OH le mie mani facenti male

Which roughly translates to 'Oh my aching hands'.

This week we covered two regions in Italian, Apulia(Puglia) and Tuscany.
Chef Roberta is really quite an interesting and amazing woman.  She lived in Italy for many years as child and then returned back to sit Political Science in Tuscany studying in Italian, since her early days there she has returned back to each of the regions, some many times.  Each of morning lectures is also accompanied by many off side stories and tales of her travels, it is always interesting but makes for a long lecture before we even hit the kitchen.

On Monday we were down in the dungeon to talk about Apulia or 'the heel' of Italy.  It is a very poor area of the country and there are many more factory processing jobs rather than agriculture or land owners in this part of the country.  The area produces olive oil, wine, almonds and fruits and there are abundant flour mills and pasta factories and many canneries to package the seafood.
There are beautiful ancient buildings called Trulli, that sort of resemble Oast houses of Kent.  They are made with no mortar and have conical roofs of slate, some with primitive patterns made out of the slate design.
As is common with the poorer parts of the country the food is all about vegetables with rather little meat or charcuterie that is so prevalent in other regions. Of course there are a host of fish dishes with mussels and eels being some of the most popular. 
One of the regional dishes are eels which are put in shallow pans with some sea water and left in the sun to 'cook' until the water evaporates.  Yum! (not)
Desserts in this area have a Greek influence and are often made with figs(fichi), nuts and honey.
We had 11 dishes to make that day, 12 if you count the rustic bread that Brian made.
We had an appetizer of stuffed peppers, 'Peperoni Ripieni'.
A sweet and sour rabbit dish called 'Coniglio Agrodolce', sweet and sour is common to this region, they seem to like vinegar, perhaps because they make so much wine and making vinegar would be a natural subset of that.
A potato 'pizza' with cheese which was more like a casserole, 'Torta Tarantina di Patate'.
A pea dish with eggs,'Piselli con la Straciatella' - or peas with little rags, eggs are often added to dishes in poorer areas to increase the protein without having to use expensive meats.
Zucchini cooked with vinegar, 'Cocuzze alla puviredda' or Zucchini alla Poverella (poor thing).
A basic mixed salad with a vinegrette.
And a 'Sagne Chine' or Lasagna and meatballs.  Lasagna refers to the long noodle and not the dish that Americans think of as lasagna. 'Sagne' is local dialect for the lasagna noodle.
And then we had two other pasta dishes, one was Penne with Asparagus, 'Penne con gli Asparagi', for which we used ready made dried pasta and the dish I made which was Orecchiette Pugliesi or Orecchiette with Broccoli Rabe.
Orecchiette or 'little ear' which the shape rather mimics they are called recchie in local dialect.  Roberta had a neighbor at one time who she spoke to over the fence occasionally.  she knew that she was from Italy, but she had never asked where she was from.  One day Roberta went next door to ask her neighbor something and walked in on the woman making orecchiette by hand.  She was so excited, she sat down and made the woman show her how to make them. 
There are two ways to make this pasta by hand.  You make your standard dough (we used '00' extra fina Durum Semolina) and water with some salt, no eggs.  After it was kneaded properly and had rested you get a big cutting board.  Wood helps to 'grab' the pasta as you are rolling it, it is not easy to work on stainless steel or other counter tops as they are too slick to grab it.  We used the pizza peels.
You grab a chunk of dough and roll it out into a snake.  Using a flexible small paring knife or butter knife cut off a 1/4" piece and then laying it on its side you pull the knife across the top of the pasta towards you, flattening it as you go.  You press your index finger into the flattened dough, lift your hand up,roll the pasta back onto your thunb to make the signature 'ear' roll or condom as we all joked and then you 'flick' it off your finger on to a waiting floured sheet pan. The other way is to just flatten the little piece of dough, pushing hard so it goes thin in the center and thicker on the edges.
Get comfortable, invite some friends, make tea or coffee, gossip.  It takes a long time to work through the dough. In fact after a bit we started make cavatelli instead which is stopping at the pulling of the knife towards you making a little tight shell of pasta which is also common to the region.
Here is the finished dish tossed with broccoli rabe, red pepper, salted anchovies, garlic and Pecorino Romano.

That's all for now, later I will tell you all about Tuscany.  but now, I think I'm off on a foodie field trip.  Details later if I am successful.

 

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