Toss This Salad

A week in Italy is a beautiful thing. Especially when you can largely eschew the restaurants and cook simply for yourself. The trouble is that in a land largely known for its meats and cheeses and gelatos, you pretty much mostly eat meats and cheeses and gelatos. (Don't talk to me about the unsalted bread.) And let's not forget about the pasta.

When you eat nothing but proteins and starches for a week, things in your body slow down. You get lethargic. You move less nimbly. You prefer to do everything laying down. So when we got home, I laid on the couch with a meat and gelato hangover. Alannah found the will to hit the market and go up to the kitchen.

After some banging around, I wondered what in tarnation was going on. Was she actually cooking a full meal up there? Would I have to call a surgeon in Neuilly (Paris' Beverly Hills) to make a liposuction appointment? Is my wife mad to bother feeding us after a trip like we had?

There. This oughtta make you regular enough
to star on German video sites.

The result was a ginormous salad, replete with half a head of red-leaf lettuce, lightly blanched broccoli (raw broccoli is for hippie), red peppers grilled under the broiler, fresh cucumber, and plenty of coeur de pigeon (pigeon heart, what kind of name is that!?) tomatoes. Drizzled with a touch of vinegar, a hit of salt, and plenty of our favorite olive oil, it was the antidote to a week of overindulgence.

Upon consuming what seemed like 2 kilos of nothing but vegetables, a wave of healthiness swept over us. Perhaps too much, so we high-tailed it to our neighborhood gelato joint for an appropriate Italian dessert.

Realizing that this much vegetable at once can constitute a shock to the system, our next meal incorporated one of the most fabulous ingredients we happened upon in Italy: Cuore di Proscuittuo. If you think Parma ham is something amazing, imagine this, the filet mignon of the ham. This is seriously drool-inducing stuff.

Handle this meat with care.

Normally you'd use one of those circular deli-style meat slicers to cut this stuff to the fineness it deserves, but we're amateurs here, remember? But even with our insanely sharp knives (the ones we didn't have with us in Italy...) it's tough to cut ham deli-thin. The solution? Cut "normal" slices, lay it down on the cutting board, then horizontally make slices from the slices sushi style. This way you get delicate, manageable strips without having chef's salad-type matchsticks whose rough shape interferes with the enjoyment of such refined hammy flavors.

We again went with a bed of red-leaf lettuce, coeur de pigeon tomatoes and a tiny bit of cucumber, topping it with a nice helping of cuore di proscutto and freshly shaved Parmesan. A bit clichéd, sure, but I opted for a balsamic vinaigrette this time for a hint of sweetness to go with the salt from the cheese and ham.

Moist & glistening.

The one touch that really made this magical, in my most humble opinion, was using several whole leaves of basil to garnish the salad. The occasional but powerful punch of basil rounds out the salad with a perfect balance of flavor, and distinguishes it from typical meat-based meal salads you get at your typical workaday lunch spot.

[Insert Italian Sausage Joke]

This post is dedicated to another couple in Paris, as it wouldn't have been possible without them.

They recently shared with us some goodies shipped over from family in Italy, and we had to honor the gift by consuming it as elegantly as possible. As much as I'd personally have no problem simply biting chunks out of a hunk of twine-wrapped provolone cheese, or shave off chunks of spiced soppresatta sausage with my pocket knife like a country bumpkin, I have to pretend I'm as classy as the wife sometimes.


So we went all trendy and had it on the cutting board, along with a super fresh baby spinach leaf salad drizzled in olive oil, balsamic, and freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano. There's something almost primal about eating off of a well-used cutting board - maybe the way it invites you to pick things up with your fingers and lick off bits of olive oil here and there, rolling slices of cheese and meat between your fingers... That whole classy thing went right out the window.

Sticking with the board theme, we served up a from-scratch pizza the same way. The smell of the proofing pizza dough (yeast + warm water + flour) drove me nuts all day, and it remained untainted and perfect by being baked as the simplest and best of all pizzas: The Margherita. Mozarella cheese, tomatoes, basil. Nothing else.


The simplicity of this pizza demands the best ingredients, as it can reveal any and all faults. Our only shortcoming was not having a pizza stone or slab to really retain the necessary heat underneath the crust as it cooks. While our oven is pretty admirable, reaching 260ºC/500ºF, that's still nowhere near the heat of a proper pizza oven. And somehow, I don't think installing a wood-burning oven with a reflector dome to achieve 375ºC/700ºF would really be up to code... Mmm, but think of the tandoori we could make!

'Til then, these simple Italian fixin's will do us just fine... We'll put up with slightly less than perfect, as long as the ingredients are...

Naked Food: May Day Market Haul

It's May (Labor) Day weekend, and you'd think that in a country vilified by its transatlantic friends as some sort of socialist/communist/Marxist/pinko utopia, that everything would be closed in honor of the proletariat, and we'd all be waiting in Soviet bread lines for the small ration of food being handed to us by the state.


So to all our friends who worship at the altar of unrestricted capitalism and fear the S-word, we invite you to suck on our fresh basil (note the roots), sweet miniature bananas, long firm white asparagus, grit-free baby spinach, ridiculously red and juicy plum tomatoes, succulent gariguette strawberries, round and firm Paris mushrooms, and hairy brown kiwis.

Anyway, now to go line up at the bakery to get our gigantic baguette at the government-mandated price of 80 cents.

Sweet Little Bunny

Eating rabbit can be problematic for people. To many, it's an adorable woodland creature deified in Disney movies and Looney Toons cartoons, and very often kept as a (copiously poop producing) pet. To others, it's a rodent, and as such probably carries disease and shouldn't be touched, let alone eaten.

My problem with rabbit... is that it's insanely hard to bone. Or is that de-bone? (And you would've thought boning is the least difficult thing for us...) Granted, it was my first time, so it was messy, bloody, and a bit frustrating. But I eventually got my half-rabbit into nice, boneless chunks, leaving the legs intact, because really, without a visual identifier to know that your dinner is rabbit, you might think it was veal or turkey.

Which brings us to the choice of cooking style. As our first bunny, figuring out what the hell to do with it was half the battle. Roasting or braising it seemed so missionary... so vanilla. With the weather having turned from the "Paris in the Springtime" of musical fame to nearly bone-chilling wind and rain, a blanquette seemed in order. No, that's not a pun. A blanquette is a stew in a creamy white sauce, generally made with veal, and excellent for warming up when something nasty blows in from the North Atlantic.

Not actually being big on blanquette - for something that looks so rich, it's often very bland - we opted for a little sweetness, in the form of vanilla. (Just when we were trying to avoid "vanilla...") It may sound odd, but after having a Tahitian-inspired shark steak in vanilla sauce recently, it seemed like a brilliant idea.

And boy, was it. After stewing with onions and sand carrots on top of the stove and then in the oven in cast iron, the rabbit meat and legs were tender and moist... The vanilla blanquette sauce (made with butter, milk, and egg yolk) was poured in the pot and mixed in about 10 minutes before serving. Regretfully, the sauce curdled a tiny bit during the few minutes of broiling (to brown the legs), but it didn't affect the finger-lickin'-goodness of the taste.


Going with the sweet theme, we had cardoon 'n prune salad on the side. Sliced cardoon blanched in saltwater and lemon juice was mixed with an orange vinaigrette, basil, and slivers of prune. Served chilled and topped with a bit of orange zest. The whole looks-like-celery-but-tastes-like-artichoke trick of the cardoon went hand-in-lucky-severed-paw with the mindfuck of vanilla flavored rabbit.

It was like a Miracle Fruit party, without the Miracle Fruit.