A Ku Indeed!

When I saw this bread in Field’s The Italian Baker I was intrigued, and had to give it a whirl. After making it, I’d say it’s a certain keeper. This is a good bread with a nice, strong, sharp taste and a pleasant — though a bit odd given that it is orange – look. Carol Field calls it an extravagant bread, though I’m not sure I’d quite go that far (I’d call a casatiello more of an “extravagant” bread). At the same time, I made it to go with a tomato sauce simply as a dipping bread, but to be honest, you don’t want to do that – it’s a waste of the good extra ingredients that go into it (What was I thinking? Tomato bread to go with a tomato sauce?). You want to just enjoy this bread on it’s own, plain.

The good thing, too, is that it’s an easy one to make, if you are already pretty comfortable with Italian rustic peasant breads. It’s really just a small variation on that with some extra ingredients. If you aren’t comfortable with basic breads, I’d hold off until you are.

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I’ve been an admirer from afar of Peter Reinhart’s bread baking for a while now. Mostly I encounter people talking about it online, though I have a friend or two who swear by his stuff. So for Christmas — because I was good, after all — Santa brought me Reinhart’s Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which really is a well put together baking book, full of thick and informative discussions about the rudiments of baking (all of the various steps, ingredients, shaping, etc) as well as (of course) a lot of great bread recipes and exceptional photos (which I insist on in a good book, though Carol Field’s awesome bread book lacks these entirely, opting instead for pencil etchings). So, in the spirit of Christmas, and eager to take my new book for a spin, I figured I’d give Reinhart’s Cinnamon Raisin bread a shot, even though it is not Italian (see outcome below).

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In grim economic times, areas such as the Humanities are often disparaged, mocked and seen as useless at worst, luxuries at best. Typically, when economic hardness hits the university budget, Humanities programs are the first to be placed on the marketplace altar in order to appease the gods of austerity. This economic downturn has been no different, though one gets the feeling that on the whole, more and more, the Humanities seem to be under constant and relentless attack. However, a light appears at the end of the tunnel, at least at one university — a 20 million dollar dedicated grant to the Humanities division at the University of Wisconsin. Defending the Humanities, the college president put it well:

We are, by nature, cultural beings. We are learners. Our cultural environment shapes us. If we fail to understand how it shapes us, we forfeit our freedom and our responsibility to think about what we learn and who we are.

True, that.

I really do love stuffed mushrooms. I can just eat them and eat them and eat them. So I figured it was time to make them. I first decided that I was going to go with the recipe from Lidia’s Italian Kitchen (her cookbook is really amazing) but then I noticed that Lidia’s recipe is a bit complicated, and for one thing calls for you to make your own bread crumbs. Normally I’m fine with doing all of that, but after all the baking recently I just didn’t have it in me today. So instead I went the easy route and used Giada DeLaurentis’ recipe, which is a bit simplistic and so easy to do.

The long and the short: very easy to make, and okay tasting, but a bit underwhelming. Not enough wang (though I think the mint in the recipe is a nice touch). Not that this stopped my 2 year old daughter from devouring 7 of them. In any case, I almost didn’t list this one, but I figured hey — a mission is a mission. I’m heading home in a few days to see the family, I’ll get my mom’s recipe, which is way better and report it back here on a second try sometime in the future. It’s pretty clear that you just need to tweak the filling over and over until you hit on just the right combination. In the meantime, I have DeLaurentis’ recipe below.

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Italians tend to give each other homemade cookies for Christmas.  Italians who live in the New York City area have the bonus of living in a region where there are 2.6 Italian bakeries per square mile, so any particular Goombah or Goombette doesn’t need to have any baking skills – when holiday time comes you just go to the nearest bakery, get a box of assorted goodies, and bring those home, or to the relatives’  house you’ll be visiting.

In the spirit off the tradition, we baked a number of different cookies and then put them in tins to distribte to some of our friends and family for the holidays. Wife and I divided the duties — I made Italian cookies, and she made American ones. At 12 o’clock there are Almond and Chocolate Biscotti, some dipped in milk chocolate and others in white chocolate; at 1 o’clock there’s an “M&M” cookie; at 2 o’clock there’s a Lemon Ricotta Cookie (all those with solid colored sprinkles are of this type); at 3 o’clock there’s an Anisette cookie (all those with the multi-colored sprinkles are of this type), and at 10 o’clock there’s a classic Chocolate Chip Cookie. We can’t guarantee that these are the best tasting cookies around, but hey – it’s the thought that counts.

Casatiello is an interesting bread to make and to eat, though I’d say that it is probably best understood as the Italian response to French brioche (or perhaps even Jewish challah bread). Make no mistake – this is not your typical Italian rustic “bread.” It has a very delicate almost flaky crust, and a dry crumb that carries a host of different flavors stemming from the many, many ingredients inside ranging from eggs, butter, pepper, numerous cheeses and meat. None of these ingredients overwhelms the others, giving casatiello a blended, sophisticated and complicated (but not overwhelming) taste that has you trying to line up the ingredients you used to the different hints of flavor that you experience as you munch on it.

The odd part about making casatiello is knowing how and when to eat it – or even how to slice it. It’s clearly not right to use as dinner bread, and it’s not really morning bread either (though my wife thinks it is good for this). Is it a type of snack bread? No. Surely not sandwich bread! I’m really not sure where it “goes” in the food universe, so to speak. All this confusion continues into slicing – in the photo, I sliced it like a cake, which seems to be a common practice though I’ve also seen others slice it like regular bread. Also, dieters beware: casatiello is also a major diet buster, so if you’re looking for a low-cal experience, don’t make this!

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Stop the presses. This may possibly be not only the best dish I’ve ever put together, but one of the best dishes I’ve ever had. Seriously — this dish is totally amazing.

Oddly enough, when I put this one together, I was thinking more in terms of an “ah what the hell” kind of experiment. I had very low expectations and was almost certain it would turn out badly, resulting in a last minute run to get something from a take out restaurant nearby. After all, I like ricotta — but ricotta gnocchi? You tend to think of gnocchi as made of a base material a bit more solid. Surprisingly, though, this recipe not only works – but I’m now convinced that ricotta makes for the best gnocchi base you could use, easily beating out potato, pumpkin or squash.

Unfortunately, there’s no doubt that my paternal grandmother Amelia, who for some unknown reason strongly disliked northern Italians even to the point of refusing to cook their food (I never got the full story on that one), is looking down at me unhappily about this dish. Sorry, grandma – this one is going to have to be a keeper.

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(cross posted at In Socrates’ Wake)

Without a doubt, of all the courses I have taught, the most frustrating is Introduction to Philosophy (called “Classic Problems in Philosophy” at my college). Every time I teach it I am left thinking that the course was a total bust for one reason or another. I typically then try to fix the problems from the last run and alter the course next time, only to find that the changes fix those problems but create whole set of other new ones. Trying to figure out the course structure for this class that seems to maximally “work” can drive you a bit nuts.

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The semester is now officially over, so on top of prepping for my Philosophy of Mind course next semester (well, actually, third time teaching it, but I’m using an entirely different set of reading materials this time), I’m ready to do some serious baking. Typically I don’t make cookies, and just stick to cakes and bread. But hey — it’s Christmas, and I’m Italian, so I need to make at least some cookies.

Cookies are easy to make, but they are pretty a high-maintenance project — usually it takes a long time to get all the cookies done for some recipes, and there’s usually a huge mess. Still, I’ve been wanting to give this recipe a whirl for a while because I’m a big ricotta fan, and the thought of a ricotta cookie is just a strange concept — cheese being the major component of the dough that forms the cookie. Recipe below. Who the hell makes cookies from flour and cheese?

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This recipe is from Carol Field’s The Italian Baker – I figured I’d give it a shot, especially since I don’t think I’ve ever met a mushroom I didn’t like. I wouldn’t put this recipe in the “beginner baker” category, as it actually takes quite a few steps, relies on some initial cooking, and results in a dough that is not particularly standard-feeling.

If you try this one, at the very least you’ll need some experience knowing how to tweak the amount of flour needed to get a workable dough, and since the majority of the mushrooms get added during the shaping phase, you need some more advanced kneading experience to work them in right while still getting the dough shaped correctly. It’s  worth the effort, but it’s not recommended for people not already comfortable with normal bread baking.

Recipe below.

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The Goombah Gourmet can’t be stopped. I bake almost all the time nowadays, and I’m actually way beyond Mission 15. I’ve just been bad about updating given the semester for one reason or another. Now that break is coming, I plan to get some previous missions up here so that they are in the archive and do some catch up. In any event, I’ve made a lot of forays into the bread world. This time up, chocolate chip bread. This bread is really good — extremely tasty. It’s also not hard to make, so I think a beginner baker can handle it without any problem at all. I made a round and oval loaf here, with a brushed egg wash on top and then sprinkled sugar added to that. These loaves came out just the right side of moist. Mmm! The recipe is below.

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In his essay, “Human Nature and Moral Understanding in the Xunzi,” Philip Ivanhoe suggests (in his discussion of the transformational character of becoming moral for Xunzi) that:

…Xunzi is making a radical claim about the nature of the understanding that arises from mastery of Confucian ritualistic practices and forms. He is not making the weaker but related claim that one needs to be situated in some world view before one has the possibility of acting intentionally and developing some kind of morality. That would be Heidegger, not Xunzi.

I agree, but at the same time wonder why Ivanhoe doesn’t make more of this insightful recognition of a connection between the two thinkers. Xunzi may actually be pushing a more extreme Heideggerrian point, which makes the connection useful.

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