"Nothing stimulates the practiced cook's imagination like an egg."

-Irma Rombauer (1877 - 1962)

Labels: eggs, food quotes, Friday, writers

"Cappuccino di Aspargi: Chopped asparagus stems that were sautéed with shallot, a surprisingly yummy veg stock and tips that were halved and sauteed in butter. The top is plain whipped cream." from thisismolly at Flickr.

Welcome to the second edition of Miss Molly's cooking adventures at Montali, a vegetarian restaurant and inn in Umbria.

Today: cappuccino, warm panini with buffalo butter and Mexican Death Oil...

My day:
8 a.m.
In the kitchen. Make caffe, cook breakfast, make ciabatta (I think I might be the best ciabatta maker in the world now, but I'm not sure) and panini (not the sandwiches, the rolls). Set the kitchen for service for breakfast for 2 to 8 people, wait for chef to tell us that night's menu.

8:30 - 9:30
Wait for guests to come, drink CAPPUCCINO (my new favorite drink... I'm convinced every coffee lover needs to go out and buy Lavazza brand coffee). Turn bread and clean clean clean (PS: cooks do dishes, clean glasses, sweep floors... no porters/dishwashers here. The servers help out, but since there is not a dedicated position for the task, pretty much everyone does it.) Clean up after breakfast service.

9:30 - 1:30
Get menu from chef and start prepping. Bake off bread. Clean, make lunch for 7 people unless guests request lunch.

1:30 - 2
Eat lunch. Roman bought habaneros and made "Mexican Death Oil" which we put on EVERYTHING. We usually eat leftovers from the night before, or pasta, or leftover pasta. We snack on warm paninis with buffalo butter. Usually we eat pasta though. And eggplant. And sometimes pasta. But usually, it's pasta.

2 - 3:30 or 4 or 4:30
SIESTA!!!! This is usually when I shower, read or nap. We are totally cut off from the outside world. I have no idea what's going on in New York or the world. Josh checked the Times on his day off and reported back that more troops have been killed in Iraq.

4:30 - 5
Cappuccino! Cappuccino! Cappuccino! Someone told me that when I go to Italy NOT to order a cappuccino after breakfast-time. That the Italians would look at me like I was crazy. I can't help it though. They are sooo good. My favorite part is eating the foamed milk at the end with a spoon. MMMMMmmmmmm foam.

5:30-8
Finish everything for dinner and set up for service. Usually we have a glass or two of wine or some spirit like housemade Limoncello. And we drink this while we work. According to Alberto, we have the most expensive and best wines.

8:30
Start service. I wish I had more pictures of the food.... I'll take more this week. Anyway, check my photo site and hopefully I'll have been able to post my new ones. Mostly they're of the views and the grounds, and to you they might look all the same. Anyway, they are really pretty to me.

We also try to start cleaning at this point too, so we can get out as early as possible. We make guesses as to which time we'll leave and it helps with the morale and camaraderie amongst the cooks.

Of course, Alberto is always there saying something to prolong our work period because "No one works as hard as me or my wife" and "She works 20 hours a day for seven months without a day off" (which isn't true at all, well not the extremities of it anyway) and "My wife is here before you and after you..." and "My wife my wife my wife...". She does work very hard, though, and she is great at what he does. I've never heard her complain.

The earliest we've finished is at 10:30 and the latest around midnight. I'm really really enjoying this. The people are nice, the chef is nice, and the grounds are beautiful. The food is DELICIOUS and refined and rich and technical and creative and approachable, and 100% artisanal and lovely. I kinda wish I had signed up for the whole season... but maybe next summer I will find myself in another part of Europe making prosciuttos and salamis.

I sleep really well every night. I eat well everyday. And I write everything down and put as much as a possibly can into my work day so I won't lose a drop when I leave here. It's really really really cool.

I wish I could share the yumminess with you all. My words do not bring it to light. Uuummmmm... until next time?

Labels: Italy, kitchen stories, Miss Molly

torture, from the thisismolly Flickr photostream

Though I'm dog tired and up to my eyeballs in a big recipe project, I thought ya'll might enjoy the entertaining missives graciously offered up by Molly, a young American cook of my acquaintance who is presently working in a vegetarian kitchen at Montali in the Umbrian region of Italy.

Don't miss her pics at Flickr... full-on kitchen access and food porn.

Today: meet the cast of characters.

ahhh... my first week of work finished. I started off a little slow and disoriented, but finished feeling really well.

About the kitchen:
Pretty small. Smaller than my last job, but completely set up different. As soon as I figure out how to use my laptop at one of the three public computers in this town, I will post more photos. Hopefully that will be today.

The people:
The chef is great. Her name is MaLu (short for Maria Lucia blah blah blah blah blah- she seriously has like 7 names, I think.). She is originally from Brazil, but has lived in Italy for, I don't know, 30 years? She is 50, but does not look a day over 35 and is tall and slender and beautiful and a genuinely warm and caring person. And she is a great chef to boot.

Josh is an FCI (ed: French Culinary Institute) alum who graduated in December. He lives in Bed-Stuy (Brooklyn) and will be here for the entire season, which is 7 months. He's also a really nice guy and the only other American here.

Roman is from Mexico... I forget the town but somewhere near the Texas border. He is going to go to culinary school in Perugia (the capitol of Umbria) in October.

Eva is from Slovakia and she is kinda like a server/dishwasher/maid. She speaks pretty decent English and pretty decent Italian. She's pretty quiet and mostly converses with:

Yaro. He's from Slovakia as well and is really funny. He's a dancer and has one of those kinda crackly voices.

Binario works only in the morning and I think just does laundry and cleans the rooms. She is from Sardinia and if I spoke Italian, I guess I would hear her thick Sardinian accent. She doesn't speak a word of English.

Esta is from Nigeria. She speaks English pretty well and I think she does the same thing as Binario. She is a cutie pie and a half and wears this Adidas-kinda jacket with the word "freaker" written in old English across the back. I'm not too sure what a freaker is, nor am I sure if Esta does either. But it's there!

And last but not least
Alberto. MaLu's husband. He speaks fluent (British) English and is pretty patronizing. He constantly talks about how great Montali is and his wife is and how we are so privileged to be here and BMW won't stop sending him things and how the food is so molecular and cutting edge (ahheemmbullshitcoughcough). I'm not trying to put the guy down, he's nice.

Check back! Tomorrow we'll learn more about the cooking, the eating and the drinking...

Labels: Italy, kitchen stories, Miss Molly

"Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast
heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod's roes. Most
of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a
fine tang of faintly scented urine."

In honor of Bloomsday, this nibble comes from Ulysses, a novel by James Joyce

Labels: food quotes, Friday, writers

"A wise man does all things right, including the seasoning of lentil soup."

- The Stoic Philosophers, 300 BC

Get yer hot dish 'a food quotes here.

Labels: food quotes, Friday, philosophy

The mangosteen, unadulterated.


Press gently on the tough shell to break open the fruit.


The tender mangosteen alongside its plentiful packaging.

When I spotted mangosteens in the Barcelona Boqueria, I was shocked... shocked! I'd heard all about the mangosteen from Asia-exploring friends (mangosteens favor a tropical climate) and the raves of David Karp, Gourmet magazine's fruit detective.

Residents of the United States are not allowed to enjoy them, you see (though some of us apparently love them enough to sneak in a box every now and then.) As mentioned in a comment a few posts back, this particular fruit is said to keep company with a dangerous fruit fly.

Even simply purchasing them at the market carried the cachet of illicit behavior. Why, think of the fit they'd throw at customs if they found me concealing dangerous fruit. (Come to think of it, that might be my next band: Concealing Dangerous Fruit.)

Well, purchase I did, and consume I did. But first, there was the task of getting the darn things open. The shells are tough and leathery. The edible pulp is tender and easily bruised. My research indicated that the brightly colored skins stain fabrics permanently. Cut them? Nope. Smash them? Nope. Press a thumb in to puncture and then tear open the fibrous shell.

The flavor of mangosteens reminded me of strawberry-flavored lychees. Sweet, a bit tart, with that additional vanilla note that whispers "tropical."

Tasty, sure. Worth Mission Impossible espionage maneuvers to acquire them? Not really. The flat of fragrant local strawberries waiting in the next stall were so much less fuss and far more heavenly.

Still, there's something undeniably sexy about momentarily savoring a flavor that's held just slightly beyond reach.

Labels: fruit, travel

"Progress in civilization has been accomplished by progress in cookery."

-Fannie Farmer (1857-1915)


Find a second helping of food quotes here

Labels: food quotes, Friday