Broccoli Rabe A Thousand Ways

1 bunch broccoli rabe
2-3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, sliced into strips

Steam the broccoli rabe 1-2 minutes.  Strain and saute in olive oil with the onions and garlic until all are soft.  Serve hot as a side dish, over pasta, or on a kaiser roll.  Makes about 4 servings.
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I don't think I've posted this one before, although it feels like I have because Broccoli Rabe is such a common ingredient both in the recipes in this blog and in Italian cooking in general.  Let me let you in on a little-known secret about Italians: we love vegetables.  Especially soft, summer vegetables like Broccoli Rabe, green beans, zucchini, and, to a certain extent, tomatoes.  If you've been reading this blog awhile, you can probably guess what I'm about to tell you.  We love vegetables because vegetables are cheap.  Think about it.  Nonna and Mama can have their house lot-sized vegetable gardens out back with free children/grandchildren labor all summer, can the bojangles out of what everybody eventually gets sick of eating, and going to the store becomes almost unnecessary.  Throw some chickens into the mix and it isn't. 

This is pretty much how Grandmom grew up.  Whatever meat the family had frequently came out of the backyard (this was before home owners' associations) or out of the river or woods nearby courtesy of her father and brothers' hunting efforts.  My great uncles still take a great amount of pride in having regularly put meat on the table all those years ago. 

This recipe is straight off my Great-grandmom Canduci's table, and straight off of Grandmom's too.  She still makes it for me whenever I go to visit her because it was one of my favorite dishes growing up.  And that, my friends, is what they call "The Mediterranean Diet." Not that there aren't any fat Italian kids out there.  I'm sure there are, what with all the "eat eat" and "finish finish", ending with "no throw away, MUST NOT WASTE!"  I'm pretty sure that whole "you don't have to clean your plate" movement skipped the Italians, at least in this country.

Broccoli Rabe Patties

About 1 lb broccoli rabe (also known as "rapini")
1-2 eggs
1/2 to 1 C. fresh bread crumbs
oil for frying

Steam the broccoli rabe until done, 2-5 minutes.  Strain, let cool slightly, then chop into small pieces.  In a bowl, mix together the broccoli rabe, eggs, and fresh breadcrumbs*.  Make into patties and fry like a hamburger in a little oil.  Serve as is or on a bun!
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*I say fresh breadcrumbs because they're basically the only binder in this recipe.  Otherwise you would just have an omelet, also very Italian, but which does not fit the recipe's description of something you can "fry like a hamburger".  For the record, the original recipe omitted the instruction to make them into patties, but did stipulate that you fry it like a hamburger.  Hamburgers come in patties right?  Judi, please correct me if I'm misreading the original recipe.

Pan-Fried Zucchini Flower Omelet

Several dozen zucchini flowers (enough to make 1-2 C.)
1 green pepper, chopped
1 onion, chopped italian style*
1 zucchini, sliced thinly
1 potato, sliced thinly -or- green tomatoes, chopped and sugared
4 eggs
salt to taste
olive oil for cooking

Wash the zucchini flowers and saute in a little oil just for a little bit.  (They will cook fast.)  In a separate skillet, saute the rest of the vegetables until tender, starting from hardest to softest.  (IE if you opt for potato, put it in the pan first, then the zucchini, then the green peppers, then the onion.  Otherwise, go zucchini, peppers, onion, tomato.  That way they'll all get done about the same time.)  When the other vegetables are all cooked, add in the zucchini flowers and a little more oil.  Beat the eggs, and add in the salt.  Pour the egg mixture over the vegetables in the skillet, then reduce the heat to medium low and let the egg cook until set, swirling it around in the pan a little once it's set enough to come loose in a single piece.  Serve as is or on kaiser rolls. 
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I confess to getting a little lazy.  I looked at my post list and realized that it was still February the last time I posted anything.  Then I found this recipe among the ones Judi gave me to put up here.  How could I not post this!

Red Sauce with Crabs

12 small crabs*
olive oil for sauteing
6-8 cloves of garlic
a splash of red wine
Tomato sauce made with: 3 big and 2 little tomatoes, a little sugar, fresh basil to taste, and 2 bay leaves

Clean the crabs and saute them with the garlic in a little olive oil.  Add in the rest of the ingredients and cook until done.**
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*This reminds me of the time Grandmom and I decided to eat crabs since I was up there and Grandmom therefore had justification for buying them.  We both love seafood.  Grandpop does not.  Or rather, he didn't before their marriage, went through a 20-year period where he did like it after being tricked into eating it, much the same way he learned to appreciate rabbit, and then in recent years has returned to his original seafood-hating state.  So we went to the grocery store to purchase some crabs, which in New Jersey is not a difficult thing to do.  But lo and behold!  That day, there were no large, luscious Alaskan crab legs or Snow crab legs for us to take home and boil up with a hint of Old Bay and dunk in hot melted butter.  No.  The only crabs to be gotten in the midst of the summer were little blue crabs.  So we bought them, and took them home, and made this sauce with them, which we ate on top of linguine.  The funny part is that you have to understand that when this recipe says "clean the crabs" it doesn't mean "take all the meat out of the shells"-- it just means "run them bad boys under some water so you don't eat sand and crab poop."  So the crabs should be, and were, in shell.  Hard shells.  And they were little crabs.  So, we started out with a serving platter piled high, I mean high, with tiny cooked crabs, and we, seafood lovers that we are, and stubborn people that we are, commenced to eating them.  When we conceded that we were done, two and a half hours later, we had made it about 3/4ths of the way down, sucking every tiny claw to its very core along the way.  Grandpop had left the table after finishing his non-seafood alternative about a half-hour into the crab festival muttering something about how we were eating too much.  But, as anybody who has ever tried to eat a tiny crab can tell you, there ain't a lot of meat in them tiny crabs.  I think we got more calories from the linguine.  But it was a delicious and messy experience and, honestly, that's what eating crabs should be.

**"Until done."  Possibly the two most obscure words in the English language.  It assumes so much of the recipe reader, like that they know what done is, what it looks like, and about how long it takes to get there.  In this case, you should have a nice saucy tomato sauce (not cooked salsa), and your crabs should be safe to consume without fear of horrible digestive consequences.  So at least 30 minutes on medium-low (think "simmer").  Maybe an hour.  An added benefit to making this sauce is that you have deliciously crabby red sauce left long after you finish off your tiny crabs, which you can soak into good Italian bread (the sauce, not the tiny crabs) or coat more luxurious pasta with.  A good pasta sauce should go a long way.

Pickled Green Tomatoes

As many green tomatoes as you want!
plenty of salt, olive oil, fresh peppermint and leaves, sliced garlic cloves, and hot peppers

Slice the green tomatoes.  Salt them well and let them sit at least 12 hours.  Rinse them and, in prepared jars, layer the tomatoes with the fresh herbs and sliced garlic, and fill the remaining space with olive oil.  Stuff whole hot peppers down the side of the jar or wherever you can find space.*  Put the lids on the jar and can as appropriate.  Serve on slices of Italian bread.**

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It's Lent, and Lent reminds me that springtime is just around the corner, and the fresh bright taste of pickles is just what I need to suit my mood.  Technically, pickles tend to be more of a fall-winter thing, I know-- it's what you do when you're sick of eating whatever your garden is producing fresh and what you eat when the trees and garden are bare.  Maybe that's why I think of pickles in the springtime, then-- it's the freshest thing around until the first peas and baby carrots come up.  Great-grandmom Canduci made plenty of pickles in her day, as well as Great-grandpop Canduci, who is still known for his homemade smoked sausage.  Apparently the girls of the family got out of the sausage making and procuring festivities.  So while my Grandmom and her sisters were at home making pickles, my Great-uncles were off learning the ins and outs of hog-slaughtering!

*If you're new to canning, I will warn you now: spicy things get spicier the longer they sit.  I guess the flavors have a longer amount of time to come out of the food.  But the point is: don't put too many hot peppers in your tomatoes, because however hot the resulting combination is today, it will literally double, triple, and quadruple its hotness over the space of a few weeks and months.

**Drool.  If there's anything better than good Italian cooking, it's good Italian cooking served alongside a good, fresh, crusty-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside Italian bread.  It should scrub your gums a little (and hold up to a dip in the soup) but be flavorful enough to take unsalted butter in liberal amounts without a processed bread aftertaste.  In Riverside, you can buy this bread at the supermarket and pay about $2 for it.  New Jersey shoppers laugh in the face of Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for the most part, which peddle things we can get or make on our own under the guise of "gourmet" or "exotic" items.  It is a sad state of things when a good loaf of bread is exotic and saleable at exotic prices. 

Oven Baked Chicken

The Simplest Chicken Recipe Ever

1 roaster chicken
potatoes, washed and peeled, and cut into large chunks (at least 1potato per person)
garlic powder
oregano
salt

Put the potatoes in the bottom of your baking dish, which is preferably a deep but not necessarily large or wide glass dish or casserole.  Rinse the chicken in the sink.  If you're buying your chicken in the US, take out the bag of organs stuffed, aptly, in the chicken's body cavity.*  Season it all over with the garlic powder, oregano, and salt, all to taste, but make sure to rub all of these well into the chicken's skin.  Place the seasoned bird on top of the potatoes in your dish, and then bake it at 350-400F for about 1 hour, or until fully cooked.**
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*In the Canduci family, you don't throw the guts away, you save them and make something else out of them at a later time.  Like gravy.  But people tend to have strong feelings about organ meat, so I'm not going to try to sell them on anybody in this post.

**I don't buy into that BS about "until the chicken reaches 160F internally."  A) Even if you have a meat thermometer, you have to be a meat thermometer pro not to stick it in some part of the relatively small chicken that is going to give you an inaccurate picture of how hot your chicken is.  B) Meat (and most other things) continue cooking after they're removed from the source of heat (this is why you should run your hand under cool water for about 10 minutes after your burn it), so waiting until the chicken is, thermally speaking, "cooked" to remove it from the oven pretty much guarantees it will be over-cooked by the time you eat it, unless you're in the habit of plunging your chicken in an icewater bath immediately after you take it out of the oven.  There is a better way than getting salmonella or taking your chicken on a polar bear swim.  Cook the chicken at the oven temperature the recipe recommends for 30 minutes per pound of chicken.  After that time, take it out, make a slice into the breast, and inspect the color of the meat and juice.  If the meat is light pink or white and the juice is clear, your chicken is, for all practical purposes, done with its time in the oven.  If the meat is dark pink, or if the juice is pink or bloody, put the chicken back in for at least another 15 minutes and then check it again.  (More like 30 minutes if the meat is a pretty dark pink, and if it looks "rare", well, you've got 45 minutes looking at you between now and dinner.  Sorry, just sayin'.)  After it's done according to the above guidelines, remove it from the oven and let it sit out on the counter, covered in a little tinfoil tent for about 5-10 minutes.  If you feel crafty you can even stick your meat thermometer in the appropriate place on the chicken (or leave it in there, if you were using it all along) and watch the temperature of the chicken continue to rise as it sits on the counter.

White Spaghetti with Chicken

1-1/2 to 2 lbs chicken, defatted and cut into pieces
5-6 garlic cloves, sliced
1 large onion, chopped
olive oil for cooking
1/4 C. red wine
parsley and salt and pepper to taste
1-2 pototoes, cubed
1 1/2 C. frozen peas
1 lb spaghetti, cooked

In hot oil, fry the chicken pieces just a little bit-- don't let them get brown.  Then add in the onion, garlic, parsley, and potatoes.  Add in the red wine and let everything simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes.  Add in 4-5 glasses* of water-- enough to cover the chicken-- and the package of frozen peas.  Let it simmer until there is enough sauce for the spaghetti.  (Note from 4/89-- "Too much water.")
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Mystery Ingredient solved: it was a quantifiable amount of peas.  There is still no direction on spaghetti, but I'm guessing that is due to the cooking style of Great-grandmom, which basically dictated that you put in as much spaghetti as you have people to feed, and they'll eat it and like it!

Okay, first things first.  There is a mystery ingredient that I need to get with my cousin Judi to clarify what it is.  It may be spaghetti, since it's not (as far as I can tell) mentioned in this recipe other than in the title.  The 1 lb is my thought on how much spaghetti you would need to go with this sauce.

*I'm not sure if Great-grandmom Canduci was talking about her juice glasses (6 oz.) or water tumblers (12-16oz.)  Either way, it's a lot of water.  Based on the rest of the recipe, what I would do is get to the point where you would be adding in the water and peas, and add in the peas first.  Then, stir everything around in the pot so it's in an even layer on the bottom, with chicken pieces and onions and the like peeking up amongst the peas.  Then I would add in enough water to just go over the top of the peas and proceed as directed.