The Food Maven Diary
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Silo Class, Food Coupons, Small Kitchen Video, Pletzel Defined
A REMINDER
I'm conducting a demonstration class at The Silo in New Milford, Connecticut, on June 6, Saturday, from 11 a.m. to about 2 p.m. We still have several empty chairs. Basically, I'm cooking lunch and talking at the same time. I have no idea what stories will come out of my mouth, but I can tell you the menu. I'll be preparing the simplest dishes from my own daily, Southern Italian repertoire; quick tomato sauce, of course, plus some things to do with it, like poaching eggs in it, called "eggs in purgatory" in Italian, and paccheri (huge macaroni tubes) with ricotta and tomato sauce. As a man who can eat pasta every day, I feel compelled to also make pasta and beans (or maybe chick peas) and Spaghettoni all'Setaccio dell' Immondizia. The name translates to Garbage Pail Thick Spaghetti, but that's just a Neapolitan way of saying it has everything but the kitchen sink. Let's see: The man course is chicken legs baked with rosemary and Italian paprika. Simple, simple. I actually made that for dinner two days ago. The side dish is cabbage and potatoes braised with pancetta. For dessert, it's my friend Franca Miceli's Buttery Apple Cake. She lives in Siracusa, in Sicily, and whips this together as her family sits down to dinner. I'll do the same. To register on-line, go to www.HuntHillFarmTrust.org. Or call 860-355-0300. The cost of lunch and a show (me!): $90.
BEWARE OF FOOD COUPONS
There was recently a spate of TV news features encouraging us to use food coupons to reduce our food bills. Being an old-time newspaper food editor, which means first-class skeptic, I wouldn't be surprised if the Grocery Manufacturers Association had a hand in the media blitz on this subject. Sure, there were some delightful, well-meaning spokeswomen (yes, all women) showing us how we could buy a hundred dollars worth of groceries for only a few dollars or cents (no exaggeration!), but what the coupons bought you wouldn't want to feed your family. At least I wouldn't. You've got to be very selective using coupons. They encourage us to buy and eat heavily processed foods. High-sugar items. High-fat items. High-sodiaum items. Even if the package declares that the food in it is "natural," "organic," and low-everything - the new marketing buzz word is "no transfats"
When you find coupons for fresh vegetables and fruit, milk or eggs, good whole grain breads and cereals, tell me about it. (Actually, I did once find coupons for Alvarado packaged bread, a whole grain, wholesome product I buy anyway.)
That all said, I have also clipped coupons for plastic bags and canned nuts, although I have yet to find a store near me that sells this brand of nuts. Also, surfing the internet using the key words "food coupons" and "grocery coupons," I found many sites from which you can print out coupons. (It's a new world.) I'm sure if you spend the time to search, you can find many coupons for things - soap?, plastic wrap? That you already use.
COOKING IN A SMALL KITCHEN
The above was the title of my first cookbook, published in 1979. To prove how ideas come in cycles, about 15 years later, Moira Hodgeson, who I believe is still the restaurant critic for The Observer, a New York City up-market newspaper, wrote a book on the same subject. Now, in the internet age, my young friend Jill Santopietro is cooking in her tiny kitchen in on-line videos streamed through the New York Times web site.
Jill is most impressive, in general, and on these cooking videos. We had an email relationship until a few years ago when she wrote to me asking if I knew of a water buffalo farm she could visit near Naples. At the moment she wrote, she was already in Italy and I happened to be at Tenuta Seliano, the water buffalo farm where I do my cooking classes just south of Naples. Naturally, I said "Come on down."
She came with her father, a podiatrist from Boston, with whom she was traveling, and I knew right away she was very special. For one thing, a couple of years before this she had befriended the fishermen of Pisciotta, a town just south of Seliano on the Bay of Salerno. She actually convinced these curmudgeonly Italian fishermen to take her anchovy fishing. No one gets to do that, especially a woman. These men are very wary of outsiders. What makes their work so interesting is that still harvest anchovies the way the ancient Greeks did, in nets with tiny holes, but not so tiny that the fish can't stick their necks in them. Struggling to escape the net, the anchovies get caught in the holes and, to put it bluntly, wiggle to their death, bleeding out under water. That makes them particularly delicate in flavor. If I remember correctly, Jill was going to write this up as a thesis for an advanced degree. In the end, she wrote about it for the New York Times magazine while on staff as its recipe tester. Now she is producing and starring in food videos for the Times web site. You can view them at: www.JillSantopietro.com. They started out being titled "Tiny Kitchen," with Jill in her miniscule Manhattan apartment kitchen preparing simple dishes. Now it is called Kitchen 4B, which refers to Jill's apartment number. I know you'll enjoy them, and Jill.
PLETZEL DEFINED
I recently posed a question to you all: What does the Yiddish word pletzel mean? It is used most commonly for a flat bread called "onion board" in Jewish bakeries and some New York City bagel shops. But I found it also used for flakes of matzo, also called matzo farfel, that have been baked with an egg coating and then boiled like pasta.
Some of you wrote in with interesting if not exactly illuminated responses. My friend Matthew Goodman, who is the only secular Jew I know under 80 who not only speaks Yiddish, but writes in Yiddish, had the answer. For years, Matthew was the other Food Maven, the name he wrote under for the The Forward, a Jewish newspaper that is published or was then published in Yiddish, English and Russian editions.
Matthew, otherwise known as Motl, told me that the word "pletzel" is from "plateh," meaning plane, board, or, as it sounds, plate. I thought the zle/zel ending sounded like a diminutive suffix, and it is. Therefore, pletzel is a little plane, board or plate. I suppose one could say that both onion board and flakes of matzoh are little "planes" or "boards." (By the way, the plural of pletzel is pletzlach.) The word is even used for flat noodles,
