During any normal year, I would choose a vacation location then spend days researching local food and the best places to find it. Alas, we all know that 2020 was far from a normal year. Many of us have barely left our homes, and guests aren’t visiting, but we can still travel through food.
I started these homebound “travels” by adding to my cookbook collection. I highly recommend Kitchen Arts & Letters if you are looking to do the same.
When I am lucky enough to be in Italy, I love to indulge in old school, multi-course meals. With all the time in the world, and if calories didn’t matter, every meal would involve antipasti, a pasta or soup course, a meat course with side dish, and dessert or cheese. Alas, I didn’t do all of the courses for each “stop” in my stay-at-home culinary “travels.”
We start these particular travels with a pasta course form Christine Smallwood’s “An Appetite for Lombardy” – Marubini Cremonesi in Brodo. This homemade egg pasta is filled with mixed meats combined with a bit of parmesan. I’ll confess, I didn’t make the exact filling in the recipe because I had some leftover braised brisket, and it seemed a shame not to use that. I’m also convinced that any Italian grandma would have done the same thing. The recipe says it serves 4, but this made a lot more than pasta for 4 people in my opinion. My shapes were far from perfect, but weren’t half bad for a first shot at this particular pasta, and the shape didn’t affect the taste.
If you haven’t made homemade pasta, I highly recommend it. It’s time consuming, but not difficult, and there’s really nothing to beat fresh pasta.
For the meat course, it was Lidia Bastianich’s Fagottini di Pollo (skillet braised chicken bundles) from “Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy”- a book I picked up at Becco on New York’s Restaurant Row. This is basically chicken thighs filled with a veggie mix, wrapped in bacon, browned, then cooked in wine, and finished in tomato sauce. A side of radicchio salad added some crunch, and we went with regional wine.