Extra Virgin (2 page)

I’ll be honest—merging our refrigerators involved some negotiation at first, mostly when it came to what he thought about some of my food staples. I had good extra virgin olive oil, fresh herbs, quality ingredients for a sauce. But one look at my rice milk, tofu, and bean sprouts, and Gabriele had to control his impulse to take over our kitchen. I would come home exhausted from shooting a TV series, too tired to think about much of anything except learning lines for the next day, and I’d find that my husband had whipped up a dish inspired by his scouring the local farmers’ markets. Then I understood what an act of love it is to provide a simple, fresh, and delicious meal for your
amore
. I may have occasionally had my head in the plate, I was so freakin’ tired, but you would have seen a smile as my face fell forward!

As our beautiful daughters, Evelina and Giulia, came into the picture, and since Gabriele and I decided to turn our kitchen-inspired happiness into a website to share our joys of traditional Tuscan cooking, our passion for the flavors of my husband’s land has only grown. Our television show has been another outlet for what we’re trying to convey. But there’s no substitute for this: a book with easy-to-make, joyful meals from our heart and soul.

So please use this book. Dog-ear the pages. Get sauce on it. Let a spray of olive oil from a vigorous drizzle mark its pages. Write your favorite notes—your own inspirations—in the margins. Let the love we put into these recipes become a part of your home. Your family will thank you, the friends you cook for will look at you in a new light, and maybe that special someone you hope to woo will find that decision about you a little easier to make! We crave the spice and sweetness of life after all, and as I’ve learned from loving Gabriele, delicious food made from great ingredients is the means to achieve it.

GABRIELE:
I’ve walked through olive fields picking fruits of the harvest, and stood by my grandmother as she made ravioli by hand, and stolen a bite of prosciutto from my hidden stash when my kosher Jewish father wasn’t home. I grew up with a strong sense of food’s connection to the earth, to family, and to personal pleasure.

These are the experiences that make me the Tuscan cook I am today, and I find the greatest joy in life from cooking the food I grew up with for my family and friends. It’s the same joy I experienced as a percussionist when I was pursuing a music career—that thrill of performing for audiences. There is a direct connection between doing what I love and the feeling it gives me when I experience it.

It’s interesting how often making food for someone else may seem routine on the surface, but inside you teem with deeper emotions connected to caring for others. My earliest memories of
learning how to cook come from my mother, a schoolteacher, showing me the ins and outs of the fridge and the stove, so I could make my baby brother Fabio’s bottle on Sunday mornings, while Mom slept in after a hard week. (Not waking her up was step one of the recipe.) Feeding my brother was a taste of responsibility and maturity—tied up in providing for someone unable to fend for himself—that I never forgot. Then when Nonna Lola, my beloved grandmother, taught me the secret to her wonderful almond cake, it was like being given a family heirloom, from a doting grandmother to the grandson who cherished her cooking. When I was a newlywed with a pregnant wife, it dawned on me what my life had been leading up to: the ability to feed my family, to turn the making of a fragrant, nourishing bowl of pasta with red sauce into an act of the most sincere love.

When Deborah and I started making home videos to share on the Internet, teaching people the basics of traditional Tuscan recipes, we watched our site grow into a much larger audience. I was surprised at how freeing it was to be in contact with the world through the food I loved. Then again, learning to cook as I grew up was a form of freedom, as was breaking certain rules in our house, too. The funny thing about mio amore Deborah’s story is that for her, it took leaving the city and landing in the country to round out her appreciation of food. For me, I would often feel stuck on our Florentine farm, longing for the chance to liberate myself from the delicious but restricted palate of kosher eating, which forbids pork as well as mixing meat and dairy. Sure, I learned how to use an open fire to grill steaks, plus guinea fowl, lamb, and pheasant, but I was missing out on the animal at the center of so much Italian cooking: the pig! I would go to birthday parties and see prosciutto sandwiches and cured pork products everywhere, and then stuff myself like a puppy that doesn’t know when to stop eating. There I was, sick from too much mortadella—the delicious cold cut made of high-quality pork, pistachios, and generously marked with cubes of fat—and I couldn’t tell my dad!

The recipes collected here represent my deep, abiding love for how Tuscans approach cooking. It’s a region devoted to honoring fresh, natural ingredients, using them sparingly but wisely, cooking them with the respect they deserve, and letting their flavors shine. Our food is rustic, but in its own way supremely delicate. It’s ideal as a cuisine with which to celebrate family and friends, and through which you can turn yourself into a great home cook. Tuscan food is a language all to itself, and teaching that language as I was taught it by my family is what I hope to do with this book.

I don’t believe good food needs to be expensive, or time-consuming. It doesn’t even always have to be one hundred percent handmade, especially when more and more grocery stores offer plenty of quality ingredients and prepared items. I know it can be a struggle to stay on a budget, to feel as if there’s no time to make dinner, to think you can’t make something because it seems too hard. But when you start making our food, you’ll feel that much more confident in the kitchen about all aspects of cooking—the shopping, the time it takes, and the techniques—and a lot of those worries will melt away as quickly as freshly grated Parmesan on warm risotto.

I remember the smiles on my own family’s faces when I began cooking for them, and that’s a goal well worth striving for.

THE TUSCAN KITCHEN

ESSENTIALS

G:
Think of your kitchen, pantry, and refrigerator this way: If you had to right now, could you whip up a
Spaghetti alla Carbonara
for a hungry child? Or a
Minestrone
when you’re stuck inside the house? Or an
Amatriciana pasta
for an unexpected visit from a friend or relative? We can, because when it comes to shopping, we divide our needs by what’s essential and ever present, and what’s worth making a special trip.

I know what’s in my cupboards and fridge at all times, because for me, shopping is something I look at as perpetual, not a chore to start and finish. Too often in America I see people shopping haphazardly, maybe thinking last minute only about the night ahead, rather than for a rotating menu that allows for variety and invention. I don’t go to a store to get inspired. Keep your grocery list on hand!

There’s more to shopping than the grocery store, too. Find a local butcher, and get to know what they have to offer. If you have a fishmonger, do the same. They will have the better, higher-grade cuts than your chain supermarket. Become a regular at your local farmers’ market. Learning to shop seasonally will automatically make you more conscious about your shopping and what you need in your kitchen.

Remember, the true path to shopping like a Tuscan is thinking about the purity of
ingredients, not shortcuts. It’s not about flavor-infused
olive oil, or prepackaged meals, or a mix in a bag. Once you start making a few of our recipes, you’ll start to notice how ingredients go together to best bring out their individual flavors.

So consider our Pantry section (below) a peek into the basics we never like to be without at home. These are the building blocks for a lot of our recipes. You’re not going to find specialty items here—meat, fish, that particular cheese, an in-season vegetable or fruit—just the essentials that we believe should be ready to use at all times.

The Pantry

EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL:
This is literally liquid gold for Italians, and should be for you, too. It’s a part of nearly every recipe, whether kicking things off in a heated pan, or gracing a dish at the end, or both. This culinary lifeblood is produced everywhere in Italy, but naturally we’re biased toward the justifiably coveted, world-famous Tuscan kind, which ranges from pale and effervescent to dark, green, peppery, and intense, depending on the region within the region. What makes olive oil “extra virgin” is how it’s extracted from the glorious, dutiful fruit. If the means are strictly mechanical—wheels or rocks or machines that squeeze the juice from the olive without the use of chemical agents—then you have the premium oil, yielding the most fruitiness with the least acidity (below 0.8% to get labeled “extra virgin”). If you’ve ever seen first cold-pressed olive oil, which is what’s produced from a one-time extraction process without using heat, it’s so luminescent—green and vibrant—it can actually look like automotive coolant! Our suggestion for what to have on hand is twofold: a high-end, artisanal bottle imported from Tuscany that you use for that final drizzle that anoints your meal, and
a lesser-priced brand of extra virgin olive oil (still Italian, mind you) that acts as your cooking/frying oil. Keep it nice and cool if you can—not refrigerated, just away from too much heat or light—and it’ll last a good while.

SALT:
When it comes to salting water for pasta, we prefer a coarse grind like
kosher salt
. When finishing a meat or fish, we use either the
granulated
table kind or
sea salt,
which can be coarse or flaky. If seasoning a sauce, we use pinches from a little ramekin filled with granulated salt, because it will melt more quickly in dispersing flavor. It’s important to remember that regardless if the salt is fine or coarse, the inherent saltiness doesn’t change.

WHOLE BLACK PEPPERCORNS:
You always want to grind black pepper as needed. The preground kind loses so much flavor after it leaves the factory that there’s no comparison.

HOT RED PEPPER FLAKES:
A spicy necessity! We like to make our own flakes by roasting hot peppers grown in the summer, letting them dry for the winter, then opening them up and crushing them in a mortar and pestle. But there are plenty of good store brands, and we buy those, too.

FRESH HERBS:
These are the aromatics that work wonders in all manner of dishes, and fresh—not dried—is the way to go.
Basil
is the sweet herb that gives anything it touches a garden vibrancy, and is the soul of fresh
Pesto
.
Rosemary
keeps evil spirits away, if we’re thinking like the ancients. It gives such a great fragrant kick to grilled or roasted meat.
Sage
is the essence of wildness and greenness, savory and silky in equal measure.
Bay leaves
bring an almost mysterious depth and character to stews and sauces. And
mint
is simply refreshing and invigorating. Then there’s
parsley
, so prevalent as a sprinkled garnish that its Italian translation—
prezzemolo
—is often used to describe people who won’t stay out of your business. And yet, there’s a tinge of herby cleanliness to freshly chopped Italian parsley that leaving this common adornment out would just feel wrong. You might wonder why we didn’t mention oregano, that other ubiquitous seasoning. The honest answer is, we just don’t care for it. Buy it if you love it, though!