Cooked Water: A Recipe

I'm nearing the end of my first WWOOF stretch, and next week I promise a post reflecting my thoughts on my experiences so far. One more week of manual labor, then off on a little touristing in Florence, Bologna, and environs. Then off to London before my tourist visa expires for a little touristing with my favorite expat and my mother, who is hopping the pond for a little mother-daughter Scottish Christmas vacation. Then, back to work!

Meanwhile, in the present, I've been spending many hours reading a few Italian cookbooks, one the Big Book of Regional Cuisine:




I spent quite awhile translating a few recipes (minus the many mysterious oven temperatures and grams), from the very simple to the amazingly complex. Imagine, if you will, a dish consisting of a crispy shell of delicious risotto encasing a steaming mixture of meatballs, sausage, tomato sauce, and fresh mozzarella. That sounds like a once in a lifetime type of recipe. On the other hand, I noticed a great tradition in all of the different regions of Italy a skill of making a delicious, simple dinner from whatever might be lying around the kitchen. There are a few different recipes along the same lines, but the Tuscan version is called Acquacotta, or literally "cooked water." This seemed like one of the easier recipes to "translate" to the American kitchen, but be warned it hasn't been tested and the measurements are guess-timated from my own soup-making intuition.

Acquacotta

Serves 4, 30 minutes total cooking time

Ingredients:

1 cup fresh mushrooms (preferably porcini)
2 small peeled tomatoes, chopped
2 cloves garlic
2 eggs
16 small pieces toasted bread
1/4 cup grated parmesan
4 tbsp olive oil
Salt, pepper

Cooking Instructions:

Clean the mushrooms, remove the legs, and coarsely chop.
Cut the garlic in into slices and brown in a medium pot with the olive oil. Add the mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes, stirring often.
Add the tomato and about 8 cups of water. Season with salt and pepper and bring to a boil. Simmer for 15 minutes.
Distribute the toast between four bowls and sprinkle with about 2/3 of the parmesan.
Beat the eggs in a bowl with the remaining parmesan. Sprinkle the egg mixture into the soup, mixing well.
Distribute the "cooked water" between the bowls and serve immediately.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Bibbona, Livorno, Toscana, Italia

Collected Observations from Bibbona

What a week to be in Italy! Just as I arrived to the first place with a TV in it (and on during all meals, by the way), Italy blew up! Torrential rains, floods, the Fall of Berlusconi - exciting, to say the least.

Anyways, I'm in the northeast of Tuscany, about two miles from the coast on a small family farm. They have olives for their own use, plus a huge variety of vegetables that they sell to regular customers and at the local market. They have a pretty large greenhouse, plus another few acres of vegetable gardens.




My work here has been pretty mixed, so instead of describing something like the olive harvest, I'm going to throw out a few things I've learned from the work and the television.

1. In Italy, even pets eat pasta:




2. All day in the fields, olive grove, or garden, we listen to the radio. One day, I was doing more daydreaming than radio-listening when all the sudden I hear the name "Steven Pinker." Huh? I took he's psychology class with him. They cite something he said recently and start a call-in conversation about it. That's funny. Next day, same scenario and all the sudden they mention an artist that I'd met at the castle last month (apparently Pink Floyd wrote a song about her). The wonders of Italian radio.

3. Strawberries produce more in their second year. If you plant them in containers, let them sprout, and then freeze them, they think they're already in year two!




4. Garlic, obviously, is a bulb. You plant one clove, and a whole head grows out of it. I spent a day breaking apart garlic to plant, separating the good cloves from the bad cloves. Good cloves are the curved ones, which they say grow into nice big heads. The straighter cloves go into the sauce instead of the ground. Maybe an old wives' tale, but it's tradition!

5. The smell of a rotting onion is one I will always recognize, after two days of sorting onions to sell, onions to plant, and onions to throw as far away from my olfactory range as possible.




6. Everyone in Italy seems to be 100% ready to be on television. I know American television is full of people who may have no business being there, but this is something that has really struck me about Italians. They seem to always be willing to share an opinion on national television or call into the radio station to tell the country what three certain songs meant to their lives. When one certain game show comes on, I can't help but laugh in glee. It's a show where eight people stand up on a dais with a number pinned into your chest and a folder containing the prize money amount. The player has a list of eight occupations, and one by one they come to center stage and the player has to guess their job description correctly for the prize money.

7. Italians drive videocameras like they drive cars. There are lots of them, no rules, and no control. Every time you see a news report, half the screen is taken up by other reporters, or the camera is zooming in and out willy-nilly, or they zoom in on a face from across the street and bounce the camera around. Even the interview shows or game shows I've seen have odd camera angles from across the room, or behind someone's ear. Schizophrenic, a little disconcerting, and somehow perfectly Italian.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Bibbona, Livorno, Toscana, Italia