November 14, 2015

 

 

Back in the Kitchen

This is a John day.  Yesterday was going to be a John day too, but Mary enjoyed it enough that it will be moved back to the center of the ledger.  Not today.

We are a little lazy this morning and don’t get to breakfast until 9:15, which in retrospect will be a small mistake.  Head cook Paula is running the breakfast this morning and there are a couple more people around this morning.  She whips up some coffee, fresh squeezed OJ and scrambled eggs to go with the nice assortment of other goodies.  Always prosciutto, cheeses, some sort of quiche and assorted cakes, cereals and breads.  Paula is not an English speaker but we can communicate enough to be well fed.

The big deal today is that John is joining Elena and Paula in the kitchen for a 2 on 1 cooking class.  This won’t be the full blown deal but fresh pastas and torta fritta are both on the agenda.  Mary gets to pull up a soft chair in the living area of the house, read a book and look at the garden. (Say, maybe this is a Mary day after all.)

The cooks start with the fillings for the pastas.  We’re going to do two different stuffed pastas today, each a different shape but both called tortelli in local terminology. (We might call them ravioli.)  One filling is ricotta mixed with seasonings, Swiss chard and Parmigiano Reggiano.  The other is “pumpkin” which is butternut squash in America, steamed and mashed with almonds, nutmeg and apple mustard.  Paula gets John started on the pasta (1 lb. flour with 5 eggs—that’s a lot of eggs) and decides that he is reasonably capable to knead the dough.  Operating the pasta machine is a different story.  We’re making a lot of pasta today which is a good thing because it takes a lot of practice.

The first shape is squares created by folding one side of a sheet of pasta over the other with the filling in mounds in the middle.  The pasta is then pressed around the filling and then cut into squares and lined up in a hotel pan.  Pretty basic stuff you see on the food channel.  John first discovers that one hand is required to crank the pasta maker, another is needed to guide the pasta onto the cutting board and a third hand has to make sure the long sheet of pasta continues to feed into the machine.  That’s one too many hands.  The more we do, the better he gets.

Paula makes the first few ricotta stuffed pastas in the square shape and then turns it over to John.  He is in his element now plopping the mounds of ricotta down onto the pasta sheet until, out of the corner of his eye, he catches Paula making concerned eye contact with Elena.  Elena says that Paula believes there may be too much stuffing.  OK, no problem.  John makes smaller piles then folds the pasta over and starts pressing down around the filling.  Again with the eyes.  Elena says that maybe Paula should show me again exactly how to seal the pasta so it doesn’t come apart in the water. Sure, that’s fine.  Finally it is cutting time and that will be easy.  John is using the rolling pasta cutter like a pro until Paula rips it out of his hands and starts to re-trim all of the edges.  Apparently there needs to be a little precision here.

By the time we make batch after batch of the ricotta/chard tortelli John is getting the hang of it and the individual pastas are actually starting to look pretty good.  Time to move along.  We are doing the pumpkin stuffing and will make the tortelli into a round shape.  John is rolling now on the pasta machine (except for the occasional dropping of the handle causing more eye rolls—but with smiles).  With this pasta we are using one sheet on top of the other instead of folding.  The pumpkin stuffing is still in mounds in the middle in just the right amounts.  We use a cookie cutter type of device to make perfectly round shapes with the stuffing hopefully in the middle.  Paula is smiling, Elena is smiling and John is relieved.  All of our pasta is covered with towels and stored to be used later.

The ladies made a dough earlier for the torta fritta.  This is the fried puffy bread that we have been having at the restaurant the last couple nights, also a local specialty.  It is a flour, water and milk combination which is what we used to make spaetzle at the Lodge.  Here a little bit of yeast is added to help with the puffing process.  More time on the pasta machine for John as we take a hand-size rectangle of dough and work it down to a medium-thin sheet and then slice it into random shapes.  Elena has heated a pan of oil on the stove and we drop the bread sheets into the oil and they puff right up and turn brown.  These are an acquired taste but over the last couple nights we have gotten the hang of it and sort of like it.

Now is the part where we should have been at breakfast at 8:00 this morning.  John is sent to get Mary and lunch is served.  There is a plate of prosciutto with cheeses and the torta fritta as a starter with a bottle of Malvasia white sparkling wine.  Then the ricotta and chard stuffed tortelli that Paula has tossed with a brown butter and fresh sage leaves.  Finally the pumpkin tortelli in a tomato-shallot sauce that is heavenly. What a great lunch and we are more than stuffed.  It’s 2:00 in the afternoon and we’re done for the day.  Really.

We do our best to keep moving.  We walk the four corners of Porporano.  We make friends with some Italian dogs.  We log a couple miles of exercise and that’s as good as we’re going to do.  If it were sunny we may have gone into Parma but it is still foggy and gray so we’ll stay close to home.

We read and nap off our big lunch/bottle of wine and decide to just stay in with no dinner tonight.  We have our own bottle of wine, a couple pears and the last few pieces of a Toblerone bar.  We watch some more news from Paris and wrap up this really fun day.

What did we learn today?  The best cooks pay attention to the details.