Ethicurious - Sformatino di vedure

A few months ago, there was an article in Salon about raising and killing your own food (cool!). Novella Carpenter on how bad cooking is an ethical issue:

"As I prepared him, I thought about how much higher the stakes are when you raise and kill your own animal. Not only had I spent in excess of $100 for Harold, but if he had tasted bad, I would have wasted his life. The burden was on me. But, while hard to shoulder, that burden was exactly what I had hoped to cultivate. Meat had became sacrifice, precious, not a casual dalliance."

So it was with more care than usual that I rubbed Harold with olive oil and salt, touched every surface of his body like a mom bathing her baby. It wasn't until I put him into a 450 degree oven that the evening was transformed from a funeral into a dinner party."

General Rule: It's a sin to mess up meat.
Implication: Fledgling cooks should play with fruits, grains, and veggies only.

The first dish Marco taught me to make was Sformatino di vedure - Vegetable Flan.

Ingredients: 1 kilo vegetables (we used eggplant); 8 eggs; 1/2 liter of bechamel sauce; Parmigiana cheese; salt, pepper, hot pepper; leeks
Saute leeks in olive oil. Add salt, pepper, and hot peppers. Add basil. After a few minutes, add veggies. When eggplant is starting to cook, add a little bit of water. Let mixture simmer. Remove from heat and mix with hand mixer until chunky. Add eggs and cheese (Do not put back over heat. Otherwise the eggs will cook!). Mix in roux (béchamel). Ladle into greased molds. Put molds into pan filled 1 cm with water.

Bake for 40 minutes at 200 deg C

Bechamel Sauce: Heat 1 liter milk with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. In a separate pan, add 70 g flour to 70 g melted butter and mix into a paste. Warm paste over stove and add to boiling milk. Stir with wooden spoon (metal is too cold). Cook over med-low heat for 8 - 10 minutes.

A Linguistic Point (Cannelloni with salt and pepper)

Italian has two words for boiled—knowing this came in handy when opened my door to find Signora Regoli holding a little treat. She brought it into the kitchen, said something quickly about “…lessati con sale e pepe”, and—after she was sure I was molto contenta—went back down the stairs to feed her family. After she left, I peered into the pot to see cannelloni beans. These I ate while leafing through my dictionary to find out which cooking technique lessato implied.

Bollito – boiled (added to boiling water)
Lessato – boiled (added to cold water, brought to a boil)

For reference: pasta is bollito, potatoes are lessato.

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Cannelloni con sale e pepe:
Ingredients: cannelloni beans, sage, olive oil, salt, pepper, garlic
Soak beans overnight. Discard soaking water. Add olive oil to pan and sauté garlic and sage lightly. Add fresh water until water level is about two inches above beans. Slowly bring water to a boil and simmer until beans are fork-mash-able. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and toss to coat.

Milan to Florence

Arrived in Milan after airport security went through my carry on and threw out my shampoo and conditioner in Dusseldorf. Relived much of last semester in one day--Saw the collegio (everyone's moved out!), went to Chocolat for gelato, and had pizza and really good espresso. Walked around Navigli.

Managed to stay awake on the Eurostar to Florence reading "A Room with a View."