Notes From Nowhere

In between more ambitious cooking, I need something simple: spaghetti con zucchine. Following up on my credo that lemon is a great ingredient, here’s a way to make an inexpensive vegetable taste special. No offense, but zucchini can be a little bland. But they don’t cost a lot of money and are quick to cook, so I end up buying them anyway. To make them more attractive, I’m preparing zucchini by cutting up slices and searing them individually. This generates an unexpectedly intense taste. A moment of success: friends in Italy have asked me whether what they’re eating is really just plain zucchini! The slices that are done go on a plate, waiting until the rest of the dish has been prepared. I’m adding salt, pepper, and lemon (yes, again!) while they are sitting on the plate, already crisp and brown. If you cut them very thin, they’ll turn into zucchini chips. But I don’t do that: too much oil, too little vegetable for my taste. Instead I’m cutting slices of 2-3 mm, so that below the crust there’s a recognizable bit of zucchini.

And I wanted a Bavarian response to cooking with sage, a dish based on parsley. But here’s an Italian twist. The parsley, a lot of it and finely chopped, is sautéed by itself in hot olive oil. The taste is rather elevated, as if it was truffle. Full disclosure: I came up with my way of searing zucchini in order to emulate this way of preparing parsley. I’ve heard Italian cooks call it prezzemolo truffelata. But I haven’t found this term online. Perhaps this is just too simple to make it into upscale Italian food blogs.

Meanwhile, I cooked some spaghetti. They’ll get a tiny bit softer once you mix them up with the sauce. So I’m under-cooking them, keeping them a bit too al dente. And then I put everything together: pasta, zucchini, parsley, and more fresh pepper.

Finally, it all goes onto a plate. I still had some of the nice organic mozzarella. This is something I learned in Maremma, one of my favorite regions in Italy. They use mozzarella for lots of purposes where people from Northern Italy use parmigiano, putting little bits on pasta dishes. I love it—it tastes like summer, cool and refreshing.

There’s a garden with herbs and salads right outside of the kitchen where I’m currently visiting. I’ve been carefully harvesting single leaves of salad, following the gardener’s instructions on how to use up a little bit at the time and keep it growing. And I’ve been using bits of thyme and sage. But the sage is so exceptional that I needed a dish that was all about it. I got thin slices of veal, beautifully cut by the local butcher. If you don’t mind splashes of hot olive oil, you can put the meat into the pan when the oil is already heated. In a sense, that’s ideal, because then the meat is seared right away at high temperature. But I prefer to lay out the scaloppine nicely, and I can’t do that when the pan is hot.

If you’re doing it my way, you need a bit of patience. The pan will heat up gradually and nothing much happens right away. You’ll need to wait for the meat to sear. But that’s OK, because with scaloppine it’s not all about the crust. It’s also about moisture and softness. I’m using lemon, and I have strong views on cooking with lemon. For decades, it had a bad reputation, counting as the lousy cook’s way to substitute for tasty ingredients and sophisticated preparation. Everything, chefs say, tastes a bit more intensely with lemon. So using it can seem to be a kind of fraud, as if you’re making your food seem better than it is. My view: that’s all nonsense! Lemon has a wonderful and distinctive taste. And what’s wrong with things tasting better than they otherwise would? So once it looks like the meat is browning up, I squeeze a bit of lemon juice on each piece of meat individually.

All in all, you’ll think this isn’t a whole lot of meat, given how thin it is. Right! I’m not a vegetarian, but I love vegetables and I care about all the reasons for cutting down on meat consumption. So overall, I’m aiming for a vegetable-heavy ratio. And after a few days of cooking, I had various left-overs: bits and pieces of different vegetables and some red wine that turned out to taste a bit different from what we had imagined. Perfect ingredients for a simple risotto, which went nicely with the scaloppine.

Friday, it turns out, is the weekly farmers market here in the village where I’m staying. The very first stall, selling just a few items, had such nice produce that I didn’t get much further. So it was arugula for salad and mushrooms for pasta, beautiful, fresh, and spotless. Another stall I loved was selling farmers cheese. I’ve become weary of mozzarella di bufala, after reading up on the gruesome conditions in which the animals are kept. What used to be an almost unknown speciality is now a staple, available in every supermarket. And the conditions for production seem to have gone downhill dramatically. Rather than being a purist about the cheese being from Campania or the Maremma, I’ve come to be a purist about how the mozzarella is produced. So I liked the thought of mozzarella di bufala made by an organic farm in Bavaria. Here’s then the salad that started off today’s meal.

Spaghetti ai funghi are just as easy to prepare. Like with all mushrooms, don’t overdo the cleaning. Dry the mushrooms after cleaning on kitchen paper. Cut nicely and put them into a pan side-by-side. The less they are sitting on top of each other, the better.

Make sure not to stir the sliced mushrooms before they are seriously browning in the pan, add some cream and lemon and white wine.

Cook the spaghetti until they are al dente, or rather, very much al dente, still a tiny bit too hard. You’ll want to mix them in with the sauce, and as they soak up the sauce they are growing just a notch softer. As always, add parsley late: you don’t want it cooked, you want it pretty much raw mixed in with the rest.