Mary Ann Esposito's Ciao Italia™

Mr. or Mrs. Eggplant?

There are those who have discussed ad nauseaum which version of eggplant is better, the male or the female.  Some claim that male eggplant is less bitter than the female because they have fewer seeds. A male eggplant, according to eggplant experts, has a round, small flowered end while the female is less round and smooth. 

I have no interest in whether eggplant is male or female, but on your next purchase of this wonderful vegetable, bring your magnifying glass and see if you can pick out the difference. 

I grow eggplant without regard to gender in my garden and have always found that if you pick it young, it will not be bitter.  So much for the gender theory.  Eggplant straight out of the garden is firm and shiny, not shirveled looking or spongy to the touch, which is often the case when choosing it in the supermarket.  

My favorite way to use eggplant is to stuff them or use them to make marinated eggplant in olive oil or classic caponata. To make stuffed eggplant, get a medium size one (male or female, your choice) and cut it into 8 length wise, 1/4 inch thick slices and sauté them very quickly in a little olive oil, just until they are wilted looking and start taking on a little brown color. 

Then let them cool while you make up your favorite meatball mixture. I use a pound of ground beef, but pork or veal is good too. Divide and spread the mixture on each slice of eggplant.  Roll up  each slice on itself to encase the meat. Place them in a casserole and pour 2 cups of tomato sauce over them. Add some grated cheese over the top. Cover with foil and bake in a 350F preheated oven for 30-35 minutes. Delicious! 

And while you are enjoying them, you can ponder the gender question!

How to Order Breakfast in Italy

Italians never eat breakfast as we know it in America with cereal, eggs, toast, and bacon. No, Italians wake up to the clank of cups and whooshes of steam as the head to the nearest bar before work to order un cappuccino e un cornetto (a cappuccino and a buttery pastry croissant).

A bar in Italy is not where you mosey up and order a beer or martini and chit-chat with the stranger next to you.

An Italian bar is refinement with a take-your-time attitude. If you travel to Italy, the bar is one of the first things you will see in the airport. Shiny counter tops with glass mirrors and baristas smartly dressed in starchy uniforms take your oder and pump out cups of cappuccini faster than you can say, "Un cappuccino per favore."

Cappuccino starts out as espresso, but is brewed in a larger cup, then steamed milk that looks like a fluffy white cloud is poured on top.

Espresso is strong coffee that is brewed in an espresso machine in which hot water is forced through the coffee at very high pressure to extract as much flavor as possible. Espresso is served in small demitasse cups.

There are some rules, though, that you should know before attempting to order espresso or cappuccino:

1. Pay first, order second. Tell the cashier what you want and pay for it. She or he hands you a receipt that you take to the bar and give to your server. Then you'll get your order.

2. Never order a cappuccino after 11:00 a.m. That will immediately alert everyone at the bar that you are a tourist! After 11:00 a.m., espresso is the drink of choice among Italians.

3. Please don't call it "ex-presso"! It is espresso (pronounced s-press-o).

4. Don't ask for lemon peel to go with your espresso! You will just get a blank stare.

Soup's On!

How did fall sneak up on us so suddenly? 

I don’t know where you live, but here in New England the trees are starting to change colors already! That means I start thinking about soup.  Since it’s one of the easiet things to make, I don’t for the life of me understand why anyone would buy sodium loaded canned soup!  

One of the best incentves for making your own soup is to clean out your refrigerator. Those limp carrots and celery? Toss thiem into a soup pot with an onion. Got frozen peas? They can go in, too. How about potatoes? Sure! Herbs like parsley, basil, and thyme are great in soup. Chopped up skinned tomatoes will give flavor and added color, and chicken wings will provide protein and bulk. 

Once all these things are in the soup pot, cover the ingredients with water, and bring to a boll. Then lower the heat to simmer and let eveything cook gently for a couple of hours. Strain out the liquid, return it to the pot, and cut up the carrrots, potatoes and celery into bite size pieces. Remove the meat from the wings and put it in the pot. Season with salt and pepper and a squeeze of lemon juice and you’ve got soup. 

For a beef-based soup use beef shank in place of the chicken wings. 

Other soup recipes can be found on the Ciao Italia web site under soups. Two of my favorites are tomato bread soup and Tuscan onion soup. Add a hunk of bread and life is good.

Iron Pan

Let's be honest. What you cook with is just as important as the ingredients you choose to cook. But, that doesn't mean you need a department store full of pots and pans to get the job done effectively.

Case in point: the old, tried and true black cast iron pan. You know, the one your grandmother always cooked in. There are so many non-cooking uses for it, too. My grandmother used it as a weight when she wanted to squeeze the moisture out of eggplant, and her chicken cutlets were paper-thin after she pounded them with her pan.

I have had my pan for as long as I have been married. It was passed down to me from my mother, who got it from her mother. It is well seasoned and works like a charm.

One of my favorite ways to use it is on the grill. No more scraping incinerated food off the grill grate. It works very well with fish.

Here's what I do when I want to cook scallops, shrimp, or a delicate piece of halibut or cod:

Place a well seasoned, empty cast iron pan on the grill grate and get that grill smoking to 600 degrees F. Meanwhile, season your fish as you like it. I usually do a rub of lemon zest, dill or tarragon, salt and pepper.

Place the fish in the pan and watch it cook, taking on great color in no time with no sticking whatsoever. A little melted butter poured over the top makes each bite perfection.

Another favorite way to use the pan is making stove top lasagne. Since the pan retains even heat, lasagne cooks in about 20 minutes.

Want a pizza with a crusty bottom? Turn the pan upside down and place in your oven or on the grill and heat to 450 degrees F. Make individual sized pizzas to fit the diameter of the pan. Place the dough first on parchment paper, add your toppings, and with a wide spatula, transfer the pizza to the top of the pan. As soon as the edges start to puff up, carefully yank the parchment paper out and allow the pizza to cook until the bottom is crusty.

Now that is something to marvel at!

Ciao Italia Blog Exclusive: The Apple of My Pie

Up the hill near my vegetable garden stands an ornery, old apple tree, the only one I own. 

For years before I bought the property, it had been neglected until one day I stooped to pick up a withered apple near its trunk. Curiosity got the best of me, so I cut off the “bad spots,” and took a bite. I was pleasantly surprised. Here was a crisp, tart,  and juicy apple with a slight taste of  honey - just like the ones I had growing up. It looked like a Yellow Delicious but it had red and orange stripes on the skin. I decided to have it analyzed. It turned out to be an old German Gravenstein variety.  

I got to work: pruned it, sprayed it, prayed over it, and hoped it would forgive the years of neglect and shower us with appreciative love in the form of a bushel of apples. No such luck. But it does provide a profusion of perfumed white flowered branches each spring and a shady spot to sit under on a hot summer day. So when I want to make an apple pie, I buy my favorites from the  local farmers market.

Today we can find a dizzying array of apples: from apples for munching to apples for baking. I am partial to Cortland and Northern Spy both of which are good for pies, apple cakes, and apple sauce. Apples for baking need to be firm, not soft, so they hold up. For pie use Northern Spy mixed with Cortland, Granny Smith, or Rhode Island Greening.  

One of my favorite fall pies is apple fig. I hope you enjoy the recipe! What are your favorite pies? 

Apple Fig Pie

Filling

8 dried figs, stemmed 

8 large Corland apples, peeled, and thinly sliced

1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice

1 1/3 cup sugar

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

Pinch black pepper

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons cold butter cut into bits

1 tablespoon milk or cream

2 tablespoons sliced almonds

2 tablespoons coarse brown sugar

Olive Oil Pie Dough

1 3/4 cup unbleached all purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1/2 cup light olive oil

3 tablespoons cold water

Place the figs in a bolw and cover them with warm water. Allow them to plump up for 20 minutes. Drain off the water and cut the figs into small pieces.

Combine the apple slices in a large bowl with the figs and lemon juice. In a smaller bowl, mix together the sugar, cinnamon, cloves, pepper and salt.

Pour the sugar mixture over the apple mixture and coat them well. Set aside while you make the dough.

Mix the flour and salt together in a bowl or the bowl of a  food processor fitted with a steel blade. Pour the oil slowly into the bowl or through the food processor feed tube with the motor running. Combine until the mixture is coarse and looks like uncooked oatlmeal. Add the water a little at a time until a smooth ball of dough is formed. Do not add too much water or the dough will be tough. Just enough so that the dough holds together. Gather the dough into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap and refrigerat for an hour.

Preheat the oven to 375F

Divide the dough in half. On a lightly floured board surface, roll out one piece to a 13-inch circle.. Line a 9 x 2 - inch pie plate with one rolled out sheet of pie crust. Trim edges. Spread the filling into the crust, packing it in well.  Dot the filling with the butter. 

Roll out the second piece of dough to an 11-inch circle. With a pastry wheel, cut the dough into 1/2-inch wide strips. Made a lattice top for the tart. Pinch the ends of the strips even with the pie pan edges. 

Place the pie on a baking sheet to catch an spilloves as it bakes.

Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, or just until the top begins to brown. Brush the top with the milk or cream and sprinkle with the almonds and coarse sugar and continue baking until the crust is nicely browned.

Remove the pie from the oven and let cool completely on a rack.  Cut into wedges. Serves 8

Buon Viaggio

In just a few short days, I will be immersing myself in my Italian heritage with a trip to Amalfi and Capri. Don't misunderstand. I won't be sitting under a lemon tree, sipping ice cold limoncello for which the region is famous. Instead, I will be practicing my Italian as I talk to staff at area culinary schools where I will conduct cooking classes for sixteen eager Americans.

I will go through my check list of ingredients and equipment to make sure I have everything I need. Mozzarella di bufala? Sí. Pomodoroni? Sí. Olio di Oliva? Sí. And so it will go.

I will drift in and out of Italian as I talk to the staff and the students. Then I will assign the recipes to the students and work with each of them individually to perfect their technicque and answer their questions.

The days will be long, and the food we prepare will be more than memorable. We will make regional Campanian classics such as Parmigiana de Melanzane (eggplant casserole) and gnocchi alla Sorrentina (potato gnocchi in the style of Sorrento). The students will grow in their understanding of what local cooking is all about.

Wine is an important component of any Italian meal, so we will visit local wineries, sample their wines, and pair them with our  recipes. We'll take in the history of the area, too, with visits to Naples to tour this chaotic, but vibrant city; Pompeii to learn more about that doomed day in 79 A.D. when Vesuvius decided to blow its top; and the serene and majestic town of Ravello, too beautiful to be true.

The whole experience will forever change my students and they will be the richer for it.

Go Fig(ure)

I decided to try my luck at growing figs a few years ago when a good friend gave me a small cutting from his own fig tree. The thought of having my own supply of sweet-as-sugar figs was so exciting!

I planted the cutting in a small container and hoped for the best. I prepared to take it indoors when cold weather came, to wrap it in black plastic while it was dormant for the winter, and to avoid watering it at all costs.

That worked, and in the following spring, at the great unveiling, green shoots were sprouting!

I repotted the tree into a larger container, and moved it outside into a bright, sunny location. It seemed to like its new home. Through the years I have followed this ritual, and over time, in September, the tree would yield a small handful of ripe figs.

But this year, the tree is enormous with figs galore. The only problem is that none of them are ripe, nor will they be in time for me to harvest them before i have to bring the tree indoors again for its winter nap.

Even though I water the tree faithfully, the fruit is small and hard. Every book and blog I consulted reaffirmed that I did everything right from the get-go.
I will simply admire those hard, little figs from afar, and think of what might have been. Go figure.

Do you have a fig tree? Any tips?

When The Saints Go Marching In

Are you going to the feast? That's the question you'll hear a lot from Italian-Americans who have kept the veneration of particular saints alive at big bash summer events known as "the feast". They take place all across America where there are communities of Italians and Italian-Americans.

I just attended the feast of St. Anthony of Padua in Boston's North End. Colorful street lights strung from end to end define the perimeter of the event, and people come from everywhere. Streets lined with food vendors selling sausage and pepper hoagies, fried dough, gelato, roasted nuts, and all kinds of other foods are just part of the festivities.

Entertainment fills the air in the form of musical bands and undiscovered (as yet) tenors belting out traditional Italian folk songs. Need a souvenir? There are all kinds of things from flags to scarves to refrigerator magnets to take home as a remembrance.

But, the climax of these feasts is the appeaerance of the saint or saints in whose honor all of this happens. In the case of St. Anthony of Padua, a solemn procession takes place with a statue of the saint carried through the streets by a team of strong armed men.

As they march past, would be saints and sinners, who have petitioned the saint for favors, pin dollar bills to his clothes, leaving him looking like he just won the Powerball. This money is donated to charities and to help maintain the feast.

Some saints are more popular than others, some I have never heard of, but one thing is certain: when they go marching in, their power is mesmerizing.

Five-Ingredient Favorites is Here!

Mary Ann's eleventh cookbook, Ciao Italia Five-Ingredient Favorites, is now in bookstores nationwide!  Buy your copy from Amazon.com today!

Have you bought yours yet? Do you have a favorite recipe?