Thank you so much, ossobuco -- there will be a little something extra in your Christmas stocking this year.
Joe Nation wrote: Was I misled by the 'o' at the end of Tico?
Have I not been paying close enough attention?
I guess she can have a 'o' at the end of her name and still be considered fem, but what am I to think of a male who ends his name with an 'a'??
Joe(Nevermind, there's nothing wrong with that either)Nation
*smooches*
Ti (and no need to change your orientation) co
Jo, my addiction to candied ginger is by now something undeniable. My wife is concerned that I'm eating too much sugar with the 5 to 7 slices I pop each day. I say I eat them, in addition to a dollop of mustard, because of their anti-inflammatory properties (in the case of mustard it's the tumeric). I AM concerned that I can not counter my health goals by eating too much sugar. BTW, I don't eat desserts.
But then I read Joe Nation's statement that
"Greens...ought to be steamed..and chopped in with some poke salad and wild onions, [then served] next to some sliced beef bar-b-que and a cold beer" (and I would add fried potatoes) and my health concerns go out the window.
Well, I've gone mad over a topping I put on fish... it involves chopped onion sauteed in olive oil, with mustard and squeezed lemon and lotsa pepper. Never mind the fish, I could just eat that.
Another thing I started doing with salmon was putting on a topping of butter and sliced ginger root (lots) and basil and lime juice - that's a take off on my ex's pasta dish invention. My point is I don't mind the ginger root itself if sauteed..
Back to greens...
what is poke salad????
Osso, thanks for those sauces--real gifts.
I used to buy poke greens in a can. Havn't found them lately. Stopped looking actually. The same company sold canned spinach, mustard greens, poke/salad greens, and collard greens. All wonderfully healthful and delicious. My memory is vague on "poke salad," but there it is.
Aha! I just found a can of cut leaf 'POKE SALET GREENS" produced by The Allen Canning Company of Arkansas (1-800-234-ALLEN). I can tell that it's no good now; the beginning of a leak (ouch!). The can recommends eating the poke greens with scrambled eggs.
New to me...
POKE SALAT
First I'm going to try beet greens...
I think mustard and collard greens would be good with italian pancetta instead of bacon, if only I could
find italian pancetta.
What's the problem? You go into your local deli--
And you ask them for a pound of this:
And you .......
Oh wait, you're not in New York City..
Joe(Nyah, nyah)Nation
PS ---- If you want I'll FedEx some to you.
Joe, looks good except for the mouse droppings.
Um peppercorns... JL.... peppercorns
Joe(maybe one dropping)Nation
Hey, Joe, where you going with that salami in your hand..
One can order from them online, I gather -
http://www.salumicuredmeats.com/
(I haven't checked it all out yet..)
gawd, did i have to see this? how am i to fall asleep now? i'll dream of italian saussage. i mean pepperoni, the good kind, not what they sell o'er here. and no other saussage either. be damned, joe, be damned.
You're betrothed, daggles. You shouldn't be going to bed thinking about Joe's sausage.
Pah, that's not imported either, though it sounds very good.
I guess there are new government regulations. For a girl who's been to Parma and had Culatello di Zibella, it's hard to put up with.
On the other hand, I saved some article about two weeks ago from the LA Times (I think) about all the new items like lamp prosciutto... by artisan purveyors.
Whatever. I hate the Boar's Head and the Molinari stuff.
signed,
Miss Picky
Lamb prosciotto? Hm, I have never heard that one....
Boar is good though, as are venison and deer.
I meant the brand Boar's Head meats, not cinghiale, wild boar... (but maybe you knew that, CJ, don't mean to be corrective.)
Here's one page of the article, which goes on for five pages, printed on Aug. 30th, so probably in the have-to-pay archive at the LA Times now.
I won't give a link because it is in my web archive, thus has my name splattered across the URL.
The ABCs of salumi
You've fallen in love with these fabulous cured meats. Now you'll really know them.
By Russ Parsons, Times Staff Writer
August 30, 2006
LIKE desert wildflowers after a rain, a thousand charcuterie plates have bloomed this summer. A few crimson hunks of pungent dried salame, a pale slice of unctuous mortadella ?- here a silky prosciutto, there a rustic jamón, everywhere some smoky speck.
Who could have predicted it? Southern California, where even great restaurants need to have a big green salad on the menu, has suddenly gone crazy for pork fat.
You can find these sliced meats at established favorites such as AOC and La Terza, and at new hot spots BLD and Cube, as well as at all of those wine bars that seem to be popping up on every corner, such as Lou, at Melrose Avenue and Vine Street, or Bin 8945, in West Hollywood.
And when the most eagerly awaited restaurant of the season finally opens this fall ?- Nancy Silverton and Mario Batali's Mozza, a mix of pizzeria and casual osteria (scheduled to open in late September or October) ?- sliced cold cuts will play a major role. After all, Batali's dad Armandino is practically the patron saint of salami.
Ironically, though many menus still label these meats with the French word "charcuterie," saucissons secs are pretty rare in L.A. Southern California's love affair with all things Italian means that prosciutto and salumi predominate. But there is also a healthy sampling of Spanish meats, mainly because La Española Meats, a great producer and importer, is located nearby in Harbor City.
Like Eskimos with "snow," the Italians have many words to describe cured meats. As a matter of definition, salame is a cured sausage made from finely ground meat (usually pork); salami is the plural. Salumi is a category of cured meats that includes salami but also other products such as coppacolla and soppressata.
In Italian, the whole bunch ?- hams and all ?- are generally referred to as affettati, the Italian equivalent of charcuterie, and that just about exactly translates as cold cuts. It wasn't so long ago that the only way we ate any of these cured meats was piled on a sandwich. Now they've got artisanal pedigrees, and partly due to the regulations on importing meat products from Europe, some of the most interesting ones are made in the United States.
In fact, a new American cottage industry has developed making and supplying high-quality salumi. First wine, then beer, cheese and bread ?- now there's one more handmade product to become obsessed with.
"What's happening with salumi now is very similar to the bread revolution 10 years ago," says Silverton, the woman who introduced Southern California to the pleasures of a rustic baguette when she created La Brea Bakery.
To this point, local involvement in the salumi revolution has been pretty much limited to the serving and eating of it. Although there are a few chefs, including Gino Angelini (chef at La Terza and Osteria Angelini) and Matt Molina (slated to head the kitchen at Mozza), who are experimenting with curing, salumi-making is not yet as popular as it is in the Bay Area, where having a rack of sausages or hams hanging in the walk-in has become a badge of honor.
Lavish assortments
BUT when it comes to the enjoyment of these meats, obsessed is the right word for Southern California. Order the full charcuterie assortment at BLD, chef Neal Fraser's new informal restaurant, and you'd better clear the table. Out will come two massive slate-gray tiles covered with artistically arranged assortments of prosciutto di Parma, jamón serrano, bresaola, chorizo, lomo, speck, morcilla and two kinds of salami.
At Cube, a new cafe and retail store on La Brea near Melrose Avenue, the menu comes with an annotated list of 20 cured meats, including an exquisite small-producer prosciutto di Parma from the firm Pio Tosini, and salumi from the two top American makers, Paul Bertolli's Fra'Mani in the Bay Area and Armandino Batali's Salumi in Seattle.
Southern California's cold cut pioneers can only shake their heads in amazement at this enthusiasm.
Many local food lovers' first exposure to artisanal salumi came when Angelini was chef at Rex Il Ristorante in the early '90s. But his best-known example, exquisite house-made guanciale that melts onto warm bruschetta like some kind of ethereal, porky butter, was offered only to special guests; it was never listed on the menu. L.A. just wasn't ready for salt-cured hog jowl, he feared.
"It was just too scary," he says. "There were very few people who would appreciate that."
Today, that guanciale (still made in-house), is the centerpiece of the great cold cut assortments that are among the most popular appetizers at his restaurants, the informal Angelini Osteria and the more dressed-up La Terza. And he is experimenting with lardo, pancetta and even prosciutto, though his experiments are still rarely served.
"Now, we sell even more salumi at La Terza than we do at the osteria," Angelini says. "It's incredible. And the people who are ordering them want to know everything about salumi. They ask questions about what regions they come from and how they're made."
One of the first places to emphasize cold cuts was the pioneering wine bar AOC. When it opened in 2003, chef Suzanne Goin and partner Caroline Styne made the decision to put charcuterie front and center on the menu. And then they swallowed hard.
"We had served prosciutto at Lucques, but only as part of a dish," Goin says. "We weren't sure how people would react; we were so afraid that people were not going to get it. But we were shocked. I guess it's a similar thing to cheese ?- when you make it the focus of what you're doing, people see how it makes sense."
All this reminds me, a friend sent me a link for some place that sold a lot of Spanish ham products online. Don't think I saved the link, because of the price of many of the items.
Wonder if the Batalis in Seattle (Joe's link) are related to Mario..
Mario Batali is mentioned in the article above as restaurant-partnered with Nancy Silverton, probably my favorite bread maker. I see by rereading this that I was wrong to be snotty about ALL US cured meats.
For my penance, I'll have to order some..
Patiodog, I hope that Dag doesn't dream of Joe's sausage, but I pray fervently that I do not do so. Processed meats are full of sodium nitrates--or is that only store-bought ones.
