What to bring home from a British grocery store

Posted on by Pat
Whenever I visit a British grocery store I scour the shelves for the most unusual items. But it's really the comfort foods that define a cuisine -- or at least taste like home. That's the lesson I learned from a lovely woman in Leeds who had lived and worked in Taiwan for 15 years. When I asked her what I might want to buy in the city's big Sainsbury grocery store, she immediately rattled off the items that she had most craved during her years abroad. At the end of every visit home, she would pack herself a big care package for her return trip to Taiwan. Here are the foods she couldn't do without: Heinz Tomato Soup. It's ultimate comfort food. Heinz Baked Beanz....Read More

Italy #6 – Grilled Montasio, prosciutto, and fig

Posted on by David
All good things must come to an end, and so too our cache of world-class cheese and ham from the Legends from Europe consortium. We had one 4-ounce piece of Montasio cheese remaining, along with four slices of prosciutto di Parma. And it was time for lunch. We found a jar of fig jam and some slices of whole wheat sandwich bread in the pantry. Drawing on inspiration closer to home (the fig, prosciutto, and Gorgonzola pizza from Todd English's original Olives, now Figs), we had the makings of a terrific grilled sandwich. If it were Italy and we had a panini press, it would have been a prosciutto and cheese panino and we might have skipped the fig jam. Whatever you want to call...Read More

Italy #5 — Parmigiano-Reggiano for dessert

Posted on by David
Leave it to the Italians to keep dessert simple. With its strong umami flavor (second only to Roquefort cheese in glutamate levels), Parmigiano-Reggiano makes everything around it taste better. Following the Italian example, we like to make a plate with a mix of nuts, dried fruit, and fresh fruit. This fall, for example, we paired chunks of a two-year-old buttery summer milk Parmigiano-Reggiano with lightly toasted walnuts, diced apple, and buttered slices of baguette. The extra special touch on each plate was a small cluster of raisins that I brought home from Donnafugata's vineyards on Pantelleria. The Zibbibo grape (Moscato di Alessandria) is one of the few things that grows on this windswept rock halfway between Sicily and Tunisia. (The other is capers.) The picked...Read More

Remembering Italy #4 — pasta with prosciutto & tomato

Posted on by David
The last time I was in San Daniele del Friuli, I was traveling with the restaurateurs of Gruppo Ristoratori Italiani (GRI) on one of their annual pilgrimages to Italy to research products, find new sources, and generally take inspiration from the regional products. Since we were a fairly large group, we booked a meal at Prosciutterie DOK dall' Ava (via Gemona 47, tel. 0432-940-280, www.dallava.com, open daily 10-10), one of the town's full-service restaurants with a prosciutto-oriented menu. It's a funny place, since it's outside the main village and near one of the prosciutto factories. It looks like a tourist trap, to be honest, and bus groups stop here. But the service and the food are both terrific and the prices, while not cheap, are...Read More

Remembering Italy #3 — asparagus & prosciutto risotto

Posted on by David
San Daniele del Friuli is a beautiful little community about 20 kilometers southwest of the big industrial city of Udine, located in the hill country where dry-aged hams are a tradition. Making prosciutto is the principal business of the town – perhaps followed by eating it. Even some of the flower planters in town are in the shape of pigs. Although the Friulani love their asparagus (see my posts from May 2009), the only time I've ever eaten asparagus risotto in Friuli, it was made with white asparagus. The Friulani version was silken and smooth and very pale. Oddly enough, I had often been served cold steamed asparagus wrapped in prosciutto, and Pat and I wondered why we'd never seen a risotto that combined the...Read More

Remembering Italy #2 with pear and prosciutto salad

Posted on by David
The Legends from Europe folks passed along a packet of prosciutto di Parma, the most familiar of the Italian raw hams seen in the U.S. and the one most imitated by American and South American producers. To qualify for the PDO label as prosciutto di Parma, the ham must come from pigs fed a special diet and raised in a defined north-central region of Italy. Additionally, the ham must be cured in the countryside near Parma in Emilia-Romagna. Much of the intense flavor comes from applying just enough salt to keep the ham “sweet” and then aging it at least 400 days. (The photo above shows whole hams hanging in a chilled aging room in Italy.) Parma prosciutto is the most intense of the Italian...Read More

Remembering Italy — first with Montasio cheese

Posted on by David
With the advent of short days and cold nights, menu planning in my house switches from summer vegetables to the heartier foods of winter. So when the Legends from Europe promotional team (legendsfromeurope.com)came through Boston last week and bequeathed me a small cache of Montasio, Grana Padano, and Parmigiano Reggiano cheeses and a few precious ounces each of San Daniele and Parma prosciuttos, I started recreating some of the great dishes I remember eating in northern Italy. I'm sharing them on the site as a series of four courses. All five products are registered under the Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) program – a guarantee of regional authenticity. Accept no substitutes! So-called “parmesans” from Wisconsin or Argentina may be tasty cheeses, but they are not...Read More

Tonging for wild oysters in Apalachicola Bay

Posted on by David
I met Kendall Schoelles around dawn at 14.2 miles west of the John Gorrie Memorial Bridge on Route 30A. (That's how they measure distances in Apalachicola, Florida.) We drove his pickup down a packed dirt path to a marshland dock, where we boarded Schoelles' shallow-draft oyster boat. We were headed for the oystering grant that's been in his family since the late 19th century. The Schoelles family grant used to be 1,100 acres; after government takings, it's down to 158. That's enough to keep Kendall and his brother harvesting enough oysters to make a living. Most Apalachicola oystermen, like those pictured above, have to make do with the public bars. Apalachicola Bay oysters are the pride of the Gulf of Mexico – plump, sweet, and...Read More

Tupelo honey hits Apalachicola’s sweet spot

Posted on by Pat and David
Honestly, the oysters were what first drew us to Apalachicola, the sleepy little town on the Florida panhandle where a barrier island at the mouth of the Apalachicola River creates perfect conditions for the tastiest bivalves on the Gulf Coast. (But more about that in our next post.) Pat wrote about some of the town's charming characters (and a delicious chocolate kumquat cake) for the Boston Globe. Here's the online version. One of those characters was John Lee (pictured above), whose shop Retsyo, Inc. (that’s ''oyster'' backwards) sells all manner of Apalachicola souvenirs – including the honey that bees make from the nectar of the white tupelo gum tree in the miasmal swamps of the Apalachicola River. According to Lee, this so-called ''champagne of honeys''...Read More

Cherry tomatoes and the Killer Tomato cocktail

Posted on by Pat and David
The last tomatoes hanging in the garden are assorted cherry types--some Sweet 100s, some Sungolds, and mostly some mongrel crosses that volunteered last spring. During our August visit to the Okanagan Valley, we had many good inspirations for using tomatoes (see the last three posts). But only mixologist Gerry Jobe at RauDZ Restaurant in Kelowna turned turned tomatoes into a terrific mixed drink. RauDZ (a great locavore restaurant that's a collaboration between Rod Butters and Audrey Surrao) focuses on local-grown food whenever possible, which means that Kelowna tomato guru Milan Djordjevich of Stoney Paradise Farm brings in boxes and boxes of Sungold tomatoes. When chef Butters challenged Jobe to make an Okanagan Bloody Mary, he created the Killer Tomato. It's fairly simple. Here are the...Read More