The Food Season IV: Meals and Cooking on the Run Up to Thanksgiving - what we remember

Last week’s post for the food season was fiction, but memories of real meals form the cornerstones in my life. 

January 1994.  Rural China.  We traveled by bus to a distant, cold, rain soaked town near Burma.  We were hungry and tired.

We found a noodle stand on a corner.  It was crowded and buzzing.  The people who worked there seemed smart, content, at least smiling and competent. 

We sat down and ordered.  We pointed to piles of meat and vegetables to communicate what we wanted with our noodles.  We watched the cook make the noodles.  He took a ball of dough in his hands and wove it through his fingers as if a cat’s cradle.  He turned the ball of dough into long noodles right before our eyes.  I’d never seen anything like it.  The cook rotated his hands, made the dough swing and splay and then he quickly flipped the newly minted strands into a pot of boiling water and just as quickly from the pot into a burning hot wok.  They sizzled.  He added some meat and vegetables; he stirred it all and tossed it and added a sauce.  He cracked two eggs and let them sit on the top of the stir-fry.  They cooked as he slid the meal into two bowls.  In seconds we devoured the best Chinese food ever.  No.  Some of the best food ever, period.

            On that night a man ordered fish and we watched the cook take a swimming fat monster and toss it live from a small tub into a pan and serve it completely whole.  While we ate a group of men played a raucous drinking game.  Everything was loud and exotic.  It was hot and full.  Some people were mocking us gently, laughing.  One man came up and took the chopsticks out of my left hand and put them into my right.  The entire room laughed as he did it.  We didn’t care.  We smiled back. 

Dipping into a culture by sharing a meal is somehow intimate.  It makes communion.  It is a connection.  As I remember the details of this and other meals from twenty years ago in China, the cook at the noodle stand might remember us too.  At least we joined his life for a short while.  We didn’t just walk by.  Of all the things we did and experienced in China the making of a bowl of noodles at a corner eatery is one of the most important to me.

Meals are also memorable because they are comfortable and close, like anyone’s grandmother’s kitchen.

My baby sister Tina gave me a tremendous gift twenty five or more years ago when she moved to Italy.  What started as just a commitment to visit my sister is now a need to keep in touch with dear friends and special places a long way away.  And I remember it mostly through meals.

            1989.  I visited my sister alone.  Tina and her husband Ignazio took me to a place in the mountains north of Prato, in Tuscany, where they lived at the time (where Ignazio still does; divorced, my sister and darling niece live in Rome).  The restaurant was just a roadside tavern, stuck close to the cars crawling by on switchbacks into the mountains.  It was cold and rainy, mid-winter.  The air smelled of coal and wood smoke, car exhaust.  (These are the smells of Italy to me and therefore they are smells I love.)

Ignazio parked his tiny Peugeot along the side of the narrow road, not exactly out of the traffic.  We ran across the busy road and I was sure we would be killed. We’d been driving for a while, so I was happy to be out of the car, but I was not excited about where this long drive had taken us.  I was underwhelmed by the look of the place.  I remember the building as small and nondescript.  It sat on the downward side of the hill, below us.  It seemed cold.  It was not.

We ran into the small room and immediately I was hit with warmth and noise.  It was crowded, mellow and calm.  It smelled great.  The place was jammed. ‘Maybe it is not so bad,’ I thought.  The only dish on the menu was a sampling of four pastas and four sauces.  No choice at all.  They had one red table wine.  No choice. We sat at a communal table and settled into conversation.   We ordered.  It was easy.  Red wine.  Three meals.

I don’t remember all of the sauces.  One was mushroom.  One was certainly 4-cheese.  Although I don’t remember each sauce, each pasta, I remember how good the meal was.  I am hungry just thinking about it.  I think I remember the name of the restaurant: La Tinaia.  If that was the place, it was in Barberino di Mugello.  (This is rare for me.  I mostly don’t remember the names of places.)

There had been a small plane crash in the mountains and the police came in.  These carabinieri essentially filled the room, tall men with thin, slicked-back black hair, wearing beautifully designed, post-fascist uniforms, peaked caps and tall, black leather boots, all animated and arguing, gesticulating and shouting.  I couldn’t understand a word and thought they were about to fight.  I thought something was about to happen.  I asked my sister what the trouble was. 

“There was a plane crash.  A small one.  Plane.”

“Why are they fighting?”

She got frustrated with me.  Gesticulated.  Spoke quickly.  Her voice tightened.  “They are not fighting.  They are just talking about it.”

“Like we are?”  I smiled.

“Shut up.”  She smiled.  

So they were there to eat.  They weren’t arguing.  They were just Italian.

I remember my sister smiling at something else I said.  We laughed a lot.  Ignazio and Tina laughed together and we talked for hours.  I remember Tina and Ignazio were in love then.

We left the restaurant full and warm with red wine.  We drove back to Prato in silence, letting the road noise fill the space.  It was dark when we stopped at Marzia’s house.  Marzia Mariottini, a beautiful woman, with a noble Italian nose and charcoal eyebrows on olive skin, her hair night-sky black and long and straight, very smart and curious.  She knows art and the architecture of her country.  She likes to share it.  She is funny.

She lived then with another great friend, Fabio.  A friend of Iganzio’s, a thin, fit man with a gangly, scraggly beard, his eyes close together.  A permanent winking smirk on his narrow face.  He is a gym teacher who loves old American noir films.

We had a few drinks with Marzia and Fabio.  We sat in a quite kitchen and just talked.  I think this was the night I tried Marzia’s Uncle's homemade artichoke liquor.  I can still taste it. 

* * * * *

Here are three recipes from Italy to accompany this post.  One, Cacio e pepe, I make a lot.  One is a variation I will write about in another post.  It's a funny story.  The last one my sister Tina told me about.  I have not made but my sister is an incredible cook so I trust her (and it sounds delicious).  (She also sent me a recipe for Cacio e pepe but I like it the way I make it better.)

Cacio e Pepe  This recipe is in a Gourmet Magazine. Here is the on line version.  It is incredibly simple.  It is spaghetti, black pepper and very good Pecorino Romano cheese.  

2 tablespoons black peppercorns, coarsely ground or ground with a mortar and pestle.

1/2 lb. spaghetti

3/4 cup + 2 tablespoons very finely grated Pecorino Romano cheese.

Gourmet says to toast the peppercorns.  Go ahead.  I don't.  It is best to use a thick spaghetti, like a number 5, or use rigatoni.  Cook the pasta until al dente.  Important: reserve about 1/2 cup of the pasta water ad then drain the pasta.  Do not shake off excess water.  Put the pasta in a warm bowl.  Sprinkle 3/4 cup cheese and 3 tablespoons cooking water evenly over spaghetti and toss quickly.  If pasta seems dry, toss with some additional cooking water.

Divide the pasta onto two warmed plates.  Sprinkle with the black pepper and another tablespoon of cheese each.  Serve immediately with additional cheese on the side.

Tina points out this is not a good pasta for large groups.  Cook it, serve it and eat it quickly.  We are a family of four and if you do a pound of pasta it's a great family meal.

Don't use inexpensive, pretender Romano cheese.  It will be a mess.

This is without a doubt the best pasta dish I have ever made or tasted.

My sister also recommends dried wild mushrooms from Scalvaia (a town near Sienna -- it is another story) grated together with the cheese and pepper as per above and then tossed with the pasta as with Cacio e Pepe.

Finally,  my sister suggests a nice summer pasta:  mix fresh ricotta cheese and cherry tomatoes with black pepper and Pecorino Romano and pasta.  But go ahead.  Make it in winter.
This noodle dish is not Italian -- It is fron the other side of the world from the book The Essential Asian Cookbook, White Cap Books, 1998 --  and it is easy to make and delicious.  Use chicken, beef or vegetables if you want:

10 large raw prawns
200 g (6 1/2 oz) Chinese barbecued pork
500 g (1 lb) Shanghai noodles
60 ml (1/4 cup) peanut oil
2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic
1 tablespoon black bean sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon white vinegar
60 ml (1/4 cup) chicken stock
125 g (4 oz) fresh bean sprouts
3 spring onions, finely sliced
fresh coriander leaves, for garnish

Peel and devein the prawns.  Cut the pork evenly into thin slices.
Cook the noodles in a large pan of rapidly boiling water until just tender.  Drain and set aside.
Heat the oil, add the garlic and cook until it is pale gold.  Add the prawns and pork and stir for three minutes or until the prawns are pink.  Add the noodles to the wok with the black bean sauce, soy sauce, vinegar and stock.  Stir-fry over high heat until it makes your eyes water.
Add the bean sprouts and spring onion for one more minute.
I add hot chilles at the end.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio

Great Baseball Photos Revisited -- Kung Fu Panda

With credit due to the Guardian newspaper --

Giants mash.  A romp.  Baseball as rock show.

The Food Season III: A Short Story 'The Night Out'

We walk down a street.  We do not talk, both stare down at feet or way ahead.  Constant, heavy traffic whips by, the sound from the rain slicked street is incessant.  The spray does not reach us but we are both soaked.  The umbrella is almost useless.  The rain slants with the wind.  Raindrops big as grapes pepper us.

It is a fight, an argument.  One said something and the other got angry.  And now we are not talking, steaming.  And now it is raining.  Hard.  We are both hungry.  Neither of us wants to be with the other.  It is dark, cold.  We are wet, hungry, unhappy.  It is depressing, oppressive.  Each of us, secretly, want simply to turn away and go off alone, leave the other, disappear.  But we don’t.  Some times this can last days, some days hours.  It is a street we've walked many times.

“Are you hungry,” I ask, knowing the answer will be a shrug.  She shrugs, which means 'yes, but I am so pissed I would rather die than admit I want to eat.'  We keep walking, slogging.  She is almost crying.  I am a knot.  I want to throw up I am so mad upset pissed off.  We just walk.

We pass a few okay restaurants but do not even slow down.  We know each other.  We may be frustrated, angry, hungry, wet, depressed.  But.  We like our food.  A bad meal or a bad place would be worse than the misery on the street. 

Finally, across the street, past the flying cars kicking up clouds of mist, there is a busy room behind a picture window.  The glass is steamed but through the window comes a light.  It is warm, not bright.  Through the fogged-glass we see a man hard at work playing a piano, occasionally pulling on a cigarette.  Tall waitresses in black pants, white blouses and long white aprons race through the room, around the crowded tables, with trays stacked high.  A man near the window pulls on his beer.  She nudges me.  I nod.

We jog across the street and push into the room.  Welcomed warmly.  No reservation but not a problem.  ‘Why don’t you wait at the bar,’ we are asked.  Fine with us.  We sit at the long bar and have a drink, don’t talk but are done with the fight.  The hostess brings us a kitchen towel I watch my wife wipe her hair with the towel, which makes me laugh.  She smiles.  Familiar.  I am smart enough not to ask her to say she is sorry.  I order two more drinks.

We fall into a deep conversation and before we know it we are asked if we’d mind, there is a table in the back by the kitchen doors, not usually used, but it’ll be a long wait if we don’t want this small table in the back.  They like us.  It's nice, being here.  We go look and the table is fine.  We don’t mind.  We sit down with our drinks.  We watch the servers fly in and out of the kitchen; when the double-hinged doors swing open it is like a portal to another world; we glance at the line, watching the chaos and the shouting in the heat of a bustling kitchen.

Our waitress comes up.  She is sweet and smart.  She smiles with her eyes and brings us warm bread and menus before we are settled.  We have our drinks from the bar and order mussels in a broth of wine and garlic and butter.  We dunk warm bread into the sauce.  We finish our drinks and order a bottle of red wine.  We can barely hear the piano over the talking and the occasional burst of talking and shouting which flows from the kitchen when the door swings open.  And the kitchen team is listening to something loud and fast; when the door swings shut the music swings back to gentle jazz of the piano in the bar.  Door opens to the kitchen and a wall of guitars rail.  It is funny.

We order our meal, the waitress answering questions and steering us to this or that. 

The room swallows us and we talk through roasted lamb, curried chicken, crisp roasted potatoes, perfectly sautéed spinach in lemon sauce, an asparagus and wild mushroom thing that tastes like melted gold.  Somewhere during the meal we order another bottle of a good red wine, dry and round and blood-red.  Not cheap but not not cheap.

We both eat – no picking at the edges of the plate.  We both tuck in.  When the plates go away they are shiny-white; we joke the chef could take the plates, reload them with a fresh meal and send them back into the room.  She says 'I am sorry.'  I smile and say 'me too.'  that's it.
Later, the waitress slides a slice of pie between us and says ‘it’s on me.  Welcome.’  We share.  We never share.  And then we order another desert, a warm apple crisp with vanilla ice cream, and two glasses of a liquor the waitress recommends to join the pie.  It is like a treacley drug, warming our throats and we feel it take off inside.  A good drunk.  We are hours in and no time has passed.  We laugh about the fight.  We are drunk, drunk, drunk and have no intention of leaving.  We talk and talk.  Finally, we drink oil dark coffee. 

We sit and hold hands across the table.  The waitress drops the check on the table and smiles.  Says as long as they don't lock the door not to worry.  When finally our table is cleared the room is quiet.  The rain has stopped. The staff are winding up now, talking.  When the doors swing open Reggae blares from the kitchen and the shouting now is in Spanish.

If we had not found this place the fight would have lasted two days, maybe longer, I can tell.  As it is, we found the place.  The fight is gone.  What can we say?  We like our food.  We love good places.  We know each other.

We make up the pie in the tip.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio

Pushing Boulders Up Hills

Our high school ski team dragged an old truck engine to the top of a hill.

The idea came from our coach, George Woodard, who did not ski but knew how to farm and tinker.  We hauled the engine up the hill to build a rope tow.  The rope tow was George’s idea to improve access to the top of our ski jump.  This was back when Vermont high schools allowed teenagers to jump, and maybe George couldn’t ski but he knew less walking meant more practice. 

Harwood Union has a small hill behind the school.  At the time, it’d been converted into a jump; a short, steep pitch with a huge dirt headwall carved into the middle of the slope.  The headwall had a kicker.  We’d sail off it. 

Walking up that hill to practice was hard work.  The long wood skis, built like barrel staves, wide as floorboards, were mounted with old steel telemark cable bindings.  Industrial.  The skis weighed a ton.  The ancient leather boots weighed, oh, one hundred pounds dry, one-fifty wet.  Throwing skis as long as small trees onto teenaged shoulders and walking up a hill wearing wet moon boots.  As I say, hard work.  So we all thought George was onto something.  Moving a rusted, ancient, gigantic, iron Ford Model A engine to the top of the hill seemed a small price to pay to avoid the hike. 

George mounted the engine on a wooden timber frame.  The frame probably weighed more than the motor.  Angled at the front with two big ropes attached, the frame was really a massive, heavy sled.  The plan was to haul the motor on the sled to the top of the jump.

The sled and engine sat on the grass behind the school while we waited for winter.  When it did finally snow, big wet flakes laying down a foot of base, we were excited for the job.  Like Egyptian slaves we grabbed the harnesses.  We dragged the sled to the base of the hill.  Dragging across flat ground itself was near impossible.  Exhausted from this small effort, and we hadn’t really done anything yet.  The hill was incredibly steep.  What we were doing was insane.

Which was perfect.  It was perfect because letting us jump with little instruction and old gear was insane.  And not only the jumping was crazy.  Landing was crazy.  The outrun to one jump we competed on took us across a small road.  A teacher was stationed at the road both to pile some snow on the dirt track and to shout when cars came, although there was no stopping so I don’t know what the teacher would have done if a car roared up when a kid came screaming down.  The base of another jump crossed a stream by way of a narrow wooden bridge.  Thread the needle over the bridge or end up in the water. 

Getting to the top of some jumps was also crazy.  The depression-era trellises, stacked high on hills, were coming to the end of their lives.  The trellis jump in Lyndonville leaned like Pisa and moved measurably in the wind.  There was no stair, just a steep incline with small, worn wooden slats for toeholds.  Dead of winter, wearing moon boots, carrying the weight of a cross and climbing in a wind with the whole thing swaying under foot, getting to the summit of the Lyndonville jump was a sport of its own. 

And then there was the jumping.  None of us were very good.  We were unschooled.  Our gear was from the Great War.  If success was overcoming sheer terror we were Olympians.  

But sometimes it went just right.  Point the skis, hurtle like an arrow toward the headwall; leap forward when you hit the lip; skis come up, body leans forward into the sky, and for one or two beats of the heart the skis lift, you lift.  You fly.  The rope tow was a chance to fly.

Hard work, dragging a truck engine to the top of a hill.  We tugged and slipped and fell.  We were soon soaked and covered in mud, exhausted.

Near the top someone noticed frozen rotting apples hanging from gnarled trees. Between the wet snow and the apples we abandoned the sled and launched an epic snowball and apple fight.  As it always is, one team member almost lost an eye, taking an apple right in the glasses.  Another I think broke his nose.  There was blood in the snow.

After the apple fight we finished the job, putting the sled in position.  We stood there, soaked, cold, battered, maybe a bit proud.  We stood in the gloam of a late-fall afternoon.  George pulled a key out of his overall pocket, wrapped cold fingers around the key, put it in the ignition, turned it.

I was brought back to all this a few days ago.  I was reading an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker about Albert Camus.  Camus - philosopher, writer, resistance hero - wrote about Sisyphus, a man who defied the Gods and was condemned for eternity to roll a boulder up a hill only to have it perpetually fall back down. 

Camus argues Sisyphus was condemned to nothing worse than life; we all spend a lifetime rolling rocks up hills only to have them tumble back down.  Gopnik sums it up this way: “learning to roll the boulder while keeping at least a half smile on your face is the only way to act decently while accepting that acts are always essentially absurd.” 

As Jonah Hill’s character says in Moneyball, ‘it’s a metaphor.’ 

We probably should have tested the engine before we dragged it up the hill.  It would not run.  The block was cracked.  Back down the hill we walked. I bet the engine sits there still.

What a day, the day we sledged a truck engine to the top of a hill.  It is the trying, I guess, which makes us smile.  

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio

The Food Season II: Cooking For Friends During The Dark Months

            Second piece on meals.  I still cook the chicken cutlets with long pasta I first new in Ernestine Rocchio's kitchen.  The smell when I cook that meal takes me right back to being a kid with his grandparents.

I know my love of cooking for friends comes from there.  Shopping for food and drink, prep-time with the radio playing, working hard right up until everyone arrives.  It is important.  It is how I connect.  

Small groups, up to eight, are best but I have fed twenty.  And we have a small house.  I like sauces and working with very hot pans.  I worked a line in college, late 1970’s and early 1980’s, at a pretty good fine American cuisine restaurant, called Dillon’s, where the owner/chef tipped the line cooks out with drugs and talked a lot about how Hawaii was better than Vermont.  It was odd but he was a very good cook.  He was a very tough boss.  I learned a lot on that line.  A lot.  And I learned a lot from my Gram.  And I have been cooking now a long time.  
I think the insight that made me confident in the kitchen, and is based on nothing more than having done it a long time, is cooking is chemistry.  You heat something up and it changes.  You heat a combination of things up and they change differently.  You learn what to heat up when, how hot, what to add when, how hot, and you become a good cook.  So I am comfortable firing foods and making meals.

Cooking in winter is in many ways the best.  Our bodies are looking for rich, fatty foods.  It is dark out.  There's nothing else to do.  It is cold out.  It is warm in a working kitchen.

I like to cook thin pieces of meat in hot hot oil on a stove, adding maybe some good soy sauce, white wine, mushrooms, lemon, maybe breading the meat or rolling it first in flour and egg.  I like making pan sauces, especially tomato sauce, which starts with olive oil, garlic, onion, a can of anchovies, adding meatballs or mushrooms or sausage or roasted peppers.  Other sauces I love to make are simple:  garlic, oil, pepper; roll meat, maybe chicken thighs or lamb bits or stew meat into it; add white wine (and fight with wife over using good wine for cooking); cover the sauce once the meat is brown; uncover it and add salt, pepper, cumin, fennel seed, who knows.  Let the sauce boil off a bit, add more wine (maybe lemon depending on what else is in there), serve it. 

In winter I aslo like to roast meats and root vegetables.  I’ll stuff a chicken with pretty much anything lying around the kitchen.  No two hens ever come out the same.  One favorite approach to roasting a chicken: I rub olive oil onto the bird’s skin, spackle it with salt and pepper, curry powder or other savory spices, stuff it with aging oranges or lemons or pears (or all three) and place the chicken into the extremely hot cavern of our oven with spanish onions all around it in the pan.  I cook it for ten minutes at temperatures reserved for reentering spacecraft and then turn the flame down to just under four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.  You can almost hear the bird cook.  When it is done it tastes sweet and crisp and rich.  The onion caramelizes and melts.

We buy a half cow from a friend and it sits in our Sears freezer in the basement.  The meat is lean and the steaks thick, red, delicious.  I cook the steaks outside on a wood fire.  I do this through the winter, at least until the snow covers over the stone firebox.  I love cooking steak over the open flame, watching it closely.  The wood smoke makes the cooked meat sweet.  I make the simplest of garlic breads over the same fire, a trick I learned from my Italian brother-in-law.  I take slices of baguette and toast them over the burning logs, grind raw garlic into the burnt toast and slather the toast with olive oil and salt.  That’s it. 

            The din during any dinner party in our house is a happy, satisfying sound.  I love to watch the conversation as one person is pulled in and another drops away; as some people laugh and others huddle and talk quietly; as stories get told; as it gets late and becomes a bit drunken.  We listen to some music, sometimes too loud, sometimes piped in low.  We drink a lot.

At one dinner party I made something new, which came out terrific.  I heated oil in a wok and added a can of anchovies, which dissolved to dust.  I added many, many chopped cloves of garlic.  I added some curry powder.  When the garlic was pulpy I tossed young squid into the hot mix.  The tentacles of the squid were cut into manageable bite-sized nests. I sliced the bodies into half-inch-wide tires and fired the squid in the oil.  As it roasted in the oil I added soy sauce and more curry.  The squid churned in the oil over a hot flame.  Occasionally I sloughed in good white wine.  As the wine boiled off I added more and more.  A bottle of good white wine ended up in the sauce.  It cooked for a long time on a low heat. 

We were all drunk when I finally served the squid.  I had no plates or small forks or toothpicks.  I had good French bread.  My friends dunked the bread in the broth and ate the squid with their bare hands.  It was messy and awkward but it was so damn good.  It all went.  We drifted to the table for dinner with burned, oiled fingers, already pretty much full, already a bit drunk.  It was a great night. 

            Some meals work better than others; some dinner parties are better than others.  I don’t know why.   Cooking is chemistry;  dinners are alchemy.  The music helps.  The alcohol helps.  People being comfortable with each other and themselves helps.  The look and feel of the room helps.  This is true whether the meal is in a home or at a restaurant.  Being with people you enjoy and being able to relax and eat.  I learned it in my Gram's kitchen.  It is the same here although completely different.  There is nothing new about cooking and eating good food with friends during the dark months.  It is I bet as old as the world.  

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio

The Food Season I: Meals and Cooking On The Run Up To Thanksgiving

            My father’s mother rolled out homemade pasta.  She pounded the dough on the counter until it formed homogenized balls of fine flour, egg, water, salt and other dustings of I don’t know what.  She then rolled the mud-white balls into circle shaped parchments, sliced the flattened dough into strips with a small knife and settled the strips to dry all around the kitchen, on countertops, chair backs and tables.  My Great-Grandmother – Ma – helped and the two women worked together, mostly in silence, sometimes talking quietly.  The conversations were about this niece, that brother, some uncle or a cousin in Maine.  All family.

During the cooking my Grandfather sat in the kitchen, drinking coffee or beer, smoking cigarettes, not quite listening or watching, pretending to read the Providence Journal or Evening Bulletin.  I sat with him.  I was little.  I could sit for a lifetime in that kitchen.

In that sanctuary as the homemades dried the two women cooked other foods, all ancestrally Italian – this was still an Italian kitchen.  In it they made this or that:  red sauce with rolled beef; stuffed artichokes, squid, or shells; roasted chickens; breaded chicken cutlets; brown meatballs; fire-roasted peppers; big antipastos; escarole soup. 

I watched it all.  Uncles and aunts stopped by after dinner for coffee and pie.  Each Thanksgiving, falling asleep, full as a python, watching football in their living room.  Sitting around the Christmas table after the meal.  The red Christmas table cloth, speckled with gold thread, its surface dusted with crumbs, weighed down by pie plates, coffee cups, ashtrays.  The adults talking and smoking and drinking coffee.  Me sitting there eating my pie, watching. 

From today through the Tuesday before Thanksgiving I am going to post bits of an essay I wrote about remembered meals, eating with friends, the importance of food.  And I'll try to offer up a recipe although nothing so precise it will be helpful.  Here is the first one:

Chicken Cutlets

2 lbs. chicken breasts

2 cups or more dry bread crumbs

4 eggs

black pepper

good parmigiana cheese

salt

olive oil

garlic

making the batter

beat two eggs and add salt and pepper to taste.

on a plate spread half of the bread crumbs and mix in some grated cheese.

preparing and cooking the chicken

Start a quarter of an inch of virgin olive oil in a cast iron skillet and add some slices of garlic.

Fillet the chicken breasts quite thin and then beat the breasts with the side of a knife or with a kitchen mallet.

Dip the cutlets into the beaten egg mixture, dredge the cutlet through the bread crumb and cheese mix and dip the cutlet again in the egg batter.  You will need to pause half way through cooking to replenish both the egg batter and the bread crumb/cheese coating.

Fry each cutlet until the batter is brown and the chicken breast is white but still tender.

Eat it all yourself or it is a meal for four.  Terrific with a pasta with red sauce.

David Rocchio lives, works and writes in Stowe, Vermont. (c) 2012 David Rocchio