copyright 2010 art of living,PrimaMedia,Inc/Maria Liberati

Lord Byron once said: “ A woman should not be seen eating and drinking unless it is lobster salad and champagne, the only true feminine and becoming viands”

 (A plaque on a building in Italy where he lived for sometime)

Well we shall pardon him, for he was Lord Byron, after all…who was  inspired by Italy and lived here for some years while working on some of his mastepieces…a true romantic at heart.. Recently I have passed many of the very places he lived in and his writing has also inspired me…here is a lobster recipe (unfortunately not a salad). But you can serve this with champagne or a dry Prosecco.

Velvety Lobster & Fennel Soup

*2 celery sticks, chopped

*2 lbs fennel

*1 onion

*2 tblsps unsalted butter

*4 ounces steamed lobster meat

4 cups vegetable broth

*1/4 cup cream

*zest of 1 lime

*salt and pepper to taste

 Wash and finely chop celery, peel onion and dice. Chop ½ of the fennel, setting aside the green top part.

Place 1 tablespoon butter in a soup pot, saute chopped fennel, onion and celery till golden brown. Place in broth. Bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer over low heat for 15 minutes.

 Cut the rest of the fennel (except top green parts) into small stick like slices. Place in saute pan with 1 tblsp butter, saute for 4 minutes.

Place soup in food processor till it is a velvety, creamy mixture. Pour into  soup pot again  and add in cream. Simmer over low heat, stirring every so often.

Add lobster meat to sauteed fennel. Saute for 2-4 minutes over low heat. Add in lime zest and dash of salt and pepper to taste. Chop green part of fennel bulb and set aside.

Divide soup mixture into 4-6 soup bowls. Top with lobster meat mixture and sprinkle with chopped fennel greens.

Serve with dry Prosecco or dry Champagne.

 For more recipes get your copy of the book selected as the Best Italian Cuisine Book in the USA

The Basic Art of Italian Cooking Holidays & Special Occasions-2nd edition

copyright 2009, Maria Liberati

Plant and herb lovers will tell you that now is the perfect time to pick basil leaves. And chefs will tell you that they’re the ideal size to be chopped up and put into your favorite dishes. Famous Recipes is here to tell you the history of pesto, a delicious sauce where basil plays the most important role.

The term pesto comes from the verb meaning “to pound” or “to crush”. The earliest known recorded version of pesto comes from Roman poet Virgil’s (70 – 19 BCE) Bucoliche. Virgil writes of a similar Roman sauce called moretum. But the sauce alluded to in this epic is not quite the pesto we know today because it didn’t have the most essential ingredient: basil. Basil wasn’t officially added to the recipe until the mid 19^th Century after the plant had been introduced to Europe and found a perfect home in the Liguria region of Italy’s northwest.

After the basil was added, the recipe became extremely more complex. According to the Basil Park in Genova Pra (http://parco-basilico.provincia.genova.it/eng/Index_PBP.html), an Italian website devoted to making the most of Genoa’s most famous food, “For centuries basil was attributed magical virtues in addition to the properties that made it so valuable in the kitchen, so that it had to be gathered in accordance with sacred, codified rituals.” This is why many older recipes will call for hand mixing the leaves in special dishes. A more scientific assumption says that basil helps with ailments such as skin disease and intestinal trouble. But interestingly enough, basil plants can be affected by any number of factors including the time of day of harvest. Whether or not there is any truth behind the medicinal or magical properties of basil, however, is immaterial. A lover of fine Italian foods will tell you that its greatest quality is its taste. And pesto is a solid example of this.

Pesto

2 ½ Cups Basil

½ Cups Olive Oil

2 Tbsp Pine Nuts

2 Cloves Garlic, peeled and crushed

½ Cup Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

2 Tbsp Pecorino-Romano cheese

Bit of pepper

In a food processor, put olive oil, pepper, basil, nuts, and garlic. Process until just blended.

Put mixture in bowl and whisk in cheese.

For more great recipes and tips get your copy of the best selling book The Basic Art of Italian Cooking by Maria Liberati at http://www.marialiberati.com and got to http://www.marialiberati.com/blog2

  Copyright, 2008, Maria Liberati

Editor: Michela Pompeo

This is a recipe typical of Liguria the strangely arch-shaped region in the north west of Italy (capital: Genoa), in whose gulf (the Gulf of Spezia) Shelley, the romantic English poet, drowned in 1822.

(The last time I passed through we were taking our yearly summer drive through the Italian and then French Riviera on our way to one of my favorite little beaches in the  South of France-Beaulieu Sur Le Mer- it was one of Napoleon’s favorite places also. Sorry, I am digressing here from the recipe,but too beautiful a place not to make a mention)

The main (and almost ‘unique’) ingredient is chickpea flour. Chickpeas furnish as many calories as dried beans, broad beans or lentils (331 Kcal for 1 cup) and as many proteins. They are very nutritious, especially if added to dishes with pasta or rice. They can substitute meat and they are easily digestible.

This kind of ‘bread’ is to be baked in the oven (in the grill mode, meaning heat coming only from above) using a special type of oven dish, called testo¹: it is round; it comes in various dimensions: the medium one has a diameter of 30 cm; it is 2.5cm deep and it is made of tin-plated copper. This is the most fundamental characteristic, because copper, being a good heat conductor, allows a uniform heat diffusion and a perfect cooking.

So, here it is:

 Genovese Chickpea Flat Bread ( Farinata Genoese) 

Ingredients:

½ cup chickpea flour;

1 teaspoon salt;

2 tablespoons olive oil

¾ cup water

Sift the chickpea flour, add salt, oil and water. Stir carefully and let it rest for a couple of hours at least (This mixture is rather liquid, due to the amount of water; never mind: it must be so). Grease the testo with olive oil. Stir the mixture again and pour it into the testo. Bake in the oven, whose door will be left ajar, at 430° F (220 C) for about half an hour. Serve hot with a sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper.

For centuries, pulses had been the fundamental food of rural people, very common and widespread. This perhaps accounts for their importance and presence in many folklore tales, such as the Princess and the Pea, Anderson’s Jack and the Bean Plant, etc.

The Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) collected a variety of Italian tales in his Fiabe Italiane, 2 volumes, Oscar Mondadori, Cles (TN), 1968. At page 364, 2^nd volume, we find Cecino e il bue (Cecino means ‘little chickpea’), a story which has different versions as Calvino himself has explained. He chose the Florentine version, but he changed its beginning, drawing from other local traditions.

While a woman was cooking chickpeas, a beggar passed by and asked for some chickpeas to eat. The woman refused to give her any, because she was afraid not to have enough for herself and her husband. The beggar cursed her: “May all the chickpeas you are cooking turn into as many children to feed!” Immediately, a hundred very tiny children(resembling chickpeas) sprang up from the pan and started crying and asking for food. The woman, terrified, chased them and crushed them into the mortar as if to make a chickpea purée. When the woman got hold of the last one, she spared him, liked him and kept him as her child.

Soon, she and her husband gave Cecino some jobs to do and then found an employment for him. Being so little, he could be of much help in thwarting robberies, etc.

After many adventures, some of which very dangerous (as when he was eaten by a wolf), he met a gang of robbers with plenty of money. While they were counting the coins, he scared them (they could not see him, but could hear his voice) to such an extent that they ran away, leaving the money there. Cecino took the bag and brought it to his family, making them happy and rich.

I think this is to show how important children are in a family… (shall I add: how important chickpeas are in human diet, too?)

For more great recipes and cooking tips get your copy of the bestselling book The Basic Art of Italian Cooking at http://www.marialiberati.com/ and go to http://www.marialiberati.com/blog2

“Mangia Bene, Vivi Bene”

Maria

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Copyright, 2008, Maria Liberati

The Basic Art of Italian Cooking

http://www.marialiberati.com

http://www.marialiberati.com/blog2

Editor: Joseph McVeigh

Basil: a kingly herb?

Basil is a widely used herb in the Italian cuisine, a little bit like parsley: you can put it almost in every dish of pasta, risotto, sauces, pizza, decoration of cold dishes… Apart from that, it is also grown in pots and kept on window-sills throughout the summer as a remedy against mosquitoes. Its fragrance and perfume keep them away (this is a quality this herb shares with citronella, a tropical grass with lemon-scented leaves, which is cultivated in Italy, too. We’re becoming a tropical country, with the weather changing so much and growing hotter and hotter…)

Its name derives from the Latin word basilicum, coming in its turn from the Greek adjective βασιλικός, meaning kingly, as the dictionary says (M. Cortelazzo, P. Zolli, Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, Zanichelli, Bologna 1979, s.v.). So, it has always been considered a very fine herb, suitable for kings and queens.

Basil is native of tropical Asia, probably India, where it is still considered a holy herb, and planted near temples. It was then spread into Europe and Italians, in the past, considered it a symbol of love. Women in search of fiancé used to put a basil pot on their window-sill to wait for true love.

It was very soon used in the kitchen: the Roman Apicio (25 BC- 37 AD ?), famous for his cooking ability, wrote in his De re coquinaria a recipe including basil to flavour peas.

References to basil can be found in poetry, prose and art from the Middle Ages to the present. In Italy, G. Boccaccio (1313-1375) wrote about basil: in his Decameron (4thy day, fifth novella), he told the sad story of two lovers, Lisabetta da Messina and Lorenzo. Her brothers, not approving of their affair, killed the young man. In a dream, Lisabetta saw where her lover had been buried, went there and with the help of a faithful servant cut the head from the body and, when at home, put it into a large pot and planted basil in it. Basil grew wonderfully as it was daily watered by Lisabetta’s tears.

The English romantic poets P. B. Shelley (1792-1822) and John Keats (1795-1821) both wrote about basil in their poems. Shelley mentioned it in his To Emilia Viviani:

Madonna, wherefore hast thou sent to me
Sweet-basil and mignonette?
Embleming love and health, which never yet
In the same wreath might be.

and Keats retold the story by Boccaccio in his poem Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.

Let’s end with the recipe for the famous pesto alla genovese. What you need for 6 people is: abundant basil fresh leaves (about two handfuls), grated Parmesan cheese (3 tblsps), 1 clove (of garlic), a glass of extra virgin olive oil, a pinch of salt, pine nuts (1 tblsp). Chop garlic and basil very finely (add a little bit of salt, so that the leaves will keep their brilliant green), put them into the mortar and keep crushing adding oil, Parmesan, pine nuts little by little (the Italian name pesto comes from the verb pestare = to crush something in a mortar) until you get a creamy, green sauce; add some salt to taste. Being people living in the 21^st century and, as such, with no much time to spare, I suggest putting all the ingredients together in the mixer and mix until ready. If you want to make it lighter and more digestible, prepare it without garlic and pine nuts.

You can season pasta with it (remember to thin it with one/two tablespoons of the boiling water in which pasta is being cooked); if you use it for boiled meat or fish you should dilute it with a little bit of vinegar.

And, very quickly, to prepare a nice colourful dish: peel and cut four potatoes into small cubes, wash and cut 1 pound of green beans, put everything into a large pan, cover with water, and cook over medium heat until the vegetables are soft. Drain and season with your newly home-made pesto!

For more great recipes, get your copy of the best selling book The Basic Art of Italian Cooking by Maria Liberati at http://www.marialiberati.com and visit http://www.marialiberati.com/blog2