Pizza Mashup

Da Michele is reputed to make the world's best pizza. Determined to taste it, we walked out of the Naples train station last October and approached two polizia, asking, "E siguro camminare qui? (Is it safe to walk here?)" They reassured us, saying, "Si, si, e siguro. Momentito. Non portano gioielli? Non c'e problema. (Sure, it's safe. Wait a minute. You are not wearing jewelry, are you? No problem.)" Following their expressive hand gestures, we entered the maze of gritty streets and, after getting hopelessly lost, asked a shop keeper for Da Michele. Of course, everyone in Naples knows Da Michele and everyone is happy to point and suggest, "Camina un po e poi chiede un'altra persona. (Walk a little this way and then ask another person.)" After several rounds of this, we easily recognized Da Michele by the crowd of people, mostly locals, waiting outside the door. A kind woman advised us to go inside to get a number, which we did. Later, we passed on the same essential advice to a Japanese woman whose English was only slightly better than her Italian and whose husband spoke only Japanese. When she returned with her number, she asked us to pronounce it for her in Italian several times so that she would recognize it when it was called. Da Michele is famous indeed.

After waiting about 20 minutes, we squeezed inside to sit at one of the long tables that crowd two small dining rooms. The waiter gave us a choice of pizzas: margherita or marinara, regular or large. That was it. No sausage, no peppers, no nothing else. Needless to say, the pizza was splendid. However, we couldn't help but notice that the dough, delicious as it was, appeared to be made entirely of white flour. Bella, on the other hand, makes her dough entirely of semolina. That gives it more flavor, more body, and a beautiful golden color. Da Michele makes the best pizza in the world, but we like Bella's pizza better!

Following the masters at Da Michele, Bella makes two red sauces, a sweet sauce for pizza margherita and a spicy sauce for pizza marinara. Whether for pizza or
pasta, margherita or marinara, San Marzano tomatoes are the best for red sauce. That is what they use at Da Michele and that is what we use at home. We grow 10-20 San Marzano plants in our summer garden, producing hundreds of sweet, long, gently pear-shaped, densely-fleshed tomatoes. We grow enough San Marzanos to make fresh red sauces all summer, enough to puree and freeze in quart containers for winter, and and enough to make several quarts of "sun-dried" tomatoes in our dehydrator. (In fact, we already have dozens of San Marzano seedlings flourishing next to the windows in our garage. More on this later!) We also grow basil for our margherita pizzas and oregano for our marinara pizzas. Last week, we made a sausage and caramelized onion pizza, with marinara sauce from San Marzanos we grew, pureed, and froze last summer and fresh oregano from our winter garden.

Of course, not all of our pizzas have red sauce on them. In fact, the current family favorite is a four-cheese pizza. You can find many great "recipes" for the four cheeses. We got ours at a restaurant in Venice several years ago. It actually includes five cheeses: gorgonzola, fontina, ementhaler, mozzarella, and parmegiano.

After our visit to Da Michele, we decided that we wanted to eat a lot more pizza. So we started making double recipes of pizza dough and freezing a few one-pizza balls for future use. We can take out one to make an hors-d'oevre or first course for dinner. We can take out five or six to make a variety of pizzas--margherita, sausage, peppers, anchovies, olives, eggplant--for movie night in the family room.

Recently, we've been feeling more inventive. For example, Bella fondly remembered the "clams casino" she used to enjoy at the Jersey shore and thought it might be fun to make a clams casino / pizza mashup--her all-semolina dough, marinara sauce with frozen San Marzano puree from our summer garden, barely steamed fresh clams, chopped garlic and pancetta, and fresh oregano from our winter garden. Mmmm. Deliziosa!

Spinach: the crop that keeps on giving

As we leave February behind and begin March, we thought it appropriate to have a nice dinner of spring lamb chops with a fresh mint/parsley chimichurri, and spinach cooked slowly and briefly with olive oil, garlic, and salt.

The spinach in the garden, planted last September to be ready in time for the traditional spinach gnocchi at Thanksgiving, is still growing and yielding! Here Tess (now 10 weeks old) is "helping" to harvest some spinach for dinner. We just cut off the largest and mature leaves, as many as we need, and keep the plants in place to keep producing...as we have done all fall and winter so far.

In the kitchen, we made some spaghetti carbonara (using guanciale and pecorino, of course), to savor as a first course. Then we moved on to the lamb chops and spinach, shown here. It was a wonderful dinner, and we look forward to many more meals made with garden parsley, mint, and spinach. And, although we now have our border collie Tess to herd sheep, we doubt that we'll be growing our own lamb chops anytime soon!

Nora and Andrew make Julia Child's boeuf bourguignon.

Bella was a college student in the late 60's, in Boston, where Julia Child was a local celebrity. Bella loved watching Julia's WGBH TV show, "The French Chef" and she used Julia's book, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," to plan and prepare her feldgling dinner parties. Inspired by her teacher's cheerful nonchalance, Bella offered her guests quiche lorraine, spinach and cheese souffle, coq au vin, duck with cherries, and beef with bearnaise sauce.

The first time Bella cooked a meal for Perry, she made "something" in aspic. The aspic was a first for both of them, so noteworthy (weird) that neither can remember what the "something" was.

Although Bella's pies and cream puffs had delighted her father for years, they became even better when she made them with Julia's pate brisee and pate a choux. At our Thanksgiving feast, Bella regularly makes 5 different pies, so that each family member can have his or her favorite. The first 4 pies are sure to be cherry, apple, pumpkin, and lemon meringue. But the 5th is a swing pie and, in various years, it has been key lime, pecan, or coconut cream. But Bella's greatest pie triumph came a few years ago, when a Parisian post-doc in her lab at Stanford pronounced her cherry pie, "incroyable!" All thanks to Julia.

We now cook more Italian than French food and several other cuisines as well. We have dozens of excellent cookbooks and, of course, the Web. Nonetheless, Julia's worn, food-stained, 40-year-old book remains on our kitchen shelf. We frequently take it down to make an old favorite, but occasionally we make a new recipe that somehow we have never made before.

The recent film "Julie/Julia" introduced many people to the wondrous Julia Child and renewed our interest in her. When our local bookstore, Kepler's, celebrated Julia's birthday in August with a cookbook sale, we bought copies of her book for Aaron, Nora, and Nathan. We also started watching her TV show all over again on DVDs from NetFlix.

Amazingly--or maybe not so amazingly--we are still learning from Julia. Who remembered that it takes only 20 seconds to make an omelet? What a great idea to put all your ingredients on a tray before starting so that you don't forget any in the rush of cooking. How convenient it is that almost anything Julia cooks can be served with a simple green salad and a crisp Riesling to make a perfectly lovely lunch. But did Julia really think a novice cook would start making a much more delicious French-style meatloaf (a pate) by skinning a duck???

We especially enjoy watching Julia's TV show with Nora and her friend Andrew. Having grown up in an era of highly processed and refined media, they watch in awe as Julia wings it. Taping her show in one continuous, unedited session, glancing at her cue cards, losing her tools, saying one thing when meaning another--Julia never loses her confidence or enthusiasm. How self-actualized was this large and rather ungainly woman, to insist on more and more butter--because it makes everything so delicious!--as long as "you're not on one of those horrible diets." How insouciant she was, commenting affectionately that the much-admired French would disdain the Asian glaze she put on fish, because, "They don't like anything they did not think of."

Naturally, we were delighted when Nora and Andrew offered to prepare us a dinner of Julia's signature boeuf bourgignon, sauteed asparagus, and parsley potatoes. Bon apetit!