A Week of Great Food

When my friend Boyd visited this week from Baltimore it become a week of great food.  No recipe-testing this week from this cookbook author.  The kids came over ever day and we feasted.  On Tuesday we started with as authentic an ossobuco all Milanese and risotto alla Milanese as you can get.  I made the veal stock for the risotto the day before and I used my ultra-low simmer setting on my stove so it simmered, barely, for about 8 hours.  Wednesday we had a mixed grill of veal sweetbreads, lamb kidney (oh man, those were good), skirt steak, and homemade Italian sausage that I had frozen about a month ago.  Along with it we had frittedda, that Sicilian dish of artichokes, peas, fava, and scallions that I made in June and my favorite Sicilian eggplant dish, mulinciana alla schebbeci, a kind of eggplant seviche, but much more.  Thursday turned into Mexican night and my girlfriend Michelle and son Seri made a 5-course dinner straight from Rick Bayless's Authentic Mexican cookbook.  We had queso fundido, chipotle chile sauce  for our tacos with chorizo and potatoes and tacos al carbon, plus some guacamole and frijoles charros.  On Friday was a break, but Saturday we had our annual lobsterfest, that wonderfully messy affair on the roof deck, juice squirting everywhere and shells a-flying.  We got 10 two-pound lobsters for $5.95 a pound, can you believe it?  Sunday was oysterfest, 100 Blue Point oysters from Long Island that I had my man fly in for our enjoyment.  We bake 24 wrapped in prosciutto and sauced with a balsamic reduction and the rest we ate raw.  Man what a week.  Lotta beer too.

[photo credits: ossobuco, Clifford A. Wright; lobster: Dailymail.com.uk]

The Imam Fainted

In my continuing celebration of the tenth anniversary of the publication of A MEDITERRANEAN FEAST I'd like to go back to an old favorite of Turkish cuisine, the Imam Fainted. The imam fainted, imam bayildi, is the name of one of the most famous of Turkish zeytinyağlı dishes (olive oil foods). It may have medieval roots, if we consider that the zeytinyağlı dishes, which are usually eaten cold, fit the prescriptions of the dietetic theory of humors that was the basis for medical theory at that time. It was customary to eat cold and moist foods in the summer during medieval times because that counteracted the hot dry humor of summer that caused an increase in bile, so the Galenic theory stated. Visit the recipe here for more on the dish and a recipe fro preparing it.
[Photo: The Bosphorus Restaurant, Winter Park, Florida]