Finding Spring in Chicago

"Bet your bottom dollar that you'll lose the blues in Chicago...."

And so I did. All winter blues ceased. I found spring. And when I left, Michigan Avenue was still awash in gaggles of tulips that would make Holland smile... the temps were in the 70's and 80's...I wore short sleeves... capris...sandals...

And I came home to lilac week.

And phlox and tulips.

And 50 degrees.
Matthew decked out the home with vases filled with lilacs as a welcome home.

Our first day was warm and gray.

Until we found Team Lizard down at the Navy Pier. If there is no sun, create your own!

Millenium Park was all angles and spirals and silver. We walked 12 miles the first day.

I love the green spaces in urban areas. The NYC child in me will always be a city girl - with a longing for green.

And the skies cleared and the next day we walked another 6-8 miles. The juxtaposition of the parks and the skyscrapers heartened. Chicago celebrates the accomplishments of mankind with its bustling downtown loop but gives way to the spirit and the beauty of the earth by melding green space and cityscapes. Lake and river. Scope and height. And when the sun warmed us, Paul and I decided to not go inside a building unless it rained.

It didn't. And so we gleefully played outside just as we did 25 years ago as newlyweds on Maui. And walked. And walked. (Until I discovered 8 blisters on my toes. Not to be dissuaded, we found band aids and walked some more.)

And when I came home to chill and clouds, I "cooked" spring. After reading Bon Appetit on the plane, I craved color. And so it came to pass that I made something similar to the recipe I had read - Halibut with mango salsa. Red, green, white and orange sitting on a plate as prettily as my phlox and lilacs. As beguiling as the tulips I left behind.

Halibut with Mango Salsa - serves 4

(Use any whitefish that strikes your fancy)

1-1/2 - 2 pounds halibut

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil - divided

juice and zest of 1 lime

1 mango peeled and seeded

1 avocado, diced into small chunks

1 pint cherry tomatoes - halved or quartered

a handful of slivered basil

salt and pepper to taste

Whisk 1 tablespoon of olive oil with 1 tablespoon of fresh lime juice. Brush liberally on the halibut and salt and pepper it to taste. Let sit ten minutes. Grill or bake halibut until desired doneness. I hesitate to give times - my halibut was thick requiring 12 minutes on one side and 12 minutes on the other - and yes, it rained so it was baked in a 350 degree F oven.

In a medium bowl, combine diced avocado*, diced mango**, cherry tomatoes, basil, the rest of the olive oil and lime juice and zest. Salt and pepper to taste. Let sit at room temperature or cover and chill for the day.

When halibut is done, spoon over the fish and serve. Find spring during the dinner hour!

*I tried Bon Appetit's suggestion of immersing the cut avocado in ice cold water to prevent browning. Lo and behold! It worked!

**I chased the slippery sucker of a mango all around the kitchen as it tried to escape after being peeled. I have since learned to cut the cheeks of the mango. Dice without cutting into the skin and then cut the peel off.

We did go inside for meals and yes, of course I ate my way through Chicago. There was no way I was going to tell Chicago, "Oh! I'm "mindfully eating" - can I have a wedge of iceberg lettuce?" Part of the wonder of enjoying the city was because of the advice from fellow bloggers. I'm grateful for the advice of Marie from Proud Italian Cook and Pat from Mille Fiori Favoriti who steered me in the right eating direction. The blogging community truly opens up new avenues of discovery. As I try to recreate some of the Chicago meals at Quartino, Floriole and Gioco's in the coming weeks I shall give you a sampling and a few recipes of the wonder that is dining "Chicago style." (And sorry, it doesn't include hot dogs and pizza - although they were pretty tasty!). Chicago is a buffet. And we gleefully stepped up to the plate.

Two Weeks of Toast

It was a simple weekend morning that belied the busyness of the weekdays. Husband-person is settled in an armchair with paper. I'm wrapped in a cozy, with coffee on the left, purring cat in lap and balancing May's Bon Appetit (devoted to Italy). And then it happened. I was hypnotized.

Eggs on toast. How basic is that? True it has smoked salmon, mashed avocado with lime, fresh chives and did I mention that you stir in a dollop of creme fraiche? In a trance, I picked up my car keys and left telling husband-person, "Don't eat anything. I will return."

And I did. With sourdough bread and an avocado to finish the ingredient list. Is it a recipe? Not really - it's just what the Italians savor - fresh ingredients. Separately they delight. Together they bewitch.

Ingredients - for 2

sourdough bread, sliced, toasted in the oven

4 eggs (or 2 eggs and 6 egg whites) whisked with a healthy dollop of creme fraiche (or butter or sour cream)

lime

1/2 avocado - mashed with lime juice - to taste

2 slices of smoked salmon (or lox)

fresh chives - about 6

Prep

Snip your chives, toast your bread, soft-scramble your eggs - add in 1/2 your chives towards the end of the scrambling process and scatter the rest on the dish when done. Smear mashed avocado on toast. Top with scrambled eggs, put a slice of smoked salmon on top, scatter remaining chives and find bliss.

Janet McCracken, Deputy Food Editor of Bon Appetit also suggests roasted red peppers with goat cheese or Prosciutto with caramelized onions. With eggs on toast. I second the suggestions.

During the last two weeks, I found myself directing a touring production of two casts of Hansel and Gretel as well as a lovely food-centric play Food For Thought, editing Under a Midsummer Moon (the play I deleted is a phoenix) and researching my new play Searching for Uncle Otto. It's tricky - moving from the Gingerbread House to July 1969's Central Park in New York City with side trips to 1930's Russia. It is no wonder I turn to toast for sustenance. I am toast. Sometimes sweetly-spiced, often nutty, alternately brittle and pliable.

As I walked through life as a piece of toast, I felt myself smitten by Smitten Kitchen's Leek toasts with blue cheese. Who tweaked it from Molly Wizenberg's leek confit. It must be Murphy's Law that when you are "toast," you are attracted to toast.

My version uses goat cheese. And it's simply your favorite bread - lightly toasted. Smeared with goat cheese and topped with caramelized or sauteed leeks. Find the recipe here. Toast can be mesmerizing.

The first performance of Hansel and Gretel was at a center for families with challenges. The play's interactive and the audience (whew) laughed where we hoped they would and participated with respect and gusto. When the father in the play announced, "We will never be hungry again!" they clapped. A poignant moment for the cast and crew.

I may be toast. But I have the means to eat. I watch the tulips close at dusk.

And the ducks sleep in our grasses.

And give gratitude for my two weeks of toast. I am off to Chicago for some R&R - which may be an anomaly or just what the doctor ordered. The computer remains at home. Have a grand week. As I toast my 25th anniversary, you can toast some bread.

Pizza Rustica

Lilies and poinsettias. Easter/Christmas. Winter/Spring. And those are my days. As I search for the Mediterranean in Minnesota, I find spring and winter trading barbs. This winter will not go gently into the good night. But spring is getting more demanding.

"You may snow," declares spring. "But you will be melted within the hour."

Our dinners remain a combination of thin-asparagus-pea-shoots-spring and hearty grains. And for a chilly eve, Pizza Rustica welcomes home the spring-chilled family. Packed with vegetables and yes - some fatty meats - this was our traditional night-before Easter meal and just plain - "make it and hope for leftovers for the week." (Fat chance.)

PIZZA RUSTICA - adapted from my mother and Giadi Di Laurentiis

I lightened it - but it's still rich. It's what you want after hiking the hills or weeding the maple tree forest that has taken over the garden. It's what you want when your spirit has a taste for creamy, tangy, spicy, chewy and supple. It's definitely what you want after you scrapped the last 30 pages of your play that you spent a month churning out. Because in the end - it wasn't very good.

PIZZA RUSTICA INGREDIENTS

• 1-16 oz package frozen spinach (or save yourself the headache of endlessly draining and saute 1 bag of spinach in smallest amount of olive oil possible until wilted)


• 2 teaspoons chopped garlic


• salt and pepper top taste


• 15 oz container whole milk ricotta cheese


• 1/3 cup freshly-shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano + 2 tablespoons for finishing


• 3 large egg yolks (make an egg-white omelette the next day)


• Favorite pastry dough (use frozen if you wish)


• 2 cups shredded Fontina cheese (can use mozzarella)


• 6 ounces prosciutto - coarsely chopped


• 6 ounces thin salami - coarsely chopped


• (can also add pepperoni if desired)


• 3 roasted red peppers (or 1 small jar drained), chopped a wee bit


• 1 large egg, beaten

*NOTE: I don't measure - the amounts are guidelines. Put in more meat, less cheese, more roasted peppers - find your balance and adjust to your tastes. And when the oregano bush springs back to like - I certainly will be incorporating those leaves into the ricotta - or use my basil... or thyme.

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.


2. Squeeze spinach of as much liquid as possible (if using frozen).


3. Heat oil in medium skillet and add garlic and spinach. Saute briefly.


4. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside to cool.


5. Blend ricotta, the Parmigiano-Reggiano and the eggs yolks in a medium bowl until smooth. Roll out dough to 1 17-inch round. Transfer dough to a springform pan. (there will be extra dough spilling over.


6. Sprinkle half the spinach on the bottom of the dough.


7. Sprinkle 1/2 the Fontina over the spinach.


8. Then half of the roasted red peppers over the Fontina and half of the meat mixture over the red peppers.


9. Then half of the ricotta mixture over the meats and repeat. Roll out 2nd dough into a 14-inch round. Place dough over filling. Press to seal with bottom dough (that was overlapping) . Don't let dough press against the sides of the springform pan. Brush top with beaten egg and sprinkle the last 2 tablespoons of Parmigiano-Reggiano on the dough. Bake for about one hour (if dough becomes browned too quickly, cover with tin foil). Let rest 20-30 minutes. Serve hot, warm and it's grand even cold for a picnic.

It works for winter, spring, picnics by the fire, cabins in the mountains, in the hills, by the beach - it just works. And it soothes the soul in the computer room that just deleted half of her play and is now not sure how the story ends.

Pasta with Peppers and Goat Cheese - a new tradition

"We don't worry so much about saving traditions. Traditions change all the time. We want to save the culture of food here." Giovanni Rebora in Laura Schenone's The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken.

That quote returns to me again and again during holiday cooking.

Am I keeping the "home fires burning" with traditions? Or saving the culture of memory for my family? Pizza du Grane or Neopolitan Wheat Pie or Easter Grain Pie - it's been made in most Italian families for generations. The wheat symbolizes spring - new birth and new life. Around the country, my cousins are making these. We stir the pastiera together.

Pastiera: soaked and cooked wheat berries later cooked in cream, milk and sugar. There is no shortcut - no microwave recipe. I stir the pastiera as my mother does and as my grandmother did.

I am told my great-grandmother was working in a field when my great-grandfather came by on horseback. Stunned by her beauty, he spoke with her, courted her and married her. She was a coarse peasant (my grandmother's assertion) and his family was not pleased. For great-grandfather was a landowner. It was the 1800's and a caste system was still firmly in place. And that is all I know of her.

As a young child I saw fields from Italy - re-imagined in my own mind as the fields on outer Long Island and New Jersey that I visited. I see her hunched over and then suddenly looking up - the sun momentarily blinding her and finally seeing my great-grandfather. Hard-work and innocence in her eyes. Did she see "love at first sight?" Or escape? And I continue to picture her beauty. It's part fairy tale with a "happily ever after" that would take generations to be true. In the meantime, much bread was broken and years of meals were shared.

With so little knowledge of her, the pastiera binds us. Surely Philomena stirred the pastiera as I did tonight. For Tess - Mary Theresa - my grandmother must have learned the recipe from her. Which was passed down to my mother and aunts without ever writing a word. The baking of the Pizza du Grane has become more than tradition - it's been the cornerstone of my Easters and one of the things that gave my Midwestern children a slice and a surety of their Italian heritage. I think "Pizza du Grane" might have been their first Italian words (spoken in dialect of course). If you want to explore spring, find the recipe here. It's sweet, creamy, a bit chewy and filled with promise.

Good Friday always meant shellfish pasta. Part culture of course - fasting and no meat on Good Friday. Part tradition.

My mother bought no less than 8 pounds of shellfish for dinner for six. And one of those six does not touch fish! Culture or tradition? She feeds a village when she cooks. This is hardly fasting.

Under the shellfish you will find 3 pounds of pasta. For 6 people! There are no protestations when you see the table groaning from excess - for it is not the amount of food that my mother was thinking of - it was the amount of nurturing she wanted to give.

With the shellfish pasta dinner held earlier this month, Good Friday's tradition changed. The busyness of our lives begged for simplicity.

Penne with Peppers and Goat Cheese (adapted from Tastes of Italia) - serves 6

1 pound penne pasta (I used whole wheat)

4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 red pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips

1 yellow pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips

1 green pepper, seeded and cut into thin strips
(I used a medley of peppers and more than the 3)

2 garlic cloves, sliced thin

4 ounces goat cheese - crumbled

salt and pepper to taste

fresh Italian Parsley - for scattering

Cook penne pasta according to package directions. In a medium-large skillet, heat the oil. When hot but not sizzling add the sliced peppers and garlic. Reduce heat to low, cover and let simmer for 15 minutes. Add drained pasta and stir well - coating all well with peppers and the oil. Add the goat cheese and mix well. Salt and pepper to taste. Transfer to serving bowl. Scatter parsley and serve.

I will do this again and again. Until it jumps from tradition into the land of "culture." In the heat of the summer when the peppers beg for a new use, I will greedily pick them and steam them in oil. I will endeavor to mix them with pasta and share my bounty. Or maybe I will just slather them on crusty bread and keep them as a guilty secret with just a few scattered crumbs telling of my crime. Maybe they'll be mixed with Fontina or fresh mozzarella or - oh dear my cheese obsession is showing. I'll stop.

A tradition that my daughter keeps alive is the dyeing of the Easter eggs. The egg decorations reveal what has been important to her during the past year. (e.g. we had years of lots and lots of cat-decorated eggs. The Easter cat trumped the Easter bunny every year.)

As you can see, she's moved on from cats. Really. That's a tiger.

And her sweetie is as enamored with decorating eggs as she is. (Although I will say his Humpty Dumpty egg resembled a zombie.)

Tomorrow the colored eggs get baked into Easter breads. And the Biscotti Regina will be baked. (Recipe is here for these sesame delectables: easy recipe, you do not have to stir with my ancestors to get it right.)

Buona Pasqua, Happy Easter, Happy Passover, Happy Spring. I wish you new traditions and old. May spring whisper new promises that bring joy.

A Spinach Duet

As spring settles into the grocery store, I greedily scarf up the asparagus and smile at Florida's newly-ripened sweet corn. I skip down produce aisles noting that the distance traveled for a vegetable to reach my table is lessening every day.

I bypass the fresh spinach. In truth, I am a bit of a lazybones. Someone who has perfected the art of vacuuming pet fur off of the couch while sitting on said couch. And as long as I am confessing - I will admit to preferring bagged spinach. Not just prefer - rejoice in it. Remembering the years I served it still containing a grain of sand or two or 30. I love the stuff - when someone else washes it for me. I tell myself about e-coli and eating fresh and local and add another bag of spinach to my cart. In celebration of the greening of spring, lots of spinach came to my table last week. In bags. You have my permission to use the fresh stuff.

This is from Sprigs of Rosemary - a lovely blog that has tickled my fancy and fed my green-genes.

Pasta with Shrimp, Spinach and a little Lemon Cream Sauce - serves 4 in my family where portion control is not a strong point or 6
(Adapted from Sprigs of Rosemary)
1 pound spaghetti
Juice of 1-2 lemons (you need about 1/2 cup)

Zest of the 1-2 lemons (you decide how lemony you want it)
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/3 cup light cream
½ cup of freshly-shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus more for serving
1 bag baby spinach
1 pound shrimp, cleaned
salt and pepper to taste

Zest and juice the lemon. Cook pasta adding the shrimp in during the lat two minutes of cooking time. Drain, reserving 1 cup pasta water. In same pot (love the "same pot" directions) boil the olive oil, half and half, zest and 1/2 cup of the pasta water together for two minutes over high heat. Return pasta and shrimp to pot and stir until coated. Add the cheese and 1/4 cup lemon juice and toss. If needed, add more pasta water, a few tablespoons at a time until the sauce is at your desired consistency. Add remaining lemon juice, then toss in spinach leaves wilted. Salt and pepper to taste (I like it peppery without much salt). Serve, passing Parmigiano-Reggiano separately.

Or play with this easy (I am all about ease) Chicken-Spinach-Avocado Salad from The Splendid Table. - serves 4

1 bag baby spinach

2 chicken breasts cooked

1-2 avocados

sliced favorite black olives

grape tomatoes

feta cheese crumbles

dressing: equal parts lemon juice and olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Favorite fresh herbs: cilantro, Italian parsley or lemon thyme are all good in this

Toss spinach, chicken, avocados, olives, feta, grape tomatoes and favorite herb together. Whisk equal parts of lemon juice and olive oil together (I did a little less than 1/4 cup of each). Pour desired amount over salad - just moistening it and announce "dinner is served."

Minnesotans woke up this morning relieved to discover that there would be a white Passover after all (and some were worried).

And with temps staying fifteen degrees below normal, one must color those Easter eggs. For finding them in a sea of white could be tricky. Ask the tulips. Or don't. They don't seem to be planning on blooming anytime soon.
And my thanks to The Wine Lady Cooks for this lovely award. Please visit her charming blog and check out her goodies. She is having fun with bacon! And if you are a follower, feel free to add this to your blog. I am deeply appreciative that you spend your precious time with me. "Choosing" is too problematical for me! I am off to audition actors for a play and it's the worst part of the process. There is always a wealth of talent and a scarcity of roles. Just as there remains a wealth of talent in the blogging world.