How to eat Arrosticini

Arrosticini are little skewers of grilled lamb meat. The meat has to

be cut into really tiny pieces to cook the right way, quickly, over coals.

Essentially, it's meat on a stick. Readers may remember my post from July 4 this year when we tried to make arrosticini back in Columbus.  Although a valiant effort, it was flawed because we didn't have the means to cut the meat to the correct and uniform dimensions.

Today we're in the spiritual home land of arrosticini, Abruzzo, and we're enjoying the real thing. As we were doing this, I came to remember the trouble that those poor Columbus-ites had trying to eat the meat on a stick, so I prepared this service as a guide.

Step 1: pick a nice restaurant. Outdoor, at night, is the best choice.

Step 2: Order your appetizers, arrosticini, beer, etc. We'll skip past all the preliminaries.  The arrosticini arrive:

Pick one up by the long end of the stick.

Step 3: bring to face.

Step 4: open mouth, insert meat between teeth and grab the last couple pieces of meat between your teeth. Clench.

Step 5: pull stick away from face, holding meat in teeth.

Step 6: Be amazed by the flavor and goodness. Don't need no stinking sauce, ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, etc, they're best straight up!

Here's a better close up view of the arrosticini.

Now some do's and don'ts.

No sword play with your food.

Liquid refreshment, a lot of it, is a good thing.

Finally, save the sticks as you eat so that at the end you can count them and boast about how many arrosticini you ate!

Fare la scarpetta

Today we will explore the curious phrase "fare la scarpetta" or "doing the scarpetta".   What is "the scarpetta"?   Taken literally, it's a little shoe, but as the expression goes "doing the", we're probably not looking for a noun here, we're looking for an action.

But let's back off.   Imagine you sit down at meal time to a nice plate of spaghetti.  Like this one.  Ok, they're vermicelli, but no one will ever know the difference.

These vermicelli are in a sauce that was cooked with tomatoes and fish. You can just see some evidence of this in the lower left corner if you look close.




Let's say you've finished the plate, and let's say it was very good, and the sauce was very satisfying.  And let's pretend you've still got some bread left.

And so you look at the bread, and you look at the leftovers in the bottom of the pan, and you think to yourself "The bread is good, but it's dry.  The sauce is better, but it's inconvenient to eat by itself:  let me put 2 and 2 together and clean the bottom of the pan with the bread!"


With the help of my assistant the 2nd photo shows just such a thing.  He's dipping the bread down into the bottom of the pan to soak up some more sauce.

Before I could get another picture, however, he had eaten all of the sauce and all the leftover vermicelli as well.  He's fast, and insatiable.  It's an inherited trait in his family:  all the males in the family show this same habit.

So, the vermicelli and all the sauce are gone, but we get the idea:  we use the bread to clean the plate, then the cooking vessel.  It's an ageless tradition in Italy, and although it derives from the basest of roots, it's gotten enough of a reputation as a "good thing to do" that if you search Google for "scarpetta" the first few pages of hits will show you links to fine Italian restaurants all over North America instead of explaining to you what "scarpetta" really is.  If you search on Bing, you find links to people who were named "scarpetta";  Bing may be completely correct but they just don't get it.

If you search for "fare la scarpetta" on either one finally you get somewhere.  You'll find links that explain that a piece of bread, when deformed between your fingers, becomes long and flat, and in some way resembles a long thin shoe, something that could reasonably be called a "scarpetta"  (a little shoe.)

So, now we know that it gets the name from the shape of the bread, but how do you do it?  It's easy enough in the plate, but say the plate is already clean?  And the 5qt pan that had the vermicelli has been cleaned out too.  What can we do?

Say we have one of these things on the right.  It's the pan where the fish was cooked in the tomatoes. All the fish is gone, all the tomatoes are gone.  What, then, is left?   Flavour!

We can do something with this. It's perfect for demonstrating the technique because the sides are low and we can get a good picture.

Start with a small piece of bread between your thumb and forefinger.  You will have to experiment with the size to see what works for you.  Try to find good bread.  Here's a hint: if you crush the bread and it turns to sawdust and disappears, it's no good.  It must take the abuse and bounce back to it's original size.

Now dip the end of the bread into the pan, starting away from you.  Slowly, moving it left and right as needed, bring it towards you, soaking up flavor as you go.

Slowly!  Give it time to soak up the sauce.  If you've got good bread to work with it will take the abuse and remain solid.

If you see the bread is staying too dry move around in search of wetter spots.  If you see the bread is getting too wet, pull out before you lose chunks of bread.

When you get to the end of the run, tilt the bread, quickly up into the air, to catch what ever loose sauce is trapped on the end.

Now carry the bread back over to your plate.
Admire the work you did, and shove the whole thing right into your mouth!

So that's how you do "the scarpetta" at home, when you've got the cooking vessels to work with.  In a restaurant, it's not so easy:  the chef doesn't just let you walk into the kitchen.  So you make do with just cleaning the sauce on your plate.  Once in a while, with luck, you will be rewarded for your efforts, and the chef's mother will bring you out more sauce!  (Hey, it really did happen to me!)

How to eat fish

Dear readers, this is what a fish looks like when it arrives on your plate, cooked.
I show two pictures,

Fish, cooked, on plate, Italy

On the left, fish in Italy.

Note that the fish more or less looks like a fish and it has a head on it.

Fish, cooked, on plate, USA

On the right, fish in the USA.
Note that it has been reorganized into a box shape and breaded and fried.








To those of you who grew up eating only the fish on the right (fish sticks, aka fish fingers) I can only say that I am very sorry for you.

To help you out, in case you ever come across a real fish, I have provided this handy guide to how to eat a fish.  You can do this with a fork and knife without getting your hands dirty.  Having a second smaller dish to hold the discarded parts is handy but not essential.  The example fish I used here was cooked in a tomato sauce, but the same steps apply no matter how it's cooked.  You will also need some good bread.

First step, cut off the head.

Make an incision more or less behind the gills, find the spine, and cut through it.  Put the head aside, we'll come back to it.

 Now take the body of the fish and split it into two parts.  To do so, make an incision down the top of the fish all the way from front to tail, down clear until you feel you're hitting the spine.

Make a similar cut from the bottom up.

When you've made those cuts, using the fork and knive you gingerly lift one half of the fish up and over so it now lays open faced.

Now slide the knife under the spine on which ever half of the fish was left with a spine, and cut away the spine from the tail.  If the fish was cooked properly, you will just life the whole spine out without having to struggle.

Put the spine on the scrap plate with the head.

Now you need to work the two open halves of the fish and remove any small bones that are left.  There could be a few. There will be big ones nearer to the gills and small ones anywhere.

The close up on the right shows the procedure to use to pull the bigger bones from the area close to the gills:  slide the knife under them and then lift the bones away, helping with the fork.

These are the two halves after the cleaning.  Now we can start to eat.

Close up of one side.

There could still be some small bones left.
They're most likely to be hiding between folds in the fish or in the sauce.

Be on the lookout.

Once you've eaten the fish, you need the bread to clean the plate.   The sauce that's surrounding the fish is so good that you don't want it to go to waste.

Now we go back to look at our plate of scraps.  This is what we had left over.

We've got the head, the spine, random bones, some skin, etc.

Let's take a close look at the head.

What's that in the head?  More meat and sauce.

Take your knife and dig out the meat, and scrape and pull out the sauce. If no one is watching you can put the whole head to your mouth and such the sauce out.

I'm by no means an expert in working fish heads, but I did what I could and cleaned mine, here's an after picture.  See how all the sauce has been cleaned away?   You can also see between the before and after pictures that large pieces of white meat were pulled out.

If you skip this step, you'll be missing out on some of the best parts of the fish.

Bon Appetit!

Paris airport on a layover

On the way to Napoli, stopped on a brief layover in Paris.

Big Soiree on the 4th of July

Had a big party at home on Independence Day.  The main idea for the menu was pizza, a spaghetti with zucchini recipe from the 1890's, and arrosticini.

Well, didn't end up with any pictures of the home made pizza, what a shame.  Lots of pictures of the arrosticini, though.  They're skewers of lamb meat, a tradition from Abruzzo.

My brother made a make shift grill to cook the skewers.  You need something long and narrow so the skewers are supported and the lamb doesn't have to sit on the rack.

We had another grill going with eggplant, and for overflow.

The soiree started about 2pm and we were still eating at 7pm, so it was a big success!

More pictures here --->  https://www.dropbox.com/sc/nl91b9cdszsjdok/doM3mdNoNB

New Year's Eve Dinner

This is way late, I'm just catching up.

People ask me: what do you on vacation?

Here's what I was doing New Year's eve:  repairing a laptop.

'o polpo, 'o polpo

Oggi si mangia 'o polpo.

Last day for this trip coming up

It's nearly Saturday, last day for this trip.
With the endless re-peating colds, it's been something of a dreadful boring trip, with long bits where I was literally doing nothing because I was too tired or ill to do much.  There were days when I was better but others were sick so on those days you also end up sitting around doing nothing and waiting for everyone to catch up.  All in all a dull trip and I can't remember very many this dull.  I remember one back in 2004 when there was a lot of waiting around, but tthis one was worse.

Don't know what we'll be doing on the last day.  Hopefully we'll get out of the house some.
Big excitement for Wednesday and Thursday this week was walking down the street for 30 minutes just to visit the corner shops or the supermarket.
Such excitement and it's a wonder I can sleep at night!

una vera e' propria vacanza di merda

(For English, look towards the end of the post.)

Non ho scritto molto su questo blog ancora del fatto che quest'anno ci siamo ammalati tutti.  E' cominciato con un raffredore, poi si e passato alla tosse, ecc.

Sono adesso piu' di due settimane che siamo tutti malati.

E' cominciato con Paolo che e' andata in Francia una settimana primo che io sono arrivato, ed e' tornato con un brutto forte raffredore.

I primi simptomi ho preso alla vigilia di Natale. Ho avuto occhi bagnati, naso che scorre, e sono rimasto al letto per 3 giorni.  Poi mi e' venuto la solita tossa grassa.

Ho preso lo sciroppo e sembrava che stavo meglio.

Poi alla vigilia di capo d'anno Paolo di nuovo e caduto con una febbre. E stato al letto tutto il giorno.

Il giorno di capo d'anno Olga ha preso la febbre.

Io non ho preso la febbre ma il 2 Gennaio la mia tosse si e' peggiorata.

Adesso siamo al 5 Gennaio, Paolo ha ancora la febbre ed ha cominciato a prendere un antibiotico.  Olga stava meglio oggi per il primo giorno ma anche lei non sta tanto bene.  A me ieri mattina mi e' tornato un nuovo forte raffredore, ed oggi mi sento un poco caldo, non posso dire ancora che ho la febbre, ma non lo posso nemmeno escludere.

In somma questo e' diventato il piu' brutto viaggio che ho mai fatto.

Ho lasciato fuoro altri detagli, tipo il figlio di 18 anni che voleva a tutti costi andare ad una feste di capo d'anno sul Lago Averno alle 2 di mattina.  Tutti i sui amici hanno pianificato di arrivare li alle 02:00, ma il fesso di 18 anni in nostra famiglia ha detto a noi che potevamo andare alle 01:00.  Il risultato e che siamo dovuti aspettare nel freddo con la macchina spenta per un ora, ed e' successo proprio quello che si aspettava in questo caso:  la batteria e' andata giu.  Paolo come orgolioso padre che fa tutto da solo non ha voluto chiedere aiuto, nemmeno ai parenti che abitavano nella zone.  Alle 2 di mattina con la febbre si e messo a camminare a casa per prendere l'altra machine sua per fare partire la toyota.  E' tornato dopo circa 45 minuti.  E' si e' portato le chiavi della toyota con se, la toyota e' rimasta li sensa chiavi.   E' strano pero, che in quei 2 ora, nessuno si e' avvicinato per chiedere nulla a noi.

I have not written much here yet about how bad this trip has been, healthwise, but it's time to fess up.

It all started a week before I arrived; Paolo went to France and brought back with him a really bad cold.  It knocked him out, which is most unusual.

By the time I got here everyone was already sick and coughing, but they just go on with their lives without taking any time to cure themselves, so they stay sick.

By Christmas Eve I was sick too.  Heavy cold followed by sore throat and three days of watery eyes and runny nose, aches.  I basically had to keep taking Tylenol and stay in bed.  I forgot to bring Tylenol Cold medicine here, and nothing like that is available here, so we have to suffer.

The others were sick too during this time, but they soldier on until they drop.

By New Year's Eve, however, people started to drop.  Paolo got it first.  Fever, pains, he had to stay in bed all new year's day and we went out without him.

Driving back home, Olga got it next.   Pains, headache, fever, she was down for the count.

I had been fine up to then, but on 2 January my cough got worse for just a day, then I was better.  On 4 January "wet" cough went away, and it was replaced with the beginning of a heavy cold.  By 5 January the cold was back to the usual watery eyes.   This time I made it out to the pharmacy only to find out that a product like Tylenol Cold Night Time is not available at all in Italy.   This afternoon, my body temperature seems to be inching up.  It's not a fever yet but it's working at it.

The biggest change I see is that when I get warm like this my nose runs less.

Olga was better today.  Paolo still has a fever.

The kids seem to go back and forth as to whether their sick or well, can't pinpoint them.  If they want to play they will play regardless of how they feel and they have to really be in bad shape to stop playing.

To sum it up, this has been possibly the worst trip I've ever made.