We had this all over Sicily and then in Rome. It's a classic Sicilian dish of simple ingredients that must be fresh and well-prepared. Make this in summertime when the eggplant is fresh and flavorful. The tomatoes can be fresh in season or canned, but canned tomatoes without preservatives are better than "fresh" tomatoes out of season (the tomatoes were fresh when they went into the can). I like Cento brand canned tomatoes.
This strange-sounding summer-time salad came to my attention when I was planning a feast to celebrate the Kentucky Derby; something similar is made at a ritzy hotel at Churchill Downs.
This is a simpler version and in my opinion better able to showcase excellent ingredients.
Our friends Owen and Brigitte were visiting from Germany. They'd been intrigued by my adventures in Moroccan cooking, and I had just added to my gear an authentic Moroccan terra cotta tagine schlepped all the way from Morocco by the mother of my friend Youssef! So that became the cornerstone of the dinner, but we wanted Brigitte to try some authentic New England treats as well, so we came up with this screwy menu:
The Moroccan recipes came from the collection of excellent Moroccan recipes by Christine Benlafquih at The Spruce Eats. The links above go to the recipes as I prepared them for this dinner.
I whipped this up when I was confronted with the leftovers of an excellent-but-too-large haddock. It's a simple dish, homey and satisfying.
I started with the fish flaked into a basic white sauce seasoned with dried dill and chervil, but then I thickened the sauce up with an egg yolk (see Mayonnaise for why that's a good idea) and then proceeded to top it with mashed potatoes and baked it.
(See Notes for a confession.)
We had our old friends Jim and Peg Baker over for dinner, after reconnecting with them over the Old Colony Club's 250th Birthday Gala. They wanted something on the lighter side, and something with an exotic flair. I suggested Moroccan, and they accepted.
For personal reasons, I added a non-Moroccan cocktail and dessert, which I will explain below.
Here's what we had:
I've been a member of the Old Colony Club of Plymouth for a long time. We have great formal parties there, but none as grand as the one that we put on for the 250th anniversary of the club's founding on 13 January 1769.
The gala is modeled on a seven-course formal dinner that might have been served in 1919, but it's all served cocktail-party style, with no need for knives and big plates and tables. That's important because we had about 100 attendees!
Before people arrived, we had set out:
This enabled early arrivals to explore and graze until the formal courses came up from the kitchen.
Here's what we had:
This is the classic cassoulet recipe lightly adapted to the American kitchen from the master recipe published by the Grande Confrérie du Cassoulet de Castelnaudary.
And if you're a cassoulet nerd of the fanatical variety, then you need to know about D'Artagnan's annual Cassoulet War in New York City!
Here I'll do my best to present something authentic and cookable.
This is a simple variation on a classic Martini: add a couple of dashes each of Sweet Vermouth and Triple Sec.
A dash isn't much, and two dashes is twice not much - you still can't call it much. This is like spicing up a Martini with a dash or two of Orange Bitters - but this one got a name.
The biggest trick with this one is figuring out how to get a dash of Sweet Vermouth or Triple Sec from a bottle that's meant for pouring. I just pour a few drops as carefully as I can and call it close enough for my needs.
This is an easy way to turn your boring New Year's Eve toast into something more tasty, if you're working with cheap champagne. Just add a sugar cube baptized with 2 dashes of the bitters of your choice.
These were a big hit at the Old Colony Club's Casablanca-themed party in 2018.
A related cocktail is the French 75, also hugely popular. This, of course, begs the question "Will I get in trouble if I add a little gin to my Champagne Cocktail?" - I won't tell anyone if you do!
I had a great deal on pork loin, so naturally I bought more than I needed.
I'm glad I did! I found a handful of great pork recipes from The Blue Danube Cookbook and this is the first of them, a simple roast pork loin accented with caraway seed and marjoram.
On this, the last full day of an ambitious, exhausting and exhilarating vacation, the carefully-wrought plan finally started to come undone. I'm happy that it held together as long as it had, but with less than 36 hours to go, there was unfinished business to attend to.
We all wanted to see St Peter's Basilica, I for my third time, Lorna for her second, and Melissa for her first. IMO it is simply the single most beautiful public work of many human hands in the world.
Melissa also wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, and so Lorna wanted to see it again, with her. I had no trouble resisting that interminable shuffle and buffeting by pushy tour groups with experienced and ruthless leaders.
We got a late start, so the intended early arrival at the Vatican was lost, and there's no point arriving in the thick of the morning tour-bus crowd, so we headed north instead, to catch the afternoon's planned sites and any other targets of opportunity that might present themselves, including a Guess store where one of them had her eye on something that I don't recall.
We started the day late, Thursday having been a long exhausting day after an unrestful night on the Palermo-Naples ferry. As we got all our cylinders firing, I sorted through my accumulated books and other souvenirs and despaired of carrying them home, so I boxed up a lot of things I no longer needed (including laundry!) to ship home.
By the time we got started, it was late morning and we all needed to shop for some mundane essentials and ship that box before turning our attention to explorations. Those chores done, we force-marched to the Jewish ghetto neighborhood to start the day's peregrinations in the Eternal City.
We had lunch at Piperno, a celebrated Jewish-Italian restaurant. Jewish-Italian food has developed for thousands of years, and Jewish food in Rome is nothing like Jewish food in New York City!
This was a busy day!
The overnight ferry from Palermo to Naples arrived on time, but it took so long to get off the boat (we had to wait for the cars to get off first) that we missed our scheduled, ticketed train. On a tip from a fellow traveller, I went to the Trenitalia ticket desk. The woman there explained that they have an agreement with GNV Ferries and she honored our tickets for a later train at no charge!
We took another sexy Frecciarossa (red arrow) high-speed train. What would have been a two-and-a-half hour drive from one city center to another and through the unpretty urban sprawl of both became a comfortable 70-minute ride, with a snack. In 2015 we had taken high-speed trains in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and the Italian train through the Alps from Milan to Zurich was the best of the three. And the Roma Termini train station is just a few blocks from our hotel!
A New Orleans tradition from about 1940, this is often served in a large glass shaped somewhat like a classic hurricane lamp, with plenty of ice. It's not a strong drink (almost half of it is fruit juice), but it's one of those easy drinking cocktails that makes the morning after so trying.
I don't usually care for very fruity cocktails, so I make these during hurricane season when those monster storms fill the news and I remember this popular drink. This is not nearly as dangerous as a hurricane, or even a Martini: it's only half rum and the other half is fruit juice and other sweet additions.
The very early morning ferry brought us back to Pozzallo at 08:15 so we had an early start for a busy day.
Much of southern Sicily has glorious oleander growing along the roadsides, and wild cactus. There are extensive groves of olive, pistachio, almond, and citrus trees, and of course the vineyards. This is also the home of Magna Graeca, as the later Romans referred to the "greater Greece" of antiquity, and its concentration of ancient Greek settlements and ruins.
There's also a lot of weedy overgrowth and occasional debris. At one point we passed a dead dog on the side of the road; southern Sicily is simply not as tourist-visited and thus not as nicely maintained as the rest of Italy that we had seen.
Except for the magnificent temples at Agrigento, today was really about getting from Malta to Naples. We had no foodie goodness and much of the scenery was like driving through eastern Colorado or New Mexico. If we had another day we'd have explored Marsala and the western point of Sicily, but we had consciously traded that for the quick and exciting side-trip to Malta.
