Seared sea scallops over potato «risotto»

This blog is dedicated to simple home cooking, mostly because that's the kind of cooking—and eating—I like best. But every once and while, the urge to make something 'fancy' strikes. So when a friend from Rome visited last night, I decided to put on the ritz and serve this elegant 'restaurant' dish of seared sea scallops on a bed on potatoes cut into small cubes and simmered with broth to resemble risotto and surrounded by a heavenly cream sauce.

Step 1: Begin by making the sauce: Sweat half a fennel, a leek and 2 shallots, all fined chopped, in some butter until tender. Add a splash of white wine and let that reduce by half. Then add a pint of cream and a few fronds pulled from the fennel stalk. Bring to a boil and simmer until the cream has thickened a bit. Transfer the mixture to a blender and blend at the highest setting (usually 'liquify') until the sauce is completely smooth. Return the sauce to the pan. (If you really want to get fancy, strain the purée through a sieve—but I skipped this step.) If too thick, add a bit more cream or milk until you have the consistency you want. Just before you need it, warm it up again and add another bit butter and minced chives.

Step 2: Then make the mock risotto: Sweat a shallot and a pint of mushrooms in butter until tender. Then add one or two diced potato and a fresh bay leaf. Begin to add chicken stock (or broth) a ladleful at a time and allow to thicken before adding more, just as if you were making an actual risotto. Continue to cook until the potatoes are tender but not mushy—depending on how finely you've cubed your potatoes, this should only take 5 minutes or so. Adjust the seasoning if needed.

Step 3: Finally, just before you are ready to eat, sear your scallops (about 2 per person) in a lightly greased non-stick pan over high heat. About 2 minutes per side should do.

Step 4: Assemble the dish by spooning a portion of the mock risotto in the center of each plate, then surround with the cream sauce and top the risotto with the scallops. Serve immediately.

NOTES: The whole dish, while it involved three separate elements and a final assembly, is actually fairly quick and easy to make. You can make things even easier by making the sauce and risotto ahead and heating them up gently just before you need them.

The original recipe (see below) calls for diver scallops, but last night I used regular sea scallops, which were perfectly delicious. (The centers of the scallops will still be quite 'rare' after this short cooking period. If you are squeamish about semi-raw seafood, then you can let it cook a bit more in a hot oven for, say, 5 minutes—but the scallops will be less sweet when cooked entirely through. Or you can slice each scallop in half across its mid-drift so they cook more quickly.)

The potatoes should be waxy, not mealy, the kind that you would use for potato salad or a gratin, like Yukon Golds. Since the potato is meant to mimic a risotto, it is best to cube it just as finely as you can manage, no more than a millimeter/1/8 inch wide. And, for that special touch, warm the plates before serving.

This recipe comes from Restaurant Eve in Old Town Alexandria, via fellow blogger and Foodbuzzer, "Kiss My Spatula". I have made some adjustments, however, to give this dish a personal touch. The tips and tricks noted above are my own.

Quick Note: Salade frisée à l'anchoiade

One of my favorite cold weather salads back in Rome were puntarelle, a kind of chicory typically dressed with a kind of garlic and anchovy vinaigrette. Fond memories...! This salad is a more refined French cousin, fit for elegant dinners but rustic enough for an everyday dinner. It makes a fine light entrée, a bed for fish or even a contorno for a seafood dish.

There are various ways to make anchoiade. For this vinaigrette-like version, melt some anchovy fillets in just a little bit of olive oil (you can also just melt them in a dry pan) over very low heat, taking care not to actually cook them. Then blend the fillets with a small spoonful of white wine vinegar, salt, freshly ground black pepper and a good pour of olive oil. Taste for balance and adjust the ingredients to your liking. Pour into a bowl or container and add a whole clove of garlic. Let the garlic steep for about an hour or so, remove it before spooning the anchoiade over the frisée. Serve with crusty bread and a crisp white wine.

NOTES: As always, whole anchovies packed in salt will give the best flavor, but fillets packed in olive oil will do fine. If you want a really assertive garlic flavor, you could add the garlic clove to the blender, but this would tend to overwhelm the frisée, which has a fairly delicate taste. I will post some time soon my more rustic mock 'puntarelle', which I use to console myself when I'm feeling nostalgic for that Roman classic.

Gratinéed Ox Tongue in Mushroom Cream Sauce

As mentioned recently, veal tongue is a common part of a bollito misto, but tongue is also a wonderful dish all on its own. Although classified as an organ meat, tongue doesn't taste 'organ-y' at all. Rather it tastes like a richest, most unctuous cut of beef you have ever had. If you haven't tried tongue, you owe it to yourself to do so, at least once.

Ox tongue (also known as beef tongue) is actually tastier than veal tongue, so when made on its own, you might prefer it--provided you have a healthy appetite, since ox tongues are quite large, generally weighing 1.5-2 kilos (3-4 lbs.) or even more. They also take quite a bit longer to cook, 3 hours or more, as opposed to 1-1/2 to 2 hours for the typical veal tongue. You need to pre-boil tongue with the usual odori for that length of time. You then let it cool a bit (you can run it under cold water) and peel off the skin.After boiling, it should come off rather easily. Some recipes tell you to peel the tongue after 20-30 minutes of cooking, which (I suppose) allows the tongue to better absorb the aromatics and possibly cook a bit faster. Allow the tongue to cool completely and then slice horizontally as much as of it as you plan to use for your dish. (Unless you're having dinner for 8, you probably won't be eating the whole thing in one sitting!)

Once pre-boiled, the tongue can be eaten as is--it is marvellous with salsa verde--or simmered in a variety of sauces. In Italian cooking, tomato sauce is an obvious and common choice. But this being Fall and all, I was in the mood for something warming and woodsy, so I made my favorite mushroom cream sauce: thinly slice mushrooms (I used 'baby bellas' but, of course, chanterelles or some other wild mushrooms would make it even better) and saute them quickly in a mixture of olive and butter, season with a bit of salt to encourage them to render their juices. When the liquid has evaporated and the mushrooms have much reduced and are just beginning to brown (as wet heat turns to dry, you will hear the mushrooms start to sizzle) add a buttuto of shallots and parsley, mix well, and sauté for just a minute or two more. (The mushroom cooked this way are wonderful as a side dish, by the way.) Add a ladleful of rich beef broth (or stock) and let it reduce until quite syrupy, then pour in an ample amount of cream (a good cupful, at least) and allow that to reduce as well, but only until it reaches a sauce-like consistency--and a fairly thin one, too, as the sauce will reduce a bit more in the oven. Taste and adjust for seasoning.

Assemble your dish by lay out the tongue slices in a greased gratin dish, overlapping them slightly like so many roof tiles. Spoon over the mushroom cream sauce, making sure that the mushrooms are well distributed, then top with lots of grated parmesan cheese and dot with butter. Bake in a hot oven (200C, 400F) for about 15 minutes, until the sauce is bubbling and a nice golden crust has formed on top. You can help the crust along by browning the dish under a broiler for a few minutes at the end. (Make sure you don't reduce the sauce too much--if you're like me, you'll want enough to sop up with bread later on...!)


Allow the gratin to 'settle down' for a few minutes (while you're enjoying your entrée) and serve in its gratin dish. And make sure you have plenty of crusty bread to sop up that exquisite sauce.

NOTE: I use the mushroom cream sauce described above for all sorts of things: as a topping for ham steaks (which can be made in exactly the same way as this tongue dish), to dress egg pasta or potato gnocchi--it's my favorite sauce for gnocchi ai funghi--or, in the Austrian manner, served with the wonderful bread dumplings called knoedel or, in Italian, canederli.

Pasta al tonno

Here's a quick note on another staple weeknight dinner: pasta al tonno. Very fast and almost as easy as opening a can.

Put your pasta on the boil. The sauce will take no more time than it takes for the water to come to the boil and the pasta to cook.

Begin making your sauce, as for many tomato and other sauces, by frying a clove or two of slightly crushed garlic (and a peperoncino, if you like a little 'heat') in some olive oil over gentle heat. As soon as the garlic begins to give off its aroma and very slightly brown, add some crushed canned tomatoes and simmer them until they are well reduced. Then add a few anchovy fillets, a handful of capers, a few pitted black olives, some chopped parsley and a can of tunafish packed in olive oil. (A small can will do for two people.) Simmer only for a minute or so and turn off the heat.

When the pasta is cooked very al dente, add it to the tomato and tuna sauce, along with a ladleful of the pasta water. Allow the pasta to simmer in the sauce for a minute or two until it is well coated with the sauce. Serve immediately. Do not serve with grated cheese.

NOTES: Like so many other Italian dishes, the success of this dish will depend largely on the quality of your ingredients. So find the best imported canned tomatoes you can find. (One day I'm going to do a post on choosing canned tomatoes--it's absolutely crucial and, in the US at least, tricky business.)

The tuna is, of course, key. At a minimum, use tunafish packed in olive oil. "Light" tuna packed in spring water and the like will result in a mundane, rather insipid dish. If you can find it (and afford it) there are some excellent premium brands of imported tuna from Sicily. The 'Ortiz' brand, from Spain, is also very good. The belly of the tuna, known as ventresca, is the tastiest part. If you can find imported anchovies and capers packed in salt, all to the good--otherwise, anchovy fillets in olive oil and capers in vinegar are acceptable substitutes. Anchovies packed in salt come whole and will need to be filleted and rinsed; the fillets in olive oil can be used as is. Capers. whether packed in salt or vinegar, should be rinsed and squeezed dry.

Finally, try to find small black olives, packed in brine or oil, preferably Gaeta or nicoise. Avoid canned olives--their taste is not characteristic of Italian cooking. If that's all you can find, feel free to simply omit them. In fact, many recipes, such as the one given by Ada Boni in Il Talismano della Felicita', calls only for tuna and anchovies. Boni tells you to add the anchovies to the oil with the garlic. She also calls for a pinch of oregano, not chopped parsley. Personally, I find that this version provides a more delicate taste--however paradoxical that may sound when talking about these assertive ingredients.

Pasta al tonno can also be made in bianco, or without tomatoes. Just add the tuna and other flavorings directly to the garlic and oil soffritto, and saute for a few minutes. You can also make an entirely raw tuna sauce, in which case you should either omit the garlic (which would be a bit too strong raw) or rub the inside of the bowl in which you are mixing the ingredients with a half clove, to give the dish just a hint of garlic flavor. A more elegant version of this dish can be made with fresh tuna and cherry tomatoes. Here's the recipe.

Perhaps the most common pasta to dress with this tuna sauce is spaghetti. But short pastas like penne, as well as concave ones like conchiglie, are also nice. Tonight I used--a bit unusually--some orecchiette that were lying around. This was the first time I had tried this combination and found it quite nice, actually.

Frittata ai peperoni

A frittata is a great solution to those nights when you want something savory but don't have much time (or desire) to make anything elaborate. The basic technique for making a frittata has appeared on this blog before, but a particularly tasty frittata is one made with peppers and onions--a classic combination of very assertively flavorful vegetables that, in another guise, goes into the summer side dish known as peperonata. Well, just add eggs and you have a great light dinner.

For 4 people, you gently stew two medium-sized red peppers (or green if you like) and an onion, each thinly sliced from top to bottom, in some olive oil until they are quite soft. This will take anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes (or even more, if you want them very soft). Regulate the heat so that the vegetables only slightly brown, if at all. Season with salt and pepper, and allow them to cool, covered, for a few minutes. (This rest under cover will further soften the vegetables and, for some mysterious reason, tends to enhance their flavor.) Then mix the vegetables with six eggs, some grated cheese and a pinch of salt, and proceed as for any frittata.

NOTES: As with peperonata, you can convert this into a more substantial dish by frying some sausage along with the peppers and onions, either sliced or crumbled. Some cubed pancetta might also be nice, though I haven't tried it. And if you want a really substantial dish, add some cubed potatoes to the mix.

You should slice both peppers and onions vertically, from top to bottom. The onions, in particular, need to be sliced in this way in order to retain their shape; sliced horizontally, onions will simply 'melt' away, something you don't necessarily want for this dish.

Bollito and other boiled dinners

Some of our favorite Sunday meals during the cold weather months are boiled dinners. I usually make homemade broth in the afternoon and, not wanting anything to go to waste, the boiled meat and vegetables that went into the pot are usually dinner that night.

Bollito misto
If you've made the broth with beef, you'll have lesso di manzo, also known as bollito di manzo. (The verbs lessare and bollire both mean 'boil'.) If you've used chicken, pollo lessato. And, if you want to serve one of the great classic dishes of northern Italian cooking, you can try bollito misto--made with beef, chicken or capon, veal breast, veal tongue, and/or calf's head, pig's foot, and one of two sausages originally from Modena, called cotechino and zampone, (often eaten with lentils on New Year's Eve, but that's another story). The sausages have a strong taste, so you should boil them separately. They can be hard to find outside Italy but available (sometimes) online or in the better Italian food shops, especially around holiday time. In Italy, you'll find them in every supermarket in December, pre-cooked and vacuum packed--just heat and serve.

A classic accompaniment is mostarda di cremona, a medieval concoction of candied fruits made with a bit of mustard seed, which gives it a sweet and spicy taste. Very unusual for the modern palate, but I really like it. If you can't find mostarda, as odd as it might sound, chutney makes for a great substitute.

By the way, if the main point of your exercise is to serve the meats, you should vary the recipe for broth a bit: first, simmer the vegetables for about an hour or so before adding the meat(s). This creates a kind of court bouillon that will flavor the meat, and adding the meat to the already simmering water will allow the meat to retain more of its own flavor rather than lending it to the broth. And you may want to take more care about the cooking times of the different cuts of meat, especially with the chicken and any other poultry, than you would  when making broth. You can hold back the quicker cooking meats, for which you'll need to calculate backwards: so if your beef will take about 3 hours to cook, for example, wait two hours before adding the chicken, which will generally take about an hour. In the alternative, and a perhaps a bit simpler, you can always take out some pieces when they're done cooking and return them to the pot when everything else if cooked. If you want to eat the vegetables, too, you can add them about an hour before the end of the cooking time rather than pre-cooking them, but remember always to bring the water to the simmer before you add the meat. By the way, don't be misled by the name 'boiled dinner': you should not literally boil the meats and vegetables; besides clouding the broth, hard boiling will tend to toughen the meats.
 
Bollito is the ultimate make-ahead meal; just let it sit (uncovered) and reheat gently whenever you're ready to eat.

Salsa verde and salsa rossa

In fancy restaurants, bollito is often served from a cart in which the various cuts of meat are still swimming in their cooking broth, in various compartments, and slices are carved for your at tableside. This ensures that the meats are still warm and moist when you eat them. Of course, this is not practical for the home cook, so I generally serve my bollito is large pieces in a large, heated serving bowl, with various ladlefuls of broth on top to keep it moist.

Bollito is almost invariably served with one or more sauces. My favorite is salsa verde or green sauce. It was laborious to make in the old days when the use of a mortar and pestle was obligatory. These days, using a blender or food processor, it's very easy: you whiz together garlic, capers, anchovies, lots of parsley, vinegar and olive oil, season with salt and pepper to taste. If you like a little heat (and in our house we generally do) add some red pepper flakes. Some variations call for cornichons, and I add them on occasion. The texture should be smooth and saucy, but not a puree, each of the elements should be identifiable, so don't overblend. If it's too thick, add more oil until it reaches a 'saucy' consistency. Another typical sauce for bollito (which I don't like nearly as much) is salsa rossa made by simmering tomatoes with a soffritto of onions and red bell pepper until well reduced (about 15-20 minutes), passing it through a food mill or blending it, and then simmering the resulting puree with some vinegar and sugar to give it a slightly sweet and sour taste. Another popular sauce, from Verona, is called peara', made with bread crumbs sauteed in butter and bone marrow, adding broth and lots of freshly ground pepper until it swells and becomes smooth. It's wonderfully unctuous.

If you're feeling in an austere mood, you can always enjoy your bollito simply with some sale grosso (coarse sea salt).

Bollito misto is a meal in itself, but is often accompanied by mashed potatoes. Being the frugal folks, in our house we often just serve the vegetables that cooked with the meats. If you're really hungry, a classic first course to precede a bollito is tortellini in brodo, made, of course, with the broth from the bollito itself. The classic wine to drink with bollito is a dry Lambrusco, although I find it goes well with many different red wines, so long as they're not too heavy, like a Bardolino or a Pinot Noir.

Boiled meats were once a common thing, and many recipes have developed over the years for using leftovers in various forms of lesso rifatto, in which the leftover meat is braised with other ingredients, often with onions and/or tomato sauce. Although not particularly Italian, I love to use leftover boiled chicken to make creamed chicken over rice. And leftover boiled meats also make their way into salads, croquettes, and stuffings for ravioli...

New England Boiled Dinner

Italians are hardly the only ones who make boiled dinners. It is, I would dare say, almost universal. Here in America, corned beef and cabbage is a venerable, if disappearing, form of the boiled dinner. Add other root vegetables like onions, carrots, turnip, rutabagas, potatoes and parsnips and you have a New England Boiled Dinner (see photo). An equally good--IMHO even better--version is made with a picnic pork shoulder instead of the corned beef.

The New England Boiled Dinner is traditionally served with mustard or horseradish sauce, but since my significant other doesn't care for either mustard or horseradish, I tried to come up with an alternative. Believe it or not, I decided to try Green Goddess Dressing! Sounds bizarre until you realize that homemade Green Goddess Dressing is basically an Italian salsa verde made with sour cream and/or mayo instead of olive oil. And the experiment worked very well, if I do say so myself.

Other Boiled Dinners
There are many other versions of the boiled dinner, from the French poule au pot (boiled chicken) and pot au feu, made from beef shank, ribs and marrowbones, often boiled in broth rather than water for a richer flavor, and served with coarse salt and cornichons, ttp the Spanish cocido and the Portuguese cozido, to the puchero popular in Argentina and Uruguay, to the Irish Boiled Dinner, very close to the New England Boiled Dinner, to the Japanese shabu-shabu or the Chinese Mongolian Hot Pot. As far as I'm concerned, they're all wonderful!

One last TIP: If you want to cut down on the time, you can use a pressure cooker. It'll need to be a large one, of course, big enough to hold all the meats, vegetable and water. You need to boil and skim at the beginning, as you would for a normal broth, then rather than lowering the temperature to a gentle simmer, you cover and let the pressure rise. Figure about 1/3 the time that it would normally take (15-30 minutes for chicken, 1 hour for beef). The result is not quite the same, I'm sorry to say, but acceptable. In such cases, I often allow the broth to simmer for 20-30 minutes after you've released the pressure, which gives it a bit more flavor. 

Buttery Mashed Potatoes

While it's true that we mostly eat Italian at home, there are some dishes that even I have to admit the French do better. (I hope Angelina isn't listening....) One of them is potato puree, also known as mashed potatoes, and, more specifically, the incredibly buttery version made famous by Joel Robuchon at Jamin, his Paris restaurant.

You begin by either steaming or boiling mealy potatoes in their jackets (russets or Yukon golds would do well here) until perfectly tender. Drain them and run some cold water over them to cool them off slightly. Peel them as soon as they are cool enough to handle and cut them into chunks into a food mill.

Mill the potatoes into a dry pan over medium heat. With a wooden spoon, stir them and allow any water to evaporate. The potato puree will be rather stiff and hard to stir, but persist. And don't worry if some of the potato begins to stick to the bottom of the pan, as  this is a sign that the potatoes are drying as they should and will anyway soon rectify itself.

Now that the potato flesh is perfectly dry, it is ready to absorb lots and lots of butter, which you will add to the potatoes a bit at a time. When I say a lot, I mean at least a stick or more (100 g) for 1 kilo (2 lbs.) of potatoes. Season liberally with salt. As you add successive bits of butter, the puree will soften and form a kind of a ball. Taste them--they should be well seasoned and have a wonderfully buttery flavor. If not, add more butter and/or salt. Finally, thin out the puree with some hot milk (whole milk, obviously!) or, if you are feeling particularly decadent, with some cream, until you reach the consistency you prefer. I like mashed potatoes rather soft, just thick enough to hold their shape.

Serve immediately. I like to place a dab of butter on top of the mashed potatoes, just for show.

NOTES: This recipe is from a wonderful cookbook co-authored by Robuchon and Patricia Wells called Simply French (William Morris & Co. 1991). Robuchon calls for a full 12 tablespoons (1-1/2 sticks or 150g) of butter and says that the amount may be doubled for a richer version! He also calls for passing the puree through a fine sieve, which produces a velvety texture. But for this 'home-style' version the food mill is enough. Unlike most mashed potatoes, these will keep for up to a hour before serving.