops re-open at 3.30 (or 5.30 in the hot summer months). Poultry and fish shops don't open in the afternoons at all....and I don't think the pasta sellers do, either, but I've obviously never tried to buy fresh pasta at that time of day (or else I'd know). In general, food shops are open on Monday mornings - all apart from the fish sellers - which is when all of the other shops are closed, presumably to make up for having been open on Sunday evening, when they take advantage of the passagiata, to catch passing trade.

Sundays in general are bliss! The mornings are peace incarnate - the streets are empty of people and traffic, and the only shops which are open for emergency supplies of bread or milk are in Via Cavour, or the shop run by the Argentinians in Via Cavalca.

What else? Well...the baker in Via San Francesco only takes delivery of Altamura bread on Thursday mornings, after about 10.30, and has generally run out for the week by the following day. The dry cleaners in San Paolo al'Orto only opens in the mornngs during the summer; and neither the ironmongers in Via Cavour nor Maurizio, the butcher, open at all after lunch on Saturday. Signor Tempestini (the plant-man) closes half an hour earlier than anybody else for lunch at any time of year....and so it goes on.

It might sound very complicated - but since it all helps to make Life's Tapestry a little richer, I wouldn't have it any other way...

Tonight's Dinner:

Sautéed Chicken Livers & Rosemary, with an Orange, Fennel & Lentil Salad.

Lamb Mentonais, with Green Beans.

Panna Cotta.