Slow Food Italy Revisited by Ruth Paget
With more people working at home now, I read the 60 Slow Food recipes made by restaurants in Italy: From the Source with an eye towards great-taste-low-cost dishes.
If you are at home working, you can have a crockpot of bean soup simmering for twelve hours that not only tastes great, but is very economical to make. Many Slow Food recipes can take twelve hours to make. Some like baccála mantecato from Venice can take two days of dealing with dry salt cod that starts out as hard as a board.
I used the restaurant recipes in this cookbook to make some moderately slow food recipes for an American home cook. The following five recipe modifications can add variety to your monthly menu planning on a budget:
*Dry bean or lentil soup
*Polenta Valdostana
*Pasta á la Norma
*Saltimboca alla Romana
*Baccála Mantecato
*Dry Bean or Lentil Soup
According to Italy: From the Source, you can cook dry lentils in 45 minutes. I have always found supermarket lentils and beans to take a few hours to cook. I also like to purée soups, so I do not care too much about beans holding their shape.
If you have time, this recipe is easy and pretty inexpensive. Soak dry lentils or beans overnight in water. The beans will double or triple in size depending on how much water you put in the bowl with the beans. Rinse the beans the next day.
Place beans in a crockpot with 8 to 10 cups of water and ¼ cup olive oil. Place crockpot on high and cover the crockpot. Cook beans for 12 hours. Use an immersion blender to purée the beans.
*What you can do with puréed bean soup:
-Season with salt, pepper, and oregano and serve with toast
-Boil 2 cups of tubetti pasta and stir cooked tubetti into the soup with seasonings
-Add cream
-Sauté onions, garlic, and sliced mushrooms in olive oil. Ladle the soup into bowls and top with two tablespoons of the vegetable mixture. To be extravagant, you can dribble truffle oil on top of the vegetables.
-Fry bacon till crisp and crumble on top of soup in bowls
*Polenta Valdostanta
There are brands of polenta that can be made in the microwave instead of standing at an stove stirring for an hour. I use these and mix in butter and shredded cheese.
Polenta Valdostana is made with Asiago cheese. I have used Swiss cheese and thought I had an upscale oatmeal for breakfast.
*Pasta á la Norma
This Sicilian dish has cubes of eggplant in a tomato sauce over pasta. Italian eggplant has to be salted to remove bitter juices.
I use Japanese eggplant or Italian yellow squash to make this, because you do not need to salt it.
*Saltimbocca alla Romana
In the traditional recipe, a cook places veal sirloin between wax paper and pounds it flat with a meat pounder. Then, the cook places a sage leaf on one side and covers it with prosciutto for flavor. The other side of the meat is treated the same way before cooking.
Veal is hard to come by in most American supermarkets. I have used this recipe for chicken breast and think it tastes good, too.
*Baccála Mantecato
Basically, this is a purée of boiled fish, water, olive, and seasonings. The Venetians use salt cod for this dish, but frozen white fish can be used as well to cut down on the two days of preparation time for the salt cod.
The beauty of this dish is that fish for two can be stretched to feed four or five when you spread it on toast or baked polenta.
I make what I call Monterey Mantecato with leftover salmon. There are no set measures in this recipe:
-leftover crumbled salmon
-mayonnaise
-Cholula hot sauce
-toast squares
Mix the salmon, mayonnaise, and hot sauce and spread on the toast squares.
My recipes are easier than the cookbook’s and might be a good starting point before attempting the more elaborate recipes in Italy: From the Source by Lonely Planet.
By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
