Butteriest Butter / Great-grandmom Pulls her Tricks

You know that butter you get in a seafood restaurant to dip your crab legs or lobster in?  That butter that is somehow the epitome of butter, and of the concept of butteriness?  Well, today I discovered how to make it.  No, it's not just melted butter.  And no, it's definitely not vegetarian.  But it's great on anything!

1 stick of butter
1 clove of garlic, minced
3 anchovy filets, drained and patted dry (I didn't pat mine, but I guess you could)

Melt the butter in a small saucepan.  Once it's all melted and also stopped foaming for the most part (only a few seconds after it finishes melting), toss in the minced garlic and let it sizzle for a few seconds.  Then, remove the butter from the heat and throw in the anchovy filets.  Mash them up as much as you can, prefereably with a wooden spoon.
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That's it.  I served it over cooked cauliflower today and I couldn't get enough of it.  Not that I dislike cauliflower to begin with.  I am an adult and buy my own groceries, so I don't have to eat cauliflower if I didn't like it.  Which I do, and I did.  But that was some of the most badass cauliflower I've ever eaten.  This sauce was also poured over hot cooked spaghetti or linguine by Great-grandmom Canduci, and while I can't recall ever having it, my mom liked it so much that, despite not even liking anchovies, she still remembers that pasta and how delicious it was.  The secret is that you can't taste the anchovies, at least not in the traditional sense.  They are definitely the "secret ingredient", but the end product is not fishy or even oily.  Just buttery.  So deliciously buttery!

Grand-grandmom Canduci was a card.  I got reminded of some good stories about her when I was putting up the broccoli rabe post, and decided I would share them.

Gardening: see "How to Get a Free Trip to the Grocery Store"

Great-grandmom was a wiley and resourceful old fox and, according to her children, a wiley and resourceful young fox too.  Great-grandmom's method of getting stuff done around the house that she needed to delegate or just didn't want to do herself was to rope the unsuspecting bystander (read: family member) in with a statement something along the lines of "Hey, can you come help me with this?"  Who's to turn down a sweet old Italian lady?  HAH!  Inevitably you would look up from pulling weeds or whatever it was you were "helping her" with and she would be gone!  She even did this to me with the crab grass in her front walk, and she died when I was about 8 years old so I know I must have been a fairly small child at the time.  Wiley indeed!  To pull her tricks even with a little child!  I remember the deep sense of irritation I felt. 

This is also the method Great-grandmom used when, in her later years, she needed a ride to the grocery store.  "Can you give me ride?  Is on the way!" she would ask innocently.  "Of course!" was the only allowable answer-- remember, this is the woman who smacked her own adult sons with the wooden spoon she was cooking with for failing to compliment her cooking.  (FYI: the answer is always "Oh, it is so delicious," to an Italian woman.  Otherwise: smacking.)  So, the driver in question would load up Great-grandmom and drive over the the Acme ("Ack-em-mah") and she would then turn to them and say, innocently, "Oh, can you help me carry groceries?  Is only a few things.  Short trip."  So, the driver would get out of the car (remember, at this point she or he has been promised that it will be "short trip" that is "on the way", meaning the driver still has other business to attend to) and become more and more incredulous as Great-grandmom worked her way through the entire grocery and at least one full cartload.  It's obvious that her victims (read: family members) were truly fooled only a few times.  But what are you going to say to Great-grandmom?  No?  No.  In fact, you beat her at her own game, if you could, by claiming to have a strict appointment that you were running late for, or almost out of gas.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

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.

Hotdogs are Foolproof

Heaven help us all, I'm hosting a dinner party in a little over a week.  You would think that a person who writes a recipe blog would not need Divine Intervention to successfully host a dinner party (and a potluck at that, all I'm responsible for is the main dish) but lately I've been experiencing a run of bad dishes.  Dishes that tasted bad.  Dishes that looked bad but tasted okay.  Dishes that should have been good, but were a new recipe for me and so some unidentified crucial step was impaired, leading to subpar food.  (The taker of Chemistry classes in me likes to call this "the rate limiting step", maybe because I had two separate instructors use the "making a sandwich" analogy to describe that concept.) 

Now it's bad enough when you're making food just for yourself and you both wildly overproduce and fail to accomplish tastiness.  This leads to such desperate measures as repurposing food or, as I have resorted to lately, just throwing it out.  Yes, I admit it.  I have thrown out enough food to cause at least three Italian grandmothers to have heart attacks in the last week, but I had reached my criteria at last: spoilage and intentional eating out due to nastiness.  (I have been known to accidentally-on-purpose forget about something in the fridge until it went bad and I could throw it away.  It's sad that I have to play passive-aggressive games with myself over the refrigerator.)  But returning to the subject, multiply all of the above bad by the number of guests who are not related to me and therefore do not have to pretend to like it, and you'll have an idea of why I have resorted to prayer.

I think I'll grill hotdogs when it comes time for my birthday.  Hotdogs are foolproof.

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.

Repurposed Food

Dear Blog Readers:

Today I admit that eating leftovers has its limits.  There, it's in print.  Remember the pasta part of the unsatisfactory bean and pasta soup?  That went into my freezer, to be removed and repurposed at some point in the future?  Well, I repurposed it into some Vegetarian Chop Suey.  Now, you would think that the very same person who wrote a whole tirade on how you really can't make good pastry without a fat is the now the exact same person who tried to make a beef and macaroni casserole with no beef and recycled macaroni.  Let me spell it out for you.  N. A. S. T. Y.  What's that?  Naaaaaaaaasty.  How was it?  NASTY!  And yet it sits in my lunch bag right now, along with some corn muffins that are even more bricklike than the edible doorstop, which I actually finished off.  I feel like I need to have a Guy Fawkes Day just for my leftovers.  TLC can even come over and do a reality show about my food hoarding, and if they pay me enough I'll pretend to have a breakdown watching the show crew go through my freezer.  If they pay off my student loans, I'll even pretend to have a breakthrough and let them come back six months later to film me eating single servings of things so they can dub that music over it that they usually play in made for tv movies during the part where the mother and daughter are reunited.  You know, a bittersweet piano solo with maybe some windchimes thrown in at the end.  Anyway, today is the day that I admit that there are worse things than thowing out more than one serving of food.  Like eating it for a week and hating every minute of it and then eating out, which definitely does NOT save money.