The Beauty of Marrow

This is a Milanese dish my mother has been preparing in the winter my whole life and is the most decadent, body warming, comfort food on the planet.  Mac ‘n’ cheese be gone, this stuff is life saving.  Bone marrow is one of those foods to which many people have an adverse reaction.  It is in fact incredibly rich and full of protein.  It’s a consistency some have trouble negotiating — more a gelatinous gravy that is beautiful spread across a piece of bread or scooped out with a spoon.  The meat surrounding the bone is the veal shank and we all know the cuter the animal the better tasting the dish.  This is no exception.  When properly cooked, osso buco falls off the bone without the aid of a knife.  This particular recipe is borrowed from Marcella Hazan, author of 6 cookbooks on Italian cooking.

Osso buco alla milanese: enough for 6

1 big can of whole peeled tomatoes

1 cup finely chopped yellow onion

2/3 cup finely chopped carrot

2/3 cup finely chopped celery

1/4 cup unsalted butter

1 teaspoon finely chopped garlic

2 strips lemon peel

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 shanks of veal (you can find these precut in most grocery stores, get one cut for each person)

3/4 cup all-purpose flour, spread on a plate or on waxed paper

1 cup dry white wine

1.5 cups homemade meat broth or canned beef broth

1.5 cups canned italian tomatoes coarsely chopped w/their juice

1/4 teaspoon dried thyme

4 leaves fresh basil (optional)

2 bay leaves

2 or 3 sprigs parsley

Freshly ground pepper

Salt to taste

The Business:

Heat in skillet olive oil and garlic over medium heat.

The veal shanks should be washed and patted dry, then lightly roll them in flour.  Place in skillet to brown on all sides.  Set aside when finished.

In large stock pot heat over medium olive oil, butter and garlic.  Throw in onions, carrot, celery to cook down — this is known in italian as a soffritto.  Next the veal shanks, tomatoes and their juice, beef broth, lemon peel.  Add the rest of the spices and let simmer covered for two hours.  Stir every 10 minutes or so.  This is a dish best the day after, let cool on stove stop then cover with tin foil and place in fridge.  Next day heat up at low simmer then serve in pasta dish, fettunta is a great side.

Sempre

It’s one of my all time favorite Italian words, right up there with carina (precious, cute).  It literally translates as forever or always.  I’ve heard and used it in the sense of good food and drink, when exclaiming about something yummy.  For example: “Mi piace questa birra!” another will say “Oh, semmmmpre.”

I fell across another delicious idea worthy of the praise filled word sempre.  Shopping around my local grocery store in Milan, Pam, I was looking for an alternative to the usual caprese starter for my next dinner party.  The decision was very easy:  I had pears, prosciutto and a chunk of parmesan cheese the size of my face from the original factory.  No way could I polish it off by myself in the next month and a half so I shared it.

And speaking of beer, this dish goes unbelievably well with Birrificio Lambrate’s idea of a belgian strong ale, Lambrate Bricòla.  Oof.  This stuff is so delicious and a great take on the usually too sweet for me belgian strong ale.  A smokey first sip baited my interest for further sips that grew into a dark cherry and light honey flavor.  You feel supremely decadent munching on the smokey, salty cured prosciutto with the sweet and tangy cheese/pear combination all while washing it back with this gem.

This one is so simple:  fresh prosciutto crudo wrapped around a thin slice of pear and long chunk of parmesan cheese.  Serve on a plate and watch it disappear.  I served this again at a student art exhibition and had friends come simply because they heard I was in charge of the food and specifically was serving up this dish.  I will always be in love with the simple uses of a pig leg.

Shiny Happy Bottles

I’m an Art History major, which doesn’t come close to making me an expert in art but it’s any easy way of saying I’ve always got my eyes peeled for and focused on all things visually stimulating.  It means I also like to figure out what and who is behind the art.  One of my favorite facets of seeking out and enjoying craft beer is the label.  There is something so satisfying when you find a beer that pleases all 5 senses.  That’s when I fall in love with a beer.  I fell in love with 2 beer shops in Milano, A Tutta Birra and Roybeer and came away with some great beers and great labels.  My first trip to A Tutta Birra, I almost broke my arms carrying home my bags of beer.  I stashed a few of my babies in the fridge and others in the closet where there was more room.  I showed them to anyone who would listen to me gush about my new finds.

Here are a few of my fav-o-rite things:

Brouwerij de Molen: simple, bold, interesting, commanding, DROP DEAD SEXY (and that’s just the label!)

Three Floyds:  my heart is heavy and sad that they stopped distributing to Ohio but it makes the pleasure of getting or even seeing one that much more rewarding.  A beer named Fantabulous Resplendence needs no intro.

Le Baladin:  a birreria in Italy that has some very curvaceous bottles with some funky and some somber labels.  Take for instance their celebrated Baladin Xyauyù barley wine.

I could wax rhapsodic on these images for pages but would rather inspire others to keep an eye out for the beer or beers that makes all 5 senses very happy.  Cheers.

UPDATE:  Thanks to fellow ratebeerian OldMrCrow, I’ve been introduced to The Dissident.  Dude’s right, this label is great.  And it brings up another point, why is the only label artist I’ve heard of Ralph Steadman?  Does that even count!?!  He’d been famous long before Flying Dog Brewery.  Where is the talk of the people behind the labels?  This is usually our first encounter with a beer, visual — the label or the tap.  For something so primary and basic where’s the attention?

The Martha Way + Beer

While I adamantly loathe the era of the celebrity chef and next Food Network stars, I actually turn to Martha Stewart occasionally.  I learned this behavior from a boss of mine when I was working as a special-events intern at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland.  Whenever I was stuck on decisions for little things such as napkin holders, she told me that she often went to the MS website to get an idea and then mold it to the MOCA aesthetic.

Together with my roommate in Milan, we threw many dinner parties so I turned to the site for some fresh ideas towards the end of our time in Italy.  The recipe I found and followed without elaboration was a simple summer treat that fit perfectly with our Italian life: strawberries, balsamic vinegar, fresh ground black pepper.

Spicy Strawberries:

as many strawberries as you want to eat, cut into quarters and piled high on a plate

drizzle balsamic vinegar over top without drowning the fruit

fresh ground pepper over top

*I like to serve it in the middle of the table with forks for everyone to eat off the communal plate*

This plate also lead me to drizzling balsamic on fresh orange slices for a party.  Within minutes the plate was empty.

Now then, beer.  What goes best with the tangy zip of balsamic, the sweetness of strawberries and the spice of pepper?  My thought is a nice porter, perhaps a stout:  Smuttynose Robust Porter or Jolly Pumpkin Madrugada Obscura.  You get the bitterness of roasted coffee notes with a mellow mouthfeel to play off the bite of the vinegar and fruit, everybody wins!

Pseudo feijoada

As a way of saving money and still eating well in Milan on a student budget, I began to create one-pot stews enough to last me a week.  I am a slim woman but with daily stops at the local gelateria, pasta out the ears and panini for lunch I managed to put on 10 lbs.  So not only was this a economical choice but also a healthier choice.  My first try at a stew was feijoada — my absolute favorite Brazilian dish — which taught me the basics of making a bean and meat stew while allowing me to adapt and experiment with the recipe.  My second foray into the stew world was a twist on traditional feijoada using lentils instead of black beans.  Lentils are one of those superfoods with which you just can’t go wrong and such a stew as this is comfort food to the max.

LENTIL STEW:

(Shopping List)

1 bag green lentils (at home, rinse and drain, pick out bad beans)

1 large can whole, peeled tomatoes

2-4 bay leaves

Srichacha chili sauce

Ground cumin or cumin seeds

Chorizo or spicy italian sausage

Andouille Sausage

2 cloves of garlic

1 large red onion

2 shallots

The Business:

Dice shallots, garlic and onion.

Warm large stock pot on stove at medium heat with a enough olive oil to coat the bottom of the pan.

Toss in shallots, garlic and onion and saute until golden brown.

Next  throw in the bag of lentils, minus the plastic of course! and the can of tomatoes with their sauce.  Stir and keep an eye on the water level: the lentils will soak up the water from the tomatoes and soften and the rest will cook off.

While all that’s going on, in a skillet brown up the Andouille sausage (you can either cut them into 1/4 inch circles before or after you cook them).  If you want, you can take the chorizo or spicy italian sausage and slip it out of its casing and brown in the pan as you would ground beef for tacos or slice it with the casing on the same as the andouille.  The idea behind just browning the meat is that you don’t want to cook it completely because after it’s been browned you will throw it into the stew pot and let the heat of the water/stew cook the meat the rest of the way while it soaks up all the flavors.  Once the meat is in the stock pot, toss in your bay leaves and cumin, as much Srichacha (or Defcon for that heat) as you can handle, lots of ground pepper.  This is mostly a waiting game once you’ve got it all together, usually an hour, so don’t be in a rush.  This is one of those dishes that is always better the next day.

End goal:  lentils that are al dente and not crunchy, a stew that is thick and not watery or soupy.  Eat hearty and drink up.  I would recommend a really tart gueuze or a saison with this to take some of that heat off the tongue and clear your palate for another helping, such as Cantillon Gueuze or Saison Dupont (incredibly versatile beer with food).

*Browning meat is like giving it a sun tan – the skin touching the pan heat will turn a different color than the insides but you don’t want the whole piece to be that color. So when one side gets a touch of that sun tan, flip it and let the other side have a chance.  This is a very quick process, we’re not talking minutes in the pan.*

The Food Pushers

II. So I’ve been reading two books this summer that my mother recommended, A Mediterranean Feast by Clifford A. Wright and The Rituals of Dinner by Margaret Visser.  And it lead me to think about how we view food, and food coupled with drink.  Myself, I am a slave to pastas of every variety and the blue and yellow of a DeCecco box are enough to make me swoon, but what about everybody else?  My 4 months abroad in Italy gave me a chance to make some lifelong friends and alter some of my perceptions while strengthening others.  Everyone had different tastes, many of which I found amusing.  My dearest roommate, a Persian pescatarian who didn’t cook, relied heavily on Buitoni pre-made pizzas, gelato from Chocolat (I am happily, equally as guilty) EXY — the local vegetarian take-away store — and hard boiled eggs.

She is not a fan of cooking but she is a lover of food and would eat anything I put down in front of her never shying away, even when I brought out the Srichacha chili sauce.  Her pescatarian ways also challenged me to produce meatless meals and remold my brain from its strong convictions that a meal isn’t a meal without some meat.  It was a running joke when she would catch me hunched over my computer for hours looking up recipes for our next dinner party or sniffing out the new Italian microbreweries/brewpubs around Milan.  There were still others in our friend group who would order plain cheese pizzas, something I’ve never understood, and a Becks. However, when sat at our kitchen table they too ate what was in front of them and enjoyed it.

Back in the states, I had an illuminating conversation with a dear friend of mine who is also an avid cook and a lover of good beer.  We had a discussion about how we were raised when it came to food and drink.  Her family rule was no matter what you were served you were expected to eat.  In fact, she and her siblings would become the catalyst for other families’ picky children to try new foods when faced with the attention-creating prowess of their eating habits.  This too was how I was raised and we both benefitted from parents who could cook, who were adventurous in travel and diet and with the money to do so.  Is the blame or the responsibility for “good eating” shouldered solely by the parents as Willy Wonka would say ?  Are we faced with a combination of good parenting and personal choice or are some people naturally inclined towards, as Visser would say, neophilia – the pursuit of the new?

We also talked about the idea of the “food pusher”, or one who forces food upon one’s guests consent given or not.  She places herself in the  more aggressive streak of food pushers whereas I find myself in a more insidious position:  if I invite people to dinner, I place all the food on the table equally in front of everyone and food in the middle to be eaten by hand.  The arrangement uses unseen peer pressure as the trigger for the others who lag behind.  For example, if everyone is eating fettunta and you are the only one not, you feel kind of stupid and HUNGRY when everyone else is making those lovely yummy sounds and wolfing down the few pieces left.

From a personal stand point, I have never been afraid to try new foods and actively crave the seeking and eating of these new morsels.  A pivotal book in my high school years, was Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential: the one line of advice I took away from the book was to never order something I’d had before.  Even in my baby diary my mother wrote (besides, “she cries when is told No.”) that my new favorite food was mulligatawny soup.  I have the same craving when it comes to craft and microbrews.  The emotions I feel when confronted by a wall of pasta are much the same when I step into a beer store for the very first time.  I’ve been compared to a kid in a candy store when I shop for beer: in the beginning, I had no control and could spend $100 on beer, oops!  My drive for the new usually means I try a beer and move on to the next, so that drinking a beer I’ve already had feels counterproductive — like I’m wasting my time on a beer I know, when I should be plowing through to discovering unknown breweries.  However, this urge too I have learned to control and recognize the benefits of coming back to some beer to dig a bit deeper and create a better understanding of it.

Filthy Meat Lust

There are certain things that seriously inspire food lust in me.  Take for example raw or cooked cuts of meat or even whole fresh animals.  I suppose you could say that this lust borders on the macabre and this certainly came to fruition during my semester abroad in Milan, Italy and in my travels that took me to the Mercat de la Boquiera in Barcelona.

The first thing I saw walking into the market was a veritable outpouring of colors and ripe fruits.

These polished babies were some of the most beautiful on display at La Boquiera.

Gooseneck Barnacles!

Milan has a grocery store in the historic centro of the city, Peck, that makes Dean&Deluca look like a pile of bricks.  I saw legs of prosciutto that would make you weep they were so beautiful.

I can’t remember what these snails are stuffed with but just look at the smoked mozzarella ring.

But even this immaculate store could not compare to what I found in Barcelona.  La Boquiera was a market made of dreams for me:  here I saw whole piglets, smiling!, piles of fruit, candies, spices and the fish market was incredible — visceral in smell, sight and sound, with tough women hacking heads off fish, shucking oysters and drenched in blood.  Heaven.

Ne vuoi ancora?

This one is a serious stumble and it all went down as I was hunting for food — for a student art exhibition I was in charge of running and making the aperativo — in my local grocery store on Via Olona in Milan.

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The recipe popped into my head as I was going through my favorite section of produce and fruit.

RAG SALAD: radish/avocado/grape

4 large avocados diced into bite size chunks

1 large bunch of red (preferably red globe) grapes cut into halves or quarters

1 medium bunch of radishes thinly sliced so there are beautiful circles of them

Layer all this up in a large bowl and toss with a light coating of olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and pepper over top.  The smooth, sweet mellow of the avocado goes really nicely with the crunch and sweetness of the grapes and the spicy crunch of the radishes.  Plus it just looks really beautiful and summery heaped on a nice white platter.

I came back with this recipe to Ohio after my semester abroad in Milan, Italy and served it as one of the dishes at our annual potluck Memorial Day party and every guest came up to me asking how to make it and could I please make more.  You’ll get serious points for deliciousness, easy presentation and innovation — people like eating something that looks and tastes great and they feel better about themselves for trying something different.  You won’t have to ask “Ne vuoi ancora?” — Would you like some more?  Treat them with some prosecco (Italian champagne) or a nice juicy hopped up IIPA like: Bells Hopslam or Buckeye Aquarius.