Food Processor

When garlic cloves are poached in water, the enzymes responsible for their harsh bite are neutralized, leaving them soft and mildly flavored. As a purée, they melt into a hot soup, lending it a lovely undertone of garlic and a velvet texture. Add this purée to any soup you like; I suggest the Cauliflower (page 66), the Parsnip (page 72), and the Frantoiana (page 62) in particular. And if you, or someone you cook for, find sautéed garlic too strong, use this poached purée to flavor sauces, dressings, roasts, and braises too.

A parfait is a great party dessert—elegant-looking but essentially quite simple. This one is really fun to put together, and I have the kids help me: they love to crack and crumble up into hundreds of pieces the big brown sugar crisp I’ve baked, then layer them in the parfait glasses (and pop lots of crumbles into their mouths too, I’ve noticed). Like the crisp, the poached apple cubes are delicious all by themselves. You want to use flavorful, tart-tasting apples that will keep their shape when cooked but soften up nicely and remain moist too. Good varieties are Greening, Granny Smith, Northern Spy, and Golden Delicious. Some of the heirloom cooking apples that orchards are growing again would be fine too—we can never have too many varieties of apples to enjoy.

This dough is one I use for both the apricot and chocolate tarts given above and other dessert tarts formed in a shallow tart mold. It has a delicate, cookie-crumb texture (with lightness from the baking powder) and great buttery taste. And it takes no time to make in the food processor. This recipe gives you just the right amount of dough to form into a 9-inch tart shell—multiply the formula if you are making a larger tart.

Pignoli (pine nuts) are an ingredient much loved and used in Italian cooking— from savory pasta dishes and pesto to meat dishes such as bracciole and rollatini, and an infinite number of desserts. Here it is the topping of the tart, and hence its name, pignolata, lots of pignoli. For me, pignoli are delicious nuts that I recall harvesting from a cone of the big pine tree at the end of my grandmother’s courtyard in Istria. It was a humungous pine tree—or maybe I was small. My brother Franco and the other boys would climb up the tree and shake or knock down the open cones. Burrowed in the open scales of the pine cone were the oval brown-shelled nuts, which the girls would crack open with stone on stone. First we would eat our fill, then we began collecting them for cooking. That fresh, sweet flavor of pine nuts is still vivid in my mind, and to me there is nothing worse than biting into a rancid old pine nut. So make sure that you get the freshest pine nuts, which should be sweet, nutty, and buttery at the same time. Buy them in small quantities, since they are expensive; use them quickly, and if you have some left over, seal them tightly in a plastic bag and freeze them for future use. To heighten their aroma, toast them just before using—although not in this recipe, since you will be baking them.

This is a great sauce for poached or grilled fish or poultry. It is customary in Italy to serve a poached or boiled meat with two or more sauces. Salsa Verde (page 362) and this sauce make a delightful pair. And it’s a snap to make right out of the pantry. It’s got a brilliant color and surprisingly complex flavor for such a simple preparation: sweet, mildly acidic, and piquant—or as hot as you want, if you add more peperoncino or Tabasco. Fresh eggplant, poached with the onions, gives the sauce even more depth (see box that follows).

This recipe will seem long to you, but read it through once or twice and it will become very clear that all we are doing is stuffing a piece of meat, roasting it, and making gravy to serve it with. That’s something I’m sure you have done any number of times—only in this case it is a breast of veal, which will yield delicious results. Breast of veal—bone-in breast specifically—is another wonderful meat cut that I hope you come to love as much as I do. Like the preceding shoulder cuts, it has a good deal of connective tissue, bones, and cartilage, which contribute to the flavor and texture of the meat, especially during long cooking. Because it comes from young animals, the ribs in the breast are just developing: there’s lots of soft cartilage, and you can just pull out the ribs after cooking, so serving and slicing are convenient. Stuffing the breast is the fun part. The muscle layers easily separate and hold a generous amount of savory filling; then, when it’s cooked and sliced, the cross sections of meat and stuffing make a beautiful presentation. It looks like an eye, with the meat as the lids. If you’ve tried any of the other roasts in this chapter, the procedure here will be familiar: covered roasting for tenderness and flavor, dry roasting for deep color and crisp textures—and developing a great sauce at the same time. The only difficulty you may find with this recipe is getting a nice big piece of veal breast, preferably the tip cut. It’s not always easy for me either, as you’ll understand when you read the box and study the technique photos here and on page 357. But if we all keep asking our butchers for veal-breast tip cuts, they’ll get the message—we want those excellent, traditional cuts of meat, and we want to stuff them ourselves!

Pork shoulder is delicious braised as well as roasted. Salsa Genovese provides a wonderful sauce as well as a large amount of meat—indeed, this traditional Neapolitan Sunday dish gives you two options, for two different meals. In the custom of “Sunday sauces,” the freshly cooked pork and its braising sauce are served separately the first time: the sauce with the meat extracted is tossed with pasta for a first course, and the meat is sliced and served as a main course. (In Italian and Italian-American homes, these might be different courses or on the table at the same time.) Whatever sauce and meat are left from the first feast are then combined into a meaty sauce to dress pasta another day. A 5-pound pork shoulder cooked, in my recipe, with 5 pounds of chopped onions will give you plenty of meat and sauce to enjoy all these ways. Braise a bigger shoulder butt for even more leftovers—just be sure to buy plenty of onions: a 7-pound pork roast gets 7 pounds of onions!

You have certainly played around with fresh basil, particularly with pesto. Here the flavor is more subtle in its cooked form.

Sweet corn and fresh lima beans are natural garden partners and one of my favorite vegetable combinations. I like traditional American succotash (originally a Native American dish, in fact), in which the vegetables are cooked together in water, milk, or cream. But limas and corn are especially delicious when prepared by my covered-skillet method, with olive oil and garlic (and a bit of peperoncino). You must use fresh-cut corn kernels and lima beans right out of the shell for this dish—frozen corn and limas will get mushy and just don’t have the flavor. Cutting corn kernels off the cob is easy. For a fast method, see below. And shucking lima beans is a pleasant task that I enjoy. Though I admit that Gianni, my mother’s boyfriend, is always happy to help me when I’ve got pounds of beans to shell.

Lemon is such an everyday flavoring that we forget how unique it can make a dish.

Brussels sprouts are a love/hate vegetable. Let this recipe surprise you—even the dubious will fall in love with sprouts. But it’s the experience of tasting the vegetable in an unexpected form—all the leaves separated, tossed in the skillet until tender and sweet—that really makes the difference. They are wonderful as is, but the Lemon Sauce that follows provides a tangy counterpoint to the delicately caramelized green-gold leaves.

I suggest you use duck legs to make this guazzetto, because they are juicier. But if you can’t buy duck legs separately, you can cook the whole duck. Another way to skin this cat is to remove the duck’s breasts, make the guazzetto with the rest of the duck, and sear the breasts to be served as a second course or a treat for another meal.

Potato flour (not potato starch) makes pasta with a delicious and distinctly potato-ey flavor. The dough will feel stiff when just mixed, but after resting it gets soft and easy to roll and cut.

Italians enjoy many traditional foods made with farina di castagne—chestnut flour—especially cakes and sweets. Pasta with part chestnut flour is delicious too, as I hope you will discover. Imported farina di castagne is widely available in specialty markets (and from Web sites).

Flour from dried ceci—the Italian name for garbanzo beans or chickpeas—is one of a number of bean flours with which one can make pasta. Like the others, this yields a good pasta with a different nuance of flavor—complex, buttery, with a tinge of sweetness from the bean. It’s a great carrier for vegetable, game, or nut sauces.