AUNTIE PASTA: Mediterranean Pasta Salad

CHIAVARI, Italy – You probably already know there is no shortage of pasta salad recipes on the Internet, but today’s pasta salad has a bit of a twist, it contains cooked green peppers. It’s not unusual to find peppers in pasta salads, they are an essential ingredient in Italian cooking along with tomatoes, pasta, olive oil and Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, but cooked peppers in a cold salad, that's something else.  

 All Kinds of Pasta Make Good Salads

Peppers were not always part of Italian cuisine. They were brought to Europe after Christopher Columbus discovered America. It was the Spanish and Portuguese explorers who had been sent to the Americas to claim land for Spain who brought them back. I’m sure the King and Queen of Spain were just thrilled when the explorers carried crates of peppers to the Royal Palace instead of crates of gold, although they brought plenty of gold as well.

As the Spaniards began bringing the vegetables they saw the Aztec Indians of South America eating, vegetables like peppers, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, beans, pumpkins and squash, they caused quite a stir. None of the Europeans, including the Italians, had ever seen anything like them, and frankly, they were a little suspicious of these strange looking plants. 

They believed tomatoes and peppers were poisonous and only used them for ornamental purposes. Today, three-fifths of the vegetables that we eat originally came from the land of the Aztecs, the people Columbus named Indians. He was a little bit confused you see, and didn’t know where he was. He thought he had landed in the East Indies, instead he was in what would later be named the Americas. 

MEDITERRANEAN PASTA SALAD 

Serves 6

5 tablespoons olive oil

1 pound (500 grams) farfalle (bow-tie) or fusilli pasta, freshly cooked and drained

1pound (500 grams) cooked deveined peeled shrimp, cut lengthwise in half

½ cup finely chopped sweet red onion

½ cup each of diced red, green and yellow peppers fried in olive oil and garlic

 3/4 cup finely chopped fresh basil

Mix the farfalle, shrimp, onion, and (cooled to room temperature) fried peppers in a large bowl and toss to mix. Add additional olive oil if needed. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

You can also add any of the following instead of, or together with the shrimp: crab meat, mussels, chopped hard sausage, cooked and cubed chicken or turkey breast, chopped fresh tomatoes, black olives and scallions. Pasta is the most wonderful food, it’s like a blank canvas, happy to take on almost anything you want to mix with it.

Insiders Tip: Here in Italy Italian cooks start frying peppers (and onions) in a little olive oil and after they have cooked for several minutes, they add a half a ladle (more or less) of hot water to the pan and cover it. They let the peppers (or onions) steam over low heat, and when they are soft they take the lid off of the pan and in a minute or so the peppers, or onions, start frying once again.

I confess I steam both peppers and onions in a covered dish in the microwave before I fry them. The flavor may not be as intense as doing it the Italian way, but it saves me time and the bother of having to hover over the stove watching the pan for the right time to remove the lid. Just don’t tell anyone I told you this. I wouldn’t want my deepest, darkest cooking secrets to get around.

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.

AUNTIE PASTA: The Three P's - Peppers, Potatoes Pomodori

CHIAVARI, Italy – The shiny red peppers and plump tomatoes in the market Saturday were irresistible, so I scooped them up, brought them home and made one of my favorite dishes, potatoes with peppers and tomatoes. With a grilled chicken breast, some crusty fresh baked bread and a little wine, lunch was a spectacular feast.

 

Beautiful Peppers

This dish, called the Three P’s in Italian, patate, pomodori e pepperoni, pepperoni being the Italian word for peppers, is more of a marriage of ingredients than a recipe. The flavors blend beautifully together but if you are thinking that a marriage of three is not possible, think ménage à trios, but whatever you want to call it, do give this dish a try.

You can use almost any type of potato and peppers of any color - red, yellow, orange, chocolate brown, ivory, deep purple or green, but the tomatoes have to be blood red, super ripe and juicy. You need juice from really juicy tomatoes to cook the potatoes and peppers, and those firm, green tinged tomatoes the Italians prefer for their salads just don’t cut it.

 

Even the Lowly Potato Can be a Thing of Beauty

The success or failure of this dish relies entirely on the quality of the ingredients you use. If your Three P’s are ripe and full of flavor, if your olive oil is sweet and your onion isn’t so old it’s sprouting green shoots, your dish will be full of flavor as well.  

There isn’t a region in Italy that doesn’t claim the Three P’s as their own, but the second recipe I’ve included is more of a southern dish. I don’t know if it even has a name, we always called it baked tomatoes because that’s what it is. The recipe is my mother’s, who got it from my grandmother, who got it from her mother when they all still lived in Italy. And once again it is such a simple dish to make I hesitate to even say it’s a recipe, but it’s so good how could I not include it?

 

 Vine Ripe and Bursting with Flavor

 But let’s start with the Three P’s.

Peperoni, Patate e Pomodori

Ingredients

1 pound potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch cubes

1 pound sweet bell peppers, seeds removed and cut into ½ inch strips

½ pound mature tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped

1 medium red onion, sliced

extravirgin olive oil

salt

1. Remove seeds from pepper, peel and cut lengthwise into 1/2 inch wide strips.

2. In a heavy sauté pan that can hold all the ingredients, put in the thinly sliced onions and olive oil, and turn to heat to medium. Cook, stirring until the onions wilt and become light gold in color, then add the sliced peppers. Cook for 3-4 min, stirring occasionally, then add the tomatoes with their juice, adjusting the heat to cook at a slow, but steady simmer.

3. While tomatoes are cooking, peel the potatoes, wash them in cold water, and cut into 1-inch cubes.

4. When the oil floats free of the tomatoes, add the potatoes, turn the heat down to very low, and cover the pan. Cook until the potatoes and peppers feel tender when prodded with a fork. While cooking, stir well from time to time bringing the vegetables on the bottom of the pan up to the top.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

I have also made this dish with a can of whole tomatoes and had very good results.  

 

Brutti ma Buoni as they say in Italian - Kind of Ugly but Delicious

Now for the baked tomatoes. This recipe really does not have set amounts, you can make as many or as few as you want.  My mother and grandmother would make this dish whenever there was a bumper crop of tomatoes in the garden and they both used good size cookie trays to bake them on. Keep in mind that the tomatoes shrink as they bake, so you are going to end up with a lot less than you started with.  

Lip Smacking Good Baked Tomatoes

Ingredients

Ripe tomatoes

Dried oregano

Garlic cloves, peeled and sliced lengthwise into thin strips

Salt and pepper

Extra virgin olive oil

Sprinkle of sugar (optional)

Wash the tomatoes and cut them in half. Place them cut side up on a greased baking pan (like a cookie sheet), or you can cover the bottom of the baking pan with oven paper if you like.

Insert several slivers of garlic in each tomato half. Sprinkle with dried oregano, salt and pepper and a drizzle of extravirgin olive oil. If you want you can also give your tomatoes a very light sprinkle of sugar.

Bake in a pre-heated oven 150° C / 300° F for about one hour. The tomatoes will shrivel up, and taste the best when they are a little blacked around the edges. Let them cool and serve them at room temperature.