Italian food worth getting excited about

If you've been reading this blog for more than a month, you know that I am something of a fan of Italian food, and something of a critic of Italian-American food.  Italian food is about simple preparation of excellent ingredients.  Produce is grown on small farms, picked ripe and sold quickly and locally, often in markets by the farmers.  Meat is either cooked very quickly, often grilled, or braised all day in a fairly simple tomato sauce.  We had a terrific secondi in Rome that was simply chicken cutlets sauteed in butter and sage.  That was it -- the entire dish had three ingredients.  I've since recreated it, and the recipe is below, and even I had to add something (mostly garlic).

Italian-American food, and I mean the kind served in restaurants, not the kind made in people's homes following their parents and grandparents recipes, seems to be about volume.  Lots of pasta, lots of sauce, endless salad bowls and breadsticks (not that I'm picking on any chain in particular).  Meat and pasta are mixed together willy-nilly.  The most amazing thing is how they can start with ingredients that have flavor, and end with dishes with no flavor at all.  I believe most Italian-American restaurants in America come standard with some large flavor sucking machine.  Otherwise, I can't explain how garlic and cheese turn into what they serve.

The scene in Spokane has been pretty bleak.  The Italian Kitchen has a standard menu, and what I've had there has been competent, but it is so expensive.  Why would I spend twenty five dollars on a plate that I could make, better, at home, in twenty minutes with a dollar or two worth of ingredients?  Luigi's is worse.  I think many of their dishes have spent a considerable amount of their extended lives in a freezer.  I won't even bother discuss the big chains, and I've already expressed myself about Cassano's restaurant, Mission Bistro.  I had a lovely meal in Coeur D'Alene at Angelo's last year, but even that was safely Italian-American.

All of this is old news.  The new news is that Italia Trattoria, in the old Cafe Marron location in Brown's Addition, is actual Italian food. I've been dragging my feet about trying this place, because I had so little hope that it would be anything but more of the same, bleak Italian-American food.  I was wrong.  The first hint that Bethe and Anna, the owners, get it comes from the menu, which is split into Antipasti, Primi, Secondi, and Contorni (side dishes), although the secondi are much more complete plates than you would find in the vast majority of restaurants in Italy.  The second hint was the food itself.  Nothing about the secondi said "Italian" -- a few sun dried tomatoes, a couple of olives here and there.  What made them Italian, really Italian, was the preparation:  simple and careful, designed to enhance the ingredients rather than mask it.

We started with a charred polpo (octopus) salad.  We first had polpo in Rome, during our first trip last summer.  There, they sliced the octopus very thinly, marinated it in lemon and salt, and served it (I think) over a few greens.  I loved it; Jeremy found it a very intense engagement with octopus.  At Italia Trattoria, the octopus has been grilled and chopped, and is served with thin sliced potatoes, parsley, sun-dried tomatoes and red onion.  It was blissful, both in terms of flavor and texture.  The octopus was chewy and warm and flavorful; the potatoes were creamy and added just a touch of substance; the parsley was fresh and bright; the sun-dried tomatoes added a surprising touch of sweetness that supported the sweetness of the octopus.  Off to a good start.

I ordered the coho salmon special.  The very fact that they had a coho salmon special speaks to the spirit of their Italian cooking.  Salmon is not an Italian ingredient.  Atlantic salmon are a cold-water fish, and much more likely to be found in northern Europe, not in the Mediterranean. But, we have delicious salmon in the Northwest, so it is very Italian to use salmon here.  On any normal night, I would have been thrilled with my dish.  The salmon was beautifully, perfectly underdone, just as I had requested it.  It came with  rich, buttery lentils.  The richness was offset by a bitter, crisp endive salad.  Wonderful.  But Jeremy's secondi was so sublime I found myself jealous.  He ordered the lamb, which was lamby and gamy and beautifully grilled.  He too had a bed of lentils, but what made his dish sing was the lemony yogurt sauce which cut through the gaminess, and the balsamic onions, which intensified the meatiness.  Our meal was rounded out by a lovely bottle of Montefalco, a red wine typical of Umbria, and a decadent chocolate almond torte for dessert.  I even celebrated with a grappa as a digestivo.  Our service was on the casual, friendly side, but highly competent, and we had two chats with Bethe, the partner handling the front of the house.

I was feeling a little down last week.  The end of daylight savings time is not a good time for Spokane.  It's dark by five, and only getting worse.  The weather has turned cold and grey.  My beloved Sapphie has been having weeks of health problems, although I think she is stabilized again.  And, I'm not in Rome, where the air is warm and the light is soft and the pasta is the way the pasta is in Rome.  I became even more down as Jeremy and I were going through our restaurant options.  There are just so few places with food that is worth the money they charge, and you can only go to the same places so many times.  But the dinner we had at Italia Trattoria last night was special:  truly thoughtful food and no restaurant missteps.  I'm excited to see what Anna will prepare next, and I want to take risks with her.  I hope she stays true to her vision, and that Spokane will support her even if she doesn't put the usual Italian suspects on the menu.

As for those usual Italian suspects, there is a spaghetti and meatballs with red sauce on the menu.  Would that be found in any but the most touristy of restaurants in Italy?  Absolutely not.  But, as Bethe said to us, if we need to have spaghetti and meatballs so that people get what they want, then they will be the best possible spaghetti and meatballs.  Bethe and Anna, I wish you the best of luck, and I'm already looking forward to my next dinner with you.  Thank you for giving me a much needed lift, and reminding me that Spokane really is a beautiful place to live.

And now, my recipe for Petto di Pollo con Burre e Salvia:

Start with two boneless, skinless chicken breasts.  Slice them on a long diagonal to form two cutlets (three if the breasts are huge).  Pound them lightly, so that they are a consistent thickness but not thin.  Dredge them lightly in flour seasoned with salt and pepper.

In a small pan, melt half a stick of butter.  Add six or so fresh sage leaves and four cloves of garlic sliced thin.  Keep on medium heat until the butter is lightly browned and the garlic is well caramelized.  Turn off the heat.

In a different large, non-stick pan, heat olive oil until it is smoking hot.  Carefully add the chicken breasts.  After about two minutes, turn.  After two minutes more, both sides should be lightly golden, and the chicken should be cooked through -- if either of these things hasn't happened, leave them in for a minute or two longer.  Put them on a plate with a couple of spoonfuls of the brown butter sauce and serve.   Now, could anything be easier than that?

Potatoes!

Early this summer, my friend Ellen (who writes a fascinating Spokane-based food blog, Ethical Eating), gave me four seed potatoes for my garden.  They didn't look like much.  In fact, they looked like garbage.  They were sprouted (which I suppose is a good thing in a seed potato) and very soft.  I can't say I had much hope for them, especially as I've never planted potatoes before.  Still, I plopped them in the ground, whole, and didn't touch them until last week.  I declare they were some of the easiest and most satisfying vegetables I've planted.  Within a couple of weeks they sent up thick, vigorous sprouts.  A few weeks after that, they flowered surprisingly pretty purple and white flowers.  Last week, I dug up all of my potato plants, and my four squishy bits of garbage turned into a bonanza of food.  I had thought that Ellen had only given me two varieties, so I was surprised to discover I had three:  a deep purple, a small white, and what looked like a red skinned potato.  The red skinned were the most prolific, giving me both the largest potatoes and the most potatoes per plant.    

I have something of a romantic attachment to potatoes.  During one of our first evenings together, Jeremy told me all about the summer he worked for a plant breeding project in the Entomology department at Cornell.  They were trying to breed a species of potato that was naturally resistant to the dreaded potato beetle without requiring being doused with pesticides.  The project lasted for years, and was a complete success, but for one small hitch.  They developed a plant whose leaves had a lot of little hairs which, when chewed, released polyphenol oxidase.  Polyphenol oxidase acted like an epoxy on the mouths of the poor hungry potato beetles, thus rendering them harmless to the plants.  It doesn't even kill the beetles.  They just spend so much time trying to cleaning themselves that they couldn't create successful potato beetle families.  Thus, there was no time for the insects even to develop resistance to the plants.   Jeremy's job was to count and sex the potato beetles used in the experiment.  I knew I was falling hard for him when two hours of stories about sexing potato beetles had kept me as riveted as any nature documentary.

The hitch, you ask?  Polyphenol oxidase turns black when you deep fry it.  They created a potato that could be grown without pesticides, but no one would buy it because you couldn't turn it into chips or fries.  

Turns out that potatoes are surprisingly interesting plants.  They are members of the deadly nightshade family, and cousins of the tomato.  Like the tomato, they were a New World crop introduced to Europe in the sixteenth century.  Just think of Italian food with no gnocchi or tomato sauce!  The part we eat is neither fruit nor root, but technically part of the stem.  There are literally thousands of different species of potatoes.  In the mountains of South America, where they were first cultivated, the farmers used a different variety for each micro-climate:  each change in elevation, each exposure on a slope, each new longitude had its own type of potato.  Just think how different that is from modern agriculture, where we develop one crop and them bulldoze, irrigate, and douse the land in pesticide until we can grow that one crop, even though that process destroys the land for long term productivity and invites the myriad problems associated with a monoculture.  This episode of Diary of a Foodie has a fascinating vignette about a Chilean woman trying to save ancient varieties of potatoes.  She finds most of her new types in cemeteries, since traditionally her people were buried with food for their next life.

The problem with my beautiful potatoes is that I had no idea how to cook them.  Different types of potatoes lend themselves to different applications.  Russets bake well, and Yukon Golds make the best mashed potatoes, (and almost everything else.  Almost every new issue of Cook's Illustrated has some potato recipe that begins with them testing all sorts of potatoes, and I think they have all ended up using Yukon Golds.)  Fingerlings are amazing roasted.  Since I was pretty sure my white potatoes were fingerlings, and because I thought that most potatoes respond well to roasting, I decided to roast some of my treasure trove.  I used my usual technique:  I cut them into large chunks and par-boiled them until about half cooked.  Then I drained them, cut them into smaller chunks, and tossed with a good deal of olive oil and salt.  Cook's Illustrated has a great tip for oven-roasting potatoes this way:  they suggest that stirring them roughly with a fork, so that the surface breaks up a little bit, leads to increased crispness.  It usually does, too.  Then, onto a cookie sheet in a hot oven for about thirty minutes, stirring occasionally, until brown and yummy.

I have used this technique countless times, with Yukon Golds, fingerlings, thin-skinned new potatoes, and it always works great.  Until this time.  They just never got crispy.  They got a little hard on the outside from all the heat and all the trying to crisp them.  They were okay, but nothing special.  Also, the browning process masked the pretty colors, so you couldn't really tell the beautiful purple potatoes were purple and not just black.  Sad.

Fortunately, I had a good number of the red potatoes left, and they were in fact far from your run of the mill red-skinned, white fleshed fellows.  Their flesh was a beautiful pink color, slightly mottled like pink marble.  So, the other night, I made pink mashed potatoes.  The color was beautiful, and they had a lovely, earthy, potato-y flavor that was definitely more pronounced than your store bought varieties have.

I love my mashed potatoes.  They aren't healthy, and I don't follow the rules, but they are rich and creamy and luscious.  I think they are a little closer to french-style mashed potatoes than what you normally find next to American meatloaf.  I begin, of course, by boiling them.  When they are very soft, I drain them extra carefully, and put them in the bowl of my KitchenAid with a good deal of butter (at least half a stick).  I use the paddle to break up the potatoes and incorporate the butter.  I know you aren't supposed to use a machine to mash potatoes.  I know the conventional wisdom says that this leads to gummy potatoes.  I don't know what to say, except that I have never, ever ended up with gummy potatoes this way.  Regardless of what method you use to mash your potatoes, I do think mixing the butter in first, before the dairy and while the potatoes are still hot, helps the final product.

Once the butter is melted and the potatoes are basically mashed, I add either half and half or cream (or milk if it is all I have) until they are basically mashed potato consistency.  Then, the secret ingredient:  a big dollop of sour cream.  It ups the creaminess without making the potatoes runny, and it gives the flavor just a little tang.  Then, lots of salt, some pepper, and often some garlic powder.  I promise, these are good enough that you don't need gravy.  I even sometimes make a meal out of them by adding chunks of other stuff:  sauteed mushrooms, bacon, different cheeses, shrimp.  Whatever you have that you think goes well together and well with creaminess.  The chef at the Heathman Restaurant in Portland back in the 90's had a whole series of mashed potato with stuff dishes that were all pretty phenomenal, and I stole the idea from him.

I saved a few of my pink beauties, hoping that they will turn all soft and sprout so that I can plant them again next year.  If you have any interesting potato varieties, perhaps we could organize a potato swap?