AUNTIE PASTA Stuff It

CHIAVARI, Italy – The morning market in the piazza was very crowded yesterday. There are still a lot of tourists in town, and you could hear them oooing and ahhhing as they walked past the fruits and vegetables on display. There were two British women who made me laugh. They actually had a 10 minute conversation about the size (big) and amazing color of the red and yellow peppers. In the meantime the Chiavaresi mamas were buying them up, along with tomatoes and eggplants and I have a sneaky suspicion stuffed vegetables were  on the dinner menu last night.

 

 Chiavari's Morning Market

The most common Genovese filling for stuffed vegetables is made of bread (the soft white center) soaked in milk, bread crumbs, parmigiano cheese, marjoram and eggs to bind it all together. The flavoring agent depends on what vegetable is being stuffed. For eggplant, they add chopped porcini mushrooms plus a little garlic and oregano; for stuffed zucchini and onions, the mushrooms are omitted and they throw in a pinch of nutmeg. Chopped parsley is added to stuffed tomatoes and the mushrooms are back for stuffed artichokes. The artichokes recipe also calls for the chopped stalks of the artichokes, chopped leeks, oregano and nutmeg. 

I wouldn’t dare put oregano on artichokes – no matter how I cook them - for fear my Grandmother, who was from a town near Rome, will come back to haunt me. The Romans have a special herb for artichokes called mintuccia. It’s a type of mint that grows wild throughout the Roman countryside. I have a mintuccia plant growing in a container on my windowsill that I hope keeps my Grandmother happy so I can keep dreaming sweet dreams. But I digress. Back to stuffed veggies.

 Tasty Stuffed Peppers

In other parts of Italy they stuff vegetables with rice and ground beef, sometimes they add pine nuts or even raisins if it’s a couscous and ground lamb filling. That is the beauty of stuffed vegetables, you can fill them with almost anything, and they never disappoint you. 

You can stuff almost any vegetable, even escarole and lettuce, which are both very popular dishes here in Liguria. But that seems to me to be a lot of work because you have to tie each bundle together with string to keep the filling from falling out when you cook them. No doubt they are delicious but there are so many other vegetables that are just begging to be filled, like tomatoes for example, why bother.

Here’s an easy recipe for baked stuffed tomatoes from the Corriere della Sera, Milan’s daily newspaper. 

Baked Stuffed Tomatoes

Serves 4

Ingredients

4 large tomatoes

80 grams of ground beef (more or less 3 ounces)

60 grams of long grain rice

60 grams of fresh (or frozen) peas

2 small zucchini

1 carrot

1 white onion

1 tablespoon of chopped parsley

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Wash the tomatoes and cut off the tops (like in the photo). You can also cut a very little bit off the bottom so they stand up better. Scoop out the inside of the tomatoes, chop it into pieces no larger than the peas, and set it aside.  Chop the onion, the carrot and the zucchini also into pieces no larger than the peas. 

Put a small amount of extra virgin olive oil in a frying pan and add the chopped onion, carrot and zucchini, the ground beef, the rice, a cup of water and let it cook together for about 10 minutes, or until the water is absorbed. 

Fill the scooped out tomatoes with the rice and ground beef filling, and cover them with the tomato tops.  Drizzle a little olive oil over the top of them and then place a small amount of extra virgin olive oil in a casserole pan and bake in a preheated oven (160ᴼ C/325ᴼF) for 40 minutes. 

The recipes calls for making a sauce out of the chopped tomatoes and serving the stuffed tomato on top of it, just as you see in the photo, but to tell you the truth you could just as easily add the chopped tomatoes to the rice and meat mix and reduce the amount of water.

You can use this filling for any vegetable you want to stuff. You can substitute the rice with couscous or the soft center of Italian bread, or tiny pasta, or not use any of them and use the vegetable centers you scooped out to make room for the filling, by chopping them and mixing them with ground beef, lamb or pork, or skip the meat altogether. You can also leave out the peas and carrots, but you do need onions.

Hopefully this makes sense and you are not thoroughly confused at this point. As for me, all this talk about food is making me hungry, so I think I’ll  head for the kitchen and rustle me up some grub.  Buon Appetito.

LIFE: All Roads Lead to Rome

CHIAVARI, Italy - Rome was the first city in Italy I ever lived in, and like a first love, it holds a special place in my heart. I was there to study Italian. Through the school I found a room to rent on the Via della Vite, near the Spanish Steps. The apartment was owned by an old woman named Niola, and her only other ‘tenant’ was a girl from Argentina who was also going to school in Rome.   

 

S[panish Steps

I don’t know what she was studying, or anything else about her as she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Italian. But we got along ok, she didn’t take up space on my shelf of the refrigerator and I didn’t take up space on hers.

Every weekday morning I would take the bus from Piazza San Silvestro out to the school on the Via Nomentana and spend four grueling hours trying to get a grip on Italian grammar. It was torture trying to wrap my tongue around all the complicated verb forms, but thankfully, from one o'clock on, the day was my own and oh how I treasured it. 

Via Condotti 

I loved living in the center of Rome.  Every afternoon as the stores re-opened from their mid-day break, the narrow streets of my neighborhood, which included the famous Via Condotti, would slowly fill with people of every age, Romans and foreigners alike. I used to spend hours walking those streets, window shopping and dreaming of the day I would live in Italy forever.

It was great fun to look in the windows of the oo la la fancy shops on the Via Condotti, but more interesting were the small open air markets that seem to sprout up from one day to the next like giant mushrooms after a rain. I found them irresistible, especially the food markets.  Growing up in a country where most foods come pre-packaged and shrink-wrapped, I loved being able to buy three egg, six carrots or just one potato, if that was all that I wanted.  No one cared. It didn’t matter. Everyone shopped that way, and they still do.

Trevi Fountain 

On days that I didn’t have school, I would walk to the small outdoor market near the Trevi Fountain to do my weekly grocery shopping.  I would cross the Via del Tritone, go up Via del Stamperia, then turn and head toward the vendors. It was just at that point, near the corner bar, that I would be greeted by a Rudolph Valentino look alike who bow ever so slightly and say,  "Buon girorno, Contessa."  I'd stutter and stammer and finally come out with what I hoped was "and a good morning to you too." 

Now I know that in Italy everyone calls everyone else cara or carrissima, or caro if it’s a guy, or Contessa or any of the other hundreds of endearing names and it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Even my slightly senile landlady, Signora Niola, used to have imaginary conversations that always started with ‘ciao cara’ and continued as she walked around the apartment  talking to ‘her.’ At first I thought she was talking to me, but she wasn’t, so I got out of her way.

 Trevi Market Looked Something Like This

But I liked the Trevi market and if having this guy call me Contessa was the worst that was happening to me, it didn’t seem bothersome enough to worry about. The Trevi market was not organized like most of the other markets in the city, it was more of a meeting place where farmers sold their produce and goods like honey and jams and wine. You had to bring your own bottles if you wanted to buy wine, and they would fill them from the barrels they had on the back of their trucks.

My favorite stall was run by a very old woman who sold live chickens and eggs. She would wrap the eggs, one by one, in torn off squares  of newspaper, hand them to me to put in my shopping bag, and then hold out her wrinkled hand for the money. She never spoke to me. I later figured out that it was probably because I was actually asking her for two or three grapes, confusing the Italian words for grapes and eggs and she realized any attempt at conversation would most likely be a complete waste of time.  

Daily Market at Campo Dei Fiori

There are open markets in most of the city's neighborhoods. One of the best is the one at the Campo de'Fiori. There are two very different versions of how the Campo got its name. The most obvious is that before it became part of the city, it was a meadow of flowers. It's a nice story but I prefer the Roman legend which says the Campo was named after an actress named Flora, who lived during the time of the Caesars. Her theatre, which was the largest in ancient Rome, used to stand on what is now the northeast corner of the square. Or it could very well be that both stories are true. In Rome anything is possible.

Some of my favorite Italian memories come from those early experiences in Rome, and every once in a while I get a hankering to go back and walk the streets and revisit those early days, which is what is going on right now.