LOOKING GOOD!

To be honest I think I'm a pretty good cook, with 'cook' being the operative word. I'm not a chef, have never taken any sort of cooking lessons, and learned most of what I know from my mom. Now in the age of technology I also learn from the computer and television. I can Google a recipe, or even specific ingredients to find a recipe. I can watch cooking shows on television and get new ideas, see how other people come up with new twists for old favorites. Honestly, I love to cook, but again, it's just cooking to me, and presentation has never been something I've bothered with. Yes, a beautifully presented plate certainly adds to the experience, but if the food doesn't taste good who cares how good it looks, right?

When we attended GABRIELLA'S COOKING CLASS after our morning of TRUFFLE HUNTING, I was snapping away while she was cooking. It wasn't until later when I looked at ll the photos in sequence that I saw how beautifully she had created the antipasto plate, layer upon layer.


When she began there was only one piece of bruschetta with tomatoes and a bit of lettuce on the plate. This looked quite beautiful to me, and I might have finished it off with a nice drizzle of new oil and served it proudly. But not Gabriella! She had more food to add to the plate, so she continued......



More slices of bruschetta were added, and again, I thought the plate looked beautiful - simple, inviting, pleasing to the eye and surely very pleasing to the palette as well.



But of course Garbiella still wasn't finished....she added this small polenta flan she'd baked earlier (and I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember much about it's origins, other than it involved, eggs, truffled polenta and maybe some parmesan cheese!)





And just when I thought it couldn't get any more beautifuk, she added a drizzle of honey over the polenta for the finishing touch!




What do you think..was it worth the additional work? I certainly think so! I can also tell you that it tasted as good as it looks!


The rest of the pictures from that lunch are HERE on our Flickr page.

MAKING YOUR OWN PASTA - YOU CAN DO THIS!

A few days ago I wrote about truffle hunting with the BIANCONI's, but it was so much more than that. After we toured Citerna, we returned to the Bianconi's house for cooking lessons. While we watched Gabriella fix our lunch, we also learned lots of interesting tips and recipes.

One of the most interesting things for me was the pasta Gabriella made. The pasta itself is called frascarelli, and originally it was made with flour and water, back when eggs were a luxury for many people. Using eggs definitely makes this pasta richer, and it's so simple you might decide to make pasta even if you've never done so before. There's no hand mixing the flour and eggs, no rolling the dough or even putting it through a pasta machine.

Gabriella started out with half flour, half semolina, the golden, slightly coarser flour that's used here in Italy for pasta. I'd never heard of semolina before we moved to Italy, except as a type of flour. I'm not really sure if it's readily available in U.S. supermarkets, but surely specialty food shops carry it....or at least I hope they do! I like using at least part semolina when I make pasta because I think it makes the dough less sticky, and I'm sure there are many reasons, some traditional and others scientific to explain why you should use a blend. For now let's just go with these reasons: Gabriella said to do it this way and I've tasted the results, which were delicious. Why argue with experience or success?

Combine regular all purpose flour with semolina....I'm going to take a guess here and suggest using a generous amount of each, about 1 cup of each flour for six servings. Since I haven't yet made the recipe myself it's hard to know for sure. Using one egg for every two people to be served, whisk the eggs into a medium bowl. (To recap, that's a total of 2 cups flour and 3 eggs for 6 servings) Now comes the fun part.

Gabriella used what I would describe as a whisk broom (you can see it in the video), but you can also use a fork, or maybe even a silicone brush, which is what I'm going to use. Dip the broom/fork/whatever into the beaten eggs then drizzle the eggs over the flour, back and forth. Mix gently with your fingers or a fork. After three, maybe four drizzles, set your large sifter on an even larger tray and sift away.

Gabriella used a large setaccio (sifter) to separate the clumped up egg and flour pieces from the flour that was still loose. Once all the loose flour was sifted through, the process was repeated until all the eggs were finished. In the end you'll have tiny pieces of pasta, no bigger than grains of rice, and, not surprisingly, it will cook VERY quickly!

Cook in salted boiling water until the pasta floats, which will probably be just a minute. Drain. Gabriella then added some sliced celery she'd quickly sauteed and some summer truffles preserved in oil. She must have placed each serving in some sort of small container to give it it's shape, then simply inverted the container onto the plate. A few shaving if truffles on the top completed the dish. This was such a wonderful pasta: freshly made, simple to prepare, and absolutely delicious!

Here's a short video of Gabriella making the frascarelli...

A TRUFFLE BY ANY OTHER NAME

One of the most interesting things we did when we stayed at Bill and Suzy's villa a few weeks ago was hunt for truffles - called tartufi here in Italy. Click on the link to read about truffles, but basically they're fungi. Unlike mushrooms, truffles grow underground, on the roots of trees, so they're not easy to find.

Because of their sensitive noses (and their love of truffles) pigs were originally used to find truffles, but the problem was keeping the pigs from eating them! Now dogs are used, so we met up with our truffle dog, Asha and her owner one morning in this private, fenced and locked area loaded (theoretically) with truffles.

The dry weather this fall has greatly reduced the mushrooms and truffles in our area, but luckily Asha was able to sniff out ten or so truffles to impress us. The truffles we found, the black ones, are called summer truffles and aren't nearly as expensive as the white truffles...."the precious ones" as our guide Claudia called them.

After the hunt we headed to TARTUFI BIANCONI, a truffle shop/distributor located just outside of Citta di Castello. Gariella and her husband Saverio process and package both types of truffles in more ways than I ever dreamed possible...truffle polenta, truffle mashed potatoes, jarred truffles, frozen truffles, truffle oil....and more. Saverio loves everything truffle so he also has a small truffle museum inside his house.

If you're interested hunting for truffles, or if you'd just prefer to let someone else do the hunting so you can buy some of these yummy delicacies for yourself, check out TARTUFI BIANCONI for yourself!