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Ramp Pasta

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Ramp Pasta made like Pate Nicoise

One of my favorite springtime dishes is a classic daube of lamb, a Provencal lamb stew made from onctuous lamb cheeks slowly simmered in rose with lavender honey till impossibly tender. Traditionally daubes are served with something starchy, like pasta or gnocchi, to help stretch the meat out and serve as a vehicle to soak up the wonderful juices.

In Nice, they often make a green gnocchi (Pate Nicoise) that simmers in the broth for the last 30 minutes. This year I tried something new, I made a classic Pate Nicoise, using wild ramps in place of the more traditional Swiss chard, and the results were stunning.

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Rhubarb Tart

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True confession

I have to be brutally honest here, I am not a huge rhubarb fan. To be blunt, I could do without it for the rest of my life. Then, the other day, I was surfing the internet and came across a picture perfect rhubarb tart that stole my heart and captured my dreams.  I became utterly hypnotized by the shot from Jo Harrington, a self described ‘longtime London foodie challenged to bake the perfect pie.’ If you look up her site you will see quite possibly the most amazing collection of pies ever made. In the same moment, I felt both worthless as a pie maker and speechless in wonder of her patient handiwork with dough. Trust me, until you have tried to replicate it yourself you will never realize the amount of work involved. My sincere compliments to her skill set.

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Gnocchi with Tocco di Carne

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I recently did an Italian pop-up in Portland and the undisputed star of the show was my gnocchi tossed in a Tocco di Carne sauce with shaved parmesan and drizzled with Paniole, a beautiful extra virgin olive oil from the Ciacci family, owners of the great Brunello estate Mocali.

My six-year-old Beau constantly hounds me to cook circle pasta, his own name for gnocchi. Beau’s love for all things Italian (and especially red) emerged during his “red” phase prompted when my friend Marco Cameli, perhaps the best pasta cook on planet earth, visited from Italy several years ago. Marco was auditioning to be my sous chef at a restaurant in southern California and stayed with my family for a week. Every night we cooked dinner together and I always begged Marco to cook a pasta course. Little Beau and I joyously ate numerous plates of bucatini all’Amatriciana, spaghetti in simple tomato sauces, and perhaps the absolutely best Carbonara of my entire life.

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How to cook an octopus

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I was bitten by an octopus.  – Ted Cruz

After my last article about Greek wine and pre-cooked octopus, I thought I would follow up with a very simple method to cook your own sea beast. There is a lot of unwarranted fear surrounding octopus. Granted they are weird looking sea creatures with beaks and tentacles and a notorious reputation for being frustratingly tough. I have seen both professional and home cooks avoid preparing it like the plague. Done right it is sublimely tender and takes to a variety of preparations from simple salads to tandoori spiced appetizers to stewed in tomato sauce. Done wrong and it becomes a rubbery sea flavored chewing gum.

There are many myths about the best way to tenderize octopus. They range from dropping corks in the poaching liquid, rubbing them with salt, cooking only in copper, using your clothes dryer to tumble them into tender submission, beating them on rocks to dumping enough vinegar in the cooking liquid to make you pucker for a week straight. The simplest and best method is to steam in their own juices.

Try this and you will never go back to whatever method you used to subscribe to….

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Moroccan Preserved Lemons

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“Concerning the spices of Arabia let no more be said. The whole country is scented with them, and exhales an odor marvellously sweet.” – Herodotus

Tajines 03

colorful tagines line a wall at work

I vividly remember the first cook book I read with the ability to transport me somewhere else. My mother had just bought Paula Wolfert’s seminal classic ‘Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco’. She always had a wonderful collection of cookbooks, some of which I borrowed permanently. From the opening stanzas, I imagined myself on the same 1959 voyage aboard the Yugoslavian freighter as Paula. I could sense the nervous excitement of travelling somewhere undiscovered and exotic. I crawled under my sheets with a flashlight, creating a Bedouin tent in the sub sahara, leaving the cold Midwestern night far behind. Soon the perfumed smells of exotic spices and mechoui spit roasting co-mingled in my imagined world of my youth.

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Homemade Chicken Stock

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Making chicken stock at home is extremely easy to do and very cost-effective. It is the perfect by-product of roasting a chicken. Here’s the basic premise: Put chicken bones and vegetables into a stockpot, cover with cold water then simmer away. It really is as simple as that.

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