Another recipe from Tata Marlene. She’s such a good cook and so modest. She brought this to Pappy Jean-Pierre’s house in Neuilly the night before we were flying back home. It was the last thing I ate in Paris and one of the best. It’s very light but full of flavor. After a week of unrestrained gluttony it was a perfect ending.
There is plenty of room to play with this dish. You can change the herbs, the spice, or add some cheese amd change the sauce. One of these days I’ll try it with chopped mint, parsley, lemon zest and goat cheese. I’ll serve it with a whole milk yogurt based sauce with more herbs or a touch of spice.
One note about the carrots, you can use “short cut” carrots that have already been trimmed. You’ll get a more random pattern but that’s okay. You still need to blanched them.
TERRINE INGREDIENTS (Makes one loaf pan)
650 grams zucchini
1/2 cup chopped yellow onion
3 long, large carrots or 6 long, skinny carrots (They. Ed to run the length of your loaf pan).
Another of my friend Sandra’s Recipes. I helped her make this one the same weekend she made the Artichokes à la Barigoule in her stone house in Chartres. We picked the tarragon, parsley and zucchini in her garden and purchased the ricotta and feta at the farmers market.
You can improvise with the herbs although I suggest always using parsley and chives. Sandra used thyme, when she first made this for me and I do that version but often substitute tarragon or chervil when I can find it.
This is a vegetable soup on which my brother and I grew up. It was loved even by my father who hated vegetables. It is a soup that my own children devoured even when a bite of a vegetable would make them gag. It is a vegetable soup base that is pureed and becomes a thick base for chunks of veal, beef and pastina.
it wasn’t until my first trip to Florence that I realized this was a fairly typical Tuscan preparation and is called Zuppa Passato. I hope you enjoy it as ha e three generations of my family.
INGREDIENTS
1 lb carrots
1lb celery
1 lb onion
20 oz tomatoes, preferably San Mariano tomatoes DOP (that means they are certified San Marzano tomatoes)
I just returned from a two week trip to Sicily with Daniel. It was great to get away, just the two of us. We walked, we ate, we walked some more. We looked at a lot of Greek and Roman ruins, absorbed the incredible history of Sicily, a country who welcomed many different cultures and managed to keep bits and pieces of all of them. Then we ate some more.
The seafood in Sicily is incredible. There is an endless supply of swordfish, sea bass, scorpion fish and crustaceans. One of my favorite dishes is Spaghetti Alle vongole Veraci. Vongole Veraci are small Manila clams. They meat is more delicate and sweeter than other types of clams and the shells are small and beautifully colored with purple.
I hope you enjoy this dish as much as we did, sitting at a table by the sea.
Cauliflower purée can work as a lovely backdrop for other flavors, in this case grilled shrimp. It’s low in carbs and won’t get gummy like potatoes. I love the contrast of the tart, crisp pomegranate seeds against the creamy cauliflower and the salty shrimp. It’s an easy dish to put together and I make this dish frequently. You can make the cauliflower purée ahead of time as well as toast your nuts and de seed your pomegranate. I like to do the herbal purée within the hour I’m eating so it stays bright green.
INGREDIENTS
1.5 lb shelled, deveined raw shrimp
1/3 cup fresh pomegranate seeds
1/4 cup toasted pine nuts
2 tablespoons dried currants soaked in lemon juice
1/2 cup Italian flat leaf Parsley
2 tablespoons of tarragon leaves
8 cloves garlic
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Sea Salt and pepper
8 oz cauliflower rice (this is simply raw cauliflower that has been cut into rice sized pieces for convenience. You could certainly chop up a whole cauliflower)
The first time I ate Artichoke a La Barigoule I was in Chartres visiting a friend and it was she who made it for me.
Sandra was a wonderful cook but definitely “a pinch of this” and “a handful of that” kind of femme. I have acquired many recipes from her, for example, courgettes stuffed with cheese and Neapolitan style tomato sauce but it always entails watching her cook and rapidly writing everything down because Sandra has everything in her head and she moves fast.
Sadly, I didn’t watch Sandra prepare this dish. How was I to know that I should have been taking notes instead of chatting over a glass of wine? So, after my usual perusal of recipes on the internet and my memories of Sandra’s dish, I came up with a recipe I can share with you. It’s equally good the next day at room temperature. Please picture yourself in a house built of round stones, mortared into a two story cottage. You are seated at a rustic oak table, with your feet on a cool flagstone floor and an oak fire throwing heat into the room. It is September and the fields outside the window are golden. A subtle perfume enters the dining area from bouquets of lavender and thyme that Sandra has bundled and hung from the ceiling. Your plate of Artichoke Barigoule sits in a shallow bowl in front of you with some crusty bread and a glass of the wine you used to braise the artichokes.
Bon Appetit!
Julie
INGREDIENTS
12 oz small boiling potatoes, mixed color, (little red, Peruvian blues and fingerlings)
Two handfuls of short cut carrots or two large carrots
2 stalks of celery, diced small
3/4 lb cooked, uncured, unsmoked ham, (Fra Mani plain or rosemary, Virginia ham or country ham), cut about two inches thick.
My husband and I love to travel and one of our favorite places is Italy. One year we had the good fortune to stay with a friend of my mother in law in Volterra, famous for its alabaster. Ido graciously lent us his home and moved in with his daughter for the week.
Ido’s home was set in the Tuscan hill side amid peach and olive trees, grape vines and an assortment of vegetables. The house was rustic with terra-cotta colored plaster walls and tile floors. I distinctly remember chasing spiders out of the shower. All the beds in the house were cast iron with metal springs. The dining room table was composed of several planks of wood pegged and doweled together and it was surrounded by tippy little chairs with rush seats. However, we rarely ate in the dining room. There was a little patio on the East side of the house where we took our breakfast and in the evening we went to the patio on the West side of the house and had dinner, watching the sun set and eating Edo’s fresh peaches, soaked in his home made Chianti with a little sugar and lemon juice.
Every day Ido would drop buy bearing a small gift: some potatoes he’d just dug up, those amazing peaches with skin so thin and crisp and flesh so sweet and juicy that it was like biting into a Creme Brûlée with the crack of the sugar and then the unctuous silky cream. Ido made his own wine, olive oil and peach preserves. The peach preserves were lovely and had a distinctive flavor I had not tasted before. I sat him down one day and asked him to reveal the secret of the preserves. “Well”, he said. “I macerate the peaches in sugar and lemon juice overnight. Then I put everything in a big pot and boil it until it thickens. Unfortunately, I’m usually doing several things at the same time and it usually burns. But, I just scrape it up and put it in jars”. So, what was the secret of Ido’s peach preserves? He burnt it and what I was tasting was caramelized sugar.
Ido spoke a bit of French but often mixed it with Italian, creating new words and phrases. For example, he would often say” Va bien” in response to our query, “ How are you”. In Italian one would respond “ Va bene ” and in French one would respond “ Ca va bien”, thus Ido created the new phrase “ Va bien” which we still use with great affection when we speak of him and the enchanted week we spent in his home.
The recipe I’m going to give you is not from Ido, but it is from Lucca, not to far from Volterra and certainly in the style of Ido: excellent ingredients prepared simply. Dinner was served in the garden of a farmhouse which was up a winding rode in the hills of Tuscany. I remember two items from the meal. One was an appetizer of thinly sliced pieces of Lardo. The other a lovely carpaccio of beef. I had never seen carpaccio of beef done with anything other than raw meat so I was happy to see that this was cooked, rare but not mooing.
INGREDIENTS
1 lb Eye of round roasted rare and sliced paper thin
This is one of the simplest chickens I do and one of the best. It comes from the Cookbook ” The Scent of Orange Blossoms” authored by Kitty Morse and Danielle Mamane.
I first made this recipe when I was 13 years old for a project comparing Sephardic and Ashkenazy cooking. I have used it so often since then that the book opens up right to the recipe.
The first time I had this dish was with my son Daniel. We were on a week long eating and walking tour of NYC. Daniel and I had both researched restaurants and pastry shops but one of the best meals we had, which was not on our list, was at Vinateria in Harlem. I ordered an amazing whole grilled Branzino and the young daughter of our friends had meatballs on a bed of Polenta. She gave me a bite and I dreamt about them for the next two days: tender little meatballs the size of a walnut on a creamy, cheesey bed of polenta with a bright tomatoe sauce. We went back the night before we left and when I returned home I vowed to recreate them as best I could.
So, here is my version and I think it’s pretty close, but it will never replace the meal I had at this neighborhood bistro with my son, my childhood friend, her lovely husband and charming daughter.
Many of these components can be made ahead of time. The sauce can be made in advance and frozen. I make a lot of this sauce in August when the tomatoes are at their peak and I can use locally grown Roma tomatoes. You will not get the same result with supermarket tomatoes. The meatballs can be mixed and shaped a day ahead of time and then rolled in flour and fried the day you want to serve. The meatballs can also be mixed, shaped fried and placed in the tomato sauce a day or two ahead. I think they actually improve with a 24 hour rest in the sauce. I have also frozen the meatnalls cooked and in sauce. They defrost quite well.
This is a vegetable soup on which my brother and I grew up. It was loved even by my father who hated vegetables. It is a soup that my own children devoured even when a bite of a vegetable would make them gag. It is a vegetable soup base that is pureed and becomes a thick base for chunks of veal, beef and pastina.
One More Bite 
