BOOK/A TABLE - Tomato Flan in Florence

I brought E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View with me to Florence as the first part of the novel takes place there. What a thrill to read this upon waking, my first morning in town...

“It was pleasant to wake up in Florence, to open the eyes upon a bright bare room...it was pleasant, too, to fling wide the windows, pinching the fingers in the unfamiliar fastenings, to lean out into sunshine with beautiful hills and trees and marble churches opposite...”

And fling wide the windows I did as well that morning, breathing in all the gorgeous Florentine air, ripe with spring jasmine!

We knew we had to return to Florence’s celebrated Cibreo, one of my favorite restaurants in the world that I know. In particular, I was really looking forward to the simple, luxurious tomato flan (a savory spread similar in consistency to the Spanish dessert flan) meant to be slathered on toasted country bread. Alas, I discovered they only serve it during the summertime, when tomatoes are at their best. 

However, fate intervened when a dear friend took us to Osteria della Tre Panche tucked away in The Hermitage Hotel, a few steps away from the Ponte Vecchio. There I spied Il Budino di Pomodoro on the menu, which translates to “tomato pudding.” Served as an accompaniment to sumptuous chicken with truffled cream sauce, mozzarella in corrozza, and pappardelle with boar ragu, the budino turned out to be more than an ample subsitute for the flan. It was terrific!     

A Room with a View asks a question of its young heroine Lucy Honeychurch, who arrives home to England with a greatly changed perspective—what did you bring back from Italy? 

For me, I returned feeling the sunshine over the Piazza di Signorina still streaming on my face and the lingering scent of jasmine everywhere...I snipped a fragrant blossom and pressed it between the pages of Forster’s beautful novel. 

And oh yes, I brought back a recipe for tomato flan!

Tomato Flan
Ingredients
1 8-ounce can Del Monte or other tomato sauce
12 large basil leaves
2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil, plus extra for garnish
4 teaspoons unflavored gelatin (about 1 1/3 envelopes)
Salt and fresh black pepper to taste
Vegetable oil
12 slices country bread

Method

In a blender or food processor, combine tomato sauce, 6 leaves basil, garlic, ¼ cup olive oil, gelatin and salt and pepper to taste. Blend at high speed for 2 minutes.
Lightly oil 6 small cappuccino or other cups. Divide tomato mixture among cups. Refrigerate 20 minutes.
To serve, dip bottom of each cup in hot water to loosen flan. Unmold onto 6 plates. Garnish with a basil leaf and a drop of olive oil. Place 2 slices bread on each plate.

Yield: 6 servings.

BOOK/A TABLE - Lemon Sandwich Pie Cookies

 

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself...

So famously begins Virginia Woolf’s visionary novel Mrs. Dalloway, about a single day (in June!) in the life of a woman as she plans a party and falls into memories of a love from long ago. 

But what if Mrs. Dalloway BAKED the flowers herself? That might be a very different story indeed—and the flowers might be a blooming bunch of these Lemon Sandwich Pie cookies that look like daisies and taste like little lemon meringue pies.

Whenever I’m visiting my family in New Hampshire, I like to pick up a copy of fresh magazine at Hannaford, the New England chain of supermarkets. There’s alway something delicious to be found in the pages such as quiche or cassoulet, or these cookies! Perhaps we can call them Dalloways?

Lemon Sandwich Pie Cookies

Adapted from fresh magazine

Makes 12 to 14

Ingredients
All-purpose flour, as needed
1 (15 oz) package rolled pie crust, at room temperature
½ cup marshmallow fluff
¼  cup store-bought lemon curd
2 TB confectioners’ sugar (optional)

Method

1. Preheat oven to 350°F. Lightly dust work surface and a rolling pin with flour. Gently roll one pie crust, soothing out any creases. Using a 2” flower-shaped cookie cutter, cut out 12 to 14 cookies. Repeat with second pie crust.

2. Transfer cookies to parchment-lined baking sheets. Using a round cookie cutter ( 3/4” or smaller), cut out the centers from half of the cookies. Bake until cookies are golden, 10 to 12 minutes. Let cookies cool completely.

3. Spread 2 teaspoons marshmallow fluff into an even layer on each whole cookie. Add ½ teaspoon lemon curd to center a fluff on each cookie. Top with remaining cut out cookies. Dust with confectioners’ sugar, if desired.

MY SUGGESTION: Using a sifter, sift confectioners’ sugar over top cookie layer before placing them on each bottom whole cookie.

God bless Mrs. Dalloway—and Hannaford as well! Happy June, everybody!

This Just In...an Apple Cider Shrub from Westville!

A crisply refreshing seasonal mocktail from Westville! They have several fun, fabulous locations serving cozy fare (buttermilk fried chicken sandwich or strawberry spring salad, anyone?) all over NYC. Visit any one of them to chow down and get your shrub on as well—or make the recipe below at home!

Apple Cider Shrub
Ingredients
1/2 oz apple cider vinegar
1 oz honey syrup
1 oz pear puree, homemade or store bought (such as Goya)
Club soda
Ice

Instructions
Fill a Collins glass with ice, add apple cider vinegar, honey syrup, and top with club soda. Stir gently to mix.

Cheers! And enjoy a delicious sip of spring!


Westville is open for lunch, brunch, and dinner. Go to westvillenyc.com for more info!

Gone Fishin'

While I am away on vacation, thought I’d drop you a line...enjoy this fish dish, a marvellous meunière!

Classic Sole Meunière
Recipe adapted by Molly Wizenberg via Bon Appetit magazine 

2 servings

Ingredients
Fish
1/2 cup all purpose flour
4 lemon sole fillets (each about 3 to 4 ounces)
Coarse kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil or canola oil
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter

Sauce
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 4 pieces
2 tablespoons chopped fresh Italian parsley
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
Lemon wedges

Method:
Fish
Place flour in pie dish. Rinse fish; pat with paper towels. Sprinkle both sides of fish with coarse salt and freshly ground pepper. Dredge fish on both sides with flour; shake off excess. Place on platter.

Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat until oil is hot and shimmers. Add butter; quickly swirl skillet to coat. When foam subsides, add fish and cook until golden on bottom, 2 to 3 minutes. Carefully turn fish over and cook until opaque in center and golden on bottom, 1 to 2 minutes. Divide fish between 2 warmed plates; tent with foil. Pour off drippings from skillet; wipe with paper towels.

Sauce
Place skillet over medium-high heat. Add butter; cook until golden, 1 to 2 minutes. Remove from heat; stir in parsley and lemon juice (sauce may sputter). Spoon sauce over fish. Serve with lemon wedges.

Thanks to deliciousmagazine.co.uk for the photo!

Shouldn't You Just...?

SHOULDN’T YOU JUST...?

Advice on modern etiquette for the not-so-new millennium.

• Outfit your dining table with a bunch of yellow candles to celebrate spring, even after Easter has come and gone?

• Enliven your summertime drinks with these rosy cocktail picks?

                                            

• Keep a jar of cocktail onions on hand when you find yourself needing the occasional onion? They last for such a long time in the fridge and impart a nice flavor to recipes in a pinch!

                                          

• Burn sprigs of dried thyme and rosemary to add a delicious fragrance to your home? Or as a smoky garnish to your steak, the way French restaurants often do? Not only is thyme believed to bring about strength and clarity, rosemary is thought to be helpful in removing negative energy from the air.

BOOK/A TABLE - Vinegar Chicken

While reading P.G. Wodehouse’s devastatingly witty Love Among the Chickens, I was reminded to pull out one of my favorite cookbooks, Simon Hopkinson’s Roast Chicken and Other Stories, and once again try my hand at the Vinegar Chicken a.k.a. Poulet Sauté au Vinaigre therein.

A friend made Vinegar Chicken for me a few years ago and I’ve never been able to make the dish quite as good as hers...but sometimes, that’s just the way it is. Nevertheless, Vinegar Chicken is still pretty tasty and wonderfully fragrant. 

I’m sure you will at least have better luck making this chicken than Jeremy Garnet (the hero in Love Among the Chickens) had in raising scads of them, after being suckered into the scheme by his dear friend Stanley Featherstone Ukridge, a most unreliable flibbertigibbet and one of Wodehouse’s popular protagonists. 

At this point in the story, things aren’t going so well for Jeremy...

“Personally, I feel as if I should never move again. You have no conception of the difficulty of rounding up fowls and getting them safely to bed. Having no proper place to put them, we were obliged to stow some of them in the cube sugar-boxes and the rest in the basement. It has only just occurred to me that they ought to have had perches to roost on.”

Don’t worry if you don’t have any cube sugar-boxes, a perch, or a basement in which to place your chicken—if it has been properly dispatched, a flame proof casserole will do just fine!

Poulet Sauté au Vinaigre

From Roast Chicken and Other Stories by Simon Hopkinson with Lindsey Bareham

Ingredients 
4 LB chicken, jointed into 8 pieces
Salt and pepper
4 oz butter
2 TB olive oil
6 very ripe tomatoes, skinned, deseeded and chopped
Half pint best-quality red wine vinegar
Half pint chicken stock
Two heaped TBS chopped parsley (or tarragon!)

Method 
Season the joints of chicken with salt and pepper. Heat 2 ounces of the butter and the olive oil in a flame proof casserole until just turning nut-brown. 

Add the chicken and fry gently, turning occasionally, until golden brown all over. 

Add the chopped tomatoes, and carry on frying and stewing until the tomato has lost its moisture and is dark red and sticky. 

Pour in the vinegar and reduce by simmering until almost disappeared. 

Add the stock, and simmer again until reduced by half. 

Remove the chicken to a serving dish and keep warm. 

Whisk the remaining butter into the sauce to give it a glossy finish. (My suggestion, add a teaspoon of vinegar at the end!)

Add 1 TB chopped parsley, pour over the chicken and the sprinkle with the remaining parsley. 

Serve with plain boiled potatoes.

BOOK/A TABLE - The Manderley Cocktail

I just caught up with a great documentary—Becoming Hitchcock: The Legacy of Blackmail—which explores Alfred Hitchcock’s early style and defining techniques developed during his transition to talkies. The doc also ventures into The Master’s use of food, such as the sandwiches in Psycho, the ominously illumined, potentially fatal glass of milk in Suspicion and the dinner menus batted about in Rebecca. The novel Rebecca by Daphne duMaurier is among my all-time favorites and once again I have my high school teacher to thank for introducing it to us in our list of required reading, along with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Rebecca is a mystery foremost, but it’s also a tale of romantic suspense surrounding loss—and what is perceived of as love. The memory of Rebecca, the former mistress at Manderley, haunts the newly married bride who is ill-equipped to take her place as head of the great house. It doesn’t help things that there is an evil housekeeper lurking about (in the form of Mrs. Danvers), still obsessed with Rebecca.

Below is an elegant cocktail based on the novel. In composing his drink, the creator has taken references to the rose garden at Manderley and the civilized sherry served to its guests. There’s also a dash of Campari involved, in a sly nod to Mrs. Danvers’s bitter attitude.

Manderley Cocktail
Serves one

First make rosewater syrup; heat 250 ml (about 8 1/2 ounces) of rosewater to the boiling point in a saucepan. Take it of the heat and stir in 400 ml (13 1/2 ounces) of caster sugar stirring until all the sugar has dissolved. Let cool somewhat and then pour into a clean bottle. Will last 2-3 weeks in the fridge.

Ingredients:
4 cl (about 1 1/2 ounces) cognac
2 cl (about 1 ounce) dry sherry
1,5 cl (about 1/2 ounce) rosewater syrup
1 dash of Campari
Lemonade

Method:
Stir the ingredients in a stirring glass full of ice until well chilled. Pour into a chilled cocktail glass and top with a dash of lemonade.

Do enjoy!