You may have heard that much Italian cuisine was born out of deep poverty, but would you believe they go so far as to eat mouse tails? Mouse tails made from pasta, that is. Code di topo are another gem from Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta.

Although not made from actual mouse tails, this simple pasta shape is a testament to economy: the dough consists of only flour and water. Usually, I make pasta using flour, eggs and water in the food processor, pulsing the flour before adding the eggs and just enough water to bring everything together in a ball. I was glad to discover that this technique — using the food processor — works just as well omitting the eggs, slowly adding water until the dough coalesces. As with egg pasta, pasta made this way needs to rest for a half hour or so to allow the gluten to relax and make the dough workable.

The formation of the code was simple — probably a great activity for young helpers. Pinching off a piece of dough the size of a walnut, one simply rolls the dough out into a thin thread with one end tapered to look like  a mouse’s tail. The pasta should dry slightly on a kitchen towel before boiling it al dente.

Traditionally, this pasta is served with potatoes — a concept I couldn’t quite get my head around — but in Rovere, it is served in a simple sauce of garlic, chilis, olive oil and walnuts. This is one of my favorite pasta sauces, all the more so because I usually have all of those ingredients on hand. And that’s a good thing, since by the time you’ve decided to feast on mouse tails, you’ve pretty much ruled out going to the store.

Saint Albert was almost not a saint at all, thanks to the discovery during his beatification process of extensive studies of the occult: black magic. Among his writings on the subject was found a recipe for a depilatory potion that required burning a large frog whole and mixing the ashes with water then spreading the mixture on the to-be-hairless area. In the end though, Albert did earn his sainthood and luckily for us the Catholic parish in Seward bearing his name hasn’t taken any cooking cues from their patron; instead of burning it they prepare some of the finest fried and baked fish available for Lent, served for your convenience in two fast-moving lines. It’s the church fish-fry of the season and after the great time we had last year, Martha and I were not going to miss it.

Last year, we came on the last Friday of the Fish Fry’s operation, and it was crowded: line-wrapping-all-the-way-around-the-room crowded. This year we were a little more on the ball and showed up the second Friday of Lent. The room was certainly still full, but the line was not nearly as long and we were able to purchase our tickets ($10 for adults) and get our fish and sides in short order. So my advice to anyone thinking of visiting the great Saint Albert’s but intent on skipping the line is to get there sooner than later, before people realize Lent is almost over. Then again, waiting in line can be pretty fun; there are lots of interesting people to talk to.

The Catholic church sometimes gets a bad rep for being conservative, reactionary, even regressive. But it’s also rarely fair to judge individual parishes by the policy of the church as a whole, and without intending to direct any specific critcisms of St. Albert’s I’d like to commend them for their very environmentally-friendly reusable ticket system. I’d like to think I got the same ticket as last year!

There are a lot of reasons to make it down to Saint Albert’s for the fish fry: the always friendly volunteers who do everything from serving your food to clearing your plate, the irrepressible wit and humor of Fr. Joe Gillespie who works the crowd for the evening, microphone in hand, the bingo. But ultimately a fish fry is about the food. Given how much I enjoyed it last year, I was glad to see that the menu was unchanged from last year: in order there was: cheesy mashed potatoes, fried Alaskan Pollack, baked Alaskan Pollack, meatless spaghetti, cole slaw, rolls and of course tartar sauce and lemon wedges. Immediately after the savory line there’s a whole table of desserts to tempt you, but I’d recommend maintaining one free hand to pick up a glass of lemonade on your way to find a seat. You can always go back for dessert. And more fish.

The food prompted no complaints from me: who can object to lemon spritzed fried fish with tartar sauce? As with last year, though, the standouts were the sides; particularly, the meatless spaghetti which from its appearance you would expect to be as saccharine as any jar of Ragú but is actually somehow meaty and deeply flavored. I don’t know if this sauce is some secret church recipe or if it just comes out of a different can than I was expecting. Maybe it’s black magic. Frankly I don’t want to know. I just know I like it.

With two years under our belts at Saint Albert the Great’s, we’re starting to feel like regulars (though I can tell we’d need quite a few more years to meet others’ expectations for that title). Given how little time we spent in line this year, we might just be back before Easter. We’ll definitely be back next year, when I’m hoping for the addition of St. Albert’s famous blackened frogs’ legs to the food on offer. Does frog count as meat?

In mid-nineteenth century Italy, as power passed from one faction to another fighting to control the unification of the country, many lower-class people — ever ignored by political elites — resorted to brigantaggio, or brigandage, both as a means of securing a living and a form of resistance against occupiers foreign and domestic. In the United States today, the brevity of the Wikipedia article alone suggests the extent to which this movement has been forgotten. But where memory fades, food can preserve, and as we are talking about Italy it is only appropriate that the memory of the brigantaggio be preserved in its very own pasta shape: cappellacci dei briganti (brigands’ hats).

I discovered this shape while browsing through Oretta Zanini de Vita’s excellent Encyclopedia of Pasta, published last year in English by the University of California Press, which I received from Martha for Christmas. After introductory essays covering the significance of pasta in Italy and the methodology of her research, Zanini jumps into a comprehensive, alphabetically organized listing of pasta shapes, both home and factory-made. Many of the descriptions are accompanied by sketches, although as this is not a cookbook — something the author and translator both insist upon — the level of detail provided is generally insufficient to reproduce the pasta at home. Cappellacci dei briganti did feature a sketch, however, as well as the following description of how to make them:

The flour is sifted onto a wooden board and kneaded long and vigorously with a few eggs, water, and salt. The dough, which should be firm and smooth, is left to rest, then rolled out with a rolling pin into a very thin sheet. An inverted liqueur glass is used to cut small disks from the sheet. Each disk is wrapped into a cone around the tip of an index finger and the edge sealed, then one side is folded back like the brim of a hat. They are air dried and then boiled in plenty of salted water. (64)

Between the distinctive sketch and the intriguing history, I couldn’t help but try to make some brigands’ hats at home.

I started by making my all-purpose pasta dough, using a technique from Cook’s Illustrated. First, I put two cups of flour in the food processor and pulsed it a few times to distribute the flour evenly. I then added three eggs and allowed the machine to run until the mixture was granulated. To finish the dough I add water teaspoon by teaspoon with the processor on until it comes together in a single mass. Then I kneaded the dough a few times, shaped it into a ball, and let it rest in the refrigerator for a half hour. I suspect this method, utilizing a food processor instead of a hundred-year-old flour-soaked board, would be upsetting to Zanini and her sources, but it’s a clean and fast way to produce reliable pasta dough.

When the dough had rested long enough to be workable, it was ready to be divided in quarters and passed through the pasta machine (another gift from Martha, from a few years ago). Using a small wine glass, I cut circles out of the thin sheets of pasta.

The next step, which sounded so easy in the description from the Encylcopedia, required quite a bit of trial and error. Eventually I figured out exactly where to put my index finger — slightly off from the center to get a slanted cone — and how much of the dough needed to be folded over itself in a triangle to form the cone. This is definitely a place where fifty years of pasta-making experience — as opposed to 5 minutes of reading a book — would have paid off.

With a slightly off-center cone to work with, folding the brim of the hat was more straight-forward. The long part of the cone is simply folded up. The only trick to this was initiating the folds with the piece of pasta upside-down; trying to do it from the side resulted in a slightly crushed hat. Although I suppose in the line of duty, a brigand’s hat might get a little out of sorts.

After using all my dough to fill two sheet pans with hats, I boiled them for just under five minutes.

Anybody a little familiar with the Italian ways of pasta knows that at least as important as its shape is the sauce it’s served with. For cappellacci, nothing but a lamb ragú will do. Luckily, Clancey’s was able to provide a beautiful piece of lamb for a slow braise in a sauce consisting mainly of tomatoes canned during the height of the season last August — which tasted mercifully of summer and not botulism.

Though the brigands of Italy are long defeated and perhaps even forgotten, their hats — transformed into pasta and covered in a delicious ragú — deserve to live on.

I just found out about littlefactory.com via a post on Shelterrific, a blog I read pretty regularly. What caught my eye on their site were these number placemats.

Order soon if you like the look, with shipping from Hong Kong orders should have been in by the 5th to arrive by the 25th. I may just take my chances…

Forget the food! Here’s the table setting before we filled every possible surface with a bowlful of stuffing.

Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. This was the second year in a row in which I was cooking in isolation from my extended family in Michigan since relocating to Minnesota. I miss having my whole family together and all their different contributions to the meal. On the other hand, cooking in Minneapolis for a small crowd, I have complete control over the meal. This satisfies the control-freak in me, and also allows a bit of flexibility about how I cook the bird.

The bird in question arrived from Clancey’s Meats & Fish last Monday. I was wide-grinningly excited when our turkey — which had never seen the inside of a freezer — showed up under Martha’s arm; I immediately set about dismembering it. Originally, my plan was to cook the bird whole, in search of that classic Norman Rockwell moment. But after reading Kenji Lopez Alt’s enlightening “Turkey Stuffed Turkey” article I could not resist taking my turkey apart. It just makes so much sense: the legs and the breasts are two different kinds of meat that demand different treatments — they are done at different temperatures — and, best of all, if you cut the legs and breasts off, you have the whole carcass to make turkey stock in advance, to be held at the ready for all your stuffing/dressing and gravy needs.

After dismantling the turkey, I salted the legs and thighs and refrigerated them overnight. The next day, they were ready to confit in a crockpot with plenty of olive oil, bay leaves, thyme, orange zest, peppercorns and juniper berries. Before removing the breasts, I carefully took the majority of the turkey’s skin off in one piece — I think Hannibal Lecter would have been proud. The breasts and skin were reserved for Thanksgiving day. Meanwhile, I roasted the rest of the carcass and boiled it down into stock. The copious amount of bones made available by cutting the turkey apart meant that I got a thick, gelatinous stock.

For reference, a ten pound free range turkey produces about 2 ½# of white meat. I felt like a mad scientist rolling the two breasts together and wrapping them in their own skin per Lopez Alt’s instructions. The technique worked out really well; the meat cooked very evenly and the skin even managed to adhere to the meat, no Activa required. Go figure.

My quest to use all parts of the turkey resulted in the surprise best dish of the evening, a turkey liver pâté. After soaking the turkey’s liver in milk for two hours to leech out some supposed metallic flavors, I sauteed it in butter along with some shallots. This I ground to a paste in my food processor along with thyme, turkey meat left over from the stock, salt, lots of black pepper, some juniper berries and a bit of heavy cream. After baking this mixture in a water-bath in a 300°F oven for an hour I cooled it and refrigerated it overnight. The result was amazing. I have been dabbling in terrines, pâtés and other potted meats for well over a year now. The results, while always pretty good — how can you go wrong with potted meat? — were always missing something, or featuring too much. Either I have learned enough or the stars were just aligning right for this Thanksgiving: the pâté was creamy, rich, slightly gamy and very peppery. Great with mustard, pickled green beans and olives. Not how I’ve usually started off Thanksgiving, but possibly a new tradition!

One can hardly have Thanksgiving appetizers without Thanksgiving cocktails. Martha found the recipe we used on Apartment Therapy: 1½ oz rye whiskey (Wild Turkey, of course), ½ oz triple sec (substituted for clear curaçao), 2 oz apple cider, 1 tsp simple syrup and a couple of cranberries for garnish. Changing every “oz” to “cup” we successfully octupled the recipe with enough for everyone to enjoy two.

As for the rest of the meal, it was more or less what you would expect. Mashed potatoes, stuffing, fresh cranberry sauce, sauteed green beans with lemon, roasted parnsips, carrots and brussels sprouts, roasted turkey breast and turkey leg confit and plenty of gravy to cover it all.

In some ways Thanksgiving is a stupid meal: nobody can make all these dishes perfectly at the same time. We’d be better off focusing on just a couple and having a really great meal. But it’s Thanksgiving, it happens only once a year, and frankly, nobody expects it to be perfect. That’s why there’s gravy.

It’s a cruel irony that heat of the late summer sun that produces perfect tomatoes and fragrant basil also makes our homes so hot that the thought of even turning on the oven — let alone cranking it up all the way for perfect pizzas margherita — is unbearable.  By the time I’m willing to endure the 500 degrees blasting away for over an hour necessary for decent pizza crust, the tomatoes are long rotten on the vine and the basil withered or brought indoors. Of course there are always canned tomatoes and greenhouse basil, but if you want to eat more in-season, you have to get a little more creative with your toppings (and loose with your definition of “pizza”).

Potato-Leek Pizza. This classic soup combination works reasonably well for pizza. The potatoes present a bit of a problem since the pizza only spends ten minutes in the oven; they need to be parcooked or sliced extremely thin. I opted for the latter and utilized a mandoline to make slices so thin that the skin of each slice could be seen through the flesh of the potato slice layered above it. A generous shower of olive oil combined with the blazing temperature of the oven slightly fries the potato slices. A sprinkling of leeks and a few cubes of feta completed a pizza of which Martha claimed, “tastes like soup.” In a good way, I think.

Butternut squash-gorgonzola-walnut Pizza. After a well deserved period of squash abstinence, I decided to get back into it by combining one of my least favorite foods — said squash — with one of my favorites: pizza. After sauteeing cubes of butternut squash until tender, I mashed them with butter and enough milk to make the mixture spread easily, then aggressively salted and peppered the mix. To offset the bland sweetness of squash, I used musty, tangy gorgonzola cheese. Both butternut squash and gorgonzola are well complemented by nuts, so I sprinkled on toasted walnuts after baking the pie.

A word of caution to anyone attempting squash pizza: that squash can retain a whole lot of oven heat for a long time. Give yourself extra cooling time before taking a bite! When the pizza did cool down to a reasonable tasting temperature, my taste buds that had not been burned away told me that this was a winning combination, at least as far as anything involving squash can be. Although the gorgonzola tended to overpower the squash, I had applied it with a light hand, so the cheese was well balanced by zones of pure squash. The walnuts were the pepperoni of this pizza, providing spots of excitement amongst the more uniform cheese and crust.

I enjoyed both of these pizzas. They’re not about to replace pizza margherita in my heart, but as a way to use those last late-season farmers’ market veggies — and enjoy a sustained heatwave issuing forth from your oven in the chilly fall — they were pretty good.

True, Halloween hasn’t even happened yet, but Thanksgiving is growing near. The Wedge, the source of the turkey pictured here, has already posted their Thanksgiving hours on their homepage and will begin taking turkey orders on Monday, November 2. Tomorrow will be the last day for the Midtown Farmers’ Market, but as Minneapolis/St. Paul Magazine recently noted, if you’re a Mill City shopper:

you should be aware that you can order Wild Acres turkeys from the Mill City Farmers Market. But don’t dawdle, supplies are limited and the deadline is Nov. 13.

This year we’re ordering our turkey from Clancey’s Meats and Fish in Linden Hills, where they just began taking orders. From what I know thus far, Clancey’s turkeys are never frozen: orders are taken, sent to the turkey farm, and the turkeys are slaughtered and delivered for pickup just before the big day. (Also good to know: Clancey’s can connect you with sources for heritage breeds if you’re interested.) The birds start at 10–15 lbs. and go up from there in 5 lb. increments. At this point I’m not sure how many will be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner so it’s hard to estimate how much turkey we’ll need. I’m curious—what size bird are you ordering? Are there any other great sources for turkeys we should know about?

When a new vegetable first comes in to season, all I want to do with it is prepare it as simply as possible. A little fat, a little seasoning, and let the vegetable speak for itself. The year’s first asparagus? Lightly steam it and toss it with butter and salt. Sweet corn? Shuck, boil and enjoy slathered in butter and plenty of salt and pepper. Tomatoes? They require little more than slicing, a drizzle of olive oil and grains of sea salt.

But there comes a point, especially as a season seems to drag on, when simple preparations start to get a little tiresome, and I start trying to think of new ways to use up the half-dozen ears of corn I feel compelled to buy every week while the season lasts.

Squash, now firmly in season, is a vegetable that easily fits this pattern. I love roasted squash mashed with butter and salt as much as the next guy, but it doesn’t take very long before I start to find the squash’s sweetness and its squishiness daunting. I enjoy the occasional squash soup, but once a year is really enough. So with an eye to heading off squash fatigue, I offer an interesting, if a little labor-intensive way to use up those fall squash: bisteeya.

Bisteeya is a Moroccan sweet/savory pie filled with shredded meat and nuts. In her book Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean, Ana Sortun offers a vegetarian version using sweet potatoes. I adapted her version to use the red Kuri squash I bought at the farmers’ market in place of the potatoes. The North African flavors in this dish are a nice accent to the squash and a welcome relief from more straightforward presentations.

Squash Bisteeya

• 1 Kuri squash, about 1.5#
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1 Large onion, minced
• 1/8 Teaspoon turmeric
• Pinch saffron threads, crumbled
• 1 Teaspoon grated ginger
• Salt
• ¾ Teaspoon black pepper
• 4 Eggs, beaten
• 2 Tablespoons lemon juice
• ¼ Cup parsley, chopped
• ¼ Cup cilantro, chopped
• ¾ Walnuts (Sortun uses pine nuts, but I substituted walnuts—what we had on hand)
• ¼ Cup powdered sugar
• 2 Teaspoons ground cinnamon
• ½ Cup extra virgin olive oil
• 9 Sheets phyllo dough

Preheat oven to 350°F. Cut squash in half and scoop out seeds. Coat inside of squash with a light film of oil and roast until fork-tender, 45 minutes to an hour. Remove squash from oven and allow to cool.

While squash is roasting, melt and slightly brown the butter. Add the onion, turmeric and saffron. Lower the heat to medium-low and cook until onions are softened but not at all brown. Stir in ginger and set aside.

When squash is cool enough to handle, scoop the flesh out of the skin and into the bowl of a food processor. Purée the squash until creamy, adding ½ to ¾ cup of water as necessary to keep everything moving in the food processor. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add eggs, lemon juice, parsley and cilantro and blend until smooth. Transfer to a mixing bowl and stir in onion mixture. Add a little more salt.

Toast the walnuts in a skillet or in the oven until darkened and fragrant. Allow to cool then coarsely chop. Mix with sugar and cinnamon (when I made this I actually forgot the cinnamon and sugar. It was still good, but I have made it in the past with cinnamon and sugar and would recommend remembering them.)

Brush the bottom of a 9″ cake pan with olive oil. Place one sheet of phyllo dough on the counter and brush with olive oil. Sprinkle with 1 Tablespoon of the nuts. Top with another sheet of phyllo dough and repeat. Add a third sheet, brushing it with oil.

Carefully lay this assembly of three sheets of dough in the cake pan. The edges of the dough should overlap the sides of the pan. Assemble another set of phyllo sheets in same manner and lay it in the cake pan on top of the first set, but perpendicular. Press the dough to the sides of the pan and fill with squash mixture. Make a third set of three sheets of dough and lay it over the top of the squash mixture, then fold over the edges of the bottom sheets of dough so the entire pie is covered.

Bake for 40 to 45 minutes until puffy and golden brown.

Cut pie into wedges and dust with powdered sugar. Serve with a light salad. Part of the pleasure of this dish is the crispy phyllo crust — which your refrigerator will do nothing for — so it’s best to eat this all immediately.

The light chill today was a reminder that fall — my favorite cooking season — is upon us. Fall brings many hearty possibilities ruled out by summer’s heat; suddenly it is possible, even desirable, to have the oven on for a few hours. Enter the braise—meat and vegetables stewed in rich liquid until tender.

This particular recipe was inspired by the small cabbages that Martha insisted we buy at the farmers’ market. When I saw them, my mind wandered to the bowl of crab apples sitting at home and the thick-cut pork chops I keep wanting to buy at Clancey’s. And so a braise was born.

Braised Pork, Apples and Cabbage

Some of the visual appeal of this dish is from the small (5″ diameter) cabbages that we found at the farmers’ market. If only large cabbages are available, use one, roughly chopped, and omit the browning step for the cabbage. Four regularly-sized, tart apples can be substituted for the crab apples; cut them into eighths, rather than quarters.

• 2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
• 2# bone-in pork roast
• Salt and pepper
• 1 large onion, sliced
• 2 fennel stalks or a small bulb, roughly chopped
• 1 quart pork stock (recipe below), cider or water
• 4 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
• 3 small heads cabbage
• 8 crab apples (about 2″ in diameter)
• 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar

Preheat oven to 300°F.

Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a large Dutch oven (one that has an oven-proof lid) over medium-high heat. Thoroughly coat the pork roast with salt and pepper. Place the pork in the Dutch oven and brown on all sides, a few minutes per side. Remove the pork to a plate and drain all but 1 tablespoon of fat. Return pot to medium heat and add the onions and fennel. Cook until onions are soft and starting to brown. Add garlic cloves, pork roast, and enough pork stock/cider/water to come most of the way up the side of the roast. Bring to a boil, cover and place in oven. Cook for one hour.

Meanwhile, cut the cabbages into quarters. Cut the apples into quarters and slice out their cores. Heat remaining one tablespoon of olive oil in a 12″ skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add apple slices, cut side down. Cook until deep golden brown, about 4 minutes. Nudge the apples to the other cut side and cook until brown. Transfer apples to a plate. Place cabbage in skillet, one cut side down, and cook until starting to blacken on the edges. Flip the cabbage to the other cut side and repeat. Transfer cabbage to a plate.

After one hour of cooking, remove Dutch oven from oven. Taste the liquid and add salt and pepper as desired. Add cabbage, apples and vinegar and stir to combine. Arrange the pot so the liquid mostly covers everything. Return to oven and cook for another one hour, or until the pork is tender, but not necessarily falling off the bone.

Strain the liquid into a stockpot or large skillet. Return the solids to Dutch oven and cover to keep warm. Bring braising liquid to a rolling boil and continue cooking until reduced by half (or, until you’re tired of waiting). Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Arrange apples, cabbage, onions and fennel in a wide, shallow serving bowl. Slice or pull pork and arrange in center of vegetables. Pour reduced braising liquid over top of everything. Serve with hearty bread for sopping up the juice.

Quick Pork Broth:

Just in case you don’t have pork stock sitting around in the freezer (you might want to check in the back), here’s a quick way to get a flavorful broth that will work well as a braising liquid for pork.

• ¼# Ground pork
• Half an onion, roughly chopped (or onion scraps)
• 1 small carrot, roughly chopped

Combine all ingredients in a 2 quart saucepan. Add 4 ½ cups of water. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a bare simmer and allow to cook, partially covered, for one hour. Strain off the solids and discard.