The perfect hangover food

It's easy to cook, it's easy to digest, it's spicy and a bit greasy also. It's very comforting. What else do you need in those mornings? Spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncini, perhaps the first foreign food I learnt how to cook.

Take 200 g per person of good quality spaghetti. Of the supermarket brands, the best is De Cecco. Barilla is okay. Bring a big pot of water to the boil and add the pasta without breaking it: one of the major sins you can commit while cooking pasta is to break spaghetti; the other is to overcook it. Add plenty of salt.

Finely chop 2 or 3 cloves of garlic per person. Cover the bottom of a sautee pan with olive oil. When the oil is hot, add the garlic and dried red chiles to taste. It's your call here. Be careful not to burn the garlic, remove the pan from the heat if needed. When the garlic is fried, add a glass of white wine (the quantity of wine obviously depends on the amount of oil: use your judgement...) and bring the mixture back to the boil. Move the pan in circles to emulsify the fat and form an homogeneous sauce. Finely chop some parlsey.

Once the pasta is cooked, mix it with the garlicky oil and perfume with the parlsey. If you have parmigiano reggiano, grate as much as you want over the pasta. Enjoy! And next time, try to be a reasonable chap and drink more sensibly. The best solution is prevention! (Right...)

Fritto Misto

Ever since our last trip to Rome we have been craving this food and meaning to try to replicate it as best as we could. We had this at Andrea's birthday party, cooked live by a couple of locals in a large pot full of oil and served in paper cones. It was utter bliss.

There are many versions of fritto misto in Italy, each consisting in a different combination of fried foods: fritto misto alla romana, alla napoletana, alla milanese... you get the point.

We simply had fried aubergine, courgette, red bell pepper and some parsley. Look at this picture to see how we prepped the vegetables:


The next step is to prepare the batter. We used a recipe from an italian recipe book we have: Il talismano della felicita' by Ada Boni. Flour (125 g), one tablespoon of oil, one egg yolk, two egg whites, a glass of warm water and a pinch of salt. We read in other places that the water should be cold and that the batter should be prepared just before being used. This book asked for warm water and suggested to rest the batter for at least an hour before using... Everybody seems to agree that one should take care not to overwork the batter, just mix everything together until you get a nice smooth mixture. The glass of water is just a guideline, follow your instinct. The egg whites should beaten to a soft peak and folded into the batter at the last minute.

Shake the pieces of vegetables to get rid of the salt, pat dry, and plunge in the batter. Get rid of any excess and drop into hot oil (180 degrees, use a thermometer). This is how our looked like, and it was very good... although not quite as good as the real one...

Beans and chipotles

Remember these beans? We had a large batch in the freezer that we needed to use to free up some space, so we made some soup. The batch was really big, and we were left wondering what else we could do with these beauties.

The inspiration came from a glass of leftover chipotles in adobo sauce that was (and still is) in our fridge. Chipotles are jalapeno peppers that have been dried and smoked. These chillies are preserved in small tins with adobo sauce, which is a concoction of tomato, vinegar, garlic etc. Both the sauce and the chillies are quite used in mexican cooking. What is really unusual about this ingredient is the smokiness paired with the acidity of the vinegar and the spiciness of the peppers. Very inspiring!

Our creation: fry some finely chopped onion in olive oil until golden, and then add good quality tinned tomatoes. Cook on low heat until the sauce comes together. Then add a couple of the smoked jalapenos finely diced, and a few tablespoons of the adobo sauce. Check for salt and keep simmering on very low heat. Then you need to cook the beans. The best is to use a pressure cooker: the beans, a bit of olive oil, add enough water to barely cover, close the pot and cook for 8 minutes after the pot starts whistling. Now add the strained cooked beans to the sauce along with a few tablespoons of the cooking liquid and simmer on low heat until the flavours meld, adding more liquid as needed. Serve with sauteed turnip greens and crusty bread.

Codcheeks

A word of warning: codcheeks packed in brine should be soaked for as long as regular cod should, never less! We cooked (not fried) ours in olive oil, and used the oil to mount the sauce, so none of the excessive salt had a chance to escape. It wasn't inedible, but it was a bit far from perfection.

Codcheeks are amazing! This was the first time I ate - or cooked - these things, but many more will certainly follow. My guess is you should soak them in the fridge for 1.5 days, changing the water three times. Maybe two days, I have to experiment. We soaked ours for 24 hours and that was not enough.

Codcheeks are used a lot in Basque cuisine, where they are called kokotxas. I had been curious for a while about experimenting with the pil pil technique: essentially emulsifying the cod's gelatin in olive oil until it forms a thick sauce. Hence, saturday dinner was set.



The wine was also one which I had my eye set on for a while: 2005 Vinha Formal, a 100% Bical wine that is fermented in barrel and aged for 12 months in new oak barrels with a 650 l capacity. It's supposed to be an unusal white wine, very particular. Our bottle showed a very complex nose, but I was expecting a more exhuberant mouth. In particular, I was expecting a more unctuous wine. A very nice wine, but I am not sure I would buy another bottle, especially given the pricetag.

To serve with the kokotxas al pil pil: double-fried french fries and turnip greens that were parboiled and then sauteed in garlic-scented olive oil.

For the kokotxas al pil pil: fry 3 sliced cloves of garlic and a small dried chile until golden in a lot of hot olive oil - 1/2 a cup of oil should do it: you need enough to barely cover the codcheeks. Remove the solids to a plate, let the oil cool a bit, and then add the codcheeks that were patted dry (we used 500 g and that was enough for 3 people and there were no leftovers). The idea is to cook them in oil, not to fry them, so the temperature should not be too high. You will see white bubbles forming: this is the beginning of the pil pil. The cod cooks fairly quickly: 5 minutes or even less. Do NOT overcook! Remove the cod and let the oil cool down to about 60 C. Then start wisking the oil with a small colander. I saw this technique in this youtube video, and it really works! The oil will thicken to form a very interesting sauce. Check the video for more detailed instructions - if you understand Spanish.

Put the cod back into the saute pan, heat and serve sprinkled with parsley and guarnished with some of the fried slices of garlic.

A night in India

An impromtu dinner with friends resulted in an incursion into Indian gastronomy. This was the line-up: roghan josh, recipe courtesy of the Wine Spectator, and spinash bhaji, recipe courtesy of Saveur number 103, June 2007. Basmati rice, which was subpar, store-bought chapati. To start, mango chutney, an improvised minty yoghurt and a lime pickle with a few papadums. The wines were too delicated for the boldness of the food: Vina Sol 2006, Penedes, and Quinta de Saes 2006, Dao Doc. All in all, a very agreable dinner in very good company.

Who wants to do the washing-up?