A trip to Italy!

My daughter and I took an 8 day trip to Tuscany over spring break--to celebrate our birthdays, as well as great art, architecture, scenery, food, and WINE!  Here we are, toasting her 18th birthday. 

One of many delicious meals we had was a dish called Crespelle alla Fiorentina, or Florentine-Style Crepes.  They are on the menu tonight in Gena's Kitchen!

They are little labor-intensive, but oh-so-worth-it.  First, cook some chopped spinach and drain it REALLY well.  Combine with ricotta cheese, salt and pepper, grated Parmesan cheese, and freshly grated nutmeg.  Set aside.  Prepare large crepes--10-12 inches in diameter.  In this 8-cup dish there are a total of 4 large crepes.
Spread the spinach ricotta filling over each crepe and roll them up, pinwheel style.  Slice the rolls into 2-inch thick wheels and place, cut-side up in a baking dish.  They should be fairly close together, but not tight.

Prepare about 2 cups of medium white sauce, seasoned well with salt and pepper.  Prepare a small amount of seasoned tomato sauce (half a cup is plenty, so this is a good thing to do with leftover sauce).  Pour the white sauce over the crepes, "stain" the top of each crepe with a teaspoon or so of tomato sauce and bake at 350 for about 30 minutes.  Remove from oven, sprinkle with cheese (I used a little more Parmesan and some fontina) and bake another 10 minutes or so, to melt the cheese and brown it slightly.

I've been absent from my blog lately, and don't actually have a recipe to post today.  But I feel compelled to ruminate on cooking and eating....One of the books I read recently was "Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human."  (No, not the Hunger Games book with the same title).  The premise is fascinating and actually simple.  Before we cooked our food, it literally took virtually all of our daylight hours to CHEW enough raw food to sustain ourselves.  When we began to cook food, thereby making it easier to obtain the nutrients from it, we began to evolve into the big-brained species we are today (well, most of us).  Our brains use something like 20% of the calories we consume each day, so compared to smaller-brained mammals, our caloric needs are pretty high.  Quite simply, it wasn't agriculture that made us human, but cooking!

It all got me thinking about where we are today, and how little attention we now pay to the gathering, growing/raising, preparing, and sharing of our food.  And my thought is that if we continue along this path, we are losing something essentially, intrinsically...well, HUMAN.  I read recently that Americans now consume more than 50% of their meals away from home, i.e., in restaurants and fast food chains.  And even at home, Americans consume huge amounts of processed foods, foods that have been engineered to taste great--fooling our tastebuds, but not fooling our bodies. These foods bear little resemblance to their raw ingredients.  It is staggering the numbers and ways that corn can be manipulated!  (Google it...it will blow your mind). Crazy as it may seem, we seem to be overweight/obese and starving at the same time.

By my calculation, we are easily seeing the second and in some cases, even the third generation of "non cooks."   People who think cooking is opening a box or a can and a microwave.  Where will this lead?  People literally spend more time watching cooking shows than they actually spend cooking.  And like watching the Olympics from the couch isn't going to make you an athlete, watching Rachel Ray isn't going to put dinner on your table.

I have no answers; I wish I did.

So I guess what I will do is go into the kitchen....the last bastion of the alchemist.  While I may not turn lead into gold, I can turn raw, simple ingredients into something delicious.

Sigh.

I'm making ricotta gnocchi today.  These are MUCH easier than potato gnocchi.  I'm using sprouted wheat flour in place of all-purpose; I hope the wheat taste doesn't overpower the ricotta, which is pretty delicate.  No pictures yet, as they aren't finished.  I'm going to combine them with some diced, roasted peppers, onions, and zucchini, some good olive oil, and shavings of Parmesan.  Might dish them up individually and run them under the broiler once I've sprinkled the cheese.  If we aren't ravenous, I'll post a photo later!

I'm sorry I haven't posted for a while.  I've started a "Gena's Kitchen" Facebook page--which has a much wider audience than my sad little blog!  You can actually find it under www.facebook.com/cookwithgena.  (Primarily because /genaskitchen was already taken :(.)

The holidays are right around the corner, starting with Thanksgiving in less than a week.  I am cooking Thanksgiving dinner at home for the first time in something like two decades.  It will just be the four of us.  Maybe five?  Lucas and his girlfriend Sam will likely end up with two meals that day--our house and hers.

I'm debating braising the turkey instead of roasting it.  After brining for a few hours, it simply braises in a slow oven for just under two hours.  According to Cook's Illustrated, it minimizes the risk of dried out white meat.  The downside--no "inside the bird" stuffing.  The upside?  LOTS more gravy.  We'll see.

Mashed potatoes.  Aren't they the epitome of comfort food?  These were done quickly and easily in....wait for it...the microwave!  Cut Yukon Gold potatoes, about 1/2 inch of milk and a heavy, microwave-safe dish.  Cover and zap for 4-5 minutes.  Move the potatoes around a bit and microwave another 4-5 minutes or until tender.  Then add a little more milk if needed, and as much butter as your waistline/conscience will allow and mash.  Added benefit of cooking these in a covered dish?  Make them ahead of time and simply reheat when dinner is ready.  And no need to put them in another serving dish.  (This is a Pampered Chef product--Cranberry Round Covered Baker).

So after 10 days in Europe, which included 3 days in Barcelona and a 7 night Mediterranean cruise, I managed to only gain about 2 pounds.  Must have been all the walking.  Now that I am home, my thoughts on cooking seem to have stayed behind.  I crave olive oil, buffalo milk mozzarella, fresh basil and garlic, seafood, pasta, and good, really good, bread.  Sigh.  Is it the food or the pace at which it is  prepared and consumed?  Maybe a little of both.

Still, I am sad to be gone from there. 

Drunken Bread

First a quick update on the parsley soup--didn't take a pic, but it was delicious.  Think Cream of Spinach and the substitute loads of parsley.

This is something I've concocted from a menu item I had last weekend at a wine bar.  They called it "Drunken Bread."  I had some old garlic-studded sourdough bread in the freezer that I tore roughly into pieces.  To this I added every kind of cheese (shredded) I could find in the refrigerator:  Brie, Jarlsberg, sharp Cheddar, Butterkase.  Here's the "drunken" part:  I beat two eggs, along with some milk, generous grindings of black pepper and a good glug of white Vermouth.  Pour this over the bread/cheese mixture and let it sit for 5 minutes or so to soak in.  The I put the whole mess in a 350 oven until it was set and golden.  It's on warm waiting for my daughter to come home from school for lunch and we are going to dig in.  Smells great.