Rome sustainable food | The Roving Locavore

Posts Tagged ‘Rome sustainable food’

rainy holiday in Rome

Posted in Philosophical, Trends, tagged agricultural biodiversity, American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, eating locally, local food, locavore, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore, Slow Food, Terra Madre on December 8, 2009| Leave a Comment »

It’s rainy, school’s out, and everything’s closed for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. We made pizza for lunch, and now Jack is busy with various projects involving wooden trains, plastic tractors, blocks, legos, paint, and books. I’m drinking espresso, listening to Let It Be, and reading various things on the Slow Food website.

This week, Slow Food’s Terra Madre project will have a worldwide celebration of eating locally and sustainably. Here’s their description of the Terra Madre network:

In 1999, Slow Food launched the Presidia project which has since involved thousands of small producers across the world, strengthening local economies and saving cheeses, breads, vegetable varieties and breeds from extinction. The worldwide Terra Madre network was launched in 2004 to give a voice and visibility to these farmers, breeders, fishers and artisan producers, and to bring them together with cooks, academics, youth and consumers to discuss how to improve the food system and strengthen local economies. Today the Terra Made network is made up of more than 2,000 food communities.

Here at the American Academy, we’re going to celebrate by making the family dinner, on Friday night, a Terra Madre feast. Mona has done an amazing job over the past few years of connecting with farmers and food producers in the area, and this meal will also mark the birthday of the American Academy’s Rome Sustainable Food Project as a Slow Food Community. I like how the Terra Madre poster explains the impetus behind this event: “Animati dall’entusiasmo di Mona Talbott….” Yes! Many great things that happen here have been animated by the enthusiasm of Mona Talbott. I’m excited for this meal, as is Jack, because he gets to help, with the other kids, to make orecchiette and harvest lettuce from the garden.

A bunch of lucky school kids in Rome will get to go to the Italian School of Film Animation to watch Ratatouille and Totò Sapore e la magica storia della pizza. (Sounds fun. I’d like to see it.) There are also compost and juice-making workshops for ragazzi e bambini. Ooohh, fun! Dirt and fruit, sticky hands, making messes!

I highly recommend reading Slow Food International’s Seven Pillars. This is where it’s at.

For other Slow Food items of interest, you can check out their website. And here’s a description of the Terra Madre celebrations.

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from meatballs to masked ball

Posted in Meat, Pasta, Pork, Shopping, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, eat locally, local food, locavore, locavore Rome, meatballs wrapped in cabbage, pork meatballs, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on December 6, 2009| Leave a Comment »

I haven’t actually been making or eating as many meatballs as it may seem from the frequency of their appearance in these posts. But last night I did make a new (for me) variation on an old theme: meatballs that were halfway between Lions Heads from Shanghai cuisine and Milanese, with some of my favorite flavorings thrown in. The dish was inspired by a cabbage-wrapped meatball meal the RSFP kitchen cooked for us about a month ago.

In the morning, at the market, I bought some pork which the butcher ground on the spot. I love that they do this. Then they show it to you, as if to say, “is this to your liking?” I bought a big cabbage and some parsley, and started to plan the process in my head.

While shopping, I also bought a city bus and admired some chocolate tools:

Harry, Jack, and a serious toy

Dolce Desideri has fun with chocolate

Prep:

Then, the meatballs: ground pork, breadcrumbs, 1 egg, salt and pepper, a generous pinch of freshly crushed coriander seeds, and small pinches each of ground cumin and cinnamon. I rolled them into a generous size—something between a golf ball and a billiard ball. I browned them in the pan, while the cabbage leaves blanched. Then, when all was cool enough to handle, I wrapped each ball in a leaf and set them on a plate while I deglazed the pan, randomly, with sweet vermouth. (It was the only non-quaffable alcohol in the pantry, and turned out to be the best secret ingredient!) Then, I put in the meatballs and poured in some stock, covered them, and simmered for 15 or so minutes. Meanwhile, I cooked some pasta and tossed it with olive oil and parsley.

We took a break from mask-making to eat.

swaddled polpette

Then, we got ready for dancing.

Felix, Jack, Pio

Who are these masked dancers?

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a Dundee special in Rome

Posted in Beer, Seafood, Sweet Things, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion food, Rome sustainable food on December 5, 2009| 1 Comment »

Last night, the RSFP kitchen did it again. They had us swooning and stuffing our bellies and calling out for more. This time, the dish was fish-n-chips. One of the kitchen interns, Camilla, had been homesick for Scotland and this specialty, so she and the crew fried up a massive amount of fish and potatoes.

She began the meal by suggesting we end with whiskey, and by reciting a Robbie Burns blessing: ”Some hae meat and canna eat, And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat, And sae the Lord be thanket.”

Some in this crowd were so happy to eat good fried food, they went around scavenging from plates the kids had abandoned. There was homemade tartar sauce and homemade ketchup, malt vinegar, and beer. One friend said, “whatever we have to do to make this meal local and sustainable [the goals of the RSFP], so that we can have it all the time, let’s do it. Put in a fish pond in the Bass Garden!”

And then, when we thought we couldn’t eat another bite, out came the toffee cake—the most moist decadently delicious burnt butter sweet sugar whipped cream confection imaginable. (Camilla, will you give me the recipe?)

The couches in the salone soon became the meal recovery center.

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marrow

Posted in Meat, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, bone marrow, eating locally, local food, locavore, ossobuco, Rome locavore, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on December 4, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Last night, the RSFP served ossobuco. The platters came out piled with hunks of glistening meat and bone. Something about about the primal nature of this meal brought out the sillies in us. We started trying on each others’ glasses. Some began eating with their fingers. There was quizzing on food and sex. And then the marrow sucking began. While this was going on, there was laughter, of course, which caused a fleck of marrow to fly, projectile-style, from one man’s lips to another man’s shirt. (You know who you are, friends….) He wore the badge of grease for the rest of the evening, which ended with grappas, noccinos, and amaros. I wish I had a picture of my friends holding greasy bones up to their puckered lips. And they, I’m sure, are glad I don’t!

The vegetarians may have been horrified, and luckily for them, were not at our table. The combination of disgust at the finger-licking sensuality of this unabashedly carnivorous meal, and the ethical divide would be enough for some harsh condemnation of the bacchanalian scene.

Is it enough to say that we know, because of the dedication of Mona and Chris to finding sustainable, local food, that these animals we ate were raised and killed with care and humanity? Many prefer not to think about this, but when you’re sucking the marrow out of leg bones, the fact of your dinner’s other form as a cute little calf is hard to avoid.

Another way to think about it is as veal shanks braised in stock and white wine and garnished with gremolata—a simple dressing of parsley, garlic, and lemon. Another perspective is health: a quick google search suggests that bone marrow is nutritious and may even help to account for the low incidence of heart disease in offal-loving societies.

It was, then, a most basic and most complex feast. And it was delicious.

Since I don’t have any pictures, I’ll direct you to this video of Mark Bittman and Fergus Henderson roasting bones and then spreading the “jiggly” marrow on toast.

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meat on a stick

Posted in Meat, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, local food, locavore, locavore in Rome, meatballs, polpette, Rome locavore, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on November 24, 2009| Leave a Comment »

No. I’m not talking about that mystery conglomeration “corn dog” that masquerades as meat, but meatballs, served cocktail-catering-style on little wooden skewers. We took Jack to a cocktail reception last night, and his favorite items were the polpetti, or, meat lollipops. (My favorite was the split date posing as a dish for gorgonzola and a walnut quarter.)

The reception, here at the Academy, was for the new American ambassador to Italy, David Thorne. Alice Waters was also there, having come from a big Slow Food event, and planning to stay in Rome through Thanksgiving. I think you can guess which dignitary I was most excited about meeting.

This morning, Jack said, “Mommy, can you make polpetti?” Yes! And you can help! So, after dropping him off at school, I stopped at the Super Carni—a little butcher’s shop owned by a grandparently couple, which sells lots of organic products—and asked for “del bovino per polpetti.” Probably not very correct, but he understood. Remember how I mentioned that Italians are always, in a tacit and politely bossy way, telling you the proper way to do things? Well, I had asked for beef, but after half-picking up a piece of beef, he set it down and reached instead for the chunks of veal, which he then put through the old-fashioned meat grinder twice, making sure the texture was to his satisfaction. I love the immediacy of this operation.

And of this one:

For the recipe, check out this post.

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sardines with aioli

Posted in Eggs, Seafood, Shopping, Wine, tagged aioli, American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, local food, locavore, locavore in Rome, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore, sardines on November 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »

We’re so coddled here, with the wonderful food prepared for and served to us at the Academy. So it was with real satisfaction last night that I prepared a meal requiring what felt like authentic labor: beheading fish and whisking for a good half hour.

The meal was utterly simple, and maybe that’s why it was so much fun to make. I started in the morning at the open air market on Via Nicolini, where I bought a pile of fresh sardines. The fishmonger threw in a handful of parsley too, which is one of the nice gestures these Roman vendors always make. It’s both generous and bossy of them: “here, have some herbs” and “if you’re going to cook that, you really should have this.” (This attitude actually seems to be a regional—or even national—trait.) I bought lemons at another stall, mixed chicories at another, some apples, brocoletti, and then some pizza bianca at Pasticceria Beti.

Here are the fish, before their “dressing”:

There are a few ways to prepare sardines—going from minimally to maximally meticulous. I chose the middle road. The minimal would be just to clean the scales off and cook them whole. The most thorough would be to cut the heads off, clean the guts out, and bone them before cooking. The middle way, which Robinson Crusoe would have advised, is to break the heads off with your hands; the attached guts follow; and the boning is easier to do when the fish are cooked anyway.

Sardines are very nutritious, as they are rich in omega-3 fatty acids and low in the mercury and other contaminants that settle in the big fish higher up on the food chain. They are very high in selenium and vitamin B12 and high in calcium, niacin, and phosphorus. Are these good reasons to feel virtuous even when you fry them in butter?

After a good descaling rinse, they’re ready to be dredged in salted flour and fried up in a mixture of butter and olive oil, at high heat.

Before doing that though, I made the aioli with a whisk—and with the assistance of Junior Wells’s Hoo Doo Man Blues, prosecco, and Peter. I followed Alice Waters’s recipe from The Art of Simple Food. Start with garlic and a pinch of salt mashed with a mortar-and-pestle; add a 1/4 tsp. of water and an egg yolk. Starting drop by drop, whisk in 1 c. extra virgin olive oil. (When you’re not working with the help of electricity, this takes a good long time.)

The resulting meal was simple, cheap, yummy, and fun.

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2 birthday parties (+1 more birthday)

Posted in Bread, Nuts, Poetry, Seafood, Sweet Things, Wine, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, Byron in Rome, eating locally, local food, locavore, locavore Rome, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on November 9, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Dylan turned five, and Jim turned ninety. We celebrated with them both. It was a busy, delicious day filled with tasty tidbits—of both food and conversation.

Dylan and his parents live in a fourth floor walk-up in Trastevere. Sarah offered me a cafe latte as soon as we arrived, which was welcomed on a blustery morning. She had clearly been working for hours on the food, which was spread on their square table that sits invitingly in the middle of the open eat-in kitchen. There were assorted sandwiches for the kids to scarf down, two kinds of chicken salad with greens, a cous cous salad, a hummus platter, sliced cheeses and salumi, crackers, two kinds of cupcakes, and, warming in the oven, pizza rossa (pizza topped with tomato sauce) and lasagna! The party rolled along at an Italian pace, with people arriving as late as 12:30 for an 11:00 party. The kids went from sandwiches to cupcakes to chocolates, in between sessions of semi-organized play, and the parents went from coffee and oatmeal cookies to wine and lunch. The crowd was made up of Arcobaleno and ex-pat community friends; most of the parents switched fluently from Italian to English, and the kids played together in a happy bilingual, prelingual, nonsense, and gestural chaos. I tried to get a picture of the “fishing for chocolate” game, but only captured a bit of the party’s buzz:

The rest of the afternoon was down-time for me, but Jack was ready for more socializing, so we invited Lulu up from apartment 1. She and Jack play together so agreeably. They played “store,” which involved emptying Jack’s clothing drawers onto the bed and making play money. They drew and painted pictures of “ghosts eating people.” They played “boat” in a printer box, and rode up and down the hallway on Jack’s scooter. We made kettle popcorn, and Lulu told us that her dad is such a kettle corn expert that every kernel is popped. She also told us it was her mom’s fortieth birthday. Happy birthday, Anna!

After putting Jack to bed, and leaving him with his kitchen-intern babysitter, Jaimi, we went next door to the Ackermans’ apartment for a birthday dinner party. What an honor to be Jim and Jill’s guests! They are the most elegant, lively, curious scholar-artist couple, and they brought together some wonderful company. And Jill, who loves to help out in the Academy kitchen, cooked a fabulous, finger-friendly meal.

We started with steamed artichokes—it’s high carciofi season here in Rome—dipped in brown butter. Next, along with Mona’s chestnut bread, Jill served her own fish stew, with a soaked crouton, flavorful aioli, tiny local clams and some small whole-roasted fish to lay on top. Jeffrey managed to get a good picture of this dish:

After arugula salad, before melon and crostata, and with vin santo, we read aloud some short pieces we’d brought with us to honor Jim—as a friend, historian, Michaelangelo scholar, man, artist or all of these together. Since the text I read is in the public domain, and was the least personal, I’ll copy it out here. It’s Lord Byron’s description of seeing and being in St. Peter’s Basilica, from Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.

Thou movest—but increasing with the advance,
Like climbing some great Alp, which still doth rise,
Deceived by its gigantic elegance;
Vastness which grows—but grows to harmonize—
All musical in its immensities;
Rich marbles—richer painting—shrines where flame
The lamps of gold—and haughty dome which vies
In air with Earth’s chief structures, though their frame
Sits on the firm-set ground—and this the clouds must claim

Thou seest not all; but piecemeal thou must break,
To separate contemplation, the great whole;
And as the ocean many bays will make,
That ask the eye—so here condense thy soul
To more immediate objects, and control
Thy thoughts until thy mind hath got by heart
Its eloquent proportions, and unroll
In mighty graduations, part by part,
The glory which at once upon thee did not dart,

Not by its fault—but thine: Our outward sense
Is but of gradual grasp—and as it is
That what we have of feeling most intense
Outstrips our faint expression; even so this
Outshining and o’erwhelming edifice
Fools our fond gaze, and greatest of the great
Defies at first our Nature’s littleness,
Till, growing with its growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate.

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV, stanzas 156-158

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marjoram

Posted in Herbs, Meat, Nuts, Pasta, Salads, Wine, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, eating locally, local eating, local food, locavore, locavore in Rome, marjoram, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on November 5, 2009| Leave a Comment »

My mind and time have been taken up with other writing projects during the past week—my dissertation, about which I won’t talk here, and my story/pamphlet for Bioversity, about which I will talk, at some later date. But I have to steal a few moments from eighteenth-century literature to do some musing on marjoram.

2034-tb-marjoram

Every Wednesday night at the Academy, the RSFP kitchen cooks an entirely vegetarian meal with local, seasonal ingredients. Last night, the highlights of the meal were hazelnuts (chopped on a bitter green salad with beets) and marjoram.

Marjoram is often thought of as a meat herb because it can hold its own alongside the most flavorful lamb or venison. But last night’s main course was potato gnocchi with marjoram and chopped walnuts, pecorino and some wilted green (something chicoryish but not too bitter… plain old spinach?). It was a risky dish, because the piny astringency and almost medicinal zest of the marjoram could easily have overpowered the humble little gnocchi. That’s why I’d like to praise, along with the herb so evocative of wildness, the kitchen staff here. Not only did they create delicate gnocchi for almost fifty people, but they seasoned it delicately with one of the strongest herbs. The dish had to have been prepared with gentle fingers—to keep the gnocchi fluffy and to crush the leaves of marjoram without mincing out the flavor. The wine pairing was exquisite, too: a slightly effervescent, green-grassy crisp white from Lazio. Like a vinho verde, but even greener.

Thanks, guys!

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cookies, costumes, and crumble

Posted in Baking, Sweet Things, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, eating locally, local eating, local food, locavore, locavore in Rome, locavore Rome, Rome locavore, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on November 1, 2009| 2 Comments »

This was one of our most fun Halloweens, because of the bustling community of kids who live here in 5B, the family ghetto, the building adjacent to the main American Academy building, (where the best unkept secret is that we have the best apartments). Halloween really started on Friday, before dinner. The kitchen staff had prepared trays of bat- and ghost-shaped sugar cookies, icing, chocolate cupcakes, and frosting for a big decorating party. (Knowing the kitchen-witches here, the ingredients were as local as could be.)

The cupcakes were so crumbly that they required adult hands, so the Roving Locavore got to work:

Cheers, Aurelia & Lisa!

Mid-day on Saturday, Halloween proper, Jack and Lulu got to work on the papier-mache components of their costumes. Lulu’s parrot head paint was drying, so she helped Jack paint his fireman’s helmet:

After we returned from Halloween party #1, at Nico’s house at 4:00 (boy, was it a heavy candy-eating day!), the Academy kids paraded and trick-or-treated around the apartments and studios of the Academy building, where the fellows were dressed as witches, death in various forms, Bacchus, a princess, John the Baptist, devil & angel, and a fortune teller.

the tube is for the milk-bottle O2 tank on Jack's back

who knew that Dante had hooked up with a gondoliera?

Later, when the kids were spinning and running and staggering from their sugar overdoses, we had a potluck dinner. Everyone loved the meatballs, sangria, and the zucca lasagna. I made a pear-apple-almond crumble with mostly local or at least organic ingredients.

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What’s not to love about farro?

Posted in Grain, tagged American Academy in Rome, Amy Campion, Amy Campion food, eat locally, eating locally, farro, farro recipes, local eating, local food, locavore, locavore in Rome, locavore Rome, Rome locavore, Rome sustainable food, roving locavore on October 29, 2009| Leave a Comment »

farroGarfagnana1

Farro. It is one of the oldest domesticated crops. One of its varieties, emmer wheat, has been found in archeological sites dating back 15,000 years. For millenia, farro fed the peoples of the Mediterranean and the Near East as a daily staple.

What is it? The short answer is that farro is a variety of wheat. The long answer is botanical and semantic. Farro’s difference from modern, commonly grown wheat, is that it has a strong hull that doesn’t just fall off during threshing. This makes farro require extra work in processing, but it also relates to farro’s hardiness. Farro has survived so long, and continues to be cultivated, because of its reliable yields in the mountainous regions of Italy. The name farro is translated variously into English as einkor, emmer, or spelt because it generally signifies all of these varieties of hulled wheat.

The Italians use the dried, oblong, amber-brown grains in a variety of food preparations—from minestrone, to cold grain salads, or breads and pastas after the grains have been ground into flour. When eaten whole, in soups or salads, farro is cooked al dente, so that it has a toothsome springiness.

This springiness is one of the reasons I love it. I love it for its versatility, its deep nutty, wheaty flavor, and its incredible nutritional punch (it has more than twice the protein and fiber of the most common wheat, which loses even more in refinement). I love farro, too, for the role it could play in a future of sustainable agriculture. It is a low-yielding crop that likes craggy hillsides, and arid spots, in addition to sun-and-rain-drenched fields. That first characteristic is why it is virtually unknown in factory-farm-happy places like the Midwest U.S., where high yielding crops rule (but not for long, we fear, because of their reliance on costly inputs and/or bioengineering). These latter characteristics, and its nutritional content, are what have made it a staple crop in the past and what may make it a necessary crop in the future, when climate change forces us to use these hardy ancient crops that can survive where g.m.o.s can’t.

I’m going to quote a long Wikipedia paragraph, because I like the description. Even more, though, I love the vocabulary lesson:

Like einkorn and spelt wheats, emmer is a hulled wheat. In other words, it has strong glumes (husks) that enclose the grains, and a semi-brittle rachis. On threshing, a hulled wheat spike breaks up into spikelets. These require milling or pounding to release the grains from the glumes.

Wild emmer wheat spikelets effectively self-cultivate by propelling themselves mechanically into soils with their awns. During a period of increased humidity during the night, the awns of the spikelet become erect and draw together, and in the process push the grain into the soil. During the daytime the humidity drops and the awns slacken back again; however fine silica hairs on the awns act as hooks in the soil and prevent the spikelets from reversing back out again. During the course of alternating stages of daytime and nighttime humidity, the awns’ pumping movements, which resemble a swimming frog kick, will drill the spikelet as much as an inch or more into the soil.

Fascinating. But what’s to be done with this clever grain? Tonight I cooked some soup, the basis of which was farro mixed with green and red lentils. I especially love a lentil soup jazzed up with lemon, sweetened with carrots, and spiced with cumin. Mona and Chris and their crew in the Rome Sustainable Food Project kitchen have been making some amazing salads with farro. My favorite, so far, included fennel roasted with chopped whole lemons (rind and all) and tossed with some chopped bitter green, farro, salt and pepper, and plenty of flavorful olive oil. At a potluck at one of Jack’s school friend’s apartments, I tasted a warm farro salad featuring roasted, nicely caramelized chunks of zucca, the ubiquitous big orange squash in the Roman markets all fall. This cool Halloween weekend calls for farro with something orange….