Amazing Grill

I grill a lot during the summer. Here in southern California where I live I could grill in the winter too, but out of an old native Northeast habit I don't. As a professional food writer and author of a grill book (GRILL ITALIAN, written 12 years before Mario Batali's Italian grill book) people assume I have some Cadillac of grills. I don't. As a townhouse dweller with only a tiny roof-top deck, I grill on an itty-bitty, cheap, falling apart kettle grill. It works. We eat well and through the magic of organizational skill I can grill complicated food for eight people on this Lilliputian grill. What to grill? I like to suggest food that people don't normally think of and recipes that they might not be familiar with. Succulent fat pork chops in a marinade typical of northern Italy with fennel and juniper berries is always a winner and worth a try. It's called Costolette di Maiale alla Griglia in Italian. Try it here.

[Photo: Kim McDougal]

Devil's Chicken in the Summer

In the region of Lazio in Italy a grilled chicken is prepared called pollo alla diavolo, chicken devil-style, meaning it uses black pepper or chile for a piquant taste. But one should understand that an Italian cook's conception of piquant is very mild compared to an American familiar with, say, Mexican food. The name of this recipe, said to have originated in Rome, is applied to two very different methods. In Rome and Florence (in Lazio and Tuscany, respectively) cooks like to coat the chicken with olive oil, lemon juice, and lots of black pepper before grilling; hence the name alla diavolo, or hot as the devil. In southern Italy the use of dried chile is more common and the chicken is marinated in white wine and sage and then grilled and served with salt and pepper.

In either case, the common technique is to split the chicken open down the middle of the back, spread it out, and flatten it by heavy pounding on the breast with the side of a cleaver or a mallet. This is called spatchcocking. The chicken must be basted constantly with butter or olive oil so that it doesn’t dry out. When finished, it has an appetizing golden-brown sheen.
[Photo: giallozafferano.it]

Soup

My newest book THE BEST SOUPS IN THE WORLD will be published by Wiley at the end of the year. It was fun writing and although I've always loved soups I became even more enamored and excited from the opportunity to test so many more soup recipes than one would normally. Don't ask me for a favorite: that's impossible. But a minestra di fave e dente de leone, fava and dandelion soup, is a soul-satisfying soup made with olive oil, tomato, onions, celery and carrot in chicken broth.

[Photo: Clifford A. Wright]

Raw Sauce

Come the summer many Italian cooks forego the hot stove and make pasta with a variety of raw sauces or salsa crudo. All this means is that the hot pasta is tossed with uncooked vegetables, herbs, or other condiments and it's served. [Photo: Fine Cooking, of a Clifford A. Wright dish]

A very nice recipe is here.

Rotolo

Several regions of Italy claim the rotolo di spinach e ricotta, a large leaf of fresh pasta stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese and rolled into a cylinder. The rotolo from Sardinia is a delightful and easy dish. There is time and labor involved of course, but all in all nothing is too difficult. It's also a crowd pleaser.

One starts by making the fresh pasta, using only flour, water, and salt. While the pasta ball rests one can make the stuffing. I put two pounds of spinach with only the water adhering to it from its last rinsing into a large pot and wilt it over high heat for 5 minutes. I let the spinach drain and cool and once it has, I'll pick up softball sized pieces of the spinach and squeeze all remaining water out. Then we chop the spinach and mix it with a pound of fresh ricotta cheese and 3 eggs.

The ricotta must really be fresh and not from a container in a supermarket. As of this writing supermarkets do not sell fresh ricotta so you need to make it yourself or visit an Italian market. The pasta is rolled out into a thin sheet about 24 inches by 14 inches. The spinach and ricotta stuffing is spread over the pasta sheet and rolled up tightly. Then ends are secured and the whole stuffed rotolo is wrapped in cheesecloth and tied off with twine.

Boil it for 20 minutes in salted water and serve with tomato sauce. It's very nice, very pretty.

[Photo: Clifford A. Wright]