Christmas beers

Photo from Serious Eats.

The first year I was living in Belgium (many, many years ago, alas), I saw bottles dubbed Christmas beers for the first time. I wasn't a beer connoisseur (and neither I am now), but I assumed that this was a marketing gimmick to sell more beers during Christmas. Little did I know that Christmas beers were actually a very respected tradition, dating back to...when? 

Depending on who you ask, you will hear different accounts of the history behind the so called Christmas beers. The story I heard living in Belgium was that Christmas beers started after WW2. At the end of the harvest period, brewers would  put freshly harvested hop into their barrels, together with the remains from the previous season. Autumn providing the perfect temperatures for the fermentation of beer, by December these Christmas beers would be ready to be sold/given as presents to the best customers. Each brewery would of course put its signature into their Christmas beer, adding spices of their liking.

But this story may not fly if you talk to a Brit: he will tell you that British brewers had been making Christmas beers for a very long time, well before Belgians copied this tradition. But then again, talk to Scandinavians, and they will tell you that they invented the tradition: hundreds of years ago, Scandinavians would celebrate Jolner in December, in honor of one of their gods, Thor. In preparation of that celebration, they would start preparing a special drink in September/October, for it to be ready in December. They called this drink Julol. 

Personally I am inclined to go with a mixture of these stories: I think the Scandinavians did invent this, although it had nothing to do with Christmas; the British imported the whole affair in the UK, but the Belgians were those who relaunched the whole tradition after WW2. Do I have any ground to think that this is how it went? Nope.

Christmas beers are richer than "normal" beers: denser, more aromatic, spicier, with a higher alcohol content, they are made of two different types of malts. Although there are a couple of "blonde" Christmas beers, the vast majority are dark beers, some of them almost pitch-black.

As many things-Belgian, Christmas beers go strong in the US. The American beer scene is, even to a non-expert like me, pretty impressive: artisanal beers are pretty lively, but Belgian beers are dominating the import markets (+29% in 2011 compared to 2010...). However, next to many traditional Belgian Christmas beers (Delirium Noel, N'ice Chouffe, Fantome de Noel), you will also find American and Canadian Christmas beers that are very, very good.

Christmas beers are a wonderful thing, and make for a beautiful Christmas present, if you are still undecided about what to give. Here is a list of 8 Christmas beers, some Belgian, some North American chosen  by the site Serious Eats. I have had a few of them (Fantome de Noel, Mad Elf), and they are very good.

The all American Mac and Cheese tradition

If Americans were to single out one meal as their favorite comfort food, there is no question that macaroni and cheese (mac & cheese for friends) would win hands down. The overcooked, super soft pasta covered in melting cheese is something that most Italians do not even dare to get close to. If there is one thing that scares the hell out of Italians more than non-Italian food is food that is "similar" to Italian, but - as they would put it - it is an Italian violated.

Photo from the website My recipes

And let's be frank: nothing says violation of pasta more than a good, gooey, overcheesy bowl of mac & heese. It is true that some traditional Italian pasta dishes are technically mac & cheese: spaghetti cacio e pepe are nothing more than noodles with pecorino cheese and pepper; pasta alla ricotta is nothing more than pasta with ricotta cheese. Yet, nothing is more un-Italian than mac & cheese. It is even a bigger violation than the Chicago pizza, that at least resembles a Sicilian sfincione. In a good mac & cheese the pasta (traditionally tubolar "elbow" pasta) is boiled well past its al dente point, and then baked with a cheese sauce so as to become almost a smooth paste of starch and melted cheese. Sometimes you can add a crust of crunchy crumbs on top, but that's considered fancy in many parts of America.

Plus, this dish is almost never considered an entree, rather a side dish that one chooses to replace vegetables. YES!

Now, I often said (for instance, here) that Italians are stupid to even refuse to taste certain food simply because it is not Italian or because it seems to go against every rule of Italian cuisine. And my position is exactly the same also on mac & cheese: this stuff is D E L I C I O U S.

The history of this dish is quite interesting. The first to import pasta making machines from Italy to the US was Thomas Jefferson at the beginning of the 19th century. Pasta had already appeared here and there, but it was only with the French fleeing the French revolution that pasta factories were then created. Although there are several "recipes" of what resembles mac & cheese popping out here and there, the original mac & cheese recipe is attributed to Mary Randolph, the author of the book The Virginia Housewife. Her brother was the son in law of Thomas Jefferson, so perhaps it is not by accident that she came up with what is considered the first REAL mac & cheese recipe:

Since then, mac & cheese  has become first a Southerner typical dish, then an African American specialty, and finally a national obsession. Kraft introduced its mac & cheese in 1937, and its ubiquitous blue box is still the market leader. Kids grow up loving it, and I can't blame them.

Now, since I moved here I have been (eating and) experimenting a lot with mac & cheese. Recently I also organized a mac & cheese dinner, where guests were invited to bring their own versions of mac & cheese. If it is true that the original version only calls for pasta, butter, cheese, the variations are infinite: I have eaten mac & cheese with lobster, with burnt tips (a barbecue specialty), apples and walnuts, bacon, hot chiles, herbs...so the idea of the dinner was to see what people could come up with.

The mac & cheese options at the Tuscan Foodie's house: a traditional one, one topped with fried onion rings, one with bacon and jalapenos, one with radicchio and one with walnuts and apples...

The dinner came out well, if I do say so myself: we ate like pigs, and there were two mac and cheese that really stood out. One with apples and walnuts that was subtle, yet very cheesy, and then there was a heart attack chili, with I can't remember how many kilos of cheese had in it, and that was smothered with a crust of fried onion rings. Boy, was that thing GOOD. My liver was crying for mercy at every bite, but I kept on going. For science, of course.

I don't think anyone can accuse me of not doing enough to embrace the culture I am living in, right?
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No-knead schiacciata with potato in the dough

Before I give you the recipe for this schiacciata, let me explain a couple of things. If you are not interested, scroll down to read the recipe, or just click here to download it or print it, and go try it.

Schiacciata is as Tuscan as the leaning Tower of Pisa: you eat it every day, either as a snack mid-morning, or at lunch, or as a mid-afternoon snack, or at dinner. Or - at least in my family - in the morning AND at lunch AND at dinner. Alas, finding a good schiacciata outside of Italy is difficult. And that's what got me into bread and schiacciata baking: the need to replicate the flavors that i couldn't find anywhere else.

The perfect morning snack. The perfect lunch. The perfect mid-afternoon snack. The perfect dinner.

What is schiacciata, you may ask? For the sake of brevity, let's just say that schiacciata is the name used in Tuscany to indicate what is elsewhere known as focaccia bread. I am half lying saying this, because there are some differences, and focaccia is a very confusing word in Italian, sometimes indicating even sweets, panettone style. I will get back to the linguistic differences of schiacciata and focaccia. For the time being though, let's just say that if you are in Tuscany and go to a bakery you are going to ask for schiacciata and not focaccia. 

At its core, schiacciata is a very simple thing: a flattened bread (schiacciare in Italian means to flatten), containing three basic ingredients (flour, yeast, water). But the infinite ratios to combine these ingredients (and the different quality in the flours and the water), the addition of other elements (olive oil, herbs...), and the climatic conditions mean that 1) a lot of different products go by the same term and that 2)  it is very difficult to consistently obtain the same product at home.

As you may have understood from my previous posts about schiacciata baking, this has almost become an obsession of mine. I am spending a lot of my free time baking schiacciate from different recipes, from books, blogs, conversations with old Italian ladies...each one comes out different. Some of them I discard after the first attempt, because, honestly, they suck. Some I spend weeks baking them again and again to make them come out as I want them. I even baked a sweet focaccia with dried fruits and jams as dessert once. (And yes, it was very good).

Some of the focaccia bread I have baked...

Today I want to share with you the recipe that got me started, and that I baked and altered, baked and altered, baked and altered, until I consistently started to get what I wanted: a schiacciata with a crisp crust, a moist crumb, tall enough to be sliced open and eaten with cold cuts, but not as tall as to lose its crunchiness and become too airy when eaten on its own.

I developed this recipe starting from the no-kneading recipe given by Jim Lahey in his "My Bread" book. Lahey's method for bread baking calls for a lot less yeast and a lot less kneading (almost none). As a trade off, it requires extremely long rising time, sometimes as long as 24 hours (although this is not the case for this schiacciata). According to Lahey, working the dough less but let it rise longer, develops a bread structure stronger than what you can obtain with longer kneading and shorter rising times. I can confirm this: I baked tens of focaccia recipes requiring longer kneading times, and none of them has given me the same strength in the schiacciata crumbs (I am not saying the no-kneading method is the best for every bread, of course. All I am saying is that it seemed to work for this specific schiacciata I wanted).

Obviously Lahey hasn't invented anything, and he admits it openly: this method was used already in Roman times, and often in Middle Age's Tuscan bread making.

My obsession started now more than 18 months ago. Since then I have actually developed another recipe, with no potato in the dough, which has become my absolute favorite. I will publish it some other time, if you are interested. However, every guest we have seems to prefer this "potato" version, so here you go.

No-knead schiacciata with potato in the dough 
DOWNLOAD OR PRINT THIS RECIPE

The final product will look like this

This schiacciata takes very little active time to prepare, but it takes a long time to rise (twice), and you should plan accordingly. From the moment you start to the moment the schiacciata is out of the oven at least 5 hours will have passed. In cold weathers, make that 6 or 7.

For this particular version of schiacciata, in my experience all purpose flour seems to work better than bread flour, which has a higher protein content: the schiacciata comes out less dry. However, if you only have bread flour, it will do perfectly (for Italians I would recommend OO flour). As for the potato to use: russet potatoes seem to work better than Yukon gold: Yukon gold leave the crumbs too moist to my taste, but any yellow potato will do the trick (I even tried it with a sweet potato and it came out delicious...). The potato in the dough serves to moisten the crumbs and to make the schiacciata lighter, since it replaces part of the flour. 

I call for honey or sugar in my recipe: both help the flour ferment. I prefer honey because it gives a darker crust, but sugar will work just as perfectly.

Also, this is a no-topping recipe, perfect to be cut open and filled with cold cuts. This is the real deal. For this reason, there are no herbs (sage, rosemary, thyme, onions) nor olives added on top. What I am giving you is a "vessel" to transport the cold cuts' flavors, but which is also delicious on its own. But of course you can add whatever herb you want. Keep in mind though, that adding "wet" ingredients, such as onions and olives, will have an impact on the rising times and on the fermentation. 


Ingredients

• 600 gr (4 1/2 cups) all purpose or bread flour (or 00 for my Italian readers)
• 600 gr water (2 1/2 cups) 
• 1 potato (approximately 200 grams)
• 4 gr sugar (1 tsp) OR 10gr honey (1 tsp)
• 10 gr dry yeast (or 30 grams fresh yeast - lievito di birra - diluted in a finger of water)
• 5 gr table salt (3/4 tsp)
• 10 gr coarse salt (if you don't have it, you can use regular table salt) for dusting the dough
• olive oil: enough to coat the pan and the top of the dough, approximately 50-70gr (1/4 cup)

How to make it

• Cut the potatoes in cubes, put them with the cold water in a sauce pan, and bring to boil, covered, over high heat. Cook until the potato is very tender (you need to be able to cut through it with a fork), about 15 minutes. Keep the sauce pan covered, or else the water will evaporate, leaving you with a dough non wet enough. 

• With an immersion blender (or in a blender) pure' the potato with its water. Let the mixture rest until it gets cool enough to touch, but still warm. It will take about an hour. 

• In a large bowl, sift the flour, then stir in the yeast, the sugar (or the honey), the salt, the water with the potato. Mix with your hands or with a wooden spoon for about a minute, until you have an extremely wet dough (there is a 1:1 flour/water ratio!). Cover with plastic wrap and put this in a draft-free spot to rise for 3 hours, or until the dough has at least doubled, but preferentially tripled. (Remember that - as for any baking - the rising times and fermentation are heavily conditioned by the atmospheric pressure, the humidity, temperature...this is why a good recipe during the summer may not work as well during the winter. Put the dough to rise in a draft-free spot. The oven is perfect. A trick I sometimes use is to turn the light of the oven on (NOT THE OVEN) and, with a thermometer, I check that the temperature is at 25C/77F. If the temperature goes up, I turn the light off: fermentation above 25C/77F will give a nasty yeasty flavor and smell to your schiacciata - or to any bread, really). 

• Oil a 13 X 18 inches (33X40cm) pan (beware: a smaller or larger pan will give you a thicker or thinner schiacciata than the one I took photos of, altering the flavor and consistency: you may even like it more, or less, who knows). Pour the dough onto the pan: it will be very soft, sticky and messy. Oil your fingers, and use your hands to gently press the dough down, so as to extend it to cover the whole pan, creating a surface of an even thickness. (See the photo below).

• Using your fingertips, create dimples in the dough (no long nails, please): this is typical of any schiacciata. Drizzle with olive oil, and spread the coarse salt evenly (table salt will also be fine).

• Let the dough rest around 1 hour, or until it has risen to the (or over the) edges of the pan. In the meantime, preheat the oven to 200 degrees C (400 degrees F).

• Put the pan into the oven on the middle rack, paying attention not to move it too violently, or else the dough will collapse. Baking times vary a lot: from a minimum of 20 minutes to a maximum of 45 minutes. Just make sure you have a golden brown crusted top (see photo below).

• Take the schiacciata out of the oven, let it rest a minute. Take it out of the pan, gently, so as not to break it. Let it rest using a cookie rack or something that lets air pass underneath, or else the schiacciata will become soggy. 

• Slice after at least 5 mintues and devour it...

• Schiacciata can be served warm or cold, and can be frozen in air-tight containers.  

1) The ingredients; 2) sift the flour; 3) cook the potato until it is soft, but it doesn't break out completely; 4) mix the wet dough; 5) let the dough rest for at least 3 hours; 6) the dough has risen and fermented; 7) pull the dough onto an oiled pan; 9) spread the dough to cover the entire surface of the pan; 9) after 1 hour the dough has risen again; 10) cook in the oven at 400F/200C; 11) and 12) the schiacciata is ready. Look at that crumb and that crust... 

Downloadable and printable recipes

Although this is not really a recipe blog, I have been publishing a few recipes over the past 18 months, and more are coming your way (*). As of today I am launching a new feature: each recipe can be opened in a separate page for easy download and print-out.

You can access the downloadable and printable versions of each of my recipes either from this "recipe page", or via each single post containing the recipe. For instance, this is how the downloadable and printable version of my recipe for Pasta e fagioli, and for Risotto with butternut squash, sage and chile de arbol look like.

I have formatted each recipe so as to be on two pages maximum. I have not changed them from my original posts, but I have eliminated the introductions and the notes about how I came about developing that recipe. You will still be able to read that stuff on the blog.

I hope you will find this useful. I personally don't like to follow a recipe from a blog, because the formatting is a bit off. This will give you something that is condensed and that will look perfect if you want to print it out, include it in your files or get dirty in the kitchen. So have a look at the recipes page, and tell me what you think!

(*) Next in line, this coming Thursday, the schiacciata - focaccia bread - with potato in its dough.
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Steakhouses of Chicago

Chicago without its steakhouses would be like the seaside without water. This is a city that lives and breathes meat. It is a place where it is perfectly normal to eat bacon for breakfast, lunch and dinner, with sausages as a side dish, probably counting as vegetables. I mean, they even have a baconfest here! Those who knew me from before can understand why I love it here.

The meat is king. No, of course you are not going to starve if you are a vegetarian or even vegan. But you are going to miss one of the life changing experiences of dining in America: the steakhouse.

Now, a steakhouse is exactly what the name implies: a place where you eat steaks. We eat steaks in Europe, believe me, but we do not have the whole steakhouse concept. More often than not, there is a certain decor that goes with the name, with wood-plastered walls, wooden tables, an atmosphere of power, fat cat arrogance, exuding from everywhere. Some of the most famous steakhouses in Chicago even play on their criminal past: local big mafia criminals (there were a lot of that, and yes, Italy contributed more than a fair share) used to meet and decide who to kill in some of these steakhouses (the Chicago Chop House sports a wall with photos of Al Capone).

There are exceptions, obviously. There are always exceptions in life, but this is pretty much standards.

Porterhouse steak at Gibson's: this thing is probably 1.5 kilos...for one person. Photo from Dining Chicago

Now, some of the best steakhouses in America are to be found in Chicago. It is not just me saying this: Chicago is increasingly recognized as one of the top food capitals of the world. On the other hand, you shouldn't be surprised: if you watch Top Chef or other similar programs on TV, you will see that Chicago chefs are almost always present (6 out 16 contestants of this season are from Chicago restaurants...)

Anyway: over the past 3 years (time flies), we have been eating in a A LOT of steakhouses. The price range varies, but no matter where you go, there is a mathematical equation that will hold true: the mass of your body will increase while the mass of your wallet's content is going to shrink. Portions are normally gigantic (I mean it). And you should expect to pay at least $50 per person. And I say "at least", because if you want to go all French on me with the wine, then you are going to spend money as a drunken sailor.

This a brief review of some of the steakhouses we ate in Chicago, in order of preference...

Gibson's

A Chicago institution, it is for the steakhouse with the best meat in Chicago. Prices are steep, but not as they appear at first sight: included in the price of your steak is a salad or a soup, which in other steakhouses would set you off an additional 10-15$. Service is very good, old style. Two negative points: desserts are as gigantic as they are lacking in flavor. And the waiting times are just ridiculous, even if you have a reservation. (Good place also if you are in town looking for a lady...Gibson's bar is a sort of high-end meat market).

Carmichael's

In the West Loop, Carmichael's is most definitely not a place you go to for its glamour. But for us it has by far the best price/quality ratio we have found in Chicago. Pay attention: I am not saying it has the best meat (although it is pretty good and on par with what you can find in other posher steakhouses): but the prices are unbeatable for what you get. A steakhouse that elsewhere would cost 45$ will cost 30$ in Carmichael's. Great desserts and free valet...

Smith and Wollenski
Yes, it is a chain (although a very high end chain), but the food and the location (especially during the Summer, when you can seat on the patio by the Chicago river) is just very, very good. One of my favorites, with the flavor of the meat rivaling Gibson's.

Morton's
One of Chicago's institutions, with different locations, it is good. Just not as good as Gibson's, while the prices are the same. Plus, their central location, in a dungeon with no windows, just doesn't do it for me.

Chicago's Firehouse
They describe themselves as a steakhouse, but I would respectfully disagree. They are a very good all American restaurants, where fish and other items on the menu have consistently always been better than their (limited offer of) steaks.Still, the steaks are good (it is just that everything else is outstanding, not simply good).


Ruth's Chris
Also a high end chain, they are known for cooking their steaks in butter. The food is good, but I just prefer my steak without the butter flavor.

Chicago Chophouse
Very old school, similar to Gibson's, without the meat market scene. Very good steaks. More than in other places, the atmosphere sweats a certain air of power.

N9NE
Very hip, with a beautiful decor, this steakhouse is very different from all the ones I have mentioned above. It doesn't have the look nor the feel of a traditional steakhouse. Yet, the food is good. But it is too hip to top my list. Nice place though if you want to bring a lady friend who likes shiny things.

Keefer's chophouse
Decent steaks, nice bar and atmosphere, but it just doesn't have either the allure or the flavors or the price quality ratio of other places.

Chicago Cuts
Pretentious, expensive and the exact opposite of Carmichael: the price quality ratio is just off. The meat is good, but it is not Gibson's good. So the prices are not justified. Plus, they have Apple iPad's at the tables to choose your wine: douchebags alert!

Kinzie Chop house
Same thing as for Chicago Cuts: they try hard - even harder than most, in terms of keeping their prices way HIGH - but they are just not as good as Gibson's.

David Burke's Primehouse
We went there with high expectations. We came out disappointed, and feeling robbed. That's all I will say.

Gene & Georgetti
They describe themselves as an Italian steakhouse. Frankly, it was a major disappointment. The meat is possibly the worst we had in Chicago, and the service was not good. Plus, the room we were sitting in felt like a bad dream, with badly painted images of Italian landscapes. Not for me, thanks.
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Landscapes of food

I don't know why, but I often look at food and I see landscapes. I see similarities with earthly landscapes (cliffs, rocks, deserts), and sometimes I even see surfaces of other planets, with immensely high volcanoes, alien canyons, strangely colored seas. I have asked around, and none of my friends and acquaintances seem to experience the same thing. So I stopped asking. But I kept on seeing landscapes. And taking photos of them. (What about you? Do you also see landscapes in food? )

Here is a selection of what I see...(landscapes of food are better seen with larger images: so click on them and a larger version will open up). (*)

The cracked-up desert of Planet Castagnaccio (recipe here)

The inabitable surface of Planet Schiacciata (focaccia bread)

The surface of planet Schiacciata again: notice its high mountains and its lakes of oil.

Another region of the unwelcoming planet Schiacciata.

The deep canyons of Beef Stew, and its steep cliffs.

The snowy planet of Unbaked Mac & Cheese.

Rice swimming in the Sea of planet Butternut Squash and sage risotto (recipe here)

The Yellow Cliffs of caramelized apple, over the stormy Black Sea. (Recipe here)

The crater of pasta e fagioli (recipe here).

(*) Yes, I know: I had promised in my previous post that I would have given you the recipe for my schiacciata (focaccia bread). But I didn't have time to bake it nor to take photos of the procedure. I am going to do so this coming weekend, and post the recipe next week. I promise.
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Success and failure in baking focaccia

Failure and success...on the same day

As we all know, for each dish we want to cook, there are hundreds of different recipes. Each cookbook we own, each blog we follow, each TV show we watch gingerly swears that the recipe they have is the best for that specific dish.

I assume that what most people do when they want to check which recipe of a given dish is the best is to cook first one, then another one maybe one or two weeks later, then another one month later. This is certainly what I normally do. But this is not really a good testing procedure. From one day to another, your ingredients may change (you may be using a different type of flour with a different gluten content, which affects your dough); you may be using different tools, because the pan you used last time broke, or it is dirty and you don't feel like washing it; you have less time to cook, so you actually bend the cooking time; if you are baking, the atmosphere pressure on one day can really influence the final result, for better of for worse; or, simply, your cooking mojo one day is way up and the other day is way down, so that whatever you cook turns out a mess.

Plus, there is the memory factor: when you taste today a different version of a dish you also cooked two weeks ago, your memory may play tricks on you...everything in the past seems kind of better (but I don't want to get too philosophical here...).

So there is only one way to really test two or three recipes of the same dish: cook them all on the same day, using the same basic ingredients, the same tools, and eat them all the same day. This is a very time consuming process, and unless you are a nerd, it is something that you won't be doing very often.

It had been a while since I last had done something like that, so I decided to do it to test two recipes of focaccia genovese, a focaccia bread typical of Genoa, a city in the North of Italy. As those who follow me on my Facebook page know, I am in a phase in which I am obsessed with finding the perfect dough for pizza and schiacciata (the focaccia bread eaten in Pisa). So this was part of the process.

Pisa (my hometown) and Genoa are a little more than a 100 miles away, but they hate each other for historical reasons. Back in the day, the two Repubbliche Marinare (Sea Republics) were the great powers fighting for dominion over the Mediterranean. Pisa was finally defeated from Genoa in a famous battle, and, as I had explained here, it was on that occasion that one of my favorite dishes, cecina (farinata in Genoa) was created.

Focaccia genovese differs from the schiacciata from Pisa for...almost nothing, really. In many bakeries in Pisa you will get exactly the same focaccia you get in Genoa, with the typical white holes in it, caused by an emulsion of water and oil spread on top of it before baking it.

So, what I did was simple. I took two recipes for focaccia genovese, one from a new bread and baking book I recently got from Italy, and another one from a famous baking blog. I cooked them on the same rainy day, using the same flour, the same salt, the same honey, the same water, the same yeast. I even used exactly the same baking pans, of the same brand and size. For each of them I followed the recommended kneading and raising times. I calculated timing so as to have the two doughs risen and ready to bake exactly at the same time, so as to cook them in parallel in my two ovens.

The two doughs ready to go in the oven. You can already see where this is going....

But what I got were two very different things. One was perfect; the other one was not.

Perfection (almost) on your left - disaster (total) on your right.

The one from the book (on the left in the photos) came out almost as good as those that I remember from my youth (memories again...). It lacked salt, and it was a bit too high for my taste. While preparing it, I knew that the large amount of flour it called for would have made it too dense and too think for the pan I had. But the book didn't provide the size of the pan to use (boy, don't I HATE baking books that are not precise...). But all in all, this is a recipe that I could improve easily, and in a few times it would get very good.

The one that came out almost pefect: oily, crunchy, but a bit too thick.

But the other one? What the F happened to the other one? It didn't develop its crust underneath...and I have no idea why. The flavor of the top was actually very, very good, better even that the one that came out well (remember, the ingredients were the same, but in different proportions). But by all means, this was an utter failure.

The one baked from the recipe from a blog didn't develop a crust underneath...

I will not give you either the recipe for the "good one" or the name of the blog I took the failed recipe from. After all, I could have made something wrong myself, and I intend to give it another try. But what I will do, is give you the recipe of my favorite schiacciata recipe, the one I perfected over the past 10 months...in the next post! Come back, because the one I bake looks like this:

The real deal: tune in for the recipe in the next post...

Our first Thanksgiving dinner as cooks

Da beast (with socks...our host was very proud of the socks...)

And so my first American Thanksgiving as a cook came and went...Although technically this was my third Thanksgiving in the US, this was the first one where I actually was in charge of half of the menu. The other half - the more important one, to be honest - was the responsibility of our host, a fellow Italian who is a very good cook. Hers was the task of cooking the perfect turkey, and boy, did she deliver...She also had to make the stuffing, the potatoes, the gravy and a pecan pie.

Our task was to fill in the gaps: we had to bake some artisan bread, some focaccia bread, some starters, the cranberries chutney, a sweet potato side dish and a pumpkin cheesecake pie. The idea was to have a traditional American menu, although the only American attending the evening was Charlie Brown (my not yet 5-month old son), who really doesn't care about any food outside his bottle. Everybody else was Italian...My impression is that we made a pretty decent job in maintaining the American cooking spirit, with the turkey and the traditional sides and stuffing. Our only Italian variations were in the appetizers (fried bread with either chicken liver pate' or a mushroom sauce), and in the breads. For the rest we tried to keep it real.

The Turkey, the spread, the plate...

Surprisingly, my sweet potato, brown sugar & pecan crusted casserole was a hit. Let me explain for the non-Americans here. Traditionally on Thanksgiving, many Americans eat a sweet potato side dish with marshmallows on top. I ate it once, many years ago, when an American living in Brussels had us over for what was my first Thanksgiving dinner. And I loved it. I love sweet potatoes, and I love to eat meat with sweet sauces and sweet side dishes. But when I proposed to have something similar for our Thanksgiving dinner, the idea wasn't exactly welcomed. Whereas our host was too polite to tell me to go to hell, my mother wasn't (my family visited for Thanksgiving, in the purest American spirit). So I turned to another recipe, from the New York Times cookbook, which I adapted to make it less sweet, and to give it some heat with the right amount of paprika. 

Sweet potato, brown sugar and pecan casserole...with a kick

I expected the dish to remain almost untouched at dinner: even if less sweet than the version with marshmallows, this thing had a lot of brown sugar in it...But I was very wrong: we almost finished it!

The cranberry chutney came out also very good, but there we really had to deviate a lot from the original recipe (taken again from the New York Times cookbook, which has become my go-to cookbook for US food). I had never had cranberries, and let me tell you, they are nasty little berries. They are as sour as taxes, and they need a lot of sweetness to be edible. Good thing is that we realized this in mid-course, and we were able to adjust things, and it turned out very well.

The cranberry chutney: cranberries are evil.

And now Christmas is fast approaching...we will spend it here for the first time, and I am already thinking about the menu...