Wines of the Giro: Stage 1: Gragnano and Cav!

http://www.gazzetta.it/static_images/ciclismo/giroditalia/2013/zoom/planimetria_01.jpg

 
Stage 1: Naples – Naples
Distance: 130km
Category: Flat
This year, rather than with a prologue or time trial, we start with a pretty flat stage through Naples, designed for the sprinters. Fingers crossed here for a Cavendish win. But we shall see.  

Here we go again: The Giro! I've even added a sport package to my cable system in order to watch the coverage from BEIN on my tv. Starting out though with Eurosport online. Looks like a beautiful day for a race. 
And the first small break:
  giroditalia 6:16am via Web

The gap is now 1:30, 92 km left. Visconti takes the first mountain's points. #Giro

But safe to say that they will not be going far. Look at that, the Giro on my tv, if a bit delayed by soccer coverage.
From twitter:
Irng 7:13am via Web

Watching the Giro stage is like watching Vesuvius across the bay. It's nice to look at but you're secretly waiting for everything to erupt.

Around they went, with the day's course consisted of four laps of an opening circuit, which included a climb, and then eight laps of a flat closing circuit. With a sprint anticipated, the break never grew and as it came down to the finish, Cannondale, Orica-GreenEdge, Argos-Shimano and Omega Pharma-QuickStep were setting up their sprint trains. Cannondale moved to the front and picked up the pace yet again and the field became a long string. This split the field and the crash caused a gap, leaving 12 or so riders at the front, including Mark Cavendish. The Cannondale team faded as they crossed under the flamme rouge, with Orica-GreenEdge leading the sprint. Matthew Goss had a great lead out and started his sprint with 200 meters to go. But Cavendish was also moving up and came up on the right side with speed, to grab the win and the first pink jersey. Yay!

Results:

1	Mark Cavendish (GBr) Omega Pharma - Quick Step
2	Elia Viviani (Ita) Cannondale
3	Nacer Bouhanni (Fra) FDJ
4	Danilo Hondo (Ger) Radioshack - Leopard
5	Giacomo Nizzolo (Ita) Radioshack - Leopard
6	Matthew Harley Goss (Aus) Orica - GreenEdge
7	Francisco José Ventoso Alberdi (Spa) Movistar
8	Adam Blythe (GBr) BMC Racing Team
9	Leigh Howard (Aus) Orica - GreenEdge	0:00:23
10	Brett Lancaster (Aus) Orica - GreenEdge	0:00:32

A preview of some of the wines to come

Wine: Cantine Federiciane Monteleone Penisola Sorrentina Gragnano 2011, $14.99, from 67Wine

From the producer, with some help from google translate:  
SORRENTO GRAGNANO DOC
The slopes of Vesuvius, hidden and raised in the volcanic soils of the Sorrentine Peninsula, (this wine is) always produced with skill a noble and is an ancient wine of Naples. The Gragnano is a rebel wine with an intense color, which often emits from the mouth of the bottle or by the glass s a fine red foam is probably reminiscent of the great eruption of Vesuvius. This wine is made ​​from old forms of breeding and a mixed blend, where the main characteristics of noble grape varieties as "Piedirosso and Aglianico" give the finished product the quality of freshness and liveliness enhanced, however, by the final stage of "taking of foam. "



From NY Mag in 2009: "Italians, it turns out, aren’t big on vino with pizza. Beer, yes (Peroni, usually). Even Coke. There is one rather obscure exception: Gragnano, the frizzante red that comes from the town of the same name on the Sorrento Peninsula outside of Naples. Drunk young and served chilled, Gragnano has a touch of sweetness, a smoky finish, and a slight effervescence that cuts the fattiness of cheese and oil. David Orange, president of Brooklyn-based importer Wine Emporium, started bringing in Cantine Federiciane Monteleone Penisola Sorrentina Gragnano five years ago, and describes the blend as “inky, grapy, and similar to Lambrusco, with smaller bubbles.” The wine has DOC status, appealing to those new-school pizzaioli who aspire to Neapolitan authenticity in all things."

I say: It will not surprise anyone that I opted to pair this wine, chilled, with pizza. Frizzante, slightly sweet and intensely red. Grapey indeed. I think it would be an excellent backyard barbecue wine. A fun way to start the race. 

Easy Lemon Confit

Lemons halfway through the first boil.

Lemon confit was not my first choice for this weekend's project. I really wanted to make rhubarb compote. But after the excitement of finding rhubarb at the farmers market last week, it was not to be found at any of the three markets we checked.

Meyer lemons

Instead, Lisa suggested this confit, something she has made a few times in the past. I had never tasted it, but one forkful was enough to convince me. It is tangy, slightly sweet, spicy and fragrant. Lisa liked to mix with with chopped fresh celery or parsley and serve it with grilled asparagus. She also suggests spooning it into an avocado or eating it with roast chicken. I imagine that it would also be great with grilled fish or as the base of a pasta sauce. Obviously, it can also serve as a salt-free substitute for preserved lemons. 

Lime thyme

Pickled Lemon Confit  

Note: This recipe involves very little active work, but the process of boiling and then cooling the lemons takes time. As always, we made a few changes to the printed recipe: We substituted meyer lemons for Eureka, lime thyme for regular thyme, as I had it growing in my garden and also dried red peppers from a CSA box, for the jalapenos. We also made a second batch minus the dried peppers to share with chile averse family.

from The Elements of Taste by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky

• 10 lemons, halved and seeded (We used meyer lemons as they were available in a friend's yard)
• 1 teaspoon allspice berries
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
• 1 jalapeno chiles (We substituted 2 dried red peppers)
• 10 sprigs thyme (We used lime thyme from my garden)
• 1 tablespoon white peppercorns
• 3 cups water
• 1/4 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/4 cup sugar 

Combine all of the ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn off the heat and cool. Repeat, boiling and cooling 4 or 5 times, until the lemons are almost translucent. We cooled the lemons for about 40 minutes each time. Place the lemons in a glass jar and cover with the confit liquid. Store in the refrigerator until needed.

Ready to jar.

My half of our two batches.

 

Strawberry Whipped Cream Cake

 When K was younger, she was my assistant in the kitchen. She liked to measure, cream butter and sugar and always, lick the bowl or beater. Eventually though, she decided that she wanted to try baking on her own. Muffins and cookies became her own projects. We would choose a recipe together and I would be banished from the kitchen. At first, a yell would come from the kitchen every few minutes: "Is the butter fluffy enough?" "Can you help me separate the eggs?" "Does the frosting look ready to you?" "Can you put the pan in the oven?" "Can you test to see if it is done?" 

Cakes though, remained a joint project. But at some point this year, she decided that she could do them on her own as well. She would choose a recipe, or more often, come up with an idea. My job was to purchase any missing ingredients from a list she provided and to let her work on her own. Except, it turns out, when it comes time to cut the cake into layers. That she says "is still too hard for me to do yet. Yet." 

Here is what she has to say about her Easter Cake. "I decided I wanted something with strawberries. So I based it off of the same recipe as I used for the St. Patrick's Day cake, from one of the cakes we tested for Caitlin. 

First up, I cut strawberries and mixed them with sugar, so they would be juicy and sweet.
Then I made the cake. It was a basic yellow cake. I did use vanilla paste and vanilla salt, but beyond that I followed the recipe.
After the cake was done, we let it cool completely, overnight. I did not want to wait. 
On Easter day, I made whipped cream. I added the juice from the strawberries, to make the cream sweet and turn it kind of pink. Then Mama cut the cake into two layers for me. 

I put the strawberries on top of the bottom layer. Once the top was on, I frosted it with the whipped cream. I put a couple of whole strawberries on for decoration. It was really good."

For the cake: There are a lot of good basic cake recipes available and most bakers have a favorite. The recipe that K used, from Modern Art Desserts by Caitlin Freeman, can be found here. Her modifications to it were to use vanilla paste rather than extract, to sub vanilla salt for plain salt and to bake in a 9-inch pan.

Simple Strawberry Filling
Many strawberry compotes use lemon, K opted not to include it. 

-->

5 cups fresh strawberries, cleaned and hulled
1/2 cup sugar

Cut the strawberries in half, or quartered if they are especially big.
Combine them with the sugar and toss with your hands to incorporate.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit at room temperature for 2 hours, until the strawberries soften and are swimming in a good amount of juice.
Store in the refrigerator until ready to use.
To use: drain the juice from the strawberries, reserving both. 

Strawberry Whipped Cream

1 pint whipping cream

Juice from the cut strawberries

In a mixer whip your cream until it forms soft peaks. Add your strawberry juice and continue whipping until well combined. 

 

Green Eggs & Brown Eggs & White Eggs: Experimenting with Natural Dyes for Easter

The results

The colors, before dyeing

Green eggs and brown eggs and white eggs, oh my! 

This year, to add a new twist to our usual naturally dyed Easter Eggs, we opted to experiment with several colors of eggs. Our local cookbook store, Omnivore Books, sells farm fresh, colorful eggs. I buy a dozen often. Two of our cats, Willow and Oolong, were even featured in their newsletter, checking out a new batch.

Are these cat food?

To add to these colors we picked up a dozen at 4505 Meats, because we wanted to include a few white eggs for comparison. We then hard boiled a dozen: 4 white, 4 green and 4 brown.
 
Our dyes were made with:
Blackberries (previously frozen, from our backyard patch)
Beets (One large red beet, roughly chopped)
Onion skins (mainly yellow, but with a few red mixed in as well, gathered from our vegetable drawer, about 1 cup in total)
Red cabbage (1/2 of a head, roughly chopped)

Place each dyeing material in a in separate pot and cover with water. After they reach a boil, lower your heat and simmer until you are happy with the color. In our case, that was about 30 minutes. Strain the liquid into 4 large canning jars (or bowls) and allow to cool.

We added our brown eggs plain, but for each white and green egg, wrapped a rubber band around the egg so we could tell them apart. 

Checking them out

Labeled, because as you can tell, they look alike

The results:
Cabbage after three hours. Note, from K: "I like that blue. I don't want them in any longer. You need to take them out. Now!  . . . The brown is weird looking."

Brown, white, green

We waited until the next morning to check the other three.

Onion: As you can see, one of the rubber bands fell off. K says "Very dark, but pretty."

White, green, brown

 Blackberry: Again, a missing rubber band. The most delicate color.

White, green brown

Beet:We were hoping they would be a bit pinker. 

White, green, brown

All of the eggs

K's St. Patrick's Day Party Cake

"Mama, I want to make the cake like one of the Thiebaud cakes from Caitlin's book."

"What does that mean?"

"Vanilla cake with layers and filling inside."

"What kind of filling?"

"Can I use your lime curd?"

"No."

"The lime jelly?

"Sure."

"I want bright green frosting. And I mean BRIGHT green."

Her plan: 2 batches of Rose’s Downy Yellow Butter Cake, cut to make a total of 4 layers, filled with lime jelly and frosted with BRIGHT green buttercream, plus a few sprinkles for good measure.

Cake ingredients

Lime jelly to contrast with the sweet cake and frosting

The final cake

Leftovers. The jelly helps keep the cake moist.

 
 

More from K: Sprouts Cooking at Tartine

It was a good cooking weekend for K: First the Omnivore Books pudding contest and then on Sunday she participated in a Sprouts Cooking class at Tartine Bakery. I've mentioned Sprouts here before, they offer cooking classes, camps and more, all designed to get kids better connected to the food that they eat and cook. K has really enjoyed everything that she has done with them and I admit that more than once I have wished that I could participate as well. Perhaps someday they will offer a parent-child class. For more info, see there site.

From K: "First we walked to Tartine. It felt like walking to school, except I had my kit of knives, a rolling pin, apron and two rags with me. As soon as I got there, they talked to us about kitchen safety and showed us around the kitchen. There were 9 kids in the group with one baker from Tartine and three from Sprouts. One of things we saw was a walk-in refrigerator. It was giant and had blocks of butter that were something like 44 pounds each!

They split us into groups and gave us a recipe. One group made a small batch and the other made a giant batch of a dough called Pate a Choux. I was in the giant group. We each got a different ingredient. I got two--butter and sugar! You had to scrape the butter off of one of the giants blocks. The sugar was in a regular container. 

After we finished the dough, we separated 120 eggs. We did not use them for our project. It was fun because there was so many of them and the pile of yolks was enormous. We needed to use two containers.

Then we piped the dough out onto baking sheets. I made broomsticks, circles, a K and an eight. While they were baking, we made whipped cream. We each had bowls and whipped it by hand. It took a while. At home we usually just do it in the mixer. Then we mixed some of it with pre-made pastry cream to make Bavarian Cream. Then we supremed citrus. That is a fancy way of cutting so you don't get any of the pith. It also makes neat slices.

When the dough was finished baking, we started assembling. We cut the shapes in half and put whatever we wanted inside: whipped cream, Bavarian cream, powdered sugar or fruit. Later they brought out caramel and two kinds of Bi-Rite ice cream: salted caramel and cookies and cream, that we could also use. The dough tasted kind of like a popover. They were really good and I made a bunch to bring home to Mama.

The best part of the class was assembling and eating. I learned how to supreme fruit and what Bavarian cream was. I also got to see the inside of a professional kitchen and that was cool. I was surprised at how small it was, considering how busy they are. The baker was also really nice and so were the kids. I hope I can go to Sprouts Camp again this summer."

Slightly messy from transport, but proof she really did bring some home.

A Post from K: Cookies and Cream Pudding

Ready to go!

Whisking the pudding. I love my Wicked shirt!

Cookie crumbs, in process

Violet watched

To finish, whipped cream and a few chocolate pearls

Turns out 3 was both the entry number and placement!

K's thoughts on the Omnivore Books pudding contest:
When Mama told me that there was going to be a pudding contest at Omnivore, I wanted to enter. Actually, I wanted to eat pudding, but it seemed like it might be fun to do both. I had never made pudding before so it was really hard for me to decide to know what to make. Mama had a bunch of ideas like chocolate and butterscotch, but I wanted to do a vanilla pudding. Mama said it might be fun to think of something besides just plain vanilla. So I came up with the idea of layering. Mama suggested that I could layer with the Blue Bottle sable cookies, that I had made when we tested recipes. 

Step one was to make the cookies. Instead of making them look nice, I made a mess on the baking sheet because I was going to crumble them and did not care how they looked. Plus, it was fun. The next step was the pudding. I used a recipe from Smitten Kitchen and one from the New York Times. I started with one recipe and it seemed like it was not going to thicken. I let it sit overnight and then made a new pudding recipe, which worked. After I made the new one, I reheated the old one and it thickened. It needed to chill quickly because it was almost time for the contest.
When the puddings were cold, I started the next step, layering. I did cookies, pudding, cookies, a lot of pudding, cookies, pudding and then whipped cream flavored with vanilla. Then Mama let me use some of her chocolate pearls on top. 

Carrying it to the contest was hard! It was heavy and Mama had to help. My pudding was the third entry. There were a lot of people and a lot of different puddings. People got to taste every pudding and then they voted for their favorite. I came in third, sort of, because there was a tie for second place. It was really fun and I want to try doing it again.