Italian Supper (Wednesday)

Some friends came over for dinner Wednesday night and we served them Italian. In the interests of making note of simple foods that only take a few minutes to make, here is the menu and a few recipes.

To start, tuna crostini (oh, and a little glass of framboise before the food arrived).

Every time we arrive at our favourite Tuscan farmhouse for a holiday, Rina makes a plate of these crostini so that we don't starve on our first night in the tiny town. The key to good canned tuna (either in a green salad - in fact, greens and maybe a tomato mixed with tuna and lots of salt and pepper makes an AMAZING lunch - or for these crostini) is that the tuna be in olive oil (not soybean or canola or "vegetable" oil), not in water. Two cans, oil included, mixed with Italian mayo (nice and eggy-yellow), salt and pepper, makes the topping. Keep tasting - adding mayo until you like the texture and taste is the only way to do it. You can use day-old bread (a small loaf), or toast slices of new, dense bread (it has to be firm or it will just fall apart; white is best). On each slice, spread a spoonful of tuna mixture and top with a green pimiento-ed olive sliced in half. Think tiny open-faced sandwiches adorned with meaty tuna and accented with the brininess of the olive. Yum!

When I make these with Rina's guidance, I invariably do something "wrong" which "ruins" the crostini. Welcome to Italy and to working with Italian cooks. There is no experimenting. There is only tradition (and why should I complain? What a tradition it is!!). So I try to be as faithful as possible to her recipe, and you should too. The crostini never turn out quite as well as they do when she makes them, but I think that may have something to do with summer heat, the smell of dry grass, the sound of the tractors in the vineyard and the view of shaded castles and mountains in the hills towards Siena.

After the crostini, we served two pastas. The first I like to call "bruschetta" pasta, which is a blasphemous name (from the perspective of an Italian), but nevertheless... The second was P's idea: a simple, buttery mushroom pasta.

We love to make bruschetta pasta in the summer when the tomatoes are good, because it takes about 10 minutes and is incredibly fresh and easy. We usually make it with penne or spaghetti, but this time we had some excellent Barilla tortelloni on hand. I'll never make it with plain pasta again!

The trick to this recipe is using the best, ripest, freshest tomatoes you can find. Don't bother trying if you can't get good tomatoes. We bought our heirlooms (four big ones) at the Felton farmer's market which was, from the tamale sellers to the fruit vendors and the Beatles-playing guitarists, absolutely wonderful! I chopped the heirlooms into smallish (1-2cm square) pieces and tossed them with lots of fresh basil, good olive oil, a bit of balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. If you're ambitious, add some raw garlic or sweet/red onions, finely chopped).

The tomatoey mixture becomes a cold "sauce" which, when tossed with the hot pasta, makes a warm dish perfect for a hot day. It makes a decent salad the day after, too! (I'd add some feta, perhaps, and serve it room temperature for lunch). If you'd rather have bruschetta with your tuna crostini, toast some slices of bread, rub a halved clove of garlic over each slice, and then paint each slice with olive oil (this last bit is VITAL! Otherwise you'll have - horrors! - soggy bread.). Put spoonful or two of tomato mixture on each slice of bread, and serve with lots of napkins! But for our pasta, just toss the tomatoes with the hot tortelloni and serve. So, so good.

Next: P's mushroom pasta. We used brown, white and oyster mushrooms (3 cups sliced, perhaps?), since that was what was in season at Felton. The trick? Frying them on low for a long time in a stick (yes, a full half cup) of butter. We often add garlic to our buttered mushrooms and eat them with fresh white bread for dinner, but this time P did it plain, adding only some salt and pepper and then, just before serving, some flat-leaf parsley. Tossed with pasta, this made for a lovely, rich spaghetti ai funghi. (Again, if you want to complicate matters, add a little cream or white wine.)

We served the pastas with freshly grated parmigiano (of course), locally-made baked sausages (sweet chicken-apple and hot Italian), good mustard for the meat and a lovely bottle of Chateau St. Jean's excellent cab (brought by the guests).

To finish things off: we had considered cheese as dessert, but I wanted to try the recent Gourmet recipe for flourless chocolate almond cakes. We served these exceedingly rich, pudding-like delights with fresh strawberries and cream.

It was a lovely meal!