Comfort Food

The weather has been unseasonably warm here for the past two weeks. Warm temperatures throughout much of the state, however, contributed to strong winds on the coast - so strong that this week's Walking Fish delivery had to be postponed. It was the first time in the community supported fishery's history that the weather did not allow fishermen to gather the week's fresh catch.

We planned to cook the seafood on Friday, so when it did not make it we turned to an old reliable. Originating near my great grandfather's hometown of Lanciano, bucatini (or spaghetti) amatriciana takes everything good about pasta and adds to it extra bacon and cheese. The result is something unhealthy yet empowering. This is one of Shefali's favorites, so I make more often than our doctor would recommend.

Pasta Amatriciana

olive oil
1 pound pasta (usually a long, thin noodle like bucatini or spaghetti)
1 onion
crushed red pepper, to taste
8-12 oz bacon (I usually use an entire packet)
3.5 cups Christopher Sauce
1/2 cup or more of grated pecorino Romano cheese

put a pot of water on to boil, then chop the bacon into 1/2 inch squares. Heat the olive oil, then saute the bacon in a saucepan. When the bacon is crisp, move it with a slotted spoon to a plate lined with paper towel. In the now-empty pan, saute the onion until brown, then add the crushed red pepper. Let the pepper's flavors release for about 30 seconds, then add the Christopher Sauce. Stir the sauce vigorously at first to deglaze the pan, then simmer for 10-15 minutes. When the pasta is ready, return the bacon to the sauce, then add the cheese and pasta. Toss well and serve.

Walking Fish Delivery 3

A day or two before my Walking Fish delivery arrives, I receive an email update that announces the week's fresh catch. That evening, I break out the cookbooks and begin brainstorming the next epic meal.

Last week, I received three fillets of triggerfish, steamer clams and pasta clams. Triggerfish is a flaky white fish with a mild flavor. It has large rib and pin bones, so Shef and I decided it would be best baked.

We laid each fillet on a sheet of aluminum foil, placed a tablespoon of butter and pinches of salt, pepper and parsley on top of each fillet, then wrapped the foil and broiled them for about 20 minutes.

As for the clams, we opted for a pasta with a red sauce, since we ate our last batch of clams in a simple white sauce. Growing up, my dad and brother loved spicy food, but my mom couldn't stand it. She wasn't out of the house during dinnertime very often, but when she was, Dad would make a diavolo sauce. He's also prepared it as part of the feast of the seven fishes.

Having married a woman who loves spicy food, we eat shrimp fra diavolo often. This time, we decided to use clams instead.

Clams fra diavolo

olive oil
6 cloves garlic, diced
3.5 cups Christopher Sauce
1-2 pounds of clams, washed and scrubbed
1/2 cup dry red wine (we use chianti)*
crushed red pepper, to taste ("fra diavolo" means "the devil's brother in Italian, so use lots)
1 tsp dried parsley or 1 tbs fresh, chopped

*Note: during the summer, we sometimes substitute white wine (sauvignon blanc).

Heat a couple tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan. When hot, add the clams. As the clams heat, they will release a liquid. Shake the pan frequently so the shells do not stick. Remove the clams as soon as they open (our steamer clams opened earlier than the pasta clams). After about 15 minutes, remove the clams that did not open (if they are fresh and of good quality, like the ones we receive from Walking Fish, there should not be many that do not open) and set the open clams aside. In the same pan, add more olive oil and saute the diced garlic until fragrant but not brown. Add the crushed red pepper and let the flavors release for about 30 seconds. Add the Christopher Sauce and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the red wine, stir and simmer for an additional 5-10 minutes, until the alcohol has cooked off. Once the flavors of the garlic, red pepper and wine have incorporated into the sauce (taste it), return the clams to the sauce, add the parsley and simmer for another 5-10 minutes.

This sauce works well with linguine or fettuccine, and the clams were a nice change of pace.

Two Discoveries

I got to the farmer's market late on Saturday and found it pretty picked over, but I did walk away with butternut squash, a bag of turnips and a sweet potato. Shefali was out of town for the weekend and I had a couple hours free that afternoon, so I went exploring, hoping to uncover another hidden gem in the foodiest small town in America.

I'd heard about a fresh fish market in Carborro, just west of Chapel Hill. After driving up and down Main Street three times I finally saw the sign for Tom Robinson's Carolina Seafood Market. It's a tiny place, stuck between two restaurants, but an array of local music concerts and interest group fliers taped on both sides of a squeaky screen door keeps the shop's decor consistent with the rest of the town.

Each Wednesday, the store owner drives to the coast every, picks up the fresh catch and then sells it to customers in Carrboro Thursday through Saturday. What they don't sell on Saturday they offer to local restaurants.

When I got there Saturday afternoon the store's display case was about half full. I bought two Spanish mackerel, and the owner gutted them for me on the spot.

On my way home I also picked up The Silver Spoon Cookbook. According to the publisher, it's "Italy's best-selling cookbook for over 50 years." Filled with over 2,000 recipes, the self-proclaimed "bible of authentic Italian cooking" is different in many ways from the other self-proclaimed "number-one cookbook in America since 1930" sitting on my bookshelf. The Silver Spoon organizes its recipes by ingredient instead of courses. Its first 24 pages offer no recipes, only cooking terms, definitions and diagrams. The recipe instructions, regardless of length, are all one paragraph. It's an Italian cookbook but more specifically a cookbook for Italians, because not all recipes (like "Carrots in French Sauce," "Creole Rice" and "American Chicken Salad") come from Italy. The final 75 pages feature recipes from prominent Italian chefs from all over the world, such as Mario Batali (US), Giorgio Locatelli (London), and Gianluigi Morini (Italy).

The Silver Spoon is a textbook - something I'll reference when cooking with specific ingredients, but not a book I'll sit down and read. It's a great resource when I buy veggies at the farmer's market that I've never cooked or eaten before, and it has recipes for virtually anything Walking Fish can offer. For example, it has six different recipes for turnips bulbs and five for mackerel.

That night, I ended up boiling the turnips, seasoning them with salt, pepper, oil and vinegar, and dusting the whole mackerel with flour, pan-searing it in butter and topping it with lemon juice.

A Family Meal

My in-laws and I descended upon Cleveland last weekend to watch Shefali's brother, Manek, play in the Tavern Club Invitational. My parents saw the weekend as a special occasion and a reason to have everyone over for family meals.

Manek won the Pro-Am championship, and Saturday was also his birthday, so we had reason to celebrate. Nine of us sat at the table and enjoyed salad, spaghetti and meatballs with Christopher Sauce, stuffed hot peppers and great wine. For dessert, my mom presented Manek a massive tub of banana pudding, complete with candles.

In all, there were nine of us, and we made short work of the meal. The weather in Cleveland this time of year makes it all the more satisfying to eat well among family. We hope to make the Tavern Club Invitational an annual event.

My dad gets full credit for the meal, as he cooked everything himself.

Meatballs:

1 pound ground beef
1-3 eggs**
1/2 cup bread crumbs
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
2 tbs parsley or oregano
1 1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 onion, chopped or 1-2 tbs of onion powder

**My dad remembers watching his grandmother and Aunt Lucy make meatballs by mixing as many as three eggs into each pound of beef. He prefers one egg per pound of meat. Looking back, he believes it was their way of stretching the pound of meat (and the budget) so that it could feed more people.

Mix the eggs into the meat, then add the dry ingredients, adjusting the quantities until the meat has the right consistency (similar to burgers). Roll the meat into balls slightly larger than golf balls and arrange on a baking sheet. Brown the meatballs in the oven, then remove before they are fully cooked. Simmer them in Christopher Sauce to finish.

Stuffed Peppers:

12 hot banana peppers

3/4 pound hot italian sausage

3/4 pound mild italian sausage

1 egg

grated parmesan cheese

bread crumbs

1/2 tsp black pepper

1 tsp salt

Pecorino Romano Cheese

About 1 quart of Christopher Sauce

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Cut the top off the peppers and put the tops aside for later. Clean out the inside of the peppers.

Bring a pot of water to a boil and put the peppers in the boiling water for about 5 minutes (they should stay firm). Remove and let them cool.

In a sauce pan, add 1-2 cups of Christopher Sauce. Chop the top of the peppers you had set aside and add it to the sauce. You should make the sauce spicy to your taste. Hot peppers' heat can vary significantly. Let the sauce simmer for a while stuffing peppers.

In a bowl, combine the sausage (hot and mild), egg, salt and pepper, and 1/2 cup of the spiced-up Christopher sauce. Add parmesan cheese and breadcrumbs in equal parts until you like the consistency. It should be somewhat firm but not too much, as it will have to flow in a piping bag to fill the peppers. If you don't want to try to fill them whole you can cut the peppers in half lengthwise and fill them laying flat in a baking dish.

Put the sausage mixture in a piping bag and fill the peppers (or fill them laying flat in a baking dish). Put the peppers in a baking dish and cover with the spiced-up sauce. Cover the peppers and sauce in grated Pecorino Romano cheese. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour depending on the size of the peppers.

You should alter the recipe based on how hot you want the dish. I found the dish is highly dependent on the hotness of the peppers. If they're pretty hot, then you don't need to spice up the stuffing and sauce too much. If they are milder and you want some more spice you can add some heat to the sausage filling (crushed red pepper , etc.) or the sauce.

Walking Fish Delivery 2

The weather was not cooperative for fishermen during the last week in January, but that didn't stop Walking Fish from handing me a bag of clams and oysters last Thursday.

Shef's not a fan of raw oysters, so I steamed them in white wine. With the pound of clams, I tried a recipe for linguine alla vongole from Toni Lydecker's Seafood alla Siciliana.

After heating olive oil in a pan large enough to hold the clams and pasta, we dropped the clams in over medium high heat and shook them occasionally. I added a bit of white wine to the pan after to help them open. As soon as they started to open, I removed them from the pan and discarded a few that remained closed. With the pan off the heat, I added a couple anchovies, lemon juice and zest, and black and crushed red pepper. Once the anchovy fillets dissolved, I returned the clams to the pan and added parsley leaves and the pasta.

When I boiled the pasta, I removed it from the water a few minutes early, while it was still very al dente. After joining the clams and sauce in the pan it softened over low heat and soaked up the flavor of the lemon, pepper and seafood.

In all, the pasta was more dry than what I'm used to in a linguine alla vongole, but the flavor was excellent. The oysters were terrific.

Walking Fish Delivery 1

Two years ago, graduate students at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment partnered with fishermen on the North Carolina coast to develop a way to bring fresh seafood to Durham residents. The result: Walking Fish, a community-supported fishery and quite possibly the coolest thing to hit Durham since Crash Davis.

Every other Thursday, leaders of the cooperative drive to the coast and pick up shares of the fresh catch from local fishermen and fisheries, then drive back to Durham to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens parking lot and deliver the seafood to shareholders from all over town.

Shefali heard about the program last fall. She also learned that it has become so popular that the shares sell out within a few hours. Tired of listening to me complain about living two hours from the beach but having to buy seafood flown in from Ecuador and Indonesia in our local grocery stores, she signed us up to receive two pounds per delivery the moment winter shares became available.

I picked up our first share last Thursday. A graduate student sitting behind a collapsible table in the parking lot looked up my name, then turned to another student wearing rubber gloves and standing in the bed of a pickup truck. He opened a huge cooler and pulled out one Southern Flounder in a clear plastic bag.

While I was waiting in line to pick up my catch, I listened to other members complain about flounder's bland taste and lack of versatility. I'd cooked flounder fillets in a simple tomato broth once before, but this fish was only headed and gutted. I did a lot of fishing growing up, but never learned how to fillet. This summer in Minnesota my dad gave me a crash course on a walleye, but I wasn't about to try it on such a thin, bony fish.

I decided to cook it whole, the same way I prepare Red Snapper on the beach. I scaled the fish with a butter knife, then scored both sides by making quarter-inch incisions about six inches apart on each side, dusted both sides with salt and pepper and let it rest for a few hours. That night, I lit my grill, wiped the grates with a paper towel soaked in vegetable oil (to prevent sticking), and rubbed olive oil all over the fish. I grilled each side on medium heat for about eight minutes each, carefully using two spatulas to flip it.

After I took it off the grill I let it rest for a few minutes, then cut an incision across the top and bottom of each side. These incisions, coupled with the scores I cut before grilling, made it possible to scoop out fillets with a spatula. It's a very delicate procedure - one I messed up a couple times and ended up picking pieces of flesh with my hands and transferring to a plate - but it removed the bones far better than I could have with a fillet knife. (For more info about grilling whole fish, check out Cooks Illustrated.)

We topped the fish with a simple salmoriglio sauce (lemon, garlic, parsley or basil, salt, pepper and olive oil) or a tomato and parsley relish, and ate it with sauteed zucchini and roasted potatoes.

Legislation and The Foodiest Small Town in America

Shefali and I live in Durham, North Carolina, a small town with an surprisingly great food scene. The scene garnered national attention two years ago, when Bon Appetit named it "The Foodiest Small Town in America."

One of the reasons why food flourishes here is the extensive network of local farms that drive the year-round farmer's markets and farm-to-fork restaurants. Much like the national media has kept an eye on Durham foodies of late, Durham foodies have recently paid special attention to the national media.

Earlier this month, President Obama signed the Food Safety Modernization Act into law. The legislation should provide much needed, albeit controversial, renovations to how the Food and Drug Administration controls and inspects food safety.

Food and Drugs commissioner Margaret Hamburg, in a piece cross-posted on foodsafety.gov and whitehouse.gov, writes that the legislation is a major step in the right direction because recognizes that supervising food safety requires an inspection of the entire food system:

The idea of prevention is not new. FDA has established prevention-oriented standards and rules for seafood, juice, and eggs, as has the U.S. Department of Agriculture for meat and poultry, and many in the food industry have pioneered “best practices” for prevention. What’s new is the recognition that, for all the strengths of the American food system, a breakdown at any point on the farm-to-table spectrum can cause catastrophic harm to the health of consumers and great disruption and economic loss to the food industry.

So, we need to look at the food system as a whole, be clear about the food safety responsibility of all of its participants, and strengthen accountability for prevention throughout the entire food system – domestically and internationally. The new law meets these needs in numerous ways.

Lisa Sorg, editor of Durham's Independent Weekly, covered the story from a local angle. Her story opens with a conversation with Richard Holcomb on his farm (15 miles from our house). The new legislation would cripple small family farmers were it not for the Tester-Hagan Amendment, a "hard-fought addition to the bill," Sorg writes, "that exempts small farms from some of the law's most expensive regulations."

She goes on to explain the law's significant improvements to antiquated policies that date back as early as the 1930s (for example, the new law requires large farms to be inspected every 5 years and eventually every three; previously the farms needed an inspection once every ten). She also, with the help of Roland McReynolds, brings attention to the legislation's limited scope.

"It's important to remember that the bill does not address everything you and I might consider food safety issues: pesticides, allergens, hormones, genetically modified organisms," says Roland McReynolds, executive director of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, which advocates on behalf of farmers and consumers to promote local and organic agriculture.

"We have to go back to the beginning," Holcomb told Sorg, "to the way we grew food for thousands of years."

Because family farmers grow, transport and sell their foods themselves, they control quality of their product. For example, Holcomb harvested close to 5,000 heads of cabbage this weekend. He sold them at local farmer's markets and distributed them to area restaurants. The people who eat them shook his hand after purchasing, listened to his invitation to visit the farm, and will likely visit his stand next weekend.

To a consumer like me, it's all a matter of trust, and I feel Holcomb's model builds consumer trust more effectively than any federal regulation, and costs taxpayers nothing. Ultimately, small farms earned exemption from the new laws because they hold themselves to higher standards than the government's. They are part of the solution, not the problem. In a perfect world, such a model would be the norm.

A Sicilian Resolution

NY Times food writer Martha Rose Shulman recently wrote about an easy way to eat more fish in 2011. Shulman writes about the health benefits, as well as the hefty price tag that seafood carries throughout most of the country. Looking overseas, she writes, might provide an answer.

"While researching the cooking of Sicily some years ago," she writes, "I spent an afternoon with a chef who had a small restaurant in Palermo, where I watched him take a single piece of tuna and turn it into a pasta sauce that fed four of us. "

My dad remembers Friday meals with his grandmother that featured a similar main course. Keeping with the Catholic tradition, she would add fish - usually tuna - to the family sauce and serve it with spaghetti.

Shulman also shares a fish ragu recipe that's "a sort of fish ragù common throughout Sicily and Southern Italy:"
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 pound swordfish or tuna steaks, skinned and cut in approximately 1/2-inch dice

Salt and freshly ground pepper

1/2 cup dry white wine (optional)

1 small onion, finely chopped

2 to 4 garlic cloves (to taste), minced

1/4 teaspoon red chili flakes (optional)

2 anchovy fillets, finely chopped

1 (28-ounce) can diced tomatoes, with juice, or 2 pounds fresh tomatoes, peeled, seeded and diced or grated

1/4 cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

1 pound penne or fusilli

I followed the recipe yesterday, but substituted Christopher Sauce for the canned tomatoes and omitted the white wine (my great grandmother's aversion to wine is a story for another day). Cooking with two kinds of fish (anchovies and tuna) upholds my family's belief that a ragu is best when it includes at least two (and sometimes three) different proteins. Plus, the anchovies give the sauce a richness that compliments the winter weather.

The Sauce

My family treats its traditional red sauce like others practice religion - we all believe in it, that it's sacred and essential for life, but each of us celebrates it by making it our own way.

I grew up eating it at least once a week, oblivious to its greatness in a world full of watery, bland, sugar-laden impostors. I realized how fortunate I was while studying abroad in Ireland, living on a tight budget in an apartment with a small kitchen and limited cooking tools. There was so much to see and do in Galway that my friends and I didn't take the time to cook often, so while scrambling to come up with dinner one night I picked up a jar of Prego, threw a can of tuna in it and boiled half a box of penne.

Assembled on the plate, it looked decent enough. The meal had cost only a couple of bucks, and there was enough leftover to cover the next day's lunch. But it didn't smell the same. I took my first bite and suddenly felt very alone, in a world far from home.

This, I thought, can NEVER happen again.

Later that night, I called home. I needed to hear familiar voices, but I didn't mention the meal. I'd learned my lesson, and news of the incident would not go over well.

A few years later, while visiting my girlfriend (now wife), Shefali, I learned another lesson in sauce tradition. She was in the middle of a clinical rotation in Boston, and I was there for several days between Christmas and New Year's. The day I arrived, I opened her fridge and saw a half-eaten jar of Ragu Old World Style. It was as if I was back in Ireland, cold, alone and confused again. I quickly scanned the room to see what else had deceived me. Was I really planning to marry a girl who eats sauce from a plastic jar?

I took a few deep breaths, regrouped and found some much needed perspective. Shefali's from India, not Italy. At the time, she didn't know puttanesca from arrabiata. Pasta in India was like most Indian food here in the US - a shell of what it's supposed to be

What I didn't see in her fridge were jars of curry and tikka masala. She knew good food, but I hadn't shown her good sauce.

The next day she had to work, so I canceled my plans to explore Cambridge and instead walked to the nearest grocery store, carried several pounds of canned tomatoes back to her house and over the course of the afternoon filled her roommate's largest pot with my family's sauce. When she got home, I opened her freezer and showed her the stacked plastic bins as well as the meats she would cook and add to each. I also asked her to please never buy sauce again.

Memorable as my family's recipe may be, I've had a hard time pinpointing the exact recipe. It appears every cook in the family follows a slightly different recipe. For example, my dad includes green peppers, but Aunt Mary uses only onions. Grandma Jean slow cooks it all day, often in a Crock Pot, while others let it simmer for only an hour. I add a lot of crushed red pepper for spice.

Regardless of the disagreement and countless variations, several important universals exist:

- garlic and onions are essential
- cans of peeled, whole tomatoes are best, but other varieties (crushed, diced) work as well.
- add tomato paste in addition to the canned tomatoes
- season with oregano
- adjust the seasonings (salt, pepper, oregano, parsley, etc.) after the sauce simmers for an hour
- let the sauce simmer for at least one hour (the longer the better).

Here is the recipe in its entirety, as my father taught it to me:

1. In a large pot, simmer a few cloves of garlic (diced) in olive oil.

2. Add 1 big can (28 oz) of tomatoes, 2 cans of tomato paste, and 4 cans of water (2 cans water for every can of tomato paste)

3. Add 1/2 of 1 large onion, chopped

4. Add 4 cloves of garlic, cut into large pieces

5. Add 1 bell pepper, diced

6. Cover the top of the sauce with dried oregano. Stir in the oregano and add 2 bay leaves.

7. Let the sauce simmer for at least one hour.

8 After the sauce has simmered, season with salt, pepper, garlic, oregano, etc. to taste.

Welcome

Perhaps this blog began twenty years ago, when I was seven. My family lived in Iowa, and each summer my mom planted a garden in the backyard. She grew many different vegetables, but I only remember the tomatoes - two rows, standing tall along the fence line, soaking up the sweltering Iowa humidity that made the corn grow beyond my shoulders by the fourth of July. While she crawled around on the ground, I would stand behind her and wait until her eyes left the fence. Then I'd pluck the ripest one I could find, plunge it into my mouth and chew the piece like an apple.

"It's officially summer," she said, catching me in the act. Smiling, she stood, up, picked a tomato of her own and joined me.

Or perhaps the story began the summer I was sixteen and traveling the country on a baseball team. Lonely for home, I ordered "home style" spaghetti and meatballs from more than a dozen restaurants in Tennessee, West Virginia, Kansas City and Florida.

People pay to eat this meal, I thought. But it's not as good as what I get at home.

Or when I was twenty-two, living in my own apartment and cooking for the first time in my life. My roommate showed his recipe for a quick pasta sauce (threw oil, garlic, two tomatoes and dried oregano in the blender). I watched it form a puddle underneath my noodles, and felt emptier after eating than I did before.

Then again, this blog probably started around the turn of the century, when my great grandmother sailed to New York, settled in Philadelphia, raised more than a dozen children on a vegetable and chicken farm and fed them the only food she knew. Four generations later, I want to know it, too.

In any case, I invite you to join me as I research, experiment with and eat memorable food. Together we'll cook (probably incorrectly at first) meals like pasta fazole, the family ragu, baccala salad and oi oi, just to name a few.