Baja in Firenze, again...

Lindsay and I have been longing for some fresh mexican cuisine... again. Since the weather has turned warm and beer-and-lime season has been declared, Lindsay placed an order to the kitchen for some fish tacos, a baja specialty.

White fish isn't too hard to come by in Italy, as there is plenty of cheap, saltwater perch from the waters off Tunisia, grouper from the adriatic, and cod from the mediterranean. After testing each fish over three different taco sessions, Grouper has been declared the house favorite. It holds together nicely over a hot fire and its succulent consistency prevents it from drying out too quickly.

Here is my recipe (4 servings), albeit Italianized, for grilled fish tacos, baja-style:

There are two salsas involved with fish tacos: a sweeter version of pico de gallo and an acidic white sauce to enhance the flavor of the fish.

Pico de Gallo (all ingredients diced into 3mm cubes)

2 shallots or 1 small red onion

1/2 cucumber

1/2 red bell pepper

1/2 yellow bell pepper

1/2 cup corn

2 cups black beans, soaked, boiled and cooled

4 radishes

1 green salad tomato or tomatillo (unavailable to me)

2 tbsp ground cumin

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp chili powder

salt to taste

3 tbsp olive oil

1. Sautee diced shallots or red onion in olive oil until translucent.

2. Add diced peppers to hot shallots and turn off fire. The warmth of the pan brings out sweetness of peppers.

3. After shallot/pepper mix has cooled add all ingredients and mix well. Refrigerate for a day.

White Sauce

1 lime

1/3 cup greek yogurt

1/3 cup mayonaise

2 tbsp milk

1 tbsp ground cumin

1 tsp dried oregano, crushed

1 tsp cayenne powder

1. Juice lime into yogurt and mayo mix.

2. Add milk and spices and mix. The consistency should be liquidy but still cover the back of a spoon.

3. Chill for an hour.

Blackening Spice for fish

3 tbsp ground cumin

2 tbsp paprika

2 tbsp sweet paprika

1 tbsp garlic powder

1 tbsp chili powder

1 tbsp onion powder

1 tbsp celery salt

1 tbsp salt

Fish Tacos (can substitute chicken breast or prawns)

1 kilo (2 lbs) grouper fillet

3 tbsp olive oil or 2 tbsp butter

2 cup cabbage or lettuce, julienned

8 flour tortillas, warmed in oven (to prevent drying out, wet a towel and place tortillas inside and put in oven at 100c or 200f for 10 mins)

1. Cut fish into strips and toss in spice mix.

2. Heat a nonstick flat griddle over high heat. Add olive oil or butter and immediately add fish to avoid smoking.

3. Let fish cook on high heat until almost white all the way through. Flip each piece of fish and turn off heat. Let sit for 5 mins for carry over cooking.

4. Portion fish to each tortilla and add a couple of spoonfuls of pico de gallo, cabbage/lettuce, and spoon white sauce over it.

Buen Provecho!

Throw away the recipe box...

In case you didn't know, I've been attempting to start a private chef / catering business for the last year in Florence. Unfortunately it hasn't expanded beyond the "start-up" phase, yet. Just as it was gathering some speed, last spring everyone went on vacation during the "ferie", which is the summer holiday in Italy that can last all of August. I accomplished a couple of successful dinners, one being a buffet for 150 people, which I was quite proud of. 500 business cards and one website later, I began the waiting game. During this drought I wanted to stock my arsenal of recipes for the upcoming events that were soon to be phoned in any day now... 1, 2 ,3, now... 1, 2, 3, NOW! So I began to research recipe software that tracks one's recipes and will even go a step further by calculating servings, converting from metric to imperial, and other gadgets that would transcend beyond the home kitchen.

There weren't too many websites to choose from for decent reviews of these programs. Apparently it doesn't demand as much attention as say, digital cameras or flatscreen tvs. The best website I found was: TopTenReviews. Its list of ten recipe/cooking software was, at the least, informative and offers demos for the majority.

After trial by error, I eliminated most of them fairly quickly. The one program I was truly attracted to, which is typical of me, was the most expensive. (It's not bragging because I don't ever buy the most expensive. It's just unfortunate that I always find it.) The program was written by restaurateurs and professional chefs and was intended to track a restaurant's trends and stock. If you're interested check out StarChef Standard retailing at $550 (a small price to pay for something so... Standard).

I settled on BigOven Deluxe as it fulfilled most of my criteria. It was ranked #1 by TopTenReviews (that means a lot...) and it was the only program I sampled that didn't look like it was written on Excel. It definitely has it's problems as it is not very user friendly, i.e. they could benefit from investing in "drag-and-drop" technology, a new technology some of us have heard of.

So, if you're in the market for a program that will keep track of your recipes, BigOven Deluxe is, for now, what I'm sheepishly supporting... for now... If by chance you purchase this, feel free to contact me so we can share our gripes or praise of this software.

Thanksgiving in March

My quarterly blog focuses on an issue that has been troubling me for the past few Thanksgivings: the Turducken.

Each Thanksgiving I battle between nostalgia and the progressive ways to cook a turkey. On the one side I can't bear the thought of a Thanksgiving without a barbecued turkey (the way my family has always done it) after being brined for 5 days so it doesn't lose any moisture over the coals. And on the other side I see all of these blogs and recipes, not to mention "legends" of the famed, although illusive, Turducken. In the end my nostalgia takes over and I find myself daydreaming of an unnatural bird-beast flying away as I test the temperature of the grill on Turkey Day.

Now that we are in March, however I woke up one day and thought, "Why not?" Well, I'll tell you why not. Living in Italy does not prove for easy access to a bird native to the Americas. During the week before Thanksgiving, it is necessary to reserve your T-day centerpiece from a local butcher who is sympathetic to the cause. Afterall, it wasn't the Italians who sat around a table with some Native Americans and broke bread...

My March motivation to check this off of my list of "Things to do before I... don't do them again?" was already minus the prefix to the Ducken. Although disappointed, I was not discouraged. Instead I decided to reduce the recipe to a two-bird roast, and perhaps stuff it with some beef in order to violate natural law, even more.

Next order of business was assigning the proper nomenclature to my creation: Beducken? Duckenow? Duckeefen? Does the order of assembly take precedence in the title?

GETTING DOWN TO IT:
- I gathered my shopping list... Duck, "check". Chicken, "check".
- Synchronized my watch (??)
- Deboned my fouls (the art of cutting back the meat from the carcass without mutilating the shape of the bird. Imagine peeling a sock off of your foot; your sock being the meat and skin while your foot is the carcass.) which took me the best of an hour (less than 10 mins for Chef Martin Yan).

THE RECIPE pt. 1... as if you're really going to repeat this:
- Mixed about 200g (6.75oz) of ground beef with an egg, bread crumbs, chopped shallots, and a spoonful of parmigiano for flavor, salt and pepper.
- Pulsed about a cup and a half of mirepoix with a garlic clove, thyme and some orange zest. And then sauteed it until soft and profumey, and set aside to cool.

THE ARCHITECTURE... another dilemma in this ill-fated mission:
So my problem with all of these bird-in-a-bird-in-a-bird constructions (see "True Love Roast") is the purpose of the skin. It has always been my opinion that poultry skin is meant to be a-cracklin'. There's nothing more unappetizing than soft, soggy skin. (Soggy bread is a close runner-up). I could be uninformed on this subject but nonetheless, I decided to audible out of my original plan and rework my blueprints. Scientifically speaking, a chicken must be cooked to 165 F /73.5 C to be considered "safe". A duck, however can be served at a lower temperature (130 F / 54 C) since it is not considered to carry salmonella. So why put the chicken inside the duck? Wouldn't this overcook the duck while maintaining the proper temperature of the chicken? Thus, I erased my previous 40 mins of deboning the duck by opting to remove the meat from the skin. Afterall, a whole duck will not fit inside a chicken... it would be like me trying to enter through a doggy door.

THE RECIPE pt. 2... if you've read this far I commend you.
- Cut open the chicken from the spine side in order to lay it flat.
- Spread the mirepoix mixture (cooled) all over the meat and salt with sea salt.
- Place the corresponding pieces of duck meat over the chicken. You'll be left with the duck wings as extra pieces that don't fit.
- Spread the beef mixture over the duck and take a step back to pray the Kosher militia doesn't find you.


SEALING THE DEAL...
- You can opt to close the beast by tieing it as you would a roast (how I did it). Or you can go the professional route and sew it up, as a surgeon would stitch up a post-op.
- Flip the "Thing" over, coat with butter or olive oil and sprinkle with herbs-de-provence.
- Roast at 500 F / 260 C for 15 mins and turn down to 350 or lower depending on your anxiety to taste it. Baste every 15 mins.
- Stick an ovenproof thermometer inside until the internal reaches 151 F / 66 C.
- Remove from oven and let rest for 15 mins to allow carry-over cooking.
- Slice like you would a roast and spoon some of the juices over it.

THAT'S ALL, FOLKS...
I was very pleased and surprised by the outcome, as were my guests who hid there appall gracefully. I can't say I've accomplished the Turducken but I'm satisfied with my own creation, and I can finally put that nagging urge to rest.

La Salsa Perfecta... after 2 years of experimenting.

Hopefully not a lot of you will read this since I would like to keep this one a secret. But be it as it may, I use this site to store some of my best recipes, God forbid anything should happen to them on my laptop.

Inspired by the salsa at Baja Fresh, you know the one: almost black, tangy with a hint of picante, I set out two years ago to recreate it. Maybe easy for some, my excuse is living in Italy and not being able to find the right ingredients until I found VVMercato, where an international supply of ingredients are stocked at a fraction of the price (not a good fraction $$$). However, if you choose to eat Mexican cuisine in a restaurant in Florence, such as Tijuana, you'll spend at least 40euro ($63). Americans are not used to spending that kind of money on Mexican food unless a couple of beach buckets of Corona are factored in.

So... every month my wife and I have to fill our craving mexicano by making everything from scratch (around 2hrs and $20). Hence the gradual perfecting of a homemade salsa, unless you want the crap storebought stuff that is labeled CasaFiesta but is made in... Nieuw Yolk Syd-eh? No, even worse... Amsterdam. No, no; to avoid any suits of libel, I'm just having a bit of fun. It's made in the States but exported to Amsterdam, thus ending up on fine expats' tables such as mine, before I perfected the salsa, that is...

On with it:
Baja Salsa
Yield: 5 servings
5 globe tomatoes halved
1 chipotle pepper in adobe salsa
1 tbsp adobe salsa
Juice of 1/2 lime
1/4 large onion chopped (add little by little to avoid oniony salsa)
2 large fresh garlic cloves
1 can clear chicken broth
1 fresh tomato diced
Salt to taste

Place tomatoes upside down on aluminum covered grill. Roast at medium flame for 1 - 1.5 hours until the tomatoes are cracking and black on the down side. Do not roast the garlic. Put tomatoes, peppers, garlic, lime juice, onion and salt in a food processor and puree. You can adjust the conistency by adding as little or as much chicken broth as you want. Transfer to a bowl and let cool to room temp. Add one diced tomato and mix with a spoon. (Baja Fresh makes it a liquid consistency.) Add more salt to taste.

Buen Provecho!

Pulp non-Fiction

"Three tomatoes are walking down the street- a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him... and says, Catch up."

So, what is your favorite food? Is is possible to have one above all others? Probably ignorantly possible, and under that specification I will declare the TOMATO as my favorite food/ingredient, since it is most definitely both.

I thought about blogging the history of tomatoes among many other factual tidbits that I (and under 100 people in the world) only find interesting, but that's what wikipedia is for. Instead I've decided to cover some other topics. For instance, varieties of tomatoes (in the tomato realm) are called cultivars. Trying to memorize the cultivars would be something like memorizing the Appellation d'Origine Vin De Qualité Supérieure in France or the Denominazione di Origine Controllata of Italy, i.e. not easy. Just as one can memorize the most notable French and Italian wines, I will only describe in short, tomatoes, which can be found without a machete or an amazonian tour guide.

A couple of terms before beginning, however:

Heirloom - We have all heard this term before and sub-consciously relate it to high prices. This group of cultivars simply means that the tomato seed has been openly polenated, i.e. polenated in an uncontrolled environment. Otherwise known as backyard tomatoes, they're not genetically enhanced to fit the perfect store-bought image of what we think a tomato should look like. They're usually misshapen, ribbed, often miscolored (meaning not red). But what lacks in beauty usually compensates in taste. Many of the tomatoes listed below are members of the Heirloom family.

Hot House - Synonymous with "green house", hot house tomatoes are grown in green houses to avoid seasonal variation.

1. Beefsteaks - The whopper of the tomato family, (yes, pun is intended) this tomato is commonly used for burgers/sandwiches due to its size and ease of slicing. Its size, up to one pound, also allows it to be hollowed out and stuffed just as a bell pepper would be. A popular varietal of beefsteaks is the Brandywine. Pinker then its cousin, it is the sweetest of beefsteaks and can be ripe despite a greenish top.

2. Plum - A generic term for tomatoes with more "paste"than other tomatoes, the plum tomato family includes: Roma, Grape, Campari, Picadilly F1, and San Marzano, to name a few. These cylindrical shaped cultivars are used for sauces and canning due to their fleshiness and ability to hold shape throughout stewing. Although Romas are the most available in the U.S., San Marzano's are the most highly regarded. Originating in San Marzano (coincidence?), Italy, these tomatoes gather their bittersweet characteristics from the volcanic soil of Mt. Vesuvio, the volcano responsible for burying Pompeii just south of Napoli (Naples). They are less sweet and less acidic than others, such as Picadillies (fantastic raw). They are so respected in Napoli that they have been stamped with an official "DOP", meaning their origin has been protected. Ask any Napolitano which tomato can ONLY be used for pizza sauce and you will feel the short blast of exhaled breath surrounding the over-pronunciation of "SAN MARZANO!!"

Campari's are the smallest and roundest of the group. A relatively new arrival to the U.S. they have become tremendously popular because of their burst of sweetness and low acidity. A little bigger than cherry tomatoes, Campari's are often known as the "salad tomato". They can be heard crying by any chef around the world if cooked beyond the one-minute mark (unless speaking of tomato confit), as they are enjoyed raw or quickly tossed in hot olive oil to enhance their natural flavors.

3. Cherry - I think we've all seen enough of these to avoid an explanation. With that said, cherry tomatoes are a caterer's best friend due to their bite-size proportions.

See http://bootsintheoven.typepad.com/boots_in_the_oven/2007/11/dropping-some-s.html, to get an idea of hors' dourves for these tiny-matoes.

4. Globe - Last but not least the average, the common, the familiar, the work-horse of the tomato world. These are the generic guys found in any grocery store under "Tomatoes $1.60/lb". Two things, though: 1. I don't know if that price is ridiculous for those of you who are more familiar than I; 2. There are some fantastic Globes out there that are overlooked by the normal consumers due to their lack of distribution to supermarket chains, so don't assume that all globes = generic tomatoes.

Baseball posts aside, this is a post that is close to my heart, and one that inspired me originally to create a blog. Before ending this beautiful opera di pomodori, I will list a few quick tomaw-to facts:

- Never refrigerate your toms unless you prefer cold over flavor.

- To skin a tom, boil water, score your your toms (draw a cross on the bottom with a knife), submerge in boiling water for 15-20 seconds, remove and put in cold water. Skins will remove easily.

- The smell of tomatoes comes from the stems. If you want to infuse that smell into your toms, make your sauce and put it into a ziploc with the stems while still hot. Let sit overnight and remove stems before serving.

- Tomato leaves are poisonous.

- You can balance acidity in tomato sauces with sugar or baking soda.

- Last but not least, please, for the sake of all that went into growing that little tomato, use a sharp knife when cutting it and let the knife cut it, not your strength.

Remember when...

... I used to blog about food and fun stuff? Seems like ages ago. A 2 month drought in blogging can be attributed to reasons such as:

1. Working my way through batches of limoncello, which I so thoroughly covered in last blog.
2. October Baseball, my favorite time of year.
3. Having on-off bouts with stomach flu.
4. Forgetting to bring my camera with me whenever I leave the house, and/or diminishing motivation to use the camera even if I have it.

So let us talk about baseball for a few thousand pixels or so. Watching baseball in a foreign country (excluding Japan, Korea, Cuba, D.R., and all Central American countries), is not an easy task. Ask any Scotsman if he would like to watch baseball and he might respond something like this (minus the profanities), "Ah cannae be bowdered wittha. " Or... trying to explain the rules of baseball in broken Italian might sound something like this, "The thrower launches the ball to the beater. If the beater no beats the ball, is 'lo strike'. If the beater beats the ball in air the defense must takes ball from air to put beater outside. If the beater beats the ball on earth, the defense tries take ball from earth and launch it to first plate. Nevertheless, when beater runs past house, he signs a point."

Congratulations!! If you could follow that last bit, you now speak Italian. So, when it comes time for the playoffs and the World Series it is extremely difficult to ignore the results of the previous night's game. Since games begin at 2am and finish at 5am, my normal routine is to wake up and watch the game with a couple cups of coffee. Doing so unbiasedly means I either have to link to a page which will not show me the results of the game or I have to cover parts of the screen with my hand. Do you think these drastic procedures are recognized, let alone appreciated by Major League Baseball or the 50 million fans who simply turn on their tv's and watch the game in real time? Sure, I could massage 3 or 4 Red Bulls down my throat and stay up for the game, but then my day is ruined. You're right, I am bitching about the dumbest thing you've ever read on the Internet but now you are more aware of the dilemmas of viewing baseball from abroad.

Let's pose some other scenarios that I have encountered throughout my 4-year tenure of watching baseball in Europe:

2002: SF Giants vs Ana Angels. I was living in BCN with my Orange County native roommate. As if a civil war had driven us to contempt, our home town teams faced off in a best of 7, which we watched at Scobies Irish Pub http://www.scobiesirishpub.com/home.asp who agreed to tape the games and re-play them at 6pm the following day. His reasoning was Americans don't drink like those of the UK or Ireland. He foresaw us drinking until 2am and then either passing out in his pub or sitting over the same pint for four hours. We were happy with our VHS compromise as we sat in his pub each night from 6-9pm yelling at anyone who came in to not tell us the results of the games. HOWEVER, my roommate, being the lazy baseball fan that he was, would always check the results and then decide if he was going to the game, inadvertently telling me whether his team won or lost that day. When it came down to game 7, he went to the pub...

2007: Bos Sox vs Col Rox. With today's technology of watching games online from the comfort of my own apartment, I vowed that I would watch every game during the October postseason. Doing so successfully meant I would have to watch them upon waking up so the spoilers of the outside world wouldn't find me until after I had seen the games. Everything was going well until the World Series. I was beginning to lag in my viewings and was venturing outside, once again yelling at anyone who even remotely looked like they shared an interest in baseball. Game 1 and 2 passed without any problems. As I was watching game 3 (2 days after the game) Lindsay hopped on the computer and remarked, "Whoa! don't go to cnn.com today." Simply warning me of this was the beginning of the end. I'm quite familiar with cnn.com and I know there only be one reason for the webpage to put baseball as their headline. (I'll quickly explain that only 4 games had been played and the series is a best of 7. Knowing already who won the first game would clearly tell you the outcome if the Series finished in four.) After hearing her warning I had a pretty good idea but I decided to erase it from my mind as I continued to sip on my morning cup of coffee and watch the game. About a half-hour later I heard the chime of an incoming email when, who do you think should email me?... Major League Baseball, kindly letting me know:


Another year, another blown surprise, another chance to get your Red Sox 2007 World Series Champs Gear. But I continue to live in Europe happily knowing that I am probably the only person whose baseball woes can be read by those who could care less.

Until next season...

Limoncello: Your Source for Vitamin C

If the world was a lemon, you could divide into two hemispheres: one sweet, one sour. Now speaking of the real world, there is some controversy over the origins of the lemon. Some say originating from China, others India, lemons are indisputably the best source of vitamin C and of course, a key component in the kitchen.

Thus, we speak about the Limoncello. History lessons aside, we’ll return to our two types of lemons. For Limoncello we only use the sweet varieties of lemons, most popularly characterized by Italy’s regions of Liguria and Campania. To be specific, we are speaking of the Cinque Terre in Liguria and the Amalfi Coast in Campania.

After sending Lindsay on a reconnaissance mission of sunbathing and obtaining native Ligurian lemons from Monterosso (see Cinque Terre), she retrieved 6 lemons whose soul purpose was to be my test candidates for my Limoncello experiment.

A quick tangent for ya, as you're quickly learning I like to do, I will mention that my inspiration for making this digestif is by an American chef I had the fortune of studying with in Florence. I can, also add my Blog site the list of things I have been inspired to do by his wife and him. Check out his blog site if you enjoy food and amazing photography: bootsintheoven.typepad.com.

With that said, there are many recipes for Limoncello, Limoncino, or whatever varieties are usually sold in your average Italian tourist shops. Most recipes involve minor changes in the process so each town's preparation can be called unique. Some even involve the use of lemon juice, which is fondly referred to as "schifo" by the Italians I have spoken with.

Typically Limoncello is prepared in two steps.
For 4-5 Liters of Limoncello (depending on desired alcohol content):
10 Large sweet lemons
2 Liters 90-95% Alcohol

This is all that is needed for the first step. For the infusion of the alcohol, the skins "scorza" must be carefully removed from the white part, pith, of the lemon. The bitter flavor of a lemon is mainly concentrated in the pith and juice. Being my first time attempting the artful carving of the "scorza", I was intensely focused not to take any parts of pith with my shavings. If this was a full time job, however, I don't think a little bit of pith would ruin the batch. Although as the old saying goes, "One bad pith for the whole damn batch". Maybe comedy and recipes don't blend...

After the lemons have been skinned, make sure the zest is thin enough to fit in the neck of a bottle (and thin enough to get out if you plan on reusing the bottle). Open your bottles of nail-polish remover and pour out a little for your fallen homies, so they don't overfill when the skins are placed inside. Ideally these bottles should be sealed air-tight, which can be done easily with a wine stopper, but isn't necessary if you have screw tops. Leave the bottles in a cool place to infuse with the flavor of the skins for anywhere from 1-2 weeks.

If you're like me waiting is the toughest part of this recipe. After your infusion period you are ready for Step 2, which I should add is open to interpretation depending on how sweet you desire your Limoncello to be. Another reason for me making it and not buying it was because traditionally it is too sweet for my liking. I will provide you with the quantities I used, however you can certainly add more sugar.

Step 2:
900g Sugar
2.5 Liters water

Pour the sugar and water into a clean pot. The reason I emphasize is because some pots that are used often can take on an essence of onions or other sensations that could ruin your Limoncello. Bring the water and sugar to a boil and then reduce the heat to a low flame. You should avoid losing much water to evaporation. While you are waiting for your sugar to dissolve, you can spend your time filtering your infused alcohol into clean bottles (bottles that won't break in the freezer), preferably 2/5 up the side of the bottle. When the sugar has dissolved remove from the stove-top and let it cool to room temperature.

At this point hopefully you are as excited as I was. In case you have any doubts over the color of your infused alcohol, don't worry. The magic is about to happen. Funnel the (now) syrup into the bottles and watch your clear, yellow-tinted infusion pop to the neon yellow color we are used to when sipping on Limoncello. The less sugar, the less cloudy your mixture will be and vice-versa. Seal the bottles and... more waiting. Return to that cool place your bottles have become familiar with and let rest for another month (one week is sufficient if you just can't resist).
Following these directions, you have made Limoncello with 40% alcohol (store-bought is usually 35%, so don't serve to your kids). The true test will take place in the freezer. If you have made a proper batch with enough alcohol to clean your kitchen counters, the Limoncello won't freeze, giving it's ideal serving temperature. Don't worry if it does freeze... Limoncello-pops...

After-thoughts:
Since it was a learning experience for me, I've read enough recipes in English and Italian to know that it's okay if you use a 50-50 mix of alcohol and vodka. Next time I will try this method to reduce the intense alcohol sensation of the Limoncello. Otherwise I think you will be very happy with what you have produced... not to mention, very popular within your circle of friends.