Mollie Katzen's Cooking Show; Mangia

Why would you want to know. I'm Molly Katzen and though I don't speak Italian I do speak fluent Italian menu. When I'm looking for a flavorful unpretentious cuisine that's satisfying and straightforward. It only comes through for me every time. White being an s grill soup is what I call Italian slow food. It tastes like it simmered all day but you can make it in under an hour. It's perfect with alfalfa Romaine of salad. My own personal spin on the classic Caesar. Pesto polenta spoon bread is a fluffy corn meal souffle that tastes like the polenta of the gods and the scrumptious pear port and cheese tart is like four courses and one fruit cheese dessert and after dinner drinks you can make this fabulous Italian feast right in your own kitchen. It's only one word of Italian You need to know Monita. Next on Mollie Katzen is cooking show. Part by heart friendly soy based meatless products created a taste with soy protein vegetarians celebrate additional funding from Mollie Katzen cooking show provided by helping people

enjoy vegetables is important to us too. And beano is made with the natural food enzyme when taken before eating. It helps prevent gas caused by many vegetables. Everybody wants a light meal. Very often Everybody also wants to know that they've eaten.

You want to feel satisfied. So it seems like a contradiction we want to have it both ways. Today we're going to have it both ways. I have a kind of augmented soup salad and bread meal that I want to show you. It's really nice because I guarantee it's light that you will know you've eaten. It's very important. All the lighting these days are kind of end up grazing all day long and we never completely feel like we've had a meal that won't be the case here. I am cooking and enjoying the aroma very much this year which is simply onions carrots and celery. I'm such an olive oil you can see that they're very small and they've been in there for a while I want them to get really soft and sweet. It's going to flavor a soup that I'm making a very simple Italian style soup soup features. And let me show you a scroll it's not that common to green. It's often in the produce department near the lettuces and we look at it we think. I was supposed to make a salad out of this are we supposed to cook it. It's a lot paler than some of the greens that we normally would serve just cooked it's pale like a lettuce but it does have a bite to it. It has

a slightly sharp flavor and although it is edible raw I really only cook it. I don't ever serve it raw. And what's nice about it is that these ribs are edible and have a really nice bite to them both flavor by it and texture bite. So I'm going to give it a nice coarse chop. You can chop these anywhere you want because it is basically edible raw. How long you leave it in the soup and how long it cooks just sort of a judgment call on your part. I'm going to add it with some bay leaf and I get the Bailey from the part here that has the oil the little bay leaves. It's really nice in California we can use bay leaves that are relatively fresh. It's going to go on the side as they put in the escrow. I'm going to kind of infuse it and I'm going to add about three different installments of garlic. I might use most of the garlic in this jar with garlic which I was just a little while ago I don't like it around too long but because I use so much garlic I do a lot of time so I'm getting this all mixed in and I'm going to add some vegetable stock. If you don't have vegetable stock if you're confused about the different kinds of stock they're available it's OK to use

water it still tastes good because of all the onion garlic daily all the seasonings that are going in but I found this kind of vegetable broth which I really like. It's got a mild but rich flavor and it's going to steam and cook this world. Now I'm putting the escrow on in stages because it cooks down it takes up a lot of room in the cooks down to have some more here that I chopped earlier. And I'll try to fit as much as I can in the pan kind of alternating with the stock. And I want to get some of the cooked vegetables on top I think I'll use the tongs bring the cooked vegetables up on top to help cook the Escorial. And I'm going to add the rest of this and it will cook down quite a bit. What's going to help it cook down is the addition of some salt. And that goes an ice coarse salt. And I think that's it for now maybe a little more garlic. I had garlic as I said intermittently. I'm going to add a little more later. They kind of want all these ingredients to adjust to each other at this point. I have a little more stock three important to cover it now because the heat just right medium.

And cover it. And I'm going to prepare the salad component of this meal. And I'm going to make some some big big krit tons out of pumpernickel bread. You could make it out of any bread. But I like dark bread on the salad it's not exactly traditional to this meal but sometimes we sometimes we push the traditions in our own style and taking up the crust and the shape I have now is kind of a rectangle and I want to make triangles because those are my favorite shapes. So I'm cutting the rectangle in half. I don't see the olive oil is hot and I can smell it the olive oil is hot and this is a good time to start frying the bread. Almost deep frying. It'll get really crunchy. First will do the traditional Caesar salad dressing in the bowl and I start with the acid I'm starting with a good amount of lemon juice. I have some mustard was my little Here's my little spatula some prepared mustard goes in. I used to love those old fashioned restaurants when I was a kid where they'd make most of the table they'd wheel up the carton and some little man

in a bow tie would make the Caesar salad at the table. Garlic goes in. And I'm going to make a nice little acid bath here before I put the oil and now comes the more controversial ingredient to vegetarians Worcestershire sauce originally developed not in England in India. Surprise. It's very spicy but the reason. It's controversy of vegetarians because most brands have in showbiz in them and if you're strict vegetarian and you don't eat fish then you don't want to. But there are a couple of brands available in health food stores that don't have inch over so if you're really strict and don't eat fish you can find those bands. But I want to do these crew tons before I go back to my oil. So I want to just give them a little bit of parmesan cheese so it'll melt on top and I'm being a little bit purposely sloppy because any cheese that hits the pan will kind of melt into a nice little edible crust. Very hot pan it's popping and that's telling me I'm going to move it over here. They'll be ready in a minute. Back to the dressing room whisking in olive oil in a drizzle of

extra virgin olive oil. Just very aromatic from the first pressing of the olives. Just an approximately twice as much of the oil as you had asked. And this is really fresh you want you want to hear the lettuce you want to hear it crunch when you tear it will tell you that it's really fresh. So that was then and I'm going to do away. My turning action we turn we grab the lettuce and we turn the dressing on to it. We want all the leaves how the leaves are getting coated. That's what we want. Coat it like so be patient. And everything coated but before it's completely mixed in. I want to distribute these alfalfa sprouts which I'll put here. They're very pleasant they have a slightly better flavor. They're basically a middle ground between a seed and a vegetable. The seed has sprouted. That's why it's called sprout but they're kept in the dark. So they're just starting to germinate but they're not in the ground so they're just elongated become crunchy. They were once thought to have a whole lot of mysterious and

phenomenal food value but they actually don't. They're just really fun to eat. They're a great snack and you can sprout just about any kind of seed. I find lentil sprouts and garbanzo bean sprouts in the store and they're delicious for snack. Some of them are hot radish sprouts and onions sprouts are hot and delicious very spicy. So I got this distributed up top and I'm going to put in a little bit of grated Parmesan as ya know. Like so Parmigiano-Reggiano is made in only one area of Italy. I'm sure you're familiar with it. There's a grated cheese. This was grated pretty fresh hard drive flavorful cheese pungent. I just want to make sure that these are drains talk with the crew tons here for a moment. You can hear how crunchy they are. Love that sound. And here comes the salad. See the sprouts are very well distributed among the lettuce just a very subtle presence. If you were to use onion sprouts or red or sprouts in the salad that would be nice it would give it a little punch. So you can see how the salad is

kind of carrying our theme of light but substantial that's a pretty rich dressing. So it's great for the final touch. Just a few crew tons. Like so. And always always a little bit of freshly grated black pepper. Stay there. And there you have alfalfa salad. The soup is busy. The soup is busy making itself become so. And look at how those greens cooked down you saw how much I put in there. Look look at that. They wanted to they could. But they absorbed all this isn't eating all the flavor of the broth. Smells great. Needs very little else but. It's something very important it needs its beans and pretty white beans and the name of the soup is being an ass girl soup needs the beans. I'm using a combination of PV. Navy beings which are also called Merope beans. And great northern beans they're very similar in flavor these two white beans.

They're in the same bean family and you do not need to soak and cook them first. But I did today and I'll bring these in and I like the combination of the two kinds of beans just because the two different sizes give a nice visual to the soup. I don't want the beans. I do not ever like crunchy beans. I can't think of a single example when I do it unless there sprouts sprouted beans but when beans are cooked I want them to be cooked so they're very very tender. But I do not want these beans to be cooked until they're mush. So that's why I'm adding them to the soup now if I'd added them when I added the escrow I would have a lot of mush. So I'm adding it now and all I'm doing with these being I'm not adding all of them. Because I want there to be a balance. Between the beans the broth and the Greens. I just want them to heat through and get flavor through. And that just takes a few minutes and then just a few things I like to put on top of the soup it's got in the bowl first. And of course each serving is a nice assortment of all the different goodies in there. I like to protect her you know in the soup I like just let me shave it down here for you. This is

a sheep's milk cheese. They love the sheep's milk cheese. Also from Italy. I like his big pieces on top of the soup. It's very lovely. Again a pungent hard cheese well-arranged these big pieces on top so it's a light soup but you feel satisfied because you've got to bite into that cheese like a grade of nutmeg on top and I really like to see them that makes it so pretty but it's really strong so it's really just a small grating. I've got a little parsley. And again a little bit of black pepper freshly grated in there you have white bean and that's girl soup. This is a soup salad and bread meal in a way but it also needs a dessert. It very much needs a dessert because remember our theme here today is we want to be very satisfied. We want to know we eat and we want to walk away from the table really happy and we will with this dessert we really

really will be and we will be so happy. Love this dessert. I'm making a pie crust for actually a tart and it's going to be Ahmanson. The tart is going to be a fruit and she's tart really unsweet and sophisticated and crunchy and satisfying in the crust. We'll have almonds in it and her to get ground and putting some of the flour in with the elements to grind them in the reason I'm doing that is because the flour will absorb some of the natural oils that will come out of the elements and keep them from turning into almond butter. I want a fine powdery result and not much else. Right. So this is what it should look like when the elements are off the ground. I'm going to just show you this sea of fine powdery slow grind of adding the flour for the crust to the ground. And we're going to mix them together. And putting in a pinch of salt. And I'm going to just buzz a couple times to combine.

It with. Some slices of butter on the top of the flour in as much of an even distribution as I can in this butter is very very cold and not handling it too much because I don't want to warm it with my hands. I wanted to stay cold so I can get a nice uniform mixture and a dry dry feeling uniform powdery mixture of butter cut through flour and ground almonds. So I'm going to post this a few times until I get that kind of course meal effect. Right. Now it's the way I want to starting to come together. The fact that it's coming together this much without my having added water tells me both that my kitchen is kind of humid today and also that the almonds give a little extra moisture so I'm adding less water than I normally would. I'm watching this very carefully and I want to add too much water. Yes it is enough because you can see that when the dough to start sticking to itself like this it's done away I have

a candling it minimally is to put it right into directly into the plastic wrap that I'm going to start and to chill it so I don't have to put my hands on it too much and keeps it cool cause my hands are warm and this way I can use the paper to push the dough together like this. Right in the paper. And then we have the dough. But it needs to be refrigerated so I'm going to put it over here and exchange it with some dough I made earlier that I just took out of the refrigerator it's just it's firmed up and it's rusted. This is the tart pan put in there. It's time to roll the dough. Now I want to be sure it's bigger than my pants so I have plenty of room and it is so I'm going to pick it up. And this is a great tool for this. The dough scraper or pastry cutter or in French it's called a cook pot. And I'm going to put it into the pan and because it's in pieces I might have to put it in more than one piece just fine it just laid in the pan like this. And ease it into the corners. What I'm going to do is I'm going to just take off the excess with my rolling pin like this.

So just pull off all the sides like this. I have here some soften cream cheese which I've been stirring and let me put this here sort of solid and I'm suffering the cream cheese I don't want to whip it too much because I don't want a lot of air in this filling because I wanted to be dense but I do want this very soft because I'm staring into it some yogurt again very tart cream cheese this tart. Some almond extract is going in just a little bit to kind of pull up the almond flavor from the crust and some vanilla extract and some honey. I don't often like to use honey in deserts but once in a while a very light colored honey with a mild flavor is a very special taste. I'm going to put this aside for just a minute. I am going to spread this into a pre-baked crust the crust is the only part of the pie that bakes. And this crust bakes all by itself and how it stays down instead of kind of pushing up and then losing its whole shape is that we do what's called baking it blind which is to put

weights in it. You can buy expensive fancy weights in Cologne or stores but I just use beans regular old beans have a piece of paper it's parchment paper. I fold it into quarters and I'm going to pull it on the diagonal like this cone shape like so and I'm going to just cut a circle. Sort of reminds me of when we used to make paper snowflakes in grade school when I was a kid and I have these beans are just regular old Pinto Beans and what I do is they use the same beans over and over again. And I call them my highway jeans but I don't ever use them for eating and just sharing this you know is kind of a demonstration because I did the earlier. And it's over here cooling because the crust has to be cool before you put the cream cheese and or the cream cheese will get all melted. And we don't want that we want the cream cheese really firm. Let me. Pull it in. And this is how lovely and flaky it is and you can see the little flecks of almond which I love. It's not a thick layer.

Now the next layer is a fruit layer. And my original recipe for this is calls for apples poached apples. In this case I have poached not apples but pears I've taken the liberty of doing a variation on my own recipe and all I did was put a cinnamon stick in a pot of Port heated up poached pears till they're just full of these beautiful tawny port they absorb it they absorb the color the flavor and I'm going to cut them and make a nice design on top. This is how I'm going to put the pear and top it's a kind of artistic little easy method of making it look very impressive. I made lengthwise slits but I didn't go all the way to the tip of the pear and I'm simply going to push it down like this and make a pear fan and smells really nice because of all that port that it's absorbed in and putting it here. It looks like about four pairs will fit four pair halves will fit. There's one more layer now to the start. This is the port that has been spiked with the cinnamon in the cinnamon stick was in there

and I'm going to make a glaze out of it. I'm going to measure out a lot of company. If we do it this way. And I'm going to just whisk in some honey just a little bit of honey. I want to take the sides off the pan that's very easy I have a bowl here and I was going to drop the side like that and then just turn this around. I'm going to do what's called slaking the cornstarch this is cornstarch putting in just enough water to make a paste. And I'm going to just take a little bit of this already warm here and just throws a little bit into the cornstarch mixture just to temper it to the heat. And it kind of warns that it's about to go back in to. The port mixture which smells divine. And I will thicken it over this heat. I want to keep whisking it so it'll be smooth and I want that

shiny look I love how cornstarch goes from being utterly opaque parity opaque to being a glaze. And that's it. That's all we need and it will thicken more as it cools. So all I need to do you know and spoon a little bit over the pears I just want to give them some shine and return some of that lovely port flavor a little bit around the edges. Now you could go all the way to the edge but I actually like to leave that white border so I'm just doing this much glaze. And I'll put it on a serving plate and I just need for it to have a green mint garnish right in the center like that. And there we have Apple port cheese tart which I like to make with pears. The bread entree the bread entree is going to be a polenta souffle. It's called pesto polenta spoon bread. And as you see I'm very gradually just sprinkling in corn meal to hot water. So as

soon as all the corn meal goes in and it comes back up. To its original temperature it gets thick which is just about instant instant situations. I want to remove it from the start we need to make pesto. And I'm sure you're familiar with this it's pretty well known by now Italian special special television from Genoa Italy. I'm putting it behind us today for extra protein. You can use different kinds you know if you want. But it doesn't take long and I'm going to put in a little bit of coarse salt which will help grind up the base leaves which I'm putting in now. And so basically we're grinding all this stuff to a paste. This is what I like it to look like right before I add the oil it's ground pretty small. And I'm going to drizzle in the oil and it will lighten in color and thicken. So here comes some cheese. Not too much just a modest amount.

And I just fold the set at the end so the pesto is now ready. I put it here and now because this is a souffle it requires beaten egg whites. I have my egg whites here now they've been coming to room temperature. It's easier to separate eggs when they're cold but it's easier to beat them when their room temperature so the ideas separate them earlier get them later which you have to do anyway. I'm adding a tiny bit of lemon juice to help keep the egg whites from overheating. So this is looking like you're ready. To be sure they're four to five picks which means they stand up like this and that means that they're ready. I'm going to mix everything into this corn meal mush. This polenta that has cooled down to just a little warmer than room temperature. And I'm going to beat the egg yolks in first. Just a little bit at a time and keep mixing because I don't want to cook too quickly it's still warm and egg yolks can cook in contact with something even

warm. And of course the yellow color becomes much more intense now. So I'm adding some pesto which will also soften the polenta. Through a bright yellow green and then it gets tinier and then I want to get the pesto in the egg yolks completely distributed into the polenta. Just take a little bit of the egg white and lighten up. It's quite heavy mixture and fold it in slightly like this. I'm going to work quickly because the plant is still warm and the eggs are somewhat cooking on contact. Cutting and folding. And as I do this I'm just going to sprinkle in a little extra grated parmesan. And keep going. And I prepared the pan earlier by oiling it. See oil in the pan and I just give it a dusting of parmesan cheese the cheese will give the souffle better something to cling to so it can climb and try to aim correctly. A tiny bit more cheese and I'm going to get it into my pre-heated oven.

Lucky for us. We have one that I couldn't earlier so we can see how beautifully and dramatically wonderful it was. Just bring it over here. And look at that. I told you that color would be indescribable Qahtani and pick it up very very carefully. This puff will only last for just a few minutes and there we have pesto. This is my version of a sort of fusion Italian meal it's near too light nor too heavy we start with the white bean as that lovely pecorino cheese on top then an alfalfa salad. The star of the pesto and for dessert. Another star. Of the apple pie that I made today with pears. I like to serve all of this with a traditional

Italian wine. You can make all of this exciting food in your own kitchens and know you're going to be really glad you did. To learn more visit our website you can see dot com. All the recipes from this series can be found in the updated editions of Mollie Katzen classic Moosewood Cookbook and broccoli forest which are available by calling the toll free number on your screen featuring full color photographs and Molly's original. These special editions are personally signed by me. To purchase each book for 1995 or both books for $35 plus shipping and handling. Call 1 800 342 6 5 2. Cats the show is brought to you in part by heart friendly soy based products. Meatless products created a taste look and cook like real meat with soy protein. Boca burger.

Vegetarians celebrate meat lovers salivate additional funding from Mollie Katzen cooking show provided by helping people enjoy vegetables is important to us too. And dinner was made with the natural food when taken before eating. It helps prevent gas caused by many vegetables.