Roman Cooking

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I wasn't sure that Jon was doing our self-taught Italian cooking justice, so I have to go into all the details of the amazing food that we cooked in our lovely little apartment, with the most wonderful ingredients from the local market.  And we don't want to forget how we prepared our 2 favorite dishes, so this will suffice as a small recipe collection!

While we were in Rome we had access to an amazing array of fresh fruits and vegetables from the local market up the street from our apartment, and there was one vegetable in particular that we hadn't had much experience with, yet found an abundance of at each farmers stand. Artichokes! Our only experience with artichokes is pretty recent, when my best friend Des, also our old roommate 😊 prepared steamed artichokes as a snack in our DC apartment. We both loved them, but didn't really come face to face with these interesting little things until our stay in Rome. Intrigued by our last venture with Des' artichokes, we decided to buy one and give it a try the same way we had had it before, and were we pleasantly surprised! Apparently artichokes are indigenous to Italy, and therefore had the most amazing flavor and were shockingly inexpensive...a combination right up our ally! One night, after our stupendous initial artichoke experience, and a few bottles of 3 euro wine later, Jon and I got into a heated discussion of how terrible it is to botch the beauty of an artichoke by covering it in mayonnaise, sour cream, and other dairy based products in the American version of spinach and artichoke dips. We were outraged and decided that we were going to make our own version of spinach and artichoke dip the right way. 1 large bag of fresh spinach, 7 artichokes, and a mountain of parmesan and mozzarella cheeses later we were ready to conquer this dip!  I read up online how to go about cooking and "peeling" artichokes, which all seemed pretty easy and self explanatory, just steam the artichoke for a good 20-30 minutes given the size and then you are free to enjoy the tastey veggie by plucking off the leaves, scrapping off the fleshy ends, and harnessing the convetted artichoke heart. "No problemo", I thought as I ventured down a road that would eventually end 2 1/2 hours later, with very burnt fingertips, and more artichoke than I knew what to do with. Turns out it takes a little time to strip away all the goodnes from one artichoke, and it takes a TON of time when you have to replicate that with 6 others. After Jon and I finally tore through these tricky things we were left with a huge bowl of delicious artichoke bits! After mixing in some wilted spinach, garlic, peperocini pepper, lemon, olive oil, parmesan cheese (which is ridiculous here) and a little grated mozzarella we enjoyed the most wonderful, and labor intensive dip we had ever made! A process that we decided was totally worth the time and effort.  Paired with the delicious pizza bianca, I doubt well be able to go back to the restaurant version. Buonissimo!

Our second, and almost more daunting escapade was to make real tomato sauce from all fresh ingredients. Again, we headed to the market where we perused the many varieties of tomatoes until we had a huge bag full of roma, cherry, and your standard normal looking tomatoes. I had heard of different techniques to get the fresh tomatoes into sauce form, and most used food mills which we obviously didn't have, so we took the boiling approach.  We put on a huge pot of boiling water, dropped in the tomatoes for about a minute, scooped them out, plunged them into cold water, removed the skins, cut them in half to remove the seeds, purred them in a blender (in fact, a very small blender that held at the most 2 tomatoes), and finally transferred them into a pot on the stove to make the sauce. Whew! This was the coolest process! Unlike the artichokes, everything happened in the exact way and amount of time as was described online. Anyways, after we added all the good stuff: garlic, peperocini peppers, fresh spinach, and herbs we left it to hang for a while. Finally, we enjoyed this basic sauce as if it was the best thing we've ever eaten, and we ate as if we would never see pasta again. It was so cool to have made something that we bought around the corner, and made from scratch something we had never cooked before...and it actually tasted good!         

So that is the saga of our home cooked meals, in our tiny studio in rome. We were so stoked that everything worked out, and being able to cook with the wonderful food in Italy has really been an amazing experience. The food in general has been amazing. Jon and I find ourselves harping on the topics and descriptions of food because we've found ourselves obsessed with the cuisine. It's all so simple, and so wonderful. The oranges, for example, are the juiciest and most flavorful oranges I have ever had. There are orange and clementine trees everywhere and they all taste as if they were just plucked off the branch that morning. Each orange has the most vibrant colors, and most have dark red edges and bright green stems and leaves still in tact when you grab it from the bin. It looks like a tropicana commercial...but it's not! 

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Comments

[Pam/Mom]

Food
You guys are a riot! I love your enthusiasm for the food prep and isn't it great that the age-old traditions of local farmers' markets are popular here at home too! Vermont is very much in the forefront of that, happily. Love, P/M

[Fred]

Foodies!
Glad to see pasta finally making it into the "Beer and Pasta" blog. My mouth's watering.

[Umer]

:)
i forgot about your blog and ran into it on your FB page as i was about to give you a shout jon. sounds like you two are up to no good and having a blast. don't show off those italian cooking skills too much or i will expect to be fed when u return :D are you farming yet????? lol i have the funniest images in my head of you farming over there! right... off to jamaica tomorrow mon. peace!!!