Chopsticks
March 8, 2009
Benk and Ginny and I took a trip to Albuquerque, and all agreed that we needed to visit Ta Lin Market. This is where you can stock up on Irish tea (and even Lucozade), achiote paste from Central America, pad thai noodles, Japanese ponzu sauce… While we were there, Benk and I went to the tiny-random-dishes section and found these “rookie chopsticks” for $1.95; we each bought a pair for our kids, but I mostly bought them because, wow - what a cool shape! If you don’t have a version of Ta Lin, you can get them here
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Hakuna Crostata (apologies to The Lion King)
September 25, 2008
I’m not an incredibly keen cook. I get distracted, wander off, and tend to boil over, burn or otherwise mess things up. But I really love good, simple food, and a few times I’ve gotten very attached to a particular food, from a particular region - food that you just can’t find in New Mexico.
This is how the story of the Crostata begins… David and Finn and I were in Italy in 2007, in an area called Le Marche. You haven’t heard of it? A lot of people haven’t heard of it, which is exactly why it’s so great. I could go on and on about Le Marche, but that’s another topic. One of the great things about Le Marche is the food, and one of the great foods of Le Marche is the crostata. In Italy they eat basically the same things everywhere, but each region cooks them in a slightly different way.
I’d been to other places in Italy and eaten crostata, and crostata is always nice, but I have never eaten an entire crostata by myself and I’ve never had to go home to try to recreate a crostata before I ate the Crostata from Carassai.
When we returned home in May, utilizing recipes on the internet, I made a crostata that was a like a dry shortbread cookie and tasted like flour. Bleh.
That was that. And then we returned to Le Marche in 2008, to the same town. The day after we arrived was market day in Montalto, and we bought two of those Carassai Crostate and ate them both immediately. I saved the label. We went to Carassai (a few towns over the hills) and tried to find the bakery (Porra Bruno) but couldn’t find it. But I had the ingredients list, and I knew that NOW I would be able to have crostata in New Mexico.
So when I got home I tried again. I have a made a spreadsheet, with all of the ingredients and the amounts of each ingredient I used in each attempt. I won’t tell you how many times I tried before I asked my friend Michaela (who is from Perugia) call the bakery on her skype phone to find out exactly how much flour, how much sugar, etc. With the sort of sketchy instructions from the bakery (they explained that they were artisans, so you just put in “some” lemon zest and “some” vanilla and “enough flour to make a soft dough”) I went back into the kitchen… and made a crostata!!! A wonderful, artisinal crostata at 7,000 feet above sea level!
Now that I can make crostata, we eat it a lot. And it’s cheap, cheap, cheap to make! If you email me, I’ll send you the recipe.
