Here's one way to use the black kale that comes in your CSA share. It's a simple recipe that's good with sausages.
You cut the kale into thin shreds and cook it with fusilli or a similar textured pasta that can "catch" the kale shreds. You need a second pan to make a simple sauce of olive oil flavored with garlic and chili to add some zing, and then some grated Pecorino cheese to finish it.
The Brasato al Barolo is a rightly celebrated main dish of Italy's Piedmont region, traditionally made using the local Barolo wine. That can become very expensive in this country, but driving through the Piedmont I was astonished to see €10 bottles of Barolo on endcap displays in highway rest areas! The best Barolos can fetch $1,000 and more; that's not what you braise a chuck roast in!
I was surprised when I first saw this. It's so simple, with no hard-to-get ingredients, that I would expect to see it on menus and at picnics and other al fresco dining opportunities. It seemed at first counterintuitive, but Tartar Sauce used to be used for many things beside fried fish, and this is just one simple example.
This is best in late spring and early summer when you can get fresh local asparagus. There are plenty of brands of commercial tartar sauce available on store shelves, or you can make your own.
Here's a hearty cheesy dish from Italy's Piedmont region, and it's really simple and fast. Piedmont is at the foot of the Alps, and it's easy to see this as something nourishing and hot after hours of playing in the snow on a mountainside.
Because it's so heavy and caloric, it may be better to halve the servings as part of a more balanced meal!
This is a delicious side dish to accompany roast chicken or pork. I use the frozen pearl onions, the plain kind with no sauce, because this is so easy that it can be part of a dinner after a hard day.
Here's a delightful side dish that can accompany many northern dishes (that is, dishes of the northern butter clan as opposed to the southern olive oil clan). It can be made with fresh or frozen spinach, so it's a handy recipe for when you have surprise dinner guests.
This feisty Sicilian (is that redundant?) recipe was inspired by the feisty protagonist in the classic opera Cavalleria Rusticana. Here I made it with the corkscrew pasta fusilli because it seemed to fit the theme, and because the long pasta works well with this chunky sauce.
The traditional Salmoriglio sauce of Sicily is a perfect accompaniment to swordfish and other full-flavored fishes served hot off the grill. It's easy to make and it works on swordfish steaks and kebabs.
It works as a marinade, too, but I think that's too much for fish; I'd save that for pork or chicken.
It took an awfully long time for me to find a recipe for a calve's liver dish that I liked. As was the case with many of us, my mom made it from time to time, a big slab of strange-looking, strange-smelling, strangely-textured strangeness that nobody wanted to eat. But this one I liked a lot, and I and my friend Andy both took additional helpings.
I had to try this recipe because it's a Venetian classic, and how could it become a classic if it were at all like what my mom made?
The differences in this dish are twofold, one part of the recipe and the other was the liver itself.
I decided a long time ago that I did not trust liver from cattle raised on factory farms fed who knows what feed and drugs, because all of that ultimately is processed by the liver. I found some Caldwell Farms calf liver at the Belfast Coop in Belfast, Maine. I knew it was going to be as good a piece of liver as I am likely to find, so I bought it for this recipe.
The recipe insists that the liver be sliced very thinly before cooking. Andy and I agreed that this was a major improvement, getting past the worst of the texture strangeness, ensuring all of it was cooked through but not overdone, and enabling tastes of the liver to go along with the onions in a pleasing way. I will make this again, when I can get the good liver.
This is another fine, simple Italian recipe using pearl onions. Supermarket frozen onions work fine in this recipe, and they save a ton of time and sore thumbs from peeling.
I keep a bag or two of frozen onions in the freezer for this and similar recipes because they go with so many dinners, especially winter cooking. If you will be serving these with meat, consider replacing the dry vermouth with chicken stock. Of course, you can use just water, too.
