Upside-Down Pear

As near as I can tell, I was 20 or 21 before I had pancetta, in a salad at Casbah. If I had it before, it made no impression on me – but I suspect I hadn’t, since it didn’t feature in my native cuisine, and it tends to stick to more upscale restaurants than my poor student self usually frequented.

For all that I loved its salty tang, I never cooked with it until recently. It is entirely possible that I shall go to hell for neglecting it so long. It was the pancetta that smoothed away the bitterness of the rapini; it was the pancetta that gave texture to the polenta. And it was the pancetta that was left over because we’d bought a pound but barely needed a third of that.

Tonight I used another third of it in risotto – diced fine and browned, then removed before making my usual mushroom risotto with thyme, and stirred in & sprinkled over at the end.

O lift me from the grass! I die! I faint! I fail!

Crispy and chewy, the perfect salt counterpoint to the creamy rice and soft mushrooms – perfection, bleeding flavor onto my tongue.

In other news, Nat writes about Cafe de Olla.

I’ve never been a big fan of complicated muffins. Muffins ought to be simple things — but they should never be boring. The other day, I was looking for something to use up some oat flour I’d ground (steel-cut oats + KitchenAid grain mill attachment = love), and found a bunch of horridly boring-looking “healthy” muffin recipes, along with a stray OK-looking recipe that called for rolled oats. I knew Is My Blog Burning 13, on muffins and cupcakes, was coming up, so I saved the recipe for later experimentation.

Rumor has it, by the by, that cooking is an art, but baking is a science. This is codswallop. Baking is an art — with constraints. You can change a recipe to hell and back if you know what you are doing, and muffins are an easy place to learn that kind of thing. They’re more forgiving than cake and bread, and usually you can feed even failures to hungry teenagers or coworkers without embarrassment.

Last night, I set about changing the recipe:

Banana Breakfast Muffins

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup oat flour
1/4 cup ground teff berries (or teff flour, or graham flour – teff is an eensy weensy African grain and may not be easy to find. I get mine from my local Whole Foods.)
1/2 cup minus 2 tbsp white sugar
2 tbsp dark brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder (sift so there are no lumps)
1 teaspoon baking soda (sift so there are no lumps)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
3/4 cup milk
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 very ripe banana, mostly mashed (it should still have lumps)

Combine flours, sugars, baking powder, soda, and salt in a large bowl. In a separate bowl, beat together the egg, milk, oil, vanilla, and mashed banana.

Make a well in the dry ingredients and pour in the wet. Stir until just combined.

Oil a muffin tin and fill the cups about 2/3 full of batter. Bake at 400 degrees F (205 degrees C) for 22-27 minutes. (My muffin tin makes big muffins, so this recipe yields 6 muffins, and is timed for that. This can easily make 12 small muffins, but reduce the cooking time to 18-20 minutes.) Muffins are done when a clean knife inserted in the center comes out damp, but not covered in sticky batter.

The ground teff berries give these muffins a slightly nutty taste with no nuts, and a pleasantly speckled interior; the not-quite-mashed banana leaves hidden pockets of banana goodness for your tastebuds to find. Switching the rolled oats out for oat flour means no surprise dry rolled oats (bleh!), and a more tender crumb. As for the brown sugar – well, I’ve just never liked all-white-sugar baked goods; they taste thin to me. In this case, the little bit of brown sugar plays nicely with the teff for a slightly deeper flavor than the muffins would’ve had otherwise.

Unlike so many bland “healthy” muffins, these need no butter to taste delicious. They can stand up to a mug of black coffee, but aren’t too sweet to munch alongside a glass of orange juice. I won’t pretend they’re particularly good for you — but they are a damn fine breakfast all the same.

I bought some rapini (aka broccoli rabe, broccoli rabe, Italian broccoli, and about 30 other names) recently, never having made it before, and went on a quest to find some recipes. One of the recipes I found was Soft Polenta with Pancetta and Broccoli Rabe. It looked good, but I didn’t have heavy cream around, so I saved it for later. Instead I made a feta-and-rapini-and-pasta dish that was nice, but not superb.

I still wanted to try the polenta dish — polenta being something else I’d never made — so I bought more rapini and all the other necessaries, and tonight I finally got around to making it.

Someone shoot me for being so dumb as to not have run out and IMMEDIATELY bought everything for this the instant I saw the recipe. Really.

It was so delicious that I nearly died of joy on the first bite. I wanted to eat it all and never, ever, stop eating it. Possibly it was the tastiest thing I have made in my life, and it might be up there in the top 10 tastiest things I’ve ever eaten.

If you are still reading this and not in the kitchen cooking up a batch of polenta, you are missing out, and I weep for you.

I love winter, and the accompanying citrus: the boxes of clementines, the tangerines my mother used to slip in our Christmas stockings, the blood oranges.

I prefer my blood oranges with just a bare touch of red to their skins, and deep maroon-red flesh, soft and delicate, juicy enough to stain my fingers when I pull the segments apart.