Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It (10 page)
Read Skinny Italian: Eat It and Enjoy It Online
Authors: Teresa Giudice,Heather Maclean
Tags: #food.cookbooks
When you buy from your local farmer’s market, you not only know where your food comes from, but you’re also supporting people and jobs in your area. The prices are great at farmer’s markets, because they don’t have to pay for storage at big, fancy stores. And the vendors there are not only nice, they really know their stuff. Make friends with them, and they’ll not only help you pick the right food and tell you how to prep it, but they might even save the good stuff for you.
Farmer’s markets won’t have everything fresh all year long, because not everything grows all year long. That’s why you buy it when it’s in season, enjoy it fresh, but also freeze it, can it, and preserve it (all of which I’ll show you how to do).
Grow Your Own Garden
There’s no easier, cheaper, or safer way to get fresh food into your house than to grow it in your own backyard (or rooftop or balcony). During World War Two, people were encouraged to plant “victory gardens” to keep America from having the same food shortages that they had in Europe. More than twenty million American families planted their own gardens and raised 40 percent of the vegetables eaten during those years.
We had a big garden growing up with eggplant, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, basil, and parsley. My brother, Joey, and I had to work in it, but it was always really rewarding. You pull a few weeds, you water things, and then you get to pick delicious vegetables and herbs right off the vine or stalk.
Today, they call home gardens “kitchen gardens,” and I think everyone should have at least one vegetable or herb they grow themselves. It makes you care about your food that much more because you’re actually tending to the plant from when it’s a tiny baby. Even the White House finally replanted a kitchen garden in March 2009, for the first time in sixty-six years, after 100,000 people signed a Web site and Facebook petition. (Start yours now! Don’t make me have to petition you!)
Unless you live in a part of the United States that has really extreme weather, like on top of a mountain or something, these plants will grow really easily almost anywhere:
• Spinach
• Tomatoes
• Sweet peppers
• Zucchini
• Peas
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Green beans
• Lettuce
• Parsley
• Basil
• Thyme
• Garlic
You can start them from seeds, clippings, or sprouts. Check with your local nursery for the specifics on how to best plant in your time zone, climate, and type of soil.
Grow Your Own Right Up There on Your Windowsill
I don’t care if you live in an apartment or a mansion, you can grow a couple of pots of herbs in your kitchen. You’ll have fresh ingredients right there. You’ll have a healthier house because the plants release oxygen. And if you’re bored, you’ll have something to talk to.
Here are the three easiest herbs to grow inside.
They aren’t very big, and they are practically impossible to kill. Grow them in individual pots, or get a nice long rectangular planter and have a real kitchen garden.
T
eresa’s
T • I • P
Instead of adding salt to most of my dishes, I add cheese instead. Feta, Parmigiano-Reggiano, or mozzarella will give you all the salty flavor you need (without the extra sodium you don’t).
BASIL
Basil really needs only four things to survive (and keep you in tasty eats all year): high-quality potting soil to start with, plenty of light (artificial light will work), water, and occasionally, some organic fertilizer (but only use half of whatever the bottle recommends). To give yourself a head start, get a basil plant from your local nursery that already looks healthy and pretty. Put it in a pot that has nice drainage, keep the soil moist but not soggy, and you are good to go!
ROSEMARY
Rosemary needs pretty much the same thing as basil: a pot with good drainage, high-quality soil (with some sand in it), lots of light, and occasionally, organic fertilizer (use only half the amount recommended). To tell if you have enough water, push your finger in the soil an inch. If it’s dry down there, water it. Rosemary grows really slowly, so pick a plant the size you want it to pretty much stay for several months. Once a year, to give your rosemary plant a little kick, either spread a tablespoon of dried crushed eggshells around the base of the plant, or pour a teaspoon of lime in the same place. You’ll know you’re doing it right if the needles on your rosemary bush stay bendy.
THYME
Thyme is probably the easiest herb to grow indoors because it needs the least attention. It doesn’t need to be watered very often—just once or twice a week—and it will grow in a sunny location all by itself.
Naked Food
I cook for my family almost every night, so I’m not a strict raw foodie or anything, but if you love raw food, Italian is the way to go. Not only are the ingredients we typically use in Italian food fresh and natural and healthy, but a lot of wonderful dishes can be made without cooking at all. I like to call this “naked food”; it doesn’t need much more than a chop, some mixing, and you bring the natural flavors together without heat or processing or anything else getting in the way of the food. Here are three of my favorite naked dishes.
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
This is a great, fresh side dish, or you can make it a full meal by adding beans, pine nuts, or cheese to the top. I don’t peel the zucchini before slicing them because they look so much prettier with their skins on. The twirling bit in step 3 is optional; the longer you let the strips marinate, the more willing they will be to twist. This is a super-easy recipe as long as you have a good slicer (I find a V-slicer, a plastic mandoline with metal blades, works the best).
3 large zucchini (about 1 1/3 pounds), scrubbed well,
ends trimmed
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup chopped fresh basil
1.
Using a mandoline, plastic V-slicer, or spiral slicer (or, if you have mad skills, a knife), cut the zucchini into long, thin julienne strips. Do not use the seedy center of the zucchini, as it can be too soft and will ruin the look and texture of the strips.
2.
Whisk the lemon juice, oil, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Add the zucchini and basil and toss well. Let stand at room temperature for a few minutes so the zucchini can soak up the dressing and soften slightly.
3.
Using a fork with long tines, twirl each portion of zucchini onto the fork so it looks like a little bird’s nest, and transfer to a plate.
S
AUTÉED
Z
UCCHINI
“S
PAGHETTI
”
WITH
P
INE
N
UTS
MAKES 4 SERVINGS
While we’re talking about zucchini spaghetti, I wanted to give you one more way to prepare it. It does use olive oil and heat, but this preparation gives the zucchini a softer texture and slightly different flavor. It’s still a delicious vegetarian meal that even the pickiest eater will love.
Eat it naked style, or use your imagination to whip up any number of dishes: add salsa cruda or pesto to the top, sprinkle with cheese, anything is good! Just don’t drown the zucchini in too much sauce because you don’t want to lose its fresh flavor.
2 tablespoons pine nuts
3 large zucchini (about 1 1/3 pounds),
scrubbed well, ends trimmed
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1.
Heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add the pine nuts and cook, stirring often, until toasted, about 2 minutes. Transfer to a plate and set aside.
2.
Using a mandoline, plastic V-slicer, or spiral slicer (or, if you are a skilled cutter, a knife), cut the zucchini into long, thin julienne strips. Do not use the seedy center of the zucchini, as it can be too soft and will ruin the look and texture of the strips.
3.
Heat the oil and garlic together in the skillet over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is tender, about 1 ½ minutes. Increase the heat to high. Add the zucchini and cook, stirring occasionally, just until it is heated through and still al dente, about 1 minute. Don’t overcook the zucchini, or it will get mushy. Remove from the heat and stir in the pine nuts, salt, and pepper. Serve hot.
MAKES ABOUT 4 CUPS
This “raw sauce” is the Italian version of salsa. Great for dipping crunchy or salty things. Also great over angel hair pasta (cooked, but warm or cold), breads, in salads, just about anywhere!
3 large ripe tomatoes, seeded and cut into ½-inch dice
1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/3 cup chopped fresh basil
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, minced
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
About 1/3 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1.
Using your hands, combine the tomatoes, parsley, basil, oil, garlic, salt, and pepper in a large bowl. Don’t squash the tomatoes, but make sure they get good and coated. Let stand at room temperature for at least 30 minutes and up to 3 hours to develop the flavors.
2.
Serve the salsa as desired, and sprinkle each serving with about 2 teaspoons Parmigiano-Reggiano.
Famous Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini—whom I adore for giving us both the film
La dolce vita
and the word
paparazzi
—said, “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” Spaghetti, macaroni, noodles . . . whatever you call it, it’s heaven on a plate.
Admit it, you love pasta so bad you can’t stand it. You love it in all of its six hundred different forms. I never met a single person who didn’t love pasta.
Pasta is an amazing food not just because it tastes great and grabs onto delicious sauces, but also because it’s easy to cook, it stores forever, it’s cheap to buy, it fills you up, and, as my husband, Joe, says, “With two pounds of pasta, you can feed, like, a generation.”
The Truest Truth About Carbs
Unfortunately, much like my beautiful home state of New Jersey, pasta has gotten an unfair rap. Maybe it started with the Atkins guy, but somehow pasta got turned into the boogeyman of bad food—the biggest no-no if you wanted to lose weight or be healthy. Thankfully that no-carbs crap is over. Doctors kept telling everyone you need carbs for your body to function, athletes have always eaten carbs, but I think once the general population realized that without carbs, they didn’t have the energy to even get out of bed, they decided carbs weren’t so bad after all.
Hear me clearly: carbohydrates are absolutely necessary. They are the main source of energy for our body, our nervous system, and our brain. If you don’t give them to your body, you will have to burn fat for energy, which is not good for your figure and can cause nausea, lightheadedness, headaches, weakness, and (ew!) bad breath.
The trick is to eat the right amount of the right kind of carbs. Simple carbs like sugar are absorbed too quickly into the body, give you a high, and then leave you like a gold digger leaves her dying fiancé to party at the river. Complex carbohydrates are digested more slowly, don’t screw up your blood sugar, and give you the energy you need.
So we’re all agreed, we need carbs. But how many? Before I say another word, for the love of all that is holy, please check with your doctor to see what your daily calorie goal should be based on your age, gender, height, medical history, and all that. (And P.S.—If you blindly follow somebody’s 500-calorie-a-day meal plan and go blind, lose your hair, or worse, I will be so brokenhearted. But remember, I told you so.)
To maintain a healthy weight or lose weight, nutritionists agree that you should get only about 55 percent of your total daily calories from carbs. One gram of carbs equals 4 calories, so if you eat an average of 1,600 calories a day, that would be 220 grams of carbs a day. If you eat 1,200 calories a day, you could have 165 grams of carbs.
To put this in perspective, one full cup of pasta is 42 grams of carbs. Crazy, isn’t it? I bet you thought a plate of spaghetti was like 1,000 grams of carbs, right? My friends and I did too until we crunched the numbers (we’re smart chicks here in Jersey) and discovered we really could love our pasta and eat it, too! (Even if you eat more than a cup, relax. If you ate the
entire
box of spaghetti all by yourself, you’re still only eating 1,680 calories and 420 grams of carbs. Not healthy, of course, but not knocking-on-death’s-door crazy like some of those starvation diets out there.)
So, we’ve established that a normal serving of pasta doesn’t have too many carbs. Let’s kick the crap out of some of those other pasta myths so we can start digging in!
J
UICY
B
ITS
FROM
Joe
This one time Teresa and I were making a lasagna from scratch for company, and to hurry things up, we decided to stick the eggs in the microwave. Don’t ever do that.
First of all, we forgot we had eggs in there. So when they started exploding really loudly, we couldn’t figure out what was going on. It sounded like gunfire or something! We were ducking, our guests were hiding . . . it was crazy.
When we realized it was the eggs in the microwave,
ah marone
, what a mess we had on our hands! There was egg everywhere!
Maybe that’s what put Teresa off from cooking pasta from scratch. Our lasagna nearly gave us a heart attack!
Pasta Myth 1
•
White Pasta Is Bad
White pasta is often lumped in with white bread, white flour, and white sugar as a “bad” carb because they digest too quickly in your body. But what the hell is “white pasta”? Any pasta that isn’t dirt brown or green? Um, that only leaves the yellow or tan pasta.
Maybe the people who warn against “white pasta” are looking at egg noodles or noodles made with processed flour, but Italian pasta is made with a hard wheat called durum that’s coarsely ground down to a flour called semolina. (It’s so hard, the Italians used to knead the dough with their bare feet . . . no lie!) So Italian pasta is slow-digesting, healthy, and can even be called a whole grain. Ha!
Just make sure your pasta says “100 percent durum wheat semolina” or “100 percent durum wheat.” In fact, it’s against the law in Italy to make pasta with anything but durum wheat, so if your pasta is imported from Italy, you’re good. Most Italian pastas made in America also use durum semolina, so you’re probably fine no matter what you pick.
Pasta Myth 2
•
Pasta Is Fattening
This one is funny because if you’ve ever looked at the nutritional information on a box of pasta, it usually says 1 gram of fat per serving. That sounds pretty good to me! It’s not the pasta itself that’s fattening, it’s the crazy stuff people put on top of it (like ten pounds of processed cheese). But since we’re cooking the Old World Italian way, we’re using our pasta to help dress up fresh ingredients, healthy oils, and vegetables. I know my kids wouldn’t just chomp on raw spinach, but toss it in a pasta dish, and they gobble it up.
Pasta Myth 3
•
Pasta Has No Nutritional Value
Again, that amazing durum wheat used in Italian pasta making tells a different story. A cup of cooked Italian pasta imported from Italy has 8 grams of protein, 10 percent of your recommended daily amount of iron, and almost the same amount of dietary fiber as a slice of whole-wheat bread. While the Italian government doesn’t allow durum flour to be “enriched,” some American companies add even more vitamins and minerals, including calcium, potassium, and folic acid, to the protein-and-fiber goodness of semolina flour.
A Pasta Primer
You now have divine permission to eat and enjoy pasta. Amen! The first thing you need to know is that in Italy, they don’t call it “pasta.” In Italian,
pasta
means “paste,” and ordering a plate of paste just doesn’t sound so good. In Italy, they say
macaroni
. It’s sort of like opposite world: while in America “macaroni” only refers to the short elbow-shaped (or sometimes SpongeBob–shaped) noodles in a box with an envelope of cheese powder stuff or a fatty, homemade casserole oozing with cheese, in Italy, you can order macaroni and expect a sophisticated, lovely meal.
Is It Bad to Munch on
Raw, Dried Spaghetti?
It’s one of those things you think only you do (or did as a kid) but ask around, everyone at one time or another munched on some raw spaghetti out of the box, usually out of complete boredom.
My grandmother used to say my brother and I shouldn’t do it or we’d “get worms.” We didn’t believe her, but I did wonder if it was bad for your body in any way.
Several doctors I spoke with confirmed that unless there were weevils in your pasta, you had pretty much no chance of getting worms. They did say, however, that pasta is sharp and can cut up your insides, and that since pasta expands in water, it probably wasn’t a good idea to go throwing it down your pie hole before cooking it.
My dentist, though, had a very strong opinion: she said to cut it out right now. Like chewing ice, biting down on dried pasta can damage your teeth in a million ways. My dentist also won’t allow me to give my kids those fruity snacks, and they’ve never had a single cavity, so I guess I’m going to listen to her, and try to find something new to chew on.
I also want to clear up the different types of pasta. There are really only two: fresh and dried. Pasta isn’t like bread, where there are a million different recipes and tastes depending on what loaf you buy. Pretty much all pasta is made from the same ingredients: flour, water, salt, and sometimes eggs. After that, all the shaping and cutting and dyeing is mostly for show. Picking the right pasta shape can help your dish hold the sauce better, and we’ll go over that in a second, but those are just suggestions. You are free to mix and match any pasta shape with any sauce or preparation that you want.
I didn’t realize this was a big deal to some people until I taught my friend Tracey how to make my favorite tagliatelle with peas and ham (it’s phenomenal—don’t worry, I’m giving you the recipe at the end of this chapter). She’d never heard of tagliatelle—it’s a flat pasta like linguine except it’s wider—and was asking me why I had to use that kind of pasta. I told her I didn’t, that you could use any pasta you wanted, and she kind of freaked out. “But what does the recipe say?” she wanted to know. “I don’t want to make it wrong.” There is no wrong way when it comes to picking a pasta shape, I promise. If a recipe gives you a pasta suggestion, it’s only a suggestion. Feel free to substitute your favorite noodles, a fun shape you’ve never tried before, or whatever’s on sale that week.
Yes, there are people who think putting a certain sauce on the wrong noodle is like serving a hamburger on a hot dog bun. Get over it! One of the best parts about cooking Italian food is that it’s so easy to personalize. I hope that after reading this book you’ll be comfortable enough with the ingredients and how to prepare them that you create dozens of your own special recipes! (Although I do want you to name every single one after me or my girls.)
Fresh vs. Dried
Even though they taste almost the same, dried pasta is not just a shriveled version of fresh pasta, like a raisin and a grape. Each type of pasta is made with a different dough and different process. Fresh pasta uses a soft flour and eggs (which give it a little more fat and some cholesterol), and it has to be used immediately or refrigerated. It also costs a little more.
Dried pasta (except for egg noodles, and we do not count egg noodles) is made from a hard durum wheat semolina flour and water. No eggs, no cholesterol. Then it’s cut and dried, but it miraculously comes back to soft, doughy life in a pot of hot water. Dried pasta also costs pennies per serving, and it can last years in your pantry.
Bronzed Pasta
On some dried pasta packages, especially imported ones, you might see the words
bronze drawn
, or
drawn through a bronze die
. That’s a way for companies to tell you they still do things the old-fashioned way.
To make shapes, pasta dough is squeezed through a big press sort of like what you used in grade school to crank out Play-Doh spaghetti. The colored plastic bit that you slid to make different shapes is called a “die,” and while it was first made of wood,
it’s traditionally made of bronze in Italy. Bronze dies give the pasta an almost bumpy edge all around.
Many modern companies use plastic dies that make super-smooth pasta.
Either one is fine, but many people prefer the rougher pasta because they say it holds the sauce better and gives your mouth a little more fun because of the texture (ribbed for our pleasure, I guess). In any case, if I can, I usually go for the “party in my mouth” version.
Any pasta that says
rigate
or “ridged” is also telling you it will hold pasta sauce and tickle your tonsils better, but not necessarily because of a bronze die.