So delicious.

Quick and easy, only a few ingredients and one pot are needed to make this meal, and very little prep aside from the cleaning and soaking of the mussels. It can also be cheap since mussels are only a few euro for a kilo here in Italy. I’ve done this dish back in Milan as well, though without the salty sea air the experience does wane a bit. I love eating a pepata di cozze on the beach at lunch.

Pepata di Cozze – Steamed Mussels

I love the simplicity of this dish, but if you want pasta with your shellfish, try spaghetti allo scoglio (frutti di mare) or spaghetti con vongole – clams

a few cloves of garlic
olive oil
1 kilo of mussels
pepper, freshly ground
flat-leaf parsley (optional)
small tomatoes (optional)
white wine (optional)

1. Prepare the mussels if they haven’t been cleaned – soak them, scrub them well and remove the beard (step-by-step directions on cleaning mussels) and rinse them.
2. Get a large, deep cooking pot you have a lid for (glass is best so you can see in), and heat several tablespoons of olive oil in the bottom of the pan. Add the garlic cloves and sauté until they start to brown.
3. At this point, you can also add in a glass of white wine or the tomatoes if desired, and heat that back up to a fast simmer before the next step.
4. Add the drained mussels to the pot, and close the lid on top. In 4-5 minutes all the mussels should have opened – if not, turn up the heat a bit and put the lid back on for a few more minutes. Depending on how many mussels / size of pot / etc it shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes.
5. Take the pot off the heat (and turn off), and add the chopped up parsley and ground pepper. Discard any unopened mussels.
6. Serve in soup bowls and toast pieces of bread to serve at the bottom of the bowl or on the side.

The aftermath of pepata di cozze.

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• Recipes

Before you throw it away, pick it clean, keep all the bones and skin and make some homemade stock to use immediately, or to throw in your freezer.

And you don’t have to wait until Thanksgiving, either, or just with a turkey. I do this often with one of those oven-roasted chickens you can buy in a grocery store, or at the street market here in Italy. Sometimes they even come stuffed with rosemary – save that, it’ll be part of your stock!

Before I get to the directions, I want to talk about one thing I’ve become concerned about in recent years: MSG, mono-sodium glutamate, the sodium salt of glutamic acid. The presence of MSG excies your umami-receptors which perceive the savoriness/meaty taste of foods. While there have been many studies, with no conclusive proof about whether MSG is harmful to your health, I have a problem with it.

Why? Because it makes me think what I am eating is better than it is.

I want to be conscious of and enjoy every calorie I eat, whether they are “good” or “bad” calories. I feel tricked when I discover my food has MSG in it.

One of my most horrifying discoveries was when I found it in pre-sliced turkey in the supermarket here in Italy, that I was buying to slice onto my salads. Why did turkey need flavor enhancers?

In the 1970s and 1980s, in the USA we associated MSG with “Chinese food syndrome”, and companies like Panda Express went to great lengths to then assure us with shiny stickers that they are “MSG-free!” and then when you weren’t looking, MSG snuck back into other things like Doritos (potato chips), which I experienced on my recent trip to Florida in September.

I hadn’t eaten a Dorito in years, and my first taste made me go “Wow! These are so good!” and immediately reach for more. My reaction made me suspicious, as I’m getting better at knowing when I eat something because it tastes good or because my umami-loving tastebuds are going wild* (small difference). I checked the label, and boom, MSG.

You might say, well, it’s not so bad – MSG is from seaweed, and it’s natural. I too paused at this explanation, but rationalized: salt is also a flavor enhancer, but it’s also in our bodies, and is a natural part of your body’s defense when dehydrated – your body needs salt. Does it need a seaweed derivative? What are we putting in our food?

And modern production of commercial MSG has apparently nothing to do with seaweed, and is a by-product from fermentation of beets, cane sugar, and others [More from Cornell College in the MSG story - PDF link]. Fermenting beets to derive a compound that will make you think your food is savorier than it is? Yeast extract is also a hidden source of MSG. Here’s a bunch of other hidden sources of MSG.

So what does this all have to do with today’s post about homemade chicken stock?

Broth cubes are almost always very heavy on flavor enhancers and MSG. They have a tough job to do, of course, in flavoring plain water and making it savory soup-ready, but if you can make your own homemade stock, you’ll end up with a delicious base just the same and you’ll know everything that went into making it. Make a push for more natural foods in your house!

How to make homemade chicken stock

1 chicken carcass – leftover bones, skin, and pieces of chicken
2-3 stalks celery, chopped/sliced
1 small onion, chopped
2 small carrots, chopped
Garlic cloves (optional)
Salt & Peppercorns

1. In a non-stick deep soup pan, heat up a few tablespoons of olive oil and a few cloves of garlic (optional). Add the onion and cook until slightly translucent. Add the celery and carrot and cook for several minutes.
2. If the chicken carcass isn’t already broken up, break it into pieces that will fit comfortably in the soup pan, and add them to the celery/carrot/onion mix. Cover everything with water (depending on the size of the chicken, it could be 4-8 cups of water).
3. Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat so it boils at a low simmer, occasionally giving it a stir. I usually move the pan to the smallest burner on my stove, at the lowest heat setting.
4. Simmer it for several hours, uncovered. You may want to add more water every so often, especially if it boils off enough that the liquid is not covering everything.
5. You can skim off the foamy-fatty parts with a spoon as it simmers. Alternatively, you can skim the fat after the stock has cooled down, or you can leave the fat layer intact as Elise from Simply Recipes recommends.
6. Cool and strain the solids from the liquid with a wire mesh strainer into a freezer-safe container, pushing gently on the mass so you get all the juices out before discarding the solids. Divide into smaller containers and freeze or use.

Do you make your own chicken stock? What’s your favorite meal to use it in?

Do you have any feelings about MSG?

How to use up your chicken stock once you have it:

• Italian Onion soup from Ms. Adventures in Italy
• Roasted Cauliflower Soup with Gorgonzola & Caramelized Onions from Ms. Adventures in Italy
• Spicy Pumpkin Soup from Simply Recipes
• Pho Ga (Vietnamese Chicken Soup) from Steamy Kitchen
• Double Mushroom Soup from Kalyn’s Kitchen
• matzo ball soup from smitten kitchen

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Growing up on the West Coast of the United States, I didn’t grow up with a passion for lobster.

In some ways, I’ve never really developed a taste for lobster. I’m not sure I’m a fan at all. I don’t get excited about Maine lobsters or vats of melted butter or lobster tails on a menu with a price of “ask your waiter“.

I’d much prefer to crack piles upon endless piles of dungeness crab and pick out all the meaty parts with a tiny fork or my fingers, never making eye contact with the other people at the table as my hands become covered in shell fragments and stray shards of meat yet I don’t pause to wipe off my hands because they’d only get messy again and I’d risk giving up a portion of the crab I could be otherwise eating and the social custom of a civilized dinner table is lost to the moment to the crab.

Um, if you know what I mean.

But, lobster I find has a huge fanbase so I try not to write it off completely. So many people can’t be wrong. Maybe it’s just me. (Or maybe you, too?)

In Italy, I don’t really consider lobster as part of my regular cooking repertoire, as I’ve seen some live lobsters be sold as high as 70 euros for a kilo or two, and that kind of takes the fun out of it. And while I do look for crab often, and never find it other than some soft-shelled guys I don’t really get excited about, I sometimes pick up code di arragoste, spiny lobster tails. They can be a bit steep, around 25 euros a kilo (~$33 for 2.2 pounds) but you don’t need a kilo, or really even a half kilo to make a nice pasta dish just for two.

And they’ll pacify even the biggest crab fans.

If you love lobster, do you eat it with pasta? Let me know your favorite way to eat lobster with pasta in the comments. Maybe it’ll convert me into a lobster lover….maybe.

Spiny Lobster Tail with Asparagus Pasta Recipe

For two. You can use full-size, regular lobster tails in this recipe, too, but you’ll have to cook them longer so that they are cooked fully.

1/2 lb. (Spiny) lobster tails, in shells
3 tablespoons of butter
300g (1/2 lb.) asparagus spears, thinly sliced
150-200g spaghetti pasta
1-2 garlic cloves (optional)
4-5 cherry tomatoes
1 tablespoon olive oil

1. In a tall pot, set some water to boil for the pasta. Make an X with a knife on the cherry tomatoes. Blanch the cherry tomatoes in hot water for 30 seconds, and then cold water for a few seconds. Remove the skins from the tomatoes and set aside.
2. Heat the butter until it starts to bubble in a large frying pan. Add the lobster tails, still in their shells, and brown them for a few minutes on both sides and the tail meat isn’t opaque any more. Remove the tails from the pan and set aside until cool enough to touch.
3. If your water has started to boil, add a small handful of rock salt to the boiling water and then the spaghetti. Cook according to package directions.
4. While the tail meat is cooling, add the garlic cloves into the remaining (lobster) butter in the frying pan and add another tablespoon of olive oil. Add the sliced asparagus and tomatoes and cook until tender. While the asparagus is cooking, remove the tail meat from their shells and chop it into large chunks with a knife. Add the meat back to the asparagus and tomatoes for a final minute before turning off the heat.
5. Drain the cooked pasta and set aside 1/2 cup of pasta water. Turn the heat under the frying pan back on, and toss the spaghetti with the asparagus, tomatoes and lobster meat. Add a little pasta water if there’s not enough liquid to toss the pasta with.

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You’re not sure whether to take a ninja sword and chop it up so it doesn’t spontaneously reproduce and take over your living room with its spiky cones, or so that you can boil it and smother it in olive oil. I have a personal recommendation: do the second, but use the ninja sword in either case.

This broccoli is actually part of the Botrytis Group of the Brassica oleracea species which is in essence wild cabbage. Botrytis means really nothing to me, but it does add to the alien life form theory. I would go as far as to say that broccolo romanesco is the most geeky vegetable we have, winning over regular white cauliflower because of its color and coney spikes that are in a fractal formation.

As far as pairing broccolo romanesco with pasta, I have to give credit where credit is due – Rachel from Rachel Eats, a blog from a British woman living in Rome, is the blog I’m currently living through quite vicariously. Winter is especially tough on a food blogger like myself who spends her days in an office. We need really good, natural light to make those photos sing unless we want to invest in a lightbox or artificial lighting that’s good for photography. And I don’t. At least, not yet. Rachel”s cooking and blogging about it, much as I’d like to if I had access to my kitchen in daylight hours, which I don’t unless it’s the weekend.

So in these winter months, I have a choice: either I use those few daylight hours to stay in the kitchen and photograph, or I go out and do something with them. Guess which one I’ve been choosing?

But back to Rachel. W hen I saw her post about pasta e broccoli, I knew I had to try the simple pairing immediately. Now I have weekly requests for this dish!

If you see steam rising from this photo, it’s not a trick – it was hot and waiting for me to devour it after I finished photographing it, which I promptly did. I can’t wait until next week.

Broccolo Romanesco, Roman Cauliflower with Pasta Recipe

Note: I like to use as much of the broccolo romanesco as possible. I suggest cutting up the more tender parts of the stalk into small cubes.

A head of broccolo romanesco (around 1 lb or 1/2 kilo), separated into florets
Extra virgin olive oil (for cooking)
Extra extra read-all-about-it virgin olive oil (for the finishing touch)
Pecorino romano or parmigiano reggiano, to taste
Salt
250g of your favorite pasta

1. Boil salted water in a pot big enough to hold the cut-up broccoli.
2. Rinse the broccolo and separate it into florets and cutting the larger stalk pieces into cubes. When the water starts boiling, add the broccoli and boil from 5-8 minutes over medium-high heat (but don’t overflow your pot!) The broccoli should be very tender and starting to fall off your fork when pierced.
3. Remove the broccoli from the salted water, but do not drain it – save the water for the pasta! Bring it to a boil again, adding more water if needed for the amount of pasta you’re cooking, and cook your pasta al dente according to the package directions.
4. While the water is coming to a boil or the pasta has just been added, in a large frying pan, heat up a few tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, and a clove of garlic if desired. Add the broccoli florets and saute them over medium-high heat, starting to gently smash them with your wooden spoon so they get nice and creamy.
5. After the pasta is drained, mix together the pasta and the broccoli off the heat and add an extra touch of the extra-extra very good olive oil so that the crude, uncooked olive oil taste comes through. Serve and add some grated pecorino romano cheese or parmigiano reggiano.

Serves 3-4 people, or two very hungry ones.

Some of the liquid gold I topped off this pasta dish with:

Other articles about Broccolo Romanesco:

• Pasta e Broccoli from Rachel Eats
• Broccolo Romanesco from Madonna del Piatto
• Seriously Italian: Broccolo Romanesco from Serious Eats

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