The many faces of radicchio (and oven roasted treviso radicchio)

I love radicchio.....I don't know why, but I'm  simply enamored with bitter vegetables this winter.  I never really noticed radicchio when I lived in the US, but in Italy, I simply can't escape it.  I walk into the vegetable market and I am literally faced with a wall of more types of radicchio than I can count.  Ok, maybe I can count them if I tried, but my point is that there are many types of radicchio.  For many of them, the taste is about the same, but the stalk/leaf ratio is different, so they are good for different types of recipes.

These are three types of radicchio that I happen to have in my refrigerator right now (and one that I started to eat)...round, long, and treviso

 I love all radicchio, and it's great prepared in many different ways.... roasted, sauteed, in risotto, wrapped around a delicious stuffing, in soup....some weeks I eat radicchio every day, each meal a prepared in a new way.  I love colorful food, and radicchio is one of the few ways to add seasonal color to a winter's plate.

But my favorite kind of radicchio is treviso radicchio. Why, do you ask?  First, it is gorgeous, kind of looks like an orchid.  Or a crazy squid if a squid was feeling like a vegetable. 

When I look at this, all I see is an orchid-squid.

Not only does treviso radicchio make me giggle, but it has an exquisite taste.  It's characteristic bitter taste is somewhat more mild, with sweet overtones.  It's wonderful eaten raw, but I think roasting it helps round out the flavor a bit.  Its stalk is also more tender then other types of radicchio, which makes it better for roasting.

If you can find this kind of radicchio where you live, snatch it up! It's a special treat.  Roasting them are easy, you just need:

-treviso radicchio (or some other kind or radicchio if you must, halved or quartered...leave treviso radicchio whole)
-extra virgin olive oil
-balsamic
-fleur de sel (or tasty salt of choice)
-freshly ground black pepper.

Toss the radicchio in a small amount of olive oil (couple of tablespoons), and place in a baking dish.  Drizzle on a dash of balsamic, and sprinkle with fleur de sel and the freshly ground pepper.  Bake in a 375 F oven for 30 minutes or until tender, and eat immediately!

Hands in the Dough: Introd Black Bread Festival

I can't believe I haven't written about this yet.  It was just such an incredible experience that I had to let it marinate for a while so that the words came out right.... but then I forgot about writing it.  So here we are, six months later.

Seuppa valpellenentze ready to go in the oven

Black bread, called 'pane nero' in Italian, and 'pan ner' in Patois, the regional dialect, is an important staple in Valle d'Aosta.  It's a dense bread made with a mother dough and uses whole wheat and rye flours, and a fairly low hydration.  It's baked in a wood fired oven, and left to dry out on racks so that it can be eaten for months (or years) to come.  If eaten fresh, it is often eaten topped with lardo (cured and spiced pig fat, sliced paper thin) and honey.  Once it has dried out, it is used in soups such as seuppa valpellenentze, or dropped soaked in strong red wine to become a local favorite, zuppa dell'asino (donkey soup). 

Most villages, small or large, have a community bread oven, and they are generally fired up during two periods of the year: winter and summer.  In my village of Charvensod, during most of November local families can sign up to use the oven at certain times, and small groups get together to put hundreds of loaves into the oven each day so that people have enough black bread to last the year.  There are also festivals celebrating black bread, and they generally happen in December/January and July/August.  My sister Rita was visiting in August of this year, and I dragged her (willingly) to one of these festivals, to the "Fiha di pan ner" in the village of Introd, which is in the famous Gran Paradiso Park.

These local festivals are simply fabulous.  They usually involve a lot of local red wine, copious amounts of food fired in the wood oven, farmers wearing pajamas and mullets, and a lone accordion player playing cheesy music.  I simply love them! 

It turns out that we got there about 10 hours early for the party....but just in time to help with making the bread.  We found the community bread oven in a little strip mall, right by the village's ATM machine.  We peeked around shyly, looking at the oven and sneaking looks inside the room where older members of the community were kneading bread, when a man invited us inside and insisted we share a big cup of wine with him (it was 10 am!), along with generous slices of bread fresh out of the oven and local Fontina cheese.  They had just finished one batch of bread in the oven, and the next batch was going through its first rise.  The wine-welding man, Pietro, was making seuppa valpellenentze, a black bread, cabbage, and Fontina soup that is baked in the wood fired oven, and proceeded to tell some off color jokes involving his sausages. 

Morning glass of wine

For some reason I got a kick out of the implements they use to clean the oven

Oven mop.

 I don't quite know how it happened, but suddenly we were wearing aprons and kneading bread around a large table with some hilarious older ladies, Olimpia, Irene, and Agata.  There were two men there, and the one who kept making hilariously lewd comments would cut off pieces of the dough that had gone through it's first raising, and would throw it at one of the women, who would deftly knead it and shape it into a loaf, which was then thrown in a pile of dough on a sheet of fabric.  The pile was rolled into a long snake, and then chunks were again cut off, shaped, and placed on a long board.  Olimpia, who must be at least 90 years old, quickly scored the loaves with a floral pattern, and the men shoveled the shaped loaves into the roaring hot oven that fits 110 loaves at a time.  

Franco explaining to me the finer points of kneading

The ladies were amused by my sister....

I hope to be like these ladies some day......

Olimpia deftly scores the loaves

The men shovel loaves into the oven

I turned this into dinner later on

They chatted in the Patois dialect, which I don't' understand much of, and occasionally switched into Italian.  Being that they were all from older generations, they didn't speak a word of English, so Rita was out of luck.  So what they did was make funny faces at her, which was pretty hilarious.  

We helped all day until we got all 110 loaves of bread that we helped make into the massive community oven.  We couldn't stay for the party that night because we actually had to help friends bake bread in their smaller wood fired oven at their house.

Poor me.  








 Here are some video clips I took while a group of kids were there helping out:

An Ode to Agretti

Agretti, Agretti, how do I love thee!

I'm sure the neighbors think I'm crazy.  I've been waltzing around the house proclaiming my love to this deletable vegetable in song.  But if ever a vegetable deserved to be serenaded, it is agretti.

I stopped by our village vegetable market on  my way to picking up some milk and Fontina from the neighbor's raw milk vending machine, and I about jumped to the ceiling in joy when I saw that they had agretti.  Agretti mean it's nearly spring.  Agretti also mean that I get to eat agretti, which is pretty much the best thing this gal could ask for. 

What are agretti?  They look like grass, and are a succulent plant that grows in Italian bog land.  They have skinny red roots, and when you steam them, they taste like salty lemons.  I learned to cook them from my friend Stefano Zonca (one of the best chefs in Italy, and I had the opportunity to work with him in his restaurant two years ago).  You can do a lot of things with agretti.... they make an incredible tortellini stuffing, and are good eaten raw, but I like them best steamed and tossed with a bit of lemon and olive oil. 

Yesterday I bought some infused organic extra virgin olive oil from a farmer at the market... two bottles.  One infused with lemon rind, the other with truffles.  I have a feeling a dab of the truffle olive oil will be divine on my little agretti friends. 

I also found some pleurotus mushrooms at the market, and they turned into a creamy mushroom soup to accompany the agretti.

If you can somehow find agretti where you live, they can be found from early February until the first days of June.  They are easy to clean, just snap off the red roots, and rinse the dirt off of them. 

Snap the red roots off like this

In a heavy bottomed pan (I love using a copper one) that has a lid, heat up a tablespoon of olive oil, and toss the damp agretti around in it.  Squeeze in half a lemon, and cover the pot for 3-5 minutes, until they've reduced but are still 'al dente'.  Drizzle with olive oil (even better if it is a truffle or lemon infused olive oil!) and sprinkle with fleur de sel.  Enjoy hot!

This is my favorite pot for cooking agretti.  It is encased in copper and has a stainless steel lid.

What agretti should look like when they are ready.

Agretti, I love you

Great used as a side dish, or as a base of a main course.  They are absolutely delicious topped with cannellini  bean dishes, such as polenta crusted white bean balls (I'll make a post on how to do that later!) or a roasted garlic white bean puree.

Roasted Brussels Sprouts...I love you!

I think I have a Brussels sprouts problem.

I used to hate them.  Passionately.  I remember being dared to smell one as a child, and it scarred me for life.  However, I recently started craving them out of the blue (it freaked me out, to be honest.  Who craves Brussels sprouts?), and I've been roasting- and eating- pounds of them a week! 

They are heaven, when roasted.  Crispy on the outside, soft on the inside, with an almost sweet-but-not-quite taste and lovely bitter edge.

Here's how you do it:

Take some Brussels sprouts. Rinse them off and take off any icky leaves.  Preheat your oven to 350 F or so.  In a baking dish, toss the sprouts with a little bit of extra virgin olive oil.  Sprinkle some fleur de sel and freshly ground black pepper on top.  Pop in the oven for 30 minutes (or until they darken a bit), and give them a stir every 10 minutes.  To give them an extra zing, sprinkle with good parmigiano.

I love a lot of pepper

Fleur de Sel is my favorite thing.  It is so delicious, sometimes I sneak pinches of it.

I've also been craving focaccia, and I was about ready to go all the way to Genova to get some, since Alpine people don't know how to make good focaccia in my experience. But I figured it would be easier to just make some myself.   This is a pretty good recipe, but you need to add more olive oil on the top than it says. Real Genovese focaccia is nice and greasy.  Brussels sprouts and focaccia are pretty spectacular together..... just an idea.

Why I've been MIA....my soap business!

Sorry that I've been away!  There are many wonderful things to write about, but I haven't had a spare moment. 

In a nutshell, I've finally started up my handmade soap and natural body care business here in Italy!  It is called 'Fleur de Lune', and it's going even better than I anticipated.  Unfortunately, I can't sell outside of Italy for the moment, but for anyone within Italy, you are in luck!  My website is still under construction (I'm too busy making soap, I don't have time to work on it), but you can visit and like my facebook page at www.facebook.com/fleurdeluneVDA. 

One of the things I really enjoy about what I do is working with local small farmers.  I took what I call my 'farm girl class' two years ago; it was a class made for unemployed women to learn to to start up a small farm.  I didn't become a farmer myself, but it connected me with a network of wonderful and talented young female farmers, and I am buying as many of my ingredients as possible from them.  I get goat milk from La Chèvre Heureuse, herbs (lavender, thyme, rosemary, calendula) and beeswax from Genuinus, beeswax and honey from Naturalys, which is also where I produce my products, and chamomile from Artemesia.  My wine used in my mulled wine soap is also local, but not from a small producer.  I get it from a nearby cooperative vineyard, Cave des Onze Communes. 

I try to make my products as sustainable and natural as possible; I don't use palm oil or essential oils from endangered plants, and my packaging is all recyclable or compostable.  All of the scents are from essential oils, and the colors are 100% natural!  The products I produce include lip balm, bar soap, liquid soap, whipped shea butter, exfoliating sugar scrubs, mineral deodorant, lotion bars, and an organic herbal balm. 

I was also just featured on the blog, "You Always Have a Project", where I wrote about my business and gave a recipe for a lotion bar! 

And I promise I'll be back soon with more Alpine adventures.  But for now, I need to go strain a calendula infusion.....

The Désarpa, AKA Cows with Flower Towers

Get excited or run away, but it's time for yet another post about one of my favorite subjects.... cows!

I don't know what it is about 'cow culture' that fascinates me.  More than anything, I guess it is that I am fascinated with the local fascination with cows.  You could say cows are a way of life in Valle d'Aosta.  Cheese and other milk products are an important part of the local economy, but maybe are even more important in local traditions and culture.  Wood carvers often carve cows.  There is a 'cow dome' where the finals of the pregnant cow battle, 'The Battle of the Queens' takes place.  There is a raw milk vending machine, where people can get fresh milk and cheese 24/7.

And there is the Désarpa, which is a massive celebration welcoming the cows back from their summer holidays in the alpeggio, the high-altitude mountain pastures that contributes to the distinctive flavor of Fontina cheese. Today, my friends, was the Désarpa.  It's really  important, and other people must share my bovine fascination, because people come from all over to experience this cow party firsthand; I recently saw a massive billboard advertising it as far away as Genova.

Once upon a time, the farmers walked all of their cows up, up, UP near the tip tops of the mountains at the beginning of the summer, and then walked all their cows back down at the end of the summer.  Thanks to modern technology, most farmers transport their cows in trucks nowadays, but they still celebrate the return of the cows.

I was shocked by the sheer number of people crammed into the historic Roman center of Aosta.  There were marching bands, a giant stage, a cheese market, and many thousands of people lining the cobblestone streets, craning their necks to look at the cows walking by.  Many of the farmers dressed up in historical garb, and lead their bedazzled, flowered, and ribboned cows through the ancient streets.  It's a cow beauty pageant!  Most of the cows have ribbons around their bellies, on their tails, and wrapped around their horns, and a massive, towering flower arrangement on their heads.  It's simply fabulous....

Some of the cows were wrapped up like they were a birthday present

Children dressed up in traditional clothing and carried a sign naming their village

Oh, and the market.  Oh my goodness.  More cheese than I've ever seen in one place in my entire life (and I've seen a lot of cheese), and there were free samples at every table.  I visited every table.  This is a good reason to love October in Valle d'Aosta!

Various cheeses stacked sky high

Goat cheeses from my friends at the Chevre Heureuse

Fontina from the alpeggio

Bleu d'Aost that won the 'gold medal' in the cheese olympics!

This is what I refer to when I ask if people like stinky cheese.  Fontina aged two years....

Pasta e Fagioli..... yum!

Pasta e fagioli.... according to my very Italian husband Gianluca, 'It is simple and tasty.  I can tell you I've seen business men eating their pasta e fagioli in their suit and tie, just to tell you how good it is.'
 

Pasta e fagioli translates as 'pasta and beans'.  Sounds pretty boring, huh?  Gianluca proved to me otherwise.  On a whim, I planted borlotti beans in  my garden this summer.  They recently were ready to pick, and my husband declared that it was time to eat pasta e fagioli.  I've heard Italians talking about this dish for years, but I had never encountered it.  It is one of the very few dishes that is ubiquitous in all of Italy, and many refer to it as 'Italy's national dish'. 

Oh. My. Goodness. 

It is fabulous.  Simple, wholesome, and delicious.

Tonight Gianluca walked me though his family's method of cooking pasta e fagioli.  As he said to me tonight when I asked him how he learned the recipe, ' I have expert in my family... there is Paolo!  Paolo is the expert of squishing beans.  It is typical of where we are from.'

So there you have it, and here is how it's made.  If you can find fresh borlotti beans, it is much much better.  I honestly haven't tried it with anything other than fresh beans, so try not-fresh-from-the-garden beans at your own risk!  If you substitute in dried beans, you need to end up with about 2 cups cooked beans, with enough of the water they were cooked in to cover them.  This will be a waste of ingredients if you use canned beans, most likely.  Gianluca says to make sure that I explain that there are many different versions of this dish, and this is his take on it. 

Ingredients: 
2 cups fresh, shelled borlotti beans (can use other mild tasting beans.  Some regions of Italy use white beans)
6 cups of water
1 1/2 cups dry pasta (spaghetti broken into 1.5 inch pieces, ditalini, or elbow macaroni)
1/2 onion
2-3 cloves garlic
2 carrots
2 sage leaves
2 tomatoes (or one giant one, like I did)
oil for the pan
salt, pepper, marjoram, red pepper flakes

Shell your borlotti beans, put them in a pot along with 1/2 tsp salt, and cover with your 6 cups or so of water.  Boil them until tender... it should take about an hour, but all beans are different so watch them.  If the water evaporates too much, you'll want to add in some more.  Later you will boil your pasta in with the beans and the water, so there needs to be enough to barely cover the pasta. 

Gianluca showing how a real man breaks spaghetti

When the beans are done, take a slotted spoon and scoop a slotted-spoon's worth of beans out of the pot, letting the liquid drain out.  Put the beans in a bowl, and squish with a spoon. 

smashed beans

Chop up your onion, mince the garlic and sage, cut the carrot into small cubes, and cut the tomato into cubes. 

Heat up some oil in a pan, and saute the carrots, onion, and sage over medium flame.  Add in a pinch of salt, some fresh ground pepper, and a pinch of marjoram.  Saute until tender, add in the garlic, and cook for a minute. Add in your squished beans, and stir well. Now add in the tomato , and cook for about 30 seconds. Turn off the heat. 

Bring your beans to a boil, and then add in your pasta.  Gianluca breaks spaghetti up into 1.5-2 inch pieces.  We used a great gluten-free spaghetti that is nearly indistinguishable from the real deal.  Traditionally, 'ditalini' are used, but you can also use elbow macaroni.  Cook for the amount of time your pasta needs to cook, and then when it is done, add in your sauteed veggie mixture and gently stir.  Serve into shallow bowls, top with some nice extra virgin olive oil, red pepper flakes, and fresh ground black pepper.  It is extra delicious sprinkled with some fleur de sel.... not traditional, but great nonetheless. 

Enjoy! Traditionally, it is best with red wine but this version is good with a white wine, as well.