The Italian Corner

A Comeback: Lentil Curry Risotto

The Italian Corner is back, at least for today, with one fusion recipe.

One day I was thinking, curry has this rich aromatic flavour and Indians - and Japanese too for that matter - like to eat it with rice.

And I like curry and also risotto, the Italian way to rice dishes. Lentils too go well with curry and with rice. So, why not combine the two in a lentil curry risotto?

And that's what I did.

Ingredients (they weren't measured accurately).

- 50 to 60 g per person of risotto rice
- 25 to 30 g per person of split (yellow) lentils

For 2 persons:

- 2 garlic clove
- 1 cube of Japanese curry mix (or 1 tbsp of curry paste)
- Fresh ginger: 2 cm piece of root
- Curry powder: ad lib
- Coriander seed powder: ad lib
- Dry curry leaves: ad lib
- Chilli powder: ad lib
- Hot vegetable stock (or salted water): roughly half a liter
- Olive oil
- Half a glass of dry white wine, or lager, or ang chiu*, or dry mead, or anything boozy and not sweet
- Butter (optional)
- Cream cheese: 1 heaping tbsp
- Fresh coriander leaves (optional)
- Splash of lime juice (optional)

No special equipment is required; all it takes for good risotto is a thick-bottom pot of sufficient capacity and a wooden spoon.

Chop thinly garlic and ginger, cover the bottom of a pot with olive oil or oil/butter mix, then sautee the ginger and garlic until soft; add curry powder, coriander seed powder, dry curry leaves and chilly powder and and keep cooking until garlic and ginger starts to brown. Curry spices need to be toasted lightly up for best taste, but be careful not to burn them.

At that point, add the rice and lentils and toast for a couple of minutes in the hot spiced oil, mixing well. Add the half a glass of booze (you may want to take the pot off the fire for this; it should not be too hot), mix well and let the liquid dry up. If you wanna, for obscure reasons, keep this completely alcohol-free, you can use half a glass of a tangy fruit juice; orange should work.

Add enough hot stock to cover the rice; chop up the curry cube and throw it into the pot and add a good pinch of salt too. Mix well but gently to dissolve the curry; let simmer until the liquid has dried up then add more stock and mix.

Keep simmering, adding stock and gently mixing until rice grains are well cooked and soft. Parboiled rice is not so organically-correct but much safer because it's almost impossible to overcook it. Some people like risotto dry, other prefer it soupy like a porridge. The choice is yours on this.

Turn off the fire, add a nice tablespoon of butter if you're so inclined, but don't skip the cream cheese. Mix vigorously to release the rice's starch and make a nice cream, adjust seasoning, rest a couple of minutes and serve.
This risotto can be topped with fresh coriander leaves and the idea of a splash of lime juice sounds good too, but I didn't try it. The result was creamy, rich, spicy, a bit aggressive on the tongue but so satisfying.

If cooked this way, lentils may still be underdone at the end. That was not a problem for me, but if you like lentils nice and soft, you can blanch them first and add to the curry risotto halfway through cooking.

*Chinese rice wine used for cooking

Look At My Chillies 2

Here are the Scotch Bonnet instead on the same day:

But now I realize I didn't take a picture of the best plant, potted and more than 15 cm tall: that one might start branching and thus flowring soon. The other two potted plants sit on my windowsill, in full sunlight from late morning till sunset and the position seems to be optimal for their fast growth - as fast as the naturally slow-growing Scotch Bonnet can do.
The other saplings, including the one not shown, have spent some time in the greenhouse, and the difference in growth was important. Now, the two on my window are gaining ground. The majority of the first batch of sprouts survived, but did not begin to grow in earnest until May when the temperature rose enough.

Look At My Chillies 1

First, a parade of Bulgarian Carrot plants:

(I told Blogger to align all the pics to the left - see how well it worked)In part for reasons unknown, and in part because of my carelessness, the first batch of Bulgarian Carrot sprouts died, and also a second batch did not perform so well. Finally, a third batch survived and grew; this is the situation at June 29. The tallest plant is around 15 cm (the smallest is 2 cm). Those out in the garden are growing fast, not so much for the one in the pot (next to a cherry tomato bush). Sunlight seems to be the main factor, even if my balcony is bright. Maybe I should get rid of the screen even if it works as wind barrier. Some of those plants have been grown in a small greenhouse for a while, but there is no important difference of performance between the two situations.

One Rainy Day - A Short Story

Luca left work barely five minutes after the beginning of the lunch break – it was always like that, a few minutes more here and there. But the environment was nice enough, his colleagues were pleasant to be around and the boss wasn’t much of a ballbuster.

He opened the door of his second-hand Rav4 and settled on the seat with a gigantic yawn – so much that his eyes almost watered and he had to rub them. What made him so horrible sleepy each day was the sheer boredom of his job: writing, correcting and printing quality manuals from the drafts various firms sent. And quality manuals are the most boring genre out there, even when they’re written well – but many of them were not; they looked like the authors made their best efforts to be obscure and confuse. But saying “Yessir!” even in front of the most egregious crap was an important part of his job. However his caffeine intake had reached alarming proportions.

Luca didn’t bother to let the diesel engine warm up before leaving the parking space: with nearly 200 000 km on it, there was little left to wear out. He yawned again before turning the wipers on, and realized with a bit of horror that he swerved and was about to climb onto the sidewalk when he regained control.
“Fuck it” he muttered – at least, in that industrial estate there wasn’t much pedestrian traffic; he then pressed the power button on the car stereo and the sound of pounding drum’n’bass filled the car.

Work wasn’t the only source of boredom and ennui for Luca: his meteoropathy played a big role too. A few cloudy days in the mid of summer and he got the blues; now it was mid-November and the Lowland was throwing its worst weather at him: one month passed with no glimpse of the sun except for brief visions of a pale, cold, grey disk above the fog; it had rained or drizzled the whole time during the last week, and now the temperature was dropping; snow was expected too.

All that would have been bearable, tho, if Irina was there and two could spend warm nights together, and bollocks to the weather. She looked exactly like you can imagine: tallish, blonde, blue-eyed, fit and toned and foxy. Unsurprisingly, she came from Estonia and she spoke correctly Estonian, Russian, Polish, German, and of course English and was working on perfecting her Italian. She worked as freelance translator; Luca met her when she got a contract for the translation into Polish of some manuals his company was dealing with. The immediately liked each other, but Luca had to court her a while before succeeding – but hey, his first job was salesman, and a successful one at that: being convincing was one of his strong points.

But Irina was not there: she left for Bruxelles the Sunday before to work as a translator at some EU conference or get-together of bureaucrats and she’d be back on the next Saturday. Because she’d get paid 1000 Euro – on top of free accommodation and largely free food and drinks - just for one week, she said.

So it was Thursday and Luca was bored and tired and down, and driving under the lead-grey sky along a dismal road in an industrial estate towards a canteen where to have a dismal lunch before going back for another three hours of the most boring job he could conceive – because that morning he had to dash and couldn’t make himself a sandwich. When in the distance, he saw a kind of familiar figure walking at the side of the road, under a large red umbrella.

He slowed down and recognized that tacky, boorish multicoloured leather jacket: not many people dared to walk around with a Corona beer towel sewn on the back like a patch; that fad was already crass in the ‘90s. Luca had no doubt about the identity of the man: he had to be the jock nicknamed The Marpion for his habit of having a crack onto every single girl he met – and despite his being rude and crass and uncultured, he often succeeded. Of course his habit attracted the hatred of a number of men, but The Marpion’s considerable physical size and lack of repulsion for violence kept him relatively safe. Relatively, because some blokes, either through brute force or intelligence managed to get back at him. The only odd circumstance was that he was just walking around that industrial estate instead of zooming around in his tackily tuned-up VW Golf.

How did Luca know him? Because before meeting Irina he had been in a relationship with Marzia, a nice but naïve local girl. They hung around the same old establishments where also The Marpion prowled – their town after all isn’t that big. Eventually, the hunter chose Marzia as his prey and moved in for the catch; after a few weeks Luca realized something was amiss and one night confronted The Marpion. The ensuing fight ended more or less with a draw, but the poor girl was so shocked and disturbed that she finally decided to take a journalism internship in Milano and was barely seen again since.

Luca went through a serious down and a couple more brushed with an enraged The Marpion; finally they got to hang around in different circles and ignore each other; Luca got his new job with a better, more stable pay (but he didn’t expect the boredom) and moved to Parma. Still, Luca hadn’t completely given up on the idea of getting some sort of revenge: not only he liked Marzia and their break-up did hurt, but it was a matter of principle; The Marpion had taken Luca’s woman and couldn’t get away with it.

And, that rainy day looked like a great occasion for revenge – there was little traffic, no other pedestrians on the road, only factories and warehouses around.

So Luca pushed down on the gas pedal letting speed build up; The Marpion was getting close any second but he still did not suspect anything and kept walking on. Luca was seeing all that like a slow-motion.

Sixty kilometres per hour, and Luca kept the pedal down; he decided to swerve at the last second not to give his target time to react.

Over sixty, reaching seventy kilometres per hour; The Marpion was only a few meters ahead and Luca steered to the right, into the enormous puddle of dark lurid water at the roadside. The prey realized what was going on too late: he turned with a horrified expression on his face, but couldn’t move, frozen in shock. Luca instead was grinning and kept the pedal down, even wondering if the puddle would cause loss of control. But at that point, it didn’t really matter.

Luca corrected the trajectory and observed in amusement the wave, almost a miniature tsunami, of water, mud and sand that the front-right wide tyre of his Rav4 raised from the puddle. It rose as high as The Marpion’s chest and hit him dead-on, drenching his sweater and jeans and shoes. The car itself passed less than half a meter from the target, and that was Luca wanted since he saw him at the side of the road: to give his opponent a nasty soak in lurid water; surely he did not intend to run him over.

From the rain-covered wing mirror, he thought he saw The Marpion cussing and cursing and making rude gestures, but Luca had gotten a bit of his revenge and happily speeded onwards: the rest of that day was going to be good.

Parma, 17 June 2008

Stuffed Peppers

I'm sure there are already many stuffed peppers recipes around, but this one I really like. It is inspired by the stuffing apparently used for horn chillies in Indonesia. There will be no exact doses here, because I did not record them.

- Bell peppers (red or yellow)
- Mincemeat (I used a mix of beef and pork)
- Potatoes (roughly twice the weight of meat, when cooked)
- Parsley
- Olive oil
- Spices

Peel the potatoes, cut them in inch-sized pieces, boil the pieces in slightly salted water and finally mash them.

Wash and dry the peppers, cut them in half (lengthwise) and get rid of the seeds; place the halves in an oiled or buttered baking tray.

Mix the mincemeat with the mashed potatoes, add chopped parsley and your favourite spices, salt and just a splash of olive oil. Add a little more salt in the pepper halves, pour in the stuffing, smooth the surface and if you have it cover with grated Parmigiano cheese (or other cheese of your choice). Stuffing in excess can be shaped in bite-sized balls and baked or fried.

Baking peppers takes some time; in order to reduce it you may pre-cook the halves in a microwave for a few minutes. In any case, I baked my peppers for about 45 mins at 180 °C in the mid of the oven, then another half a hour at 200 °C to give the stuffing a bit of crust and to nicely brown the underside of the pepper.

Garlic & Chilli Pasta - Illustrated!

150 g of pasta (spaghetti or bavette)
3 garlic cloves
half scotch bonnet chile

For one person!

Chop chilli & garlic and fry them in plenty of extra virgin olive oil until garlic becomes golden. Turn off the heat.

Pour the pasta in a large pot of salted boiling water and cook as per instructions on the box - 8 min in my case.

You may prepare a jug of ice-cold shandy for mouth relief in the meantime

Drain the pasta and sautee it thoroughly with the garlic and chilli.

Serve, top with grated parmigiano cheese and enjoy!

Wild Boar Ragu

Ragù - often known as bolognaise sauce - is the typical pasta sauce of the northern Italian tradition, particularly of the city of Bologna and surroundings.

The traditional version is made from beef, but basically any kind of meat can be used: lamb, goose, duck, chicken, turkey - and mixed meats. The following recipe will work fine with any of the above. The meat of old wild boars becomes hard and fibrous, so young specimen of about 60 kg are better.

Ragù is a sauce that takes time to make. Don't start if you cannot follow through; quick versions of the sauce aren't really worth it.

First, hunt and kill a boar... joking, but that would be a great start.

Ingredients:
- 350 g of boar meat, on the bone.
- 1 medium/small onion
- 1 medium carrot
- 1 celery stick
- Tomato paste or sieved tomatoes
- extra virgin olive oil
- Butter
- 1 glass of red wine (optional)

First, cut meat away from the bones and use those to make some stock: pour 1 liter of cold water in a pot, add the bones; another carrot; a celery stick; a hefty pinch of salt; a crushed garlic clove, skin on; and 2 crumpled bay leaves. Bring the whole thing to the boil and simmer covered for 45 min - 1 h. At the end, filter th stock through a colander (here we usually eat the vegs used for stock, later). If you think this is too laborious, normal beef stock will do.

Cut the meat into 1 cm cubes (if you happen to have a grinder handy, don't be shy with it...) and set it aside; chop the onion, carrot and celery - some people like them coarser, some finer. The indicated tool here is a Mezaluna.

Take a saucepan - best of all, a china one - and cover the bottom with oil and a heaping teaspoon of butter. Place on a medium fire and add into the saucepan chopped vegetables and meat, then fry them for some 15 min - until the meat is nicely browned. This phase is important to let meat and vegs exchange flavours; if everything is done properly, the aroma will already be mouth-watering.

Add a couple cups of warm stock and one heaping tablespoon of tomato paste (about 1 cup of sieved tomatoes): ragù must not be pale, but rich and dark in colour. At this point, add also the red wine if you like it.

Proper simmering is of paramount importance for ragù. It must simmer on a low fire for at least a couple of hours; keep an eye of it to avoid the sauce burning or sticking to the pan: add more stock or just warm water if required (and probably it will be). For that special touch, cook the sauce about 90 min, let it rest for a few hours and cook for another half to one hour.

Ragù is excellent with pasta and egg pasta (with plenty of grated Parmigiano on top); it is the sauce that goes into lasagna an you can eat it even on a slice of toasted bread.