Love through the stomach... » Wine

Taste of…

Valerie — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 21:10:07 +0000

Taste of Amsterdam, event site

We spent 5 days in Milan to visit my in-laws. Going to Milan is always a great treat to me. Not only because of the fact that it’s vacation, with nice weather, amazing historic sights and family, but for a large part it’s also due to the amazing food. Going into an ‘express’ supermarket makes me giggle. The loser version of a grocery store is actually better, in quality and choice, than the large Dutch (or American) grocery stores.

Taste of Milano, event site

This trip to Milan was extra foodielicious, because the week before we left, I realized that not only would there be a movie, a music festival and the fashion week, but the first days we were there were the last days of ‘Taste of Milano’.

Saffron everything at Taste of Milano

When I found out I didn’t hesitate one second (or ask Laurens if he was even interested), but immediately contacted them for tickets. And on Sunday, the last day of Taste of Milano, we went to the ippodromo where it was held.

Cute chef's hats and aprons at Taste of Milano

When we came back to Amsterdam, I realized that Taste of Amsterdam had just started. I figured I’d contact them for tickets as well, and so two Sundays in a row were spent at a ‘Taste of…’ event.

Delicious hams at Taste of Milano

Now Taste of Milan and Taste of Amsterdam look somewhat similar. The furniture, tents and logo look exactly alike. The two events couldn’t be more different in atmosphere though. And to be honest, I felt much, much more in place at the Italian event, despite the fact that I’m a Dutchie by birth.

Champagne for VIPs at Taste of Amsterdam

Taste of Milano was -despite the rain and mud- a fun event. People who went there, often with their children who ran around in the mud while eating the finest cuisine – were casual. They were there to have fun. To find the tastiest treats, to learn about some wonderful products, to taste. It was very laid back which made great to just hang out and eat and drink and try things. The dishes that were offered from the top 20 restaurants of Milan all looked amazing and the few dishes I tried tasted as great as they looked. They were extremely refined and special. It reassured us that we really need to have more time in Milan, because there are so many restaurants we just need to try out!

Hand made tortellini and ravioli at Taste of Milano

The dishes offered by these restaurant ranged from 4 to 6 euro’s with a lot of them being 4 or 5 and only a slight few being 6. Besides the restaurants there were a whole lot of booths presenting their products, which offered their products to taste for free or gave some demonstrations. More on the tasting of some amazing wines and the making of some wonderful chocolates will follow in a next blog post.

Traditional (and less traditional) panettone and pandoro at Taste of Milano

Taste of Amsterdam was completely different. The weather was really nice, so it was busy. It didn’t seem like the guests were more food lovers though. It seemed to me that it was a seen-and-be-seen event for the nouveau riche of Amsterdam (or their wannabe counterparts). It was just a very, very different atmosphere. One I personally don’t care for that much.

Visitors of the VIP lounge at Taste of Amsterdam

The restaurants that showed themselves at Taste of Amsterdam were very decent, but didn’t seem to me like the absolute top 20 of Amsterdam. If that’d been the case Ciel Bleu, Yamazota and La Rive (among others) would’ve been at the event. Some came close or are in the top, but I think we all have to agree that while Fifteen is a great concept, it’s not one of Amsterdam’s very top restaurants. The dishes the restaurants showcased had the same 6, 5 or 4 euro price structure, though more dishes were in the 6 euro range than in the 5 or 4. Also there were very few dishes that gave an instant wow factor. I mean come on, I love pizza, but mini pizza’s aren’t an exceptional dish to show at a food event, just like barbecued pork sausages. Tasty, but nothing close to exceptional.

Mini pizzas at Taste of Amsterdam

The only dish that had a wow factor was The Amsterdam-onion-sherbet, made with liquid nitrogen by restaurant Bolenius.

Stirring the composition of the sherbet after adding liquid nitrogen at Taste of Amsterdam

The many booths around the event also didn’t seem to be interested in educating us about their products as well as sell, sell sell. If you’d be able to get a taste, portions or pieces were almost too small to even taste something, or actually had to be paid for. A nice exception to that was the ‘workshop on how to make a cheeseplate’ (will blog about that later) and South African Vineyards (Idiom), that actually gave me a small glass of a wonderful Viognier to try. A big shout out also goes to Maldon Salt, who understands that the way to getting people to buy your product, is by first giving it. The big box of salt I received has been well used already, and will appear in recipes soon (and will be bought again when I’m out!)

Idiom vineyards letting me taste their Viognier at Taste of Amsterdam

All in all it was fun to be able to go to Taste of Amsterdam and make the comparison with taste of Milan. If I have to choose though (and it was possible), I’d go and visit Taste of Milan every year from now, while I’m not sure if I’d visit Taste of Amsterdam again.

One of the chefs of Teatro alla Scala/il Marchesino looking stern at Taste of Milano

Fussili alla carbonarina

Valerie — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:50:57 +0000

As mentioned in my previous post and when we visited Milan last summer, I fell in love with a saffron, zucchini and ham pasta. The fussili alla carbonarina served at Tarantella, my (now) favorite restaurant is so different and full of flavor, that I needed to try it at home.

I wish I could tell you that I’d succeeded completely. I haven’t yet, though my attempts so far have been tasty. From a very very simple version to a more advanced version to make a better sauce, the taste has been good, maybe even great, but definitely not the taste explosion the original gave me.

Obviously I googled the heck out of this recipe. Googling ingredients, the name, different things, however, apparently the combination of these main ingredients and the name of the recipe are both frequent on the internet, however not together. I’ve found hundreds of ‘carbonarine’, that had no mention of saffron or zucchini. The thousands of recipes with zucchini and saffron and rice, or pasta, or meats or whatever, didn’t completely look like what we ate at Tarantella.

I decided to give it the good old college try. Just boil the pasta, reserve a bit op the salted pasta water and dissolve the saffron powder in there, frying zucchini and speck (okay, okay, I used a different cured ham) combining, pasta, zucchini, ham and add the saffron water, add parmigiano, stir and serve. It tasted good. But it certainly wan’t any explosion of tastes.

A couple of days later I decided to try again. From reading through tons of blogs and recipes I’d found that carbonarina was either a carbonara type sauce that used cream instead of eggs (making it more suitable for very little kids, as there’s no chance of ingesting raw egg) or a carbonara (with egg) that’s just been altered. I figured I’d give option number 2 a try.

I chopped up my ham again (I used Serrano, which is, like speck, a seasoned, air cured ham, I preferred this to Parma, as that’s not seasoned and cured longer, Serrano seemed closer.)

I cooked the ham and zucchini in a big skillet again. I used a little bit of olive oil in addition to the natural fats rendered from the ham. I boiled the pasta in salted water. I grabbed my big block of parmigiano and my microplane grater and grated a nice heap of the cheese into a little bowl. I added 1 egg and beat the cheese and egg together, then added the saffron powder and a splash of white wine.
Once the pasta was cooked al dente, I drained it and added it to the skillet. The pasta, ham and zucchini were stirred together before I moved the pan off the heat. I poured in the beaten egg, cheese, saffron and wine mixture and stirred everything through vigorously, making sure to stir quick enough to prevent scrambled eggs.

The plated result, again, tasted wonderful. A nice, different pasta, full of flavor and something entirely different from the standard tomato or pesto sauce. But again, it wasn’t the same as Tarantella’s.

I’m at a loss by now. From the taste I’m fairly convinced we do need the egg in there, but it’s still a slightly different color and there are flavors missing. I guess I have no choice but going back to Milan and ask the chef for the recipe! (And hey, if you have any tips or tricks or ideas of what totally different things I can try to make a saffron/zucchini pasta, please let me know!!! I’m obsessed!)

Decorating chocolates

Valerie — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 09:21:04 +0000

Last Sunday we celebrated my in-laws’ 45 wedding anniversary. Some day I hope we get to celebrate our 45th anniversary (not wedding, as the chances for that are slim – not merely the likelihood, but sheer age restrictions are present here!, but the us-being-a-couple-anniversary is hopefully doable.)
And if we get to do that, I would totally love to receive the gift we gave them!

Okay, yeah, so I’m a foodie. And L is an eat-ie. L’s mom is Italian (as in born and raised in Milan with summers in Tuscany), so she’s used to wonderful food.
We say “love goes through the stomach”, and they’ve been lovingly married for 45 years.
What’s a better gift than the gift of food???

We went with the 45 theme. If you’re doing several different gifts, you better find a theme in there. You don’t want people to think you just randomly went to the store and grabbed some groceries and packed them.
- 45 pieces of home-made ravioloni (napoletana and funghi é speck),
- 45 Leonidas bonbons, (great! chocolates),
- 45 glasses of wine (or well- a number of still-closed bottles) and
- 45 saucages, from the mini-mini half-a-bite-kind to bigger, full salami’s.
The idea was primo, secondo, dessert – a full dinner, or at least, that’s how we explained it.
And we added napkins, wrapped pretty with a big bow. Just for completeness, and the fun of it!

The reason behind this themed food gift is that we really didn’t know what to get them. What do you buy people who already have a house full of stuff, travel to Italy regularly, already have a season pass to the opera, and have their own life completely figured out. We had a hard time figuring it out. We’d been wrecking our brains for weeks, months even. Until we came up with the 45 thing.

So I bought the chocolates, and these chocolates – bonbons – are wonderful on their own. Leonidas is a Belgian brand. They make really high quality chocolate. Their chocolate is made fresh regularly – daily I’d say. I bought them in one of their own stores, which also means you know they haven’t just been transferred from a box that’s been lying around there forever.
While I was picking out the chocolates, I noticed they had some blocks of their high quality chocolate, ready to be melted. I obviously had to, needed to, get creative.

I bought 6 extra chocolates, to test, plus a block of extra dark and a block of white chocolate. When I got home I melted the chocolate and piped the number 45 on the 6 test chocolates. Half way through I changed my tip, to get a thinner line, which I could control a little better. After those 6 chocolates, I felt fully comfortable to pipe them as a gift.

The end result… 45 bonbons bearing the number 45. I love getting creative with edible stuff, especially if it’s chocolate! And expecially when I know it’ll actually mean something to someone.

My in-laws were excited about the gifts. They obviously asked L where he ordered the chocolates. He (Somewhat proudly) announced ‘from Valerie’.
This confused his parents at first -couldn’t I have told L where I’d bought or ordered them-, until we actually mentioned that I physically decorated them.

The whole unwrapping of gifts was hilarious. They hadn’t completely figured out the theme yet, when they started finding sausages in the packages. I can totally imagine how strange that must be.

Hmmm, another sausage. Yes, we like sausage, but why another. Oh, another package, these are small sausages. What the heck, why do these darned kids think we eat that much sausage. Oh, napkins, cute, oh wine, great, we like wine, and chocolates, good choice… What the heck, another sausage!

All in all we had a very nice evening, and I can’t wait until someone makes chocolates like these from me! (And if you feel inclined to do so, hazelnut, praliné creme are my favorite!)

We moved! (and are eating stew)

Valerie — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 19:05:14 +0000

As I’m writing this I sit at my kitchen table, in my new kitchen, with a stew cooking on the stove behind me. It’s wonderful.

Thursday was moving day. At 8am the movers arrived at our old house and after a cup of coffee they started loading our 120 boxes and some loose things and furniture.

Around 2 pm all our boxes were unloaded and we (and the movers) were sitting in our new backyard to rest a bit.

the move went super-smooth. At some point we started helping a tiny bit, but not even that much. IT was mostly us standing on different floors telling them ‘this goes there’.

The first thing I started unpacking, was the kitchen. At the same time L started working on computer and media stuff, so we could sit down and watch tv later that night. I got about half the boxes unpacked that evening and after that I just couldn’t do things anymore. I sat down on the couch, L joined me and we had a drink and watched some tv.

Saturday morning I went on unpacking the kitchen and started giving things more final places. It all worked out. Every cupboard is filled now. There aren’t any empty ones left (even though this kitchen is way bigger than my old kitchen) but that’s okay. Everything is nicely spaced out. No more lifting a stack of bowls and plates to get to that thing you need. Eventually we’re planning on buying a nice, old-fashioned, cabinet, in which we’ll have room for some more stuff. Also, later this week (probably) we’ll put shelves up in the pantry/laundry room we created, which means my stock-supplies move there and suddenly I should have some spare room in the cupboards.

I love love love my new kitchen. It’s just so spacious and nice. There’s room to move around. We can both stand there and walk around without bumping into one another. We don’t have to ask each other to scoot over to make it past the dishwasher. It’s just great.

While I was finishing the kitchen, L finished the bookcases. We have half a wall in our living room filled with bookcases. He even unpacked, sorted and placed the books already. Next Saturday my late grandma’s antique cabinet will arrive and moves into the living room as well and then we’ll be able to completely finish unpacking/decorating that room as well.

Then there’s our bedroom. That still needs a lot of work. We did put the shelves into the walk-in-closet today and I started unpacking the boxes of clothes. However, I just discovered I don’t have enough hangers, so I quit that and started cooking instead.

I love, love, love that I get to cook again. Since the reunion dinner, I hadn’t really done much cooking anymore. At least no chopping and adding tons of different fresh ingredients. With the closing on the house and then packing and moving, we just ordered in or got microwave meals. I made the occasional simple dish, like the chicken adobo, but that didn’t involve that much chopping either. I’ll tell you though, I really missed it!

So tonight, I’m making a stew. It’s fairly simple, but has tons of fresh veggies and a nice chunk of meat (which will be cut up after cooking. And I’ll set the table, with actual place mats and such and we’ll have the first fresh-cooked dinner in our new house.

It’ll be wonderful!

[print_this]New-kitchen stew (recipe feeds 4)

big chunk of beef (brisket, rib roast or such, about 500 grams)

6 tomatoes

1 big onion, chopped

some garlic (to taste), chopped

1 red, 1 green and 1 yellow pepper, chopped

your favorite stew/steak seasoning to taste

a pinch of salt (pink himalayan preferred)

1 bouillon cube (or enough powder to make a quart)

far to fry in (butter, oil, lard or a combination)

flour for dredging and thickening

A good pour of red wine (optional)

water

Dredge the beef with flour and a bit of the seasoning. Place your fat in a Dutch oven (I use a combo of butter, lard and olive oil for flavor) and let it melt. Place the beef in the pan and brown it on both sides. Add the onion and the garlic. When the onion turns slightly glassy, pour in some wine (optional) and let it simmer for a minute or 2. Then add enough water to mostly cover the beef.

Get the liquid to a slow boil and add the green pepper and 2 of the tomatoes. Add the bouillon cube and let it simmer for close to an hour.

Taste the sauce and add salt to taste (the amount really depends on your seasoning and the amount of liquid you needed to cover your beef, if your seasoning has salt, wait until you serve to check it. You might not even need to add any, I used a salt free seasoning, so I needed a good pinch.)

Add the rest of the tomatoes and yellow and red pepper. Let it simmer for another 30 minutes or so, until the meat is very tender. Remove the meat and cut it into smaller chunks. Add the meat back into the pan.

In a small bowl combine 2 to 3 tablespoons of flour with some more seasoning and a some of the liquid from the pot. Mix well to avoid lumps. Add the flour mix to the stew to thicken it. Cook it for a couple more minutes, so it thickens and serve with some nice crusty bread.

[/print_this]

Risotto

Valerie — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 19:30:47 +0000

Risotto in it’s original form is simple. It’s just the rice, onion, broth and some seasoning. It’s generally eaten as a primo, the first course (not to be mixed up with a starter) like pasta. The way you often see risotto served in restaurants, as a side or even mail dish, is far from the original form. But original or not, it tastes wonderful!

Usually I do make my risotto’s the original way, mostly a variation on the traditional Milanese recipe, just using chicken stock and wine instead of beef stock. Very plain, very simple, very tasty.

We spent the day working on our balcony. Cleaning it up and getting it ready to sit there and have a drink, or even dinner in the sun. After a day working in the sun, I didn’t want to bother with two courses. With the ingredients I still had, I figured I could make a much jazzed up risotto as a main (and only) course. Not as plain and simple as a regular risotto, true blooded Italians would definitely frown upon my idea (or refuse to eat it), but I figured it’d still be tasty. It was. (And L, being half Italian, didn’t complain until after he finished his plate. His complaint was that he’d eaten too much – and obviously he blamed me for that!)

Risotto Milanese with a big twist (recipe for 4)

1 whole (2 half) chicken breast

1 zucchini

saffron powder

risotto rice

0.5 liter chicken stock (from a cube)

white wine

olive oil

onion

garlic

pepper

parmigiano

Cube the chicken and the zucchini into faily lage chunks. Chop a quarter of the onion and a clove of garlic. Place the chicken in a bowl, drizzle some olive oil on there and sprinkle a good amount of saffron powder over it. Mix so that all the chicken is visibly covered in saffron (it’s all very yellow).
Pour a little olive oil in a sautéing pan, add the garlic and onion and then the zucchini. When the zucchini is slightly cooked, but still has a lot of bite, remove from pan.
Add the saffron chicken to the pan, cook it until it’s slightly browning on the outside. It doesn’t matter if it’s fully cooked yet. Remove the chicken from the pan and set aside.
Add some more olive oil to the pan, chop another clove of garlic and the remaining 3 quarters of the onion and add to the pan. Add enough risotto rice for the amount of people you’re cooking for and cook the raw dry rice in the oil/garlic/onion mixture for a couple of minutes, until the outside of the grains of rice turns glassy. Add about a cup of wine to the pan. Stir until the rice has taken up all of the wine. Add some of the chicken stock, keep stirring until the liquid has disappeared into the rice. Repeat this process until you’ve used about half the stock. Add the chicken to the pan and keep stirring. Add some more stock, stir, when you’re down to the last quarter of the stock add the zucchini (you just want the vegetable to get warm again, it doesn’t need to really cook anymore. Start tasting the rice. If it’s not soft enough yet, add some more stock, or if you’re out of stock some more wine. Once the rice is nice and soft (but still with a little bite, al dente) add a generous amount of grated parmigiano. Stir the cheese through the risotto and serve immediately!
!! The risotto needs to be a little runny, if it’s too dry, add a little more stock or wine at the last minute and stir it through so you’ll have a nice, runny, creamy dish.