Blog: November 2016

As some of you already know, my favorite dish to prepare is “pasta”. I will fix any shape, using any kind of sauce, any type of cheese just because I really, really like pasta. I am not the only one who likes pasta a lot and because of that there are definitely some conflicts about it.

During the 15 century, a strong headed religious reformer by the name of Fra Girolamo Savonarola tried to ban pasta because he considered it evil and decadent. He would shout from his pulpit his condemnation for the pasta “ it is not enough for you to eat your pasta fried. No, you think you have to add garlic to it, and when you eat ravioli, it is not enough to boil and eat it in its juices, you have to fry it in another pot and covered with cheese.

The Florentine people eventually had too much of his rhetoric and burned the priest at the stake. Do you get my drift?!!

So, just let me eat my pasta and nobody gets hurt!!

One of the unusual pasta dishes that I don’t prepare often is ‘Spaghetti with parsley and anchovies” It is not that I don’t like it as much as some of the other sauces or condiments , I just forget to do this combination of flavors because there are so many ways to enjoy your pasta. I could probably cook a pasta dish every day dish and not duplicate the recipe for the whole year. I think I would be like an enormous balloon if I were to execute this thought, but boy, would I have fun! There are as many recipes out there, as your imagination can create, but let’s make sure it is a constructive imagination. Here we go with one:

Spaghetti with parsley and anchovies Now, for this recipe you will need:

• 1lb Spaghetti -not too thin like angel hair or capellini
• Hand full of fresh parsley (I mean”plenty”)
• 1 garlic glove (please don’t get carried away with this one) 1⁄2 lemon
• 1 jar of anchovies in olive oil or 2 if using the 1.75 oz jar size Olive Oil
• Salt/pepper

Wash and dry your parsley well. Chop it with the garlic clove.You can also use the garlic, without chopping it. It’s matter of fact,It is not necessary to use garlic if you don’t like it or garlic doesn’t like you either, because the lack of it will not compromise the results of this dish.

Drain the anchovies from the olive oil so you can cut them up easily and place them in a bowl. Add back the olive oil, the cut up parsley, grind liberally some pepper on top and add some more olive oil. Mix well with a fork.

Drop the spaghetti in plenty of salted boiling water and cook until “al dente”. Drain and immediately mix it with the anchovies, adding the 1⁄2 lemon juice.

One of the options is to add some salted capers after they have been soaked and rinsed. The other is to add some hot chilies if the anchovies you used were the ones without the chilies. Check for salt and add some if necessary.

Sorry, no cheese with this recipe

Simple and very flavorful.

Serve this spaghetti with a white, dry Soave wine. Until next time, keep on cooking!

Lullu

I am going to write about my subject, which is “the making of a foodie” backwards. First we have to know the difference between Gourmand, Gourmet and a Foodie.

Do these words have different meanings?

Gourmand is a person who enjoys eating well. In the old days, it was described as a “glutton” – not a great name to describe your best friend, but maybe somebody you didn’t like could be called a glutton.   This person is really not interested in the preparation of the dishes per se, but he, she (politically correct) likes to eat good food.

The person who describes himself as a Gourmet is a connoisseur of good food. This person is interested in the preparation, the execution of a dish. He wants to learn about it.

Now we talk about the Foodie. This is a relatively a new word.  It was coined in 1981 by Paul Levy and Ann Barr who in 1984 wrote the book “The official Foodie handbook. “

If you hadn’t heard the word then, you have heard that word many, many times by now. A foodie and a gourmet could be the same person. The foodie is more an amateur who loves food and want to learn about it.

Now, back to beginning (I don’t mean the beginning of time!!) -The “backward” part.

I am the proud aunt of three beautiful girls; two of them live in London and one here in Salem.

Here comes the “foodie” part. I think you know I am a foodie and my father was a foodie. Now I realize that he was the epitome of a foodie. Anyway, both mothers of the girls, my nieces, are not foodies. They like to eat, but they will not fit the description of a foodie.

One of the husbands is a foodie; he loves to cook and he is very good at it. The interesting part is that my niece who lives in London is finicky about food, but the two girls eat and like everything. When they were 3 and 4 years old, they even ate sushi. On the other end, my Salem niece doesn’t like almost anything. Ok, granted she is 6 years old….!

How do you end up with a foodie in the family if the mother, who spends most of the time with the children, is not a foodie? Is the father’s influence so strong on them even though the time spent with them is not as long?

Oh well!

In the meantime keep on cooking.

Lullu

If somebody asks if by any chance you have “Anosmia”, I would pay attention to them and maybe ask them why they are asking you that strange question. Your replay could be “No, I don’t have insomnia” and of course, you are wrong because we are talking about “Anosmia “, but you could be right also because you might actually have “insomnia”.

That is a pretty lame line, but Anosmia it is not. It is a very serious, let’s call it disability. It is the inability to detect any kind of odor. As you can imagine, it could be just plain dangerous because you will not be able to smell a gas leak or smell food that has gone bad; and I know you can come up with more awkward situations where the inability to detect smell could embarrass someone’s life. This means that a person has about 5 million cells devoted to smelling (that is the number of cells each person has dedicated to the sense of smell) that are not working. By the way, dogs have 220 million cell devoted to smelling and four times the power to process scents.

Anosmia is not reversible when it is caused by a head trauma, but it could also be temporary when it is caused, for example, by inflammation of the nasal passages and in that case, it could be restored with training. Many times it could be also limited to one nostril only, so it is not detected.

The other disability, which is not as severe, is Hyposmia. It is estimated that up to 4 million people in the US have it. This is a decreased ability to detect smells. It could be caused by allergies, nasal polyps, and infections.   At the other extreme, there is Hyperosmia, which is the increased ability to detect smells. I think I fit in this category, and sincerely, I could be happy to skip a few levels on the smell test. (Perfume that most people can’t detect goes right up my nostrils with a consequence of a headache).Now you are wondering why I am writing about this subject when I usually write about food. The sense of smell and tasting food are definitely and intimately linked; and they are critical to the enjoyment of food.

Ben Cohen, better known as a co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s has anosmia and obviously he has made up for the lack of smell, because his ice creams are rich with texture, chunks and color. Stevie Wonder is another person with the same issue, and there are quite a few more famous people with this affliction.

Basically, smell equals taste and vice versa. So the loss of smell will also impact taste.

As a chef, anosmia could be disastrous for your career but it is still manageable. You will have to compensate with texture, color and your helper to tell you when too much is too much. It is matter of trust.

But wait, not everything is lost. You can actually “re-train” your sense of smell. First, to see how bad you have it, with a friend’s help, taste some vanilla ice cream and some chocolate when you are blindfolded. If you can taste the difference between the two, consider yourself to still have some or most of those million cells still working. Another other way to see if you have problems is for you to place a pad saturated with rubbing alcohol behind your chin. If you can smell it, you are OK. (At least as far as your nose is concerned)

Now, let’s talk about one way to keep your sense of smell really active: choose some fragrance that you might like, for example shampoo, coffee, bananas, cinnamon, and place some of each in a covered jar. Remove the lid and sniff those scents a few times at day inhaling a little of a time instead of a big one.

Last night my dog Ginger had a close encounter with a skunk. Trust me; if you have anosmia, you thought you were cured. No way could you miss the strong and unique smell of a skunk.  I am just wondering how many scent cells the skunk has. I hope for his own good that he has anosmia.

By the way, I think if I have a chance, I would like to come back in my next life, as a dog. What is the possibility that all the 220 million scent cells would go bad? I might still have a shot at tasting food.

The nose knows…keep on cooking.

Lullu