positivity journal 2022:11

there's a lot of turkey tangents coming up

nov 1: my new glasses are shaquille o’neal’s line, which probably says something about the size of my head 
nov 2: trainer thinks he slyly raised the weights i work out at, but let me tell you, i noticed
nov 3: work slack: “hey jim, there's a pumpkin pie downstairs with your name on it.” so literal
nov 4: lol’d at weird al movie. spoiler alert sad he died
nov 5: ponch garcia found me a deal on my too expensive chili crisp

nov 6: salad i made for dinner had oranges in it, but before i sliced it, had the foresight to strip the peel for the cocktail i would be making later 
nov 7: took small detour on walk to work and voted without breaking stride 
nov 8: i told nora i was making tgiving dinner for a mutual friend and asked if she wanted to make a pie to include. she asked if she could make 3. it's always nice when you can see you’ve found your very specific band of weirdos
nov 9: no one notices the contrast of white on white
nov 10: discussed iron replenishment after blood donation with melanie over steak kebabs (that sentence can be read in different ways but i gave up trying to fix it; i don’t think any of them are dirty)

nov 11: my new rain jacket actually works
nov 12: “i see horses running wild, i wish / i could feel like that for just a minute”
nov 13: it was 65 when i went to bed, 55 when i woke up, and it just kept going down all day
nov 14: strategizing thanksgiving duties with jeremy while finishing editing the thanksgiving food section is multitasking in perfect synergy
nov 15: i think it’s funny when mcdonald’s suggests it's going to retire the mcrib, because the only time i ever go to mcdonald’s is when they have the mcrib

nov 16: because i’m tall, not only could i tell that supermarket had my oat milk, but i could also reach the second one when i saw the top of the first one was crushed 
nov 17: went to see patti smith talk about her new book, and she played a few songs at the end; the first was “grateful”
nov 18: when the pandemic started, i was reading “fleishman is in trouble” and now it’s a tv series on hulu
nov 19: “you made coke flavored nocino!”
nov 20: went outside and noticed a big spot in the clear sky. pointed my phone at it and learned it was jupiter

nov 21: thanksgiving prep is like the only time i feel like i know what i’m doing 
nov 22: labeled something to go in freezer and dated it 11/22. meant it as month/year, then thought, whoa
nov 23: podcast drops w tammy and jenna so i get to relive a little bit of italy 
nov 24: hybrid thanksgiving went well
nov 25: i walked 7.5 miles without stopping for a break and then came across this quote: “the way you walk the path is as important as where it leads,” which is good, because i walked in a big circle

nov 26: accomplished nothing all day but kinda feel like i was due for one of those
nov 27: discussed dogs in businesses with lara over coffee while admiring dogs in coffee shop 
nov 28: i love leftovers
nov 29: so. many. cookies. well, cookie recipes, anyway
nov 30: reasonably satisfied with my spotify wrapped. it didn’t have anything completely nonsensical on it 

positivity journal 2022:3

the hilarious thing is this file got deleted as i tried to cut and paste and there was a good 5 minutes where i thought this list was all over. then i frantically hit cmd-z about a hundred times and it popped back up.

anyway, lots about pierogi, a redux on lasagna and gratuitous: 

mar 1: shaved off pandemic beard 2. the good news is i look 10 years younger. the bad news is that’s still pretty old

mar 2: i scrolled through “raunchy comedies” list on netflix, but i’d seen them all already 

mar 3: woke up sick, but the good part is i spent all day on the couch with najah napping on me

mar 4: vince rinehart appreciation day

mar 5: “why would they make defcon-1 worse than defcon-5?”

 

mar 6: made lots of pierogi

mar 7: love watching food i made get the stylist treatment, then photographed for print (see above; 📸: scott suchman; styling: lisa cherkasky)

mar 8: decided to internalize and embrace the commenter that said i should get a pulitzer and ignore the one that called me a tone-deaf oaf

mar 9: big dog at intersection makes a VERY unconvincing lunge at approaching dog, does not even strain leash, backs up and sits at his person’s feet, looks up, and she gives him a treat. i assume dog’s name was oscar

mar 10: “is this the age of the thunder and rage? can you feel the ground move ’round your feet?”

mar 11: office salad

mar 12: played “downeaster alexa” on vinyl and i had hoped it would drive the alexa nuts, but it didn’t seem to care

mar 13: found a trove of najah’s favorite food, which has been hard to get since the pandemic started and i suspect discontinued. bought about 100 cans

mar 14: the optimist newsletter is my favorite at work, so imagine my reaction when it linked my pierogi story

mar 15: “what did we do to deserve pasta?”

 

 

mar 16: i love catching mistakes, particularly my own

mar 17: accidentally watched the st patrick’s day episode of “after party” on st patrick’s day

mar 18: peanut butter pie from becky, then jeremy broke out a bottle of port that was 12 years old when we bought it on vacation 12 years ago

mar 19: made more lasagna

mar 20: delivered more lasagna

mar 21: “success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. it must ensue”

mar 22: detoured to the cherry blossoms on the way to work

mar 23: was really proud of the mushroom bechamel i made for aforementioned lasagne, then while eating leftovers i realized i basically made cream of mushroom soup. which also explains why i loved it

mar 24: found out filter for stove vent was $125 to replace. so obviously i tore apart the old one and rebuilt it with about $10 worth of stuff. possibly better

mar 25: “run and tell all of the angels, this could take all night.” i’m glad i got to see foo fighters with taylor hawkins

mar 26: mixing up beets and horseradish, temporarily went blind

mar 27: attached to couch pretty much all day

mar 28: bob woodward walking around the office is a good sign something is up

mar 29: saw the term “inactive wear” and can officially put a label to my personal fashion style

mar 30: i’ve started a database of restaurants i can recommend for various tastes and occasions so i can do it faster when asked

mar 31: listened to a reporter on the phone talking to someone about Space X. except i kept hearing her say “space sex,” specifically that she didn’t know much about it. i am 12 and now i want to read an entirely different story

positivity journal 2021:11

 oh, cool, 2021 is almost over. anyway, here's this:

nov 1: billy joel released an old recording of one of my favorite songs and it might be my favorite version 

nov 2: as soon as i finished reading richard marx’ memoir, nikki sixx’ arrived

nov 3: i always try to eat the brown candy corn first so it doesn’t spoil the others

nov 4: “roy orbison sangin fer the lonely …”

nov 5: pad thai is so underrated 

 

 

  

nov 6: most of my goals met by noon

nov 7: “on certain sundays in november, when the weather bothers me …”

nov 8: sauerkraut on a veggie burger 

nov 9: had to test a recipe that featured leftover turkey, so had to roast some turkey to be left over

nov 10: there was leftover turkey leftover after test, so it became the star of my salad for dinner 

nov 11: while i was waiting in the parking lot at the vet, a woman pushing a shopping cart down the street stopped to tell me she hoped my kitty would be ok

nov 12: “it’s hard to hold a candle in the cold november rain”

nov 13: i love it when neighborhood dogs start running to me from half a block away 

nov 14: waitress: “who dresses you?” i greatly preferred this to the normal “aren’t you cold?”

nov 15: when i sign on to work, a note pops up that says “digital experience enabled” and while i appreciate the enthusiasm it feels like it’s trying too hard

 

nov 16: “you were written in the stars that we are swimming in”

nov 17: kathy wenner. that's all. just kathy wenner

nov 18: i saw the word “severalteen" used unironically on the interwebs and i was immediately enraged but also loved it and might adopt it

nov 19: technically, my thanksgiving work marathon basically ended just as i was about to start cooking

nov 20: butchering birds

nov 21: i finished the huge bottle of soy sauce i bought over the summer, which tells me i’m cooking a lot, and a lot of the right stuff

nov 22: was looking at our old house on redfin, and it has doubled in value since we sold it, possibly because redfin listing has a photo with najah in it (top)

nov 23: before i got out of bed, got a text asking for a lunch recommendation in savannah and i later learned it worked out pretty well

nov 24: got into a fight on the internet. it was with the son of billy joel’s former manager. i definitely won

nov 25: ate thanksgiving while food was still hot, which is not the way i’ve become accustomed to doing it

nov 26: stuffing leftovers

nov 27: not a huge beatles fan nor of the song “get back,” but maybe i’m amazed at watching actual video of the moment it was conceived

nov 28: i do love pumpkin pie

nov 29: i was not kidding about stuffing leftovers

nov 30: boosted

black pepper tagliatelle

This was an easy one: When mixing up the pasta, you just add a copious amount of black pepper. I'm a fan of black pepper, so I was totally on board.

Other than that, it was just about sautéing some parsnips and pancetta. 

OK, so I cured my own pancetta. But not specifically for this dish. It was just in the fridge. Its a benefit of being obsessive.

Boil the pasta, toss with the pancetta and parsnips, and it's all over.

I found this recipe on Cooking Channel's website. It doesn't call for the black pepper in the basic pasta. Weird. I'll tell you a secret: Add 2 tablespoons fresh ground black pepper to the eggs in the pasta part of the recipe. That may be the way it all goes down in the book.

Also, fresh pasta dishes? We have reached the point where I preface posts about them by saying, "This was an easy one." Uh huh. That's right.

Up next: Warm lamb's tongue salad.

marinated baccala; black and white strichetti

I will admit here: I had this chunk of salt cod sitting in my refrigerator for more than a year. In fact, I had had it so long that more than one refrigerator was involved. When I started, I saw how much I needed for the three salt cod dishes in the book, and I just bought that much.

One of the dishes, the Baccala Mezzalune, got made pretty quick. But I didn't love that dish, so my urgency to finish the other two waned. The always seemed like dishes I could knock out whenever, then whenever started to slip to almost never.

Then the cod managed to slip to the back of the fridge. And you know how that goes. Then it got moved, which, frankly, is sort of insane.

Luckily, the salting is a preservation technique, so it could wait forever. Then one day, I was cleaning out the fridge, saw the white chuck of dried fish, and decided to check this one off the list. 

The Marinated Baccala was a breeze. After soaking the cod for a couple of days, it marinates in some oil.

It goes with some baby fennel, which reminds me that one of the reasons I held off making this dishes in the first place was that I wanted to grow the fennel myself. And as I recall, I tried. It never went well. So I bought fennel. Shrug. 

The next night I made the Black and White Strichetti, which involved making a sauce of the cod and tossing it in big bowtie pasta, half of which is colored with squid ink. 

It was funny looking at our dishes after Pam and I were done. She had picked through and mostly eaten the white pasta, I had picked through and mostly eaten the black pasta. Mainly, I wanted to see if I could discern a difference. Maybe a little. Maybe. Not really, though. It just looks neat.

Both dishes were much better than than my first attempt at working with it. And I am happy to report there is no longer any salt cod in my refrigerator.

Up next: black pepper tagliatelle

veal breast (with bonus brussels sprouts)

I have two butchers that I deal with with some degree of regularity. And while I felt confident that both of them could get me a veal breast, I knew that I shouldn't just walk in to either and expect to walk out with one, so i called the one that's closer to where I live. It was a Friday morning, and I wanted to make this dish on Sunday.

"We can get it, but you have to order it in advance. We put in our order for the weekend on Thursday nights,"

Doh. That was close.

So I called Stachowski's Market in Georgetown. Friends have had luck with specialty cuts there, and I've had some of it, and it's always fairly amazing.

"We can get it, but we have to order it," guy on the phone tells me. "Hold on. Let me go look to make sure."

(Taps fingers on the desk for about five minutes.)

"I was wrong. We have one. It's about 10 pounds and I can't break it. That OK?"

Yup.

At this point, I realized that I didn't know how much that piece of meat was going to cost. But I once watched Jeremy buy a piece of meat there that cost more than either of my first two cars, so I was prepared to be shocked.

 
My anxiety lasted until I went to pick it up the next day. When I walked in and asked for it, I was immediately tagged as "that guy who wanted the veal breast." That's fine. So that guy I talked to on the phone, which is how I immediately tagged him, went to the walk-in and brought back the vacuum-sealed piece of meat. It was gorgeous. It looked just like a brisket, which is what it would have grown up to be, but the meat was snowy white.

I took the bag to the counter, and there was some discussion among the employees about how much the veal breast cost per pound. The numbers swung rather wildly, and each number set off calculations in my head. But when it was all said and done, the total price came out to be less than half the price of either of my first two cars, so I consider it a win.

In conversation, it came up that I barely needed half of this for the recipe I was doing. So he offered to split it and just sell me what I needed, which made me scratch my head, since he pretty much told me on the phone that that wouldn't happen. But by then, I wasn't afraid of the price, and figured I'd find a second dish to do with the rest of the meat.

The dish itself was easy. Just rolls the veal roast up with pancetta then cook it low and slow with a ton of onions.

So many onions. The stack started like this:

And ended up like this:

I've been looking forward to this dish, because it looks so delicious in the photo in the book. A nice piece of rolled meat, with a ton of onions in a red sauce.

Mine was not red, at all. I looked again at the recipe, and there is nothing in it that would make it red. So I'm not sure what to think about that. But it was delicious. It tasted a lot like French onion soup, with a big hunk of meat in it.

I like French onion soup. And big hunks of meat. So all good.

Made the Brussels sprouts with pancetta to go along with it. My reasoning was that the pancetta in the sprouts would go well with the pancetta in the veal. My secondary reasoning was that something with pancetta in it always goes with anything else, whether the other thing has pancetta or no. So it seemed destined for success.

Up next: hey, is that salt cod in the fridge?

duck brasaola

I was really looking forward to this dish.

I like duck. A lot. I like cured meats. A lot. I like curing meats. A lot. Even though it sort of scares me. Maybe because it scares me?

Anyway, the photo of this dish in the book is gorgeous. The meat looks all jewel-toned and beautiful. It looks like salmon, really. So it was with great anticipation that I made a spice rub, bathed a duck breast, tied it up and hung it in the refrigerator. All I had to do was wait three weeks, and I would be having jewel-toned duck.

I looked at the duck breast after about a week, then after two weeks, and I was worried. It looked like it was turning black. I sort of shrugged and accepted I couldn't know what it looked like inside yet. Jewel-toned, probably.

When I took it out of the fridge, it looked like this: 

Not optimistic.

I made the beans, and the red onion jam that go with it. Then I sliced the duck.

There were really no jewel tones. It sort of looked like raw duck in the middle. I tasted it. It tasted a little like nicely spiced raw duck. With an unfortunate dry, black crust.

We'll file this one under "learning experience."

The beans and the red onion jam were delicious. Actually, so was the spice rub. I used all those with other dishes.

Up next: An unmitigated success story.

brasato al barolo with pumpkin orzo

Brasato al Barolo was actually the first dish that I cooked out of this book. I made it in 2006, when I was cooking for a big birthday party for my friend Lawrence. About 100 people were going to be there. Lawrence is Italian, by the grace of God, and I knew a Mario recipe would go over well. I was looking for something I could use to stuff into small peppers, to make some sort of take on jalapeño poppers. I saw this recipe, and decided to make it, shred the meat, mix it with the sauce, stuff it into the mini peppers (some went into jalapeños, some into sweet peppers that were the same size as jalapeño), then roast them.

That worked out pretty well. And as many photos as I have from that party, there are none of that dish. Weird. But here is a gratuitous photo from that party, in which the bresato stuffed peppers are nowhere to be seen:

When I went to cook it that time, I really knew nothing about wine. Unlike now, when I know enough to know that I don't know very much, but know the right questions to ask the right people. In fact, cooking this dish back then was probably how I learned that.

The dish called for a wine called Barolo, and I presumed that must be pretty important, because there it was, right there in the name of the dish. I went to Mazarro's in St. Petersburg, went to the wine rack, and saw two kinds of Barolo. One was $45 and the other was $65. Given that my budget for the whole party was about $300, this was a problem. So I went to the wine guy at the store, and told him what I was making. It's been six years now, so I don't know if I'm quoting him correctly, but suffice to say he said something like, "No, you don't want to cook with that." He implied he would consider not even selling me a bottle of Barolo if he thought I was going to cook with it.

The thing was, I did want to cook with it. I just knew that I couldn't rationally afford to. So he pointed me to a bottle of Something Or Other 2001, which was a very good year for Something Or Other, and told me that it had a lot of the same characteristics of the Barolo, but would not be a sin to dump into a braise and put in the oven for 2 hours. He seemed adamant.

And that time, it turned out great.

So this time, I never even considered looking for a bottle of Barolo. I used a bottle of pinot noir I had at hand, because, as I learned by reading the book Heat, that's what they use to braise the short ribs at Babbo in the first place. So I was achieving and added level of authenticity by not following the recipe. Woo-hoo!

When I made this dish in 2006, I'm sure I used whatever tiny short rib remnants I was able to find at Publix, and I was probably pretty grateful to find them at all. But this time, I had every intention of getting that long rib bone with the shrunken braised meat cube on the middle. So I went down to Eastern Market, where they had a bunch of the tiny short rib remnants in the case. I got the attention of one of the butchers behind the counter and asked if they had any that were uncut.

He smiled and said he'd be right back.

He brought out a container full of 10- to 12-inch long ribs. They really have no business even being called short ribs. The ones in the case were probably these cut into four pieces.

"Want me to cut these in half?" he asked.

"I don't want you to cut those at all," I said.

He smiled. "Ohhhhhh, you want to cook them right."

Yes. Yes. That is my plan.

He seemed very pleased. He pointed down at the little bitty quartered short, short ribs in the case.

"Most people tell me they want those cut again. They say those are too big," he said, with the clear subtext that most people are total morons.

"Those?" I asked, incredulously. "Those are tiny."

"I know!"

And that's how I made a butcher friend.

This dish was never, ever going to be bad. I love braising meat for a long time and getting the fall-apart chunk of meat and the amazing sauce that happens while I pretty much sit around and watch football. It's the best kind of magic.

The pumpkin orzo is the contorni that is prescribed in the book to go with this, and it was good. (I multitasked this dish: I made the pumpkin puree for the orzo at the same time that I made the filling for the pumpkin lune. That way, I killed fewer pumpkins)

Usually I'm cooking for two, so often when a recipe serves 4 or more, I halve it. Not this one. The only thing better than braised short ribs are leftover braised short ribs. I shredded the ribs we didn't eat, and they will soon be a sandwich, or on top of pasta.

Or maybe stuff some little peppers.

(Here is the recipe, if you have some short ribs to braise.)

Up next: duck brasaola

Catching up

It's not always easy to find drama in ingredient acquisition. Because sometimes getting the ingredient is so easy. And if the ingredient was easy to get, maybe there was some issue in the cooking. But maybe there wasn't. So here are a few pretty pictures of dishes that didn't require any significant sourcing and caused no headaches:

Penne and zucca (top): I got Mario's branded penne and a butternut squash from the farmer's market. I'm a fan of the toasted breadcrumbs on top of pasta.

Pumpkin lune: This pasta gets garnished with a shaved amaretti cookie. I was going to make this dish last December when I made all the cookies in the book, but then I got busy and moved. So I threw a couple in the freezer. They moved with me. Then I thought, "Wait, these have been in the freezer for like a year. I have to make new ones." Then I pulled them out of the freezer and tasted one. They were still perfect. So I didn't make new ones.

 Walnut-date delize: In the book, these look like cool little pucks. Mine looked like muffins. I suspect I used too much batter. I started to cut the tops off, but that seemed to be mangling the cakes. So I turned them upside-down on the plate. Leftovers were breakfast for the next several days.

 
Goat cheese tortelloni: I was committed to make this dish one Sunday afternoon. On Saturday, when I was making the tortelloni, I went to grab the fennel pollen out of the cabinet. I knew it was there. But I couldn't find it. The headnote in the recipe suggests fennel pollen is now, or was in 2002, ubiquitous. The only time I've ever found it was at a spice market in Napa, Calif., and it cost like $20 and ounce. I bought some fraction of an ounce. I've used it a couple times, and the more I think about it, the more I think I finished it off at some point, thinking I might as well. And apparently forgetting I needed it for this dish. I called around and couldn't find it readily available in the D.C. area anywhere. The recipe suggests ground fennel seed as an alternative. That did fine. And I have some of the tortelloni leftover in the freezer. If I see fennel pollen anywhere, I can remake it in a heartbeat.

Gorgonzola with cherries: Get good gorgonzola, get good cherries. Mix the cheese with nuts and mint to make little truffles. Cook the cherries with some sugar. Serve. Succeed.

Up next: Bresato al Barolo

two cardoons

One of the first dishes I made in this project was a gratin of cardoons. It seemed rather exotic to me at the time. (Two years ago? Really?) I had never had a cardoon at that point, and was excited to try it. It looked like a big head of celery, and word was that it tasted like artichoke, with which it shares lineage in some way.

The cool thing was that it was a fairly exotic ingredient that I had pretty easy access to. There was a little mom-and-pop vegetable stand in Clearwater that I frequented that I knew carried it. When I went to buy cardoons to make that dish, they only had one head of them, and it was sort of grayish-brown. Deep down, I suspected it should be green, but I was excited at that point. So I bought it and made the dish. It came out fine, but didn't really blow me away. I always sort of wondered if it was because I needed better cardoons.

Fast-forward to the present. I'm not in Florida anymore, and I can't get to the little produce stand in Clearwater. Since moving to D.C., I've found that the farmers markets and specialty stores are far superior to what we had in Florida. But I've also found that that's a good thing, because the typical, everyday supermarkets here kind of suck. One of the criteria that we used in picking our apartment was it's proximity to a Safeway, which is right across the street. But I don't love it. The store brands I've had there are terrible and the state of the meat case makes me sad. Produce is OK, and I'll buy national-brand staples. So, basically it's good in a pinch, but makes me wish I had a Publix.

The closest thing we have to a Publix is Wegman's, which actually might be better than Publix. But the closest one is in Landover, Md., 10 miles away. And here, 10 miles is a long ways away. But sometimes I go out there when I want to remember what a decent supermarket is like, and on one such trip, I found cardoons. This was a big deal, because I knew they were in season, but I didn't know where or when I might find them, and I knew I had two dishes left that called for them.

The first dish is perciatelli with cardoons, garlic and pecorino. The great thing was that the initial cooking of the cardoon was the same for each dish. (Actually, it was also the same in the gratin. If I had been smart, I just would have done all three dishes at the same time back then.)

While I was at Wegman's, I went over to the pasta aisle to pick up some perciatelli. Perciatelli is a long, thin, tubular pasta which looks like this … 

... and which Wegman's doesn't carry (just as we were starting to get along so well). But it had bucatini, which is exactly the same thing until someone tells me differently. So I bought it.

Then I felt guilty. What if it is different, and i just totally messed up the dish? Not really, but I went to A. Litteri, an Italian specialty store in the warehouse district of D.C. They had perciatelli. Controversy averted.

The other dish with cardoons was a contorni of cardoons and lemon. Here's what that looked like:

The dominant flavor here was the preserved lemon. We had it as a side dish with a steak. Good stuff. 

Up next: Catching up

ceci bruschetta

 My friend Ronnie says he likes the short posts. Merry Christmas.
 
 I toyed with the idea of blowing up this dish a little. Not going to say how, because I still may and it'll be a future post. But it's a bruschetta. Toss some chickpeas and olives with some other stuff and put it on bread. I could make it sound complicated in some way. I guess I could have grown, dried and rehydrated the chickpeas. But I didn't. I opened a can. Like the recipe says.

Boom. Done.

Up next: braised short ribs

big eye tuna al tarocco

This was the first dish where I was at a decided disadvantage not being in Florida.

I ran through the ingredient list on this one, and was like, yeah, I want tuna for dinner tonight. Let's do this thing.

So I went to BlackSalt and picked up a beautiful hunk of tuna. Then I went to get everything else.

Shiitake. Done. Radicchio. In there. Mizuna. Got it.

Blood orange. Blood orange? Where's the blood orange?

Turns out that here, some citrus is seasonal. That never really happened in Florida.

So now I had a fairly expensive chunk of fish and most of the parts I needed to do the dish, but no blood orange.

Worse: The name of the dish is Big Eye Tuna al Tarocco. Guess what Tarocco is?

Blood orange.

So, I called everywhere, and was told I would not be likely to find a blood orange anywhere in D.C. for several months. So I bought an orange orange.

I thought I'd get smart and soak orange segments in Aperol, a digestif that has a bitter-citrus flavor and the color of blood orange.

That didn't really work.

So, technically, what I have here is Big Eye Tuna al Arancio. And for now, that's fine. 

Up next: ceci bruschetta

swordfish involtini

I was itching to cook something. It had been awhile. What was in the book that I was sort of eager to make, that had almost no chance of being bad and wouldn't require a ton of running around for ingredients.

Swordfish involtini.

Having a well-stocked kitchen, the only thing i needed to buy other than the fish was some olives. And that was only because it called for gaeta olives. I almost always have olives on hand, but not necessarily gaeta. I'm still not sure whether what I got were gaeta, but they were small, and they were olives. Done.

Involtini are just thin slices of fish that get rolled up with some bread crumbs. Then they get cooked in tomato sauce. (In the photo, it looks like I could've used more tomato sauce, but it seemed fine.)

About 20 minutes, and dinner's ready.

What's next?

Up next: big-eye tuna

ziti with cauliflower

In prepping to cook through this book, I looked at all the dishes to assess which I might not be crazy about eating.

The dishes in the book include cow brain, stomach lining (internal and external), jellyfish, thymus glands, pig heads, raw lamb, lamb tongues and several species of liver.

Cool with all of that.

I was not looking forward to the cauliflower.

I hate cauliflower.

I try to reserve hating any foodstuff. But there is really nothing worse than cauliflower to me. From the first time I had it, so many years ago, it's something I have trouble swallowing. I tend to chew it and chew it and chew it until i realize the only reason I'm still chewing it is because I'm actually afraid to swallow it. And by then, it's even worse than when it started. And it started out bad. I try to avoid hyperbole when it comes to food, but I honestly have no idea how people eat that stuff.

The good news is, I love pasta. And I'm always willing to have my mind changed.

This dish called for dried pasta, so I didn't have to make it, which is good, because I don't have an extruder. (Though, if I had an extra $200 sitting around, I would be getting this.) So when I went to buy the pasta, I saw this on the shelf:

 I suspect that will work. (Yes, it was rigatoni, not ziti. They didn't have MB brand ziti. I made the call to go with rigatoni. And I'd do it again.)

Also, I saw cauliflower that was orange, and I saw cauliflower that was purple. Those are two of my favorite colors. If I'm unlikely to like it anyway, maybe getting a different color will help?

"It tastes exactly the same," the guy at the farmer's market tells me.

"Shut up and let me dream," I say to the guy at the farmer's market. In my head. Out loud, I just said, "OK, thanks, I'll take purple."

The dish couldn't be easier. Cook pasta. Saute cauliflower. Add some mint and chili peppers. Toss the pasta with the cauliflower. And the purple cauliflower looked really nice, I thought. And I love mint and chili peppers, so maybe …

No.

I tried. I really, really tried. But I just kept chewing, and feeling the sulfur waft up through my olfactory lobe, and remembering all of the trauma of being forced to eat cauliflower with cheese sauce when I was 8. I could spare you the details, but no, you know what you signed up for when you opened this post: There was gag reflex.

Eventually, I started picking through and just eating the pasta, which was really good, especially when it had mint and chili and no cauliflower on it. Avoiding the cauliflower was really pretty easy, it turns out, because, well, it was purple. It stood out against the pasta. So in the end, the purple totally came through for me.  

Up next: swordfish involtini

acorn squash sformato

In Florida, when I was trying to grow a bunch of stuff for this project, I tried to grow acorn squash for this dish. I got a couple of squashes that we roughly the size of acorns, but that was it.

So I got to D.C., and the climate here is more amenable to the possibility of growing such things. But I didn't get them started in time, and kicked myself a bit for it.

"Hey, I got some acorn squash in my CSA this week, and I have no idea what to do with it," Jeremy told me. "You want it?"

And that is the story about how I acquired pristine, organic, local acorn squash for this dish.

This dish was pretty reminiscent of the Sweet Pea Flan, a dish for which I did grow the marquee ingredient, against the best wishes of Mother Nature. I probably liked the pea version better. It tasted definitively of peas, where as this one more-or-less hinted at acorn squash. It was good. It was just hard not to make the comparison. 

Up next: ziti with cauliflower

spaghettini with spicy artichokes and lobster

It's not that this was a particularly easy one, nor that it didn't involve any terribly interesting process.

It involved dispatching a lobster in my kitchen, which I did before here.

It involved the basic tomato sauce, which I did before here.

It involved making the spicy artichokes, one of my favorite things now, which I did before here.

It involved mostly normal ingredients, though the pasta shape was a LITTLE outside the norm. Sort of somewhere between spaghetti and angel hair. I could have used either of those. But I got the right thing when I was at Eataly. 

In the end, it was lobster, artichokes and pasta. There was really no place for it to go wrong. 

Up next: acorn squash sformato

plum and bay leaf soup

It was clear early on that this dish was going to be a search for marzemino dolce.

I could tell from the recipe that it was a wine. I could tell by the name it was sweet.

And I could tell from the reaction in every wine store where I asked for it that it might barely actually exist.

When the Babbo cookbook calls for a rare or otherwise hard to get ingredient, it tends to make general suggestions pointing you to an ingredient that you, as a mere mortal, can attain. In the recipe for for this soup, it doesn't so much suggest an alternative as hint to the family you're looking for.

"3/4 cup of marzemino dolce, a slightly sweet sparkling red dessert wine."

Sounds like I'd like it. So I was looking forward to it just to try the wine.

"You're not going to find that in a store," said my personal sommelier, Jeremy. "Not even one that sells wine. You might find it on the Internet."

So little faith.

I started this project almost two years ago now. In that time, every time I am in a store that sells wine, I look for marzemino dolce. Because every other ingredient in this recipe is easy, I figured once I found the wine, I could just knock it out.

Almost two years. No marzemino dolce. Most places had no idea what I was talking about. Some said they were unaware that there was such a thing as a dolce, implying that they were familiar with marzemino in its unsweet state. It is also possible they were lying.

So, on a recent trip, I decided to stop messing around. I was in Port Chester, N.Y., about to have lunch at Tarry Lodge, a restaurant in the Batali-Bastianich empire. Attached to the restaurant is a market and wine shop, which Pam quickly dubbed Little Eataly. I went into the wine shop and asked about marzemino dolce.

Morgan, who was working there that day, clearly knew exactly what marzemino dolce was, and knew exactly what the inventory was.

"We don't have that. I don't think we can get it."

Cool. It was almost like closure. I asked Morgan -- who will also feature prominently in a future post, if i ever actually cook the venison leg -- if he could suggest an alternative.

"I know it's sweet, and I know its sparkling. but I've never had it, so I'm not really sure what might be like it."

It's always refreshing when a wine guy has the confidence to say he doesn't know. It actually made me trust everything he said more.

We started talking about alternatives, but we had a trip into New York on our agenda, so I figured I could hold out until then. Surely, if anyone was going to have marzemino dolce, it would be Eataly.

"No, we don't have that," I was told by the guy at Eataly. It was at that moment that I officially gave up. On the shelf was a bottle of Rosa Regale, a sweet sparkling red wine that I happen to know I like a lot, because I have been instrumental in emptying many bottles of it.

"Would that work?" I asked the guy at Eataly.

"Well, that's a brachetto, not a marzemino," he said, as if two sweet sparkling red wines could be really, really different. He didn't say no, but he definitely wasn't saying yes.

I pulled rank, and decided the answer was yes.

The rest of the recipe basically calls for plums and bay leaf to be cooked in a whole lot of simple syrup. Frankly, I wasn't sure how much flavor could possibly be imparted.

It was intense. There was a ton of plum flavor, and the bay just made it deeper. I was afraid the syrup was going to make it all too sweet, but didn't happen. The other flavors sort of pole-vaulted off the sweetness. Really good.

There was a sorbetto of vanilla yogurt that I managed to mess up. I ran it through my ice cream machine, but it never froze. So I kind of just hoped that the trip through the machine helped aerate it a little, and put it in the freezer. It tasted fine, but the texture was more like ice milk. And the recipe made a ton of sorbetto. I had cut the recipe in half, seeing that each serving was supposed to get three little scoops. I estimate I could have gotten 400 little scoops out of the halved recipe.

The book suggests pairing this with a moscato d'asti, which would probably be pretty good. But I still had most of a bottle of Rosa Regale sitting there, and it was open.

And then it was empty. Just like all the others. 

Up next: spaghettini with spicy artichokes and lobster