Un buon pranzo

 

You may have read my account of a weekend in Rome last October. The weather was apocalyptic, I had a full on head cold, but the day of artichokes at Latteria Studio learning so much from Carla Tomesi and Rachel Roddy, was an antidote to everything.  A feast of knowledge and a bloody good lunch to boot.  I have written at length and often about my unseemly love of artichokes, so I shall spare you a repeat here.

In some ways, it was a kind of a torture – spending that weekend surrounded by most loved vegetable flowers; everywhere I looked, they were on offer. And knowing that when I came back to Birmingham, it would be to an artichoke drought, broken only when (and as it turns out, if) I could get down to London’s markets, or when my young allotment plants decide to throw up their own flower buds (I’m still waiting for anything that you could tentatively call a ‘glut’).

I went to be shown a myriad ways to cook with artichokes, in the full knowledge that buying the quantities needed for some the recipes would bankrupt me, especially if I had to get them singly and cellophane wrapped from Sainsbury’s.

One dish in particular stuck in my food brain,  niggling away with thoughts of “will I ever have this again?”  Artichoke lasagna.  A vegetarian layering of pasta, cheese and artichokes.  Spanking hot and with a glass of teeth achingly cold white wine, this will be my death row meal (well, one of them).  Whilst it’s a dish for winter and early spring in Rome, here, if you’re reliant on your own crop, it’ll be a summer treat.  I have been missing this dish since October, dreaming of a day when I am rich enough to not care how many artichokes I have just bought, or somehow, have managed to persuade someone to give me gainful employment in Italy, so I can move there, just for the artichokes.

But then in the perverse way of the world, the UK want into lockdown, the panic buying stripped the shops, and bafflingly, this provided me with the wherewithal to finally break my lasagna fast.  I was told of delitalia, an Italian catering supplier that a) had flour, a lot of flour and b) was now doing domestic deliveries to Birmingham. Of course there was a small catch, just a minor detail; you still had to place catering size orders.  My cupboards and freezers are already overflowing with food from the allotment and ingredients I thought I ‘needed’ at some point.  And it’s not that I’m a hoarder, just that I’ve always regarded Best Before dates as mere guidance for the wise.  So, whilst the product list was temptingly extensive, I had to restrict myself to things that I really would use, and would buy anyway over the next year.  Flour yes, I’m already a third of the way through it (and have turned into the go to ‘flour man’ for my isolating neighbours), oil yes – 5 litres of olive oil will see me through the next year.  And then there they were, jumping out at me as though lit in neon; frozen artichokes, prepared and raring to go.  Minimum order, 5kg.  Yes, I am that much of an idiot.

A freezer drawer was cleared (I had to eat a lot of ice cream that week, a hardship) and now I have what should be a year’s worth of my favourite vegetable, but realistically, I don’t think they’ll see out lockdown.

As they arrived, my first artichoke flower formed on one of the allotment plants.  This I prepped, battered and fried – I wanted to memorialise its perfection.  It was literally a taster, for the main, the lasagna.

I urge you to find a way to make this (even if it means having to buy catering quantities of flour and olive oil).  The version I ate in Rome was Rachel’s, and my memory of the details is not perfect.  So when I get hold of the real thing, I may come back and do an update.  The potatoes were an addition suggested by Italianhomecooking – and he is right, the additional texture brings another bauble to this dish.

As I write this, I am reheating the half I did not eat last night, for my lunch.  There will be some bread too (I have to get through that flour after all) .  It will be just as good second time round I know. All sweet anaesthetic on the tongue artichoke, cheese and carbs.  Un buon pranzo.

Artichoke Lasagna

(This made enough for two large portions)

The recipe will get refined over time – as I was making this up as I went along.  If you are lucky enough to have access to abundant and affordable fresh artichokes, substitute those for the frozen ones, prepped into quarters, as shown in the photos below.  If using frozen ones, check them, some may still have a few tough petals attached, which can take all the fun out of them.

 

Artichokes

A cereal bowl’s worth of prepared artichoke hearts (defrosted)

One small onion, chopped.

1 garlic clove

Salt and pepper

Glug of white wine.

Oil

Put the oil into a large frying pan (which has a tight-fitting lid) and as it warms, add your artichokes,  onion and crushed garlic, and once they start to fry, throw in the wine, quickly turning down the heat, and slipping the lid on.  These need to cook until the hearts are tender and yield easily when stabbed with a knife.

Remove from the heat and blitz 2/3 of the artichokes into a puree with blender (check the seasoning), keep the remaining third whole.

Bechemel Sauce

Flour 25g

Butter 25g

Milk (I used 700ml)

Salt and pepper

Melt the butter, and then add the flour, cooking it, but not allowing it to brown.

Gently, very gently, add milk.  A tiny bit at a time to begin with.

The starch in the flour will suck upon the milk and swell like something from a sci fi film.  If you add too much milk, it’ll be impossible to get rid of any lumps.

When all the milk is absorbed and and you’ve beaten the flour paste into smooth submission, add a spot more milk. Repeat the process patiently, and you’ll end up up a smooth, glossy white sauce the consistency of expensive emulsion paint.  Seaso again, this is vital, as this sauce, together with the ricotta, could make a bland filling if you’re not brave with the salt here.

The rest

Lasagna sheets (I used premade, dry, as I had some in the cupboard, left by a former lodger (the wonderful Simon, who named his son for me), but if you prefer to make your own fresh, go ahead).

3 floury potatoes (peeled, boiled and sliced)

Ricotta (one tub)

50-75g (or as much as you like) Parmesan or Pecorino if you can get it.

Assemble your Lasagna

In a deep pie dish, place a third of your potatoes, artichoke hearts, and the puree.  To this add a third of the ricotta and grated parmesan. Pour over a quarter of the bechemel, season. Add a layer of lasagna sheets.

Repeat another layer of vegetables, cheese and sauce, top with more lasagna sheets.

One final layer, and then pour the last of the béchamel over the lasagna sheets.  You can grate some more parmesan over this if you like.

Into the oven at gas mark 4, for 30-40 minutes, until it is bubbling and golden.  Ideally some of the lasagna sheets will have started to curl and crisp up, for another layer of crunchy texture.

Eat straight from the oven, or reheat the next day (assuming you have leftovers).

Discovering Frittelle

 

A random patch of white flowered borage has appeared in the middle of a path on the allotment.  Somehow it grew through the winter, whilst I wasn’t paying attention, and I’ve let it stay put. It’s easy enough to step over, and it and I have more pressing, more pernicious pop ups to deal with.

Like so many randomly self-placed plants, it is abundantly happy in its chosen path hogging position.  So much so, that now, before even the end of May, it is covered in flowers which are doing their best come hither looks for every bee in Moseley.  And not just the domesticated honeybees that live at the heart of the allotments, but countless feral, less biddable bees of varying sizes, shimmers and fuzzyness.  Bees make me happy.  Another reason the patch can stay.  I shall always be a tree hugging hippy at heart.

Borage is a herb.  I know that.  It says so in the herbs section of my RHS encyclopedia.  There are suggestions  for using its flowers as a garnish in a Pimms (it looks like drain water said a non Anglophile friend of the Sicilian’s) or be frozen in icecubes (11 on the scale of Camp 1 to 10).  Is that it?  I think this is stretching the definition of herb somewhat.  So, maybe, if it gets hot and I remember to pick some flowers, I’ll stretch a culinary use from my impromptu patch.  But otherwise I have no other plans for it.

The bees had other ideas though.  I was crouching in the soil, planting out borlotti beans next to the borage.  I snapped a quick video of the bees at work, pinged it to instagram and carried on with my Tom Good impersonation.  I am no influencer; my followers are mostly other food people, friends of mine or the Sicilian’s, a few writers and a vascillating personal trainer who manages to follow and unfollow at least three times a week. Perhaps he finds the pictures of Italian cakes and pasta simultaneously too distressing and tempting for his never ending carb free/paleo existence.  But amongst them is the wonderful Stefano, of ItalianHomeCooking, who jumps in with a suggestion for taking the leaves of my bee-friendly borage, dipping them in batter and deep frying them.  I’m learning that this deep frying thing is a wider art in Italy than in the UK perhaps.  There is a fondness and love of the process that goes way beyond our cod and chips, or mars bars (see arancine, Jewish artichokes, canolli and on and on)  But I was a virgin up until this point for the battered frittelle version of things.  Now I’m hooked.  I can feel a rush of deep frying approaching.  Stefano has suggested opening a frying joint – I am decidedly tempted.

When to eat frittelle?  Well, I ate the lot, in the kitchen, standing up at the counter. They were so good that burnt fingers and mouth were minor discomforts.  The batter of flour, soda water and seasoning is effortless – seconds in the making.  The leaves of the borage, which seem so unpromising, clad in stiff, skin pricking hairs not suggested delicacy or digestibility.  But the marriage of leaves, coated in batter, fried in hot, hot olive oil until golden…just another of those Italian marriage of simplicity. It’s a way of getting some of your five a day whilst cocking a snoot to  healthy eating.  The leaves lose all their unfriendliness and faint inside the crispy cheesy batter into almost a paste of green freshness.  Despite the parmesan, the flavours are not strong so much as physical sensations; the crunch, the melt, the heat, the desire for more.

I think the rule goes that if you can batter it, you can frittelle it.  I’m a novice here though, so a lot more experimentation and frying is needed.  I shall be forced to undergo more burnt fingers, more stand up in the kitchen dinners. The prospect of this does not, however, distress me.

 

Frittelle di Borragine

12- 16 medium sized borage leaves (make sure they’re clean, and from the edible borage plant, not one of it’s inedible cousins)

100g 00 flour

25g Grated parmesan

Fresh black pepper

100-125 ml Soda water

Olive oil

MIx flour, cheese and ground pepper with the soda water to create the batter, it should be a thick – strong enough to cling to the leaves, without running off.  Don’t add all the water at once, it’s easier to thin a batter down than to thicken it up.  Whisk until there are no lumps.  If you have a soda fountain, this adds to the fun and theatre, which makes these great for inquisitive young cooks

Heat your oil to deep frying temperature in large high sided saucepan or a deep fryer if you have one.

Dip the individual leaves into the batter and then fry, a few at a time, until cliched golden brown.

Drain onto kitchen roll, and eat them piping hot, ideally outside, with cold beer.

There are all sorts of different recipes out there – that add anchovies, or mozzarella, or use beer instead of water.  But I think starting simple and then building up the complexity is the way for me to go – discovering an extravagant menu of frittelle as I go.

Chicory Risotto

We’re in the gap; when all those root vegetables and brassicas of winter have finally run their course, but there’s precious little on the allotment to take their place.  This is the time of the larder and the freezer; lots of pulses, frozen beans, jars of last summer’s passata.  But, there is fresh vegetable relief in the form of chicory.  Surely one of the easiest crops on the allotment (apartment from their final couple of weeks of molly coddling)?  Even the pigeons leave it alone; sow it in late autumn, and it just grows, shrugs off the winter and sits, waiting to be harvested whilst all around is a blasted heath.

I say chicory; but that’s a word that encompasses a whole raft of salads; leafy greens of varying degrees of bitterness.  I wrote about puntarelle a few weeks ago; very Italian and virtually unknown in the UK.  Italy loves chicory, just as it loves bitterness – think Campari, Cynar and Aperol; in the UK, the embrace is less demonstrative, and we, ever in need of justification, have to make it more fancy than it needs to be, and less bitter than it should be.  So, we torture it, starving it of daylight whilst forcing it into growth, to create tight, pale shoots that are sweeter, tender and more delicate than they would be if allowed to take their own time in the growing.

And then you can make a fancy but anaemic salad, perhaps with some citrus or a raspberry vinegar dressing. It will be terribly UnBritish.  It’ll feel healthy, nobody will really enjoy it, and you will long for the spring famine to finish so that you can eat peas raw from the pod and buttered radishes.

Or you can embrace the Latin, celebrate the bitter, accept that it is only March, and that the peas and radishes will have to wait.  Make a risotto, a risotto that is breathtakingly good, with a punch of flavours that belies its simplicity.

For Two

• Two chicory heads
• Stick of celery
• One medium onion
• One medium tomato
• Two cloves of garlic
• Butter
• 50g risotto rice
• Dry white vermouth
• Vegetable Stock
• Pecorino
• Fresh Parsley
• Salt & Pepper

Take your chicory heads, slice them in half and simmer it in salted water for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, chop the onion, celery, tomato and garlic very finely and then fry until soft (but not brown) in an indulgent amount of butter.

Drain the chicory and slice it into thin strips (about 1cm across).

Turn up the heat and add these, and the rice to the onions and celery

Then add a slug of the vermouth and let it boil off (Vermouth is better than white wine in this recipe as it gives a herby tang that complements the chicory).

Now add vegetable stock, about 50ml at a time, you don’t need to obsessively hover over the pan, but check it every two or three minutes to make sure the rice isn’t sticking and to add more stock if it needs it.  After about ten minutes, taste the rice.  I like a bit of bite, some people prefer more of a rice pudding texture.  Go with what you prefer.

Finally, add salt and pepper as you see fit, then dish it out with a generous topping of fresh chopped parsley and grated pecorino.  It’ll be piping hot and salty, the chicory will impart a very gentle mustiness, like the smell of cooked cabbage, but beyond delicious.  

So, there, chicory risotto.  Infinitely better than any ill-conceived salad for a blustery March day.