Comfortable

In troubled times, simple pleasures like home cooking and the company of friends are enough to soothe the soul.

Eat Your Greens

Olives infested with olive fly still on the tree during the December 31, 2014 snowstorm here (Photo credit: Amanda Roelle).

The temperature here is dropping as I write. Snow flurries and high winds blew in last night, but today’s snowfall is almost an afterthought, with patches of brilliant blue sky behind ominous clouds. Maybe it’s counter-intuitive, but we welcome the chill if it will lay waste to the olive fly larvae that burrow in the soil of our olive grove. There’s little else to do but stay inside and cook while entertaining visions of insect death and destruction, hoping the incongruity of these two activities doesn’t indicate something troubling about my state of mind.

In the Kitchen with Rosy

Bosc pears are plentiful in fall and winter. They’re also the best choice for desserts because they hold their shape in baking.

This won’t come as a surprise to those of you who know me, but some of the very best moments during our busy tour season this year were spent in the kitchen. Not unlike the way that dinner guests always end up converging right where the action is, our tour participants were drawn to the Italian kitchens we visited like moths to the flame. And in some cases, it really was a flame since we visited more than one glowing wood-burning oven heated to almost 700 degrees Fahrenheit. In the experience of diving into new ingredients with Italian home cooks, bakers, butchers and professional chefs, our guests deepened their understanding of this culture and its people. And they ate very, very well.

Kilometro Zero

All that’s left of our favorite summer pasta.

We always appreciate the scale of our town in Italy when summer rolls around.  Just about everything we really need is a short walk away from our front door. But we are especially grateful for all this proximity when the relentless Pugliese summer sun beats down, sapping every ounce of energy from our limbs. Then we summon ourselves into action early in the morning, making the rounds of the bar for a quick caffè ghiacciato (iced coffee), the pescheria (fish market) or the maccelleria (butcher) and, best of all, the fruttivendolo (fruit and vegetable shop) that is so mercifully close to us that we call down our order from our balcony. Italians call this shopping a kilometro zero, literally sourcing products at zero kilometers of distance. We call it incredibly lucky and we take advantage of the ease every single day.

My Culture

Cultural awareness is often obscure and sometimes just out of reach.

Somewhere I read that it is impossible to know a culture completely unless you’ve been born into it. The more experiences you have in the new, adopted culture might add to your understanding—your psychic database—but you will never lose the capacity to be utterly thrown by some new, seemingly inexplicable aspect of your new world. Which pretty much describes where we are today.

Piatto Forte

Peperoni Ripieni can be included as part of an appetizer selection—or eaten all by themselves.

Everybody has one. Whether you are a world class chef or a home cook with a week’s worth of dinner menus on regular rotation, you are inevitably known for one special dish—the one you never get tired of making. Friends always want the recipe, you count on it to be great every time you serve it and you can make it in your sleep. It’s your signature dish—your piatto forte.

Braised Leeks are a favorite piatto forte that rival Peperoni Ripieni for requested appearances.

You probably can’t remember how you came to be associated with your piatto forte. Maybe you found a recipe that intrigued you so much that you just had to try it. Your initial effort was met with enthusiastic approval, so you found yourself recreating the dish for guests, growing more confident with its execution with every repetition. Or maybe you learned it from your grandmother, adjusting the recipe over time to make it your own. By now, you never even look at the recipe, though, so ingrained is the process of crafting your signature dish. You can reproduce it when you’re away from home in someone else’s kitchen, even without access to familiar, go-to ingredients. Whether your piatto forte is as basic as guacamole or as complicated as paella, you’ve made it your own and the world is a happier place because of it.

My piatti forti always seem to come from the antipasto (appetizer) category. I love the way appetizers tease the palate, making way for the main

La Scarapaccia, a hybrid frittata from Tuscany, is another contender for piatto forte status. I make it every chance I get when zucchini is plentiful, especially when I can find zucchini flowers.

meal to come. Antipasti are a great vehicle for in-season vegetables, too. The best ones offer contrasting textures and flavors along with visual appeal. And antipasti can be designed to comprise an entire meal, offering intriguing tastes without overwhelming guests.

Peperoni Ripieni are versatile, easily prepared from readily available ingredients and very, very good to eat.

I have already shared my family’s all-time favorite—Braised Leeks— in another post, but Peperoni Ripieni (Stuffed Peppers) run a very close second. I learned how to make them when we visited Puglia for the first time almost 20 years ago and still make them for Italian friends here—a very tough crowd. Now that shiny, fleshy red and yellow peppers are dominating our local vegetable market, I am rediscovering why this recipe lives at the top of the list, ticking off all of the elements that transform a recipe into a piatto forte. Peperoni Ripieni can be made well in advance. Their baking time is flexible and they can be eaten hot from the oven or, even better, at room temperature. Their filling is equally flexible, rendering them highly customizable, which is how they could easily become your own personal piatto forte, too. Don’t be tempted to skip the pepper roasting and peeling process, though. In addition to creating one of the most addictive kitchen aromas ever, the flavor of freshly roasted peppers just cannot be replicated with jarred or canned peppers.

Peppers are abundant in the vegetable market now, making stuffed peppers are a perfect summertime piatto forte.

Peperoni Ripieni—Stuffed Peppers

Ingredients:

4 large red and/or yellow peppers

2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

2 Tbsp. roughly chopped capers

2 Tbsp. toasted, roughly chopped pine nuts

1 salt-packed anchovy, boned, rinsed and roughly chopped (If necessary, substitute 1 scant teaspoon of anchovy paste or leave it out altogether for vegetarians.)

½ cup toasted breadcrumbs

½ cup finely chopped Italian parsley

1 Tbsp. fresh oregano or marjoram (optional; if you don’t have any fresh herbs, just omit them)

Kosher or sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Method:

Roast peppers on a foil-lined baking sheet under the broiler until they’re blackened on all sides.

First, roast the peppers. Set the oven to broil and cover a baking sheet with aluminum foil. Place the peppers on the baking sheet, then put the baking sheet in the oven about 4 inches from the broiler unit above them. Roast the peppers until the side facing toward the broiler is blackened, then carefully rotate each pepper and broiling until each pepper is thoroughly blackened. Place the blackened peppers in a resealable plastic bag and let rest for 15-20 minutes or until cool enough to handle.

After removing the seeds and membranes, the peppers are placed on paper towels to drain while making the stuffing mixture.

Carefully remove the peppers from the bag, one at a time, as you peel the blackened skin from the flesh underneath. Remove all seeds and white, pithy membranes. Lay each pepper flat on paper towels to absorb excess moisture. Don’t be tempted to remove the skin by running cool water over the surfaces of the peppers; water dilutes the exceptional pepper flavor.

Sometimes the peppers will separate into sections. This is fine as long as the pieces are at least 2 inches wide. For each pepper, you should end up with four pieces, each of which will be stuffed with the filling mixture and rolled up.

Stuffing ingredients are moistened with extra virgin olive oil and mixed well.

While the skinned peppers are draining, mix the capers, pine nuts, anchovy, breadcrumbs, and parsley. Add the extra virgin olive oil and mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste.

If the peppers aren’t already separated in 2-3 inch-long pieces, slice them accordingly. In an ovenproof dish, swirl a little extra virgin olive oil into the bottom to coat thoroughly.

On the inside side, place a heaping teaspoon (approx.) of filling at end of each pepper piece closest to you. Carefully roll up the pepper piece to enclose the filling and place the roll, end underneath, in the baking dish. Repeat this process until all of the pepper slices are filled. Drizzle a little more extra virgin olive oil over the tops of the pepper rolls.

Peperoni Ripieni can be prepared to this point earlier in the day, then baked before serving.

Bake the rolls in a hot over (400 to 425 degrees) until they are hot, with a golden toasty appearance on the top. Serve them hot, or let them cool to room temperature and serve as part of an antipasti selection. You can also prepare them early in the day, waiting until just before serving to bake them.

Serves 4-6 as part of an antipasto (appetizer) selection.

Note: In Naples and Sicily, it’s not unusual to find currants or raisins added to the filling mixture. To do this, soak 2 Tbsp. of currants or raisins in hot water for 15 minutes, then drain, chop and add them to the filling mixture.

Afloat

As twilight approaches, sailboats appear to float on the glassy surface of the Ionian sea in this quiet bay on Paxos.

A week ago, we were bobbing along in the turquoise waters of Paxos, wondering just how we got so lucky. The sky was a brilliant, Greek blue and the sun was strong, but not punishing. Paxos’s olives, pines and cypress trees shone in the distance above the sweetest little port town we’d ever seen. Even the fish seemed to have a little extra joie de vivre as they darted underneath our wiggling toes. It was about as close to paradise as we can imagine.

In the Swing of Summer

Creamy white and violet-striped eggplant have just started to appear in Martina Franca’s fruit and vegetable market.

When we’ve been away from Martina Franca for any period of time, we try to get ourselves to the weekly open-air market as soon as we can. Not only do we need to stock up on whatever looks especially gorgeous in the fruit and vegetable department, but meandering through the stalls and listening to the vendors confirms that we’re really home.

La Pausa

Getting ready for one in a series of Pascarosa olive oil tastings we held throughout Oregon and California this spring.

After a month and a half of unbridled hedonism —and absolutely no blog posts—we have slipped back into the now familiar cadence of our lives in Martina Franca. We went back to the U.S. to see our children, parents and friends these past few months, experiencing a pausa from Italian life while escaping the tail end of winter. We also peddled our extra virgin olive oil up and down the west coast, reconnecting with olive oil aficionados and meeting some truly lovely new friends, too. It was a rollicking good time between the world class I.P.A. craft beers in Portland, John Locke’s bewitching Birichino Malvasia and my father-in-law’s deadly margaritas, which ought to be illegal. We need a vacation from the vacation.

The Heart of It

Extra virgin olive oil adorns this savory butternut and nut butter soup.

When we moved to Martina Franca for good, we knew what we would find. We’d been coming here for years and years, sometimes for a few months at a time. We knew our neighbors, where to buy mozzarella and which nearby beaches have the best sand and the shadiest parking. We chose this new life with our eyes wide open.