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Fava Bean Puree and Spaghetti

Fava beans are a lot like life: it takes a lot of work to get to the really good parts.

First there’s a pod to deal with. Peel back the zipper-string that keeps the pod sealed tight, open up the green shell, and inside you’ll find the precious fava beans nestled inside. But the work doesn’t stop there. There’s still a heavy, protective skin to remove before you get to the precious kidney-shaped nuggets of delicious emerald green. What a luxury fava beans are; I marvel at their simple elegance every time.

Lately, I can’t help but admire the wonderful little things about my job at Mozza.

It took countless years of shedding through inconsequential restaurant positions to find a job studded with rewards. I pitched the notion of the power of a flashy title and began to celebrate the good, humble work of service. I zipped past months catering, peeled back the years of meaningless beer-tap pulling, and stored away my management jobs, to uncover the simple joy of waiting tables and making drinks at Osteria and Pizzeria Mozza.

Nancy Silverton, Mario Batali, and Joe Bastianich’s world-class restaurant is a place where there is no such thing as a meaningless job.

From the prep cook shelling fava beans, the dishwasher cleaning off plates, the receptionist taking calls, the pasta cook dropping fresh pasta into the boiling water, the waiter explaining the menu, to the chef in pristine whites calling out orders —we all make a difference to the experience of everyone that steps into the restaurant.

Continue for a delicious Fava Bean Puree and Pasta Recipe »

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How to gut a fish


There’s a certain amount of fearlessness required to do anything unfamiliar. Faith helps, especially when facing an impressively difficult task. Steve Martin, the well-known grey haired comedian/writer (“well excuuuuuuuse me!”) says in his recent memoir “Born Standing Up” that naivite is the single most important trait required for anyone about to do something truly difficult. Pure, bright-eyed innocence of what trials are awaiting them is what is needed in order to protect the individual “from knowing just how unsuited [they] are for what [they] are about to do.”

And so it is with prepping, gutting and eating a whole fish.

When it comes to cooking, you have to be a little fearless, a touch naïve, and full of faith that your efforts will result in something good—and hopefully—something really delicious. There’s only so much research you can do. Not every task has a clear set of rules. Sometimes you just have to wing it.

Which is exactly what I did last week when I went to the market and was dazzled by the beautiful, clear-eyed whole fish on display. I never hesitated selecting a pound of whole sardines and two glorious, whole branzino from the shaved ice. It didn’t matter I had never cleaned a fish myself. I had faith that I could figure it out.

In all my years of working in restaurants, I’ve seen hundreds of fish scaled, cleaned and filleted. I’ve watched cooks throw whole fish onto their cutting boards and deftly use their knives to slice through the skin to reveal the tangerine flesh of salmon and the milky white meat of snapper. I’ve noticed how the back of a knife could be used to peel scales from the delicate skin of the fish. I’ve heard the percussive thud of fish head after fish head, hitting the side of the rubber garbage bin. So when I got home with my fish I figured just how hard could cleaning a fish be?

Back home in the kitchen, I immediately went to work. I washed my hands, ripped open the fishmonger’s paper packages and admired my bounty. The fishes’ tiny eyes shone bright and their silvery scales glistened in the kitchen light. I marveled at their fresh, clean smell. When I was good and ready to say goodbye to the pristine natural state of the fish, I took out my Knife Skills book and scanned its pages for tips on gutting.

Plenty of information is to be had on how to fillet (the left handed and right handed versions are beautifully illustrated), but to my surprise, Knife Skills doesn’t see the need to mention the fish gutting step. Feeling up to the challenge, I took my one good chef’s knife and pointed its tip into the belly of the first sardine. The knife barely pierced the fish’s delicate flesh, indicating that I had learned my first valuable lesson in gutting a fish.

1) Sharpen your knife.

After a good once over with my knife sharpener, I was ready to slice into the belly of the sardine. It was simple enough, running the knife along the belly to reveal the center cavity. Inside, the contents were easy enough to remove with the gentle swipe of a finger.

Gutting the whole branzino (whole black bass), however, offered to be a tad more difficult. The branzino, though much more hearty and therefore easier to work with (i.e. was more forgiving to my novice gutting skills), required scaling. Going from memory, I used the back of my knife to lightly push the scales back and off the fish. As I washed the skin under the sink’s cold water, I felt the skin with my fingers to find what spots I missed.

When it came time to gut the fish, self-doubt began to creep in. My husband is a perceptive man (and also a fifteen year restaurant professional) and took the opportune moment to give me some sage words of advice gleaned from a former employer, Michael Cimarusti, the well known chef/owner of the sea-food driven restaurant Providence. “Michael used to say that gutting a fish is easy” Hans told me in practically a whisper. “The fish’s meat stays firm and while the rest just slides away.”

I took a deep breath, let my sharpened knife slide through the thin layer of skin. Once inside the internal cavity, the organs did just as Cimarusti said they would. The liver, stomach and kidneys slipped onto the cutting board without a struggle. I rinsed the cavity to make sure I had removed everything and nothing unnecessary remained.

2) Let the fish release its insides to you

Following a very simple recipe from Mario Batali’s Molto Mario cookbook, I lightly seasoned the inside and outside of the fish, drizzled it in olive oil, and cooked it for three minutes on each side under the broiler for a total of 12 minutes. When done, the meat is moist, sweet and unbelievably delicious.

Of course, the real adventure of preparing a whole fish begins when you eat it. There are no rules. Whole fish, like lobster, is an incredibly rustic meal that appeals to meat foragers and people who aren’t afraid to get a little messy at the dinner table. Fingers are good instruments to find the bones, but depending on your dining environment, eating with your hands isn’t always possible. Regardless, care must be taken when eating a whole fish. Remove as many bones as you can–in one grand, head to tail gesture is always fun—but be sure not to throw away the head! The cheeks are one of the most delicious parts of the fish!


Mario Batali’s recipe for Branzino alla Griglia:
Grilled whole black bass with onions, olives and red chard

Makes 4 servings
Two 2-pound black bass (branzino), cleaned and scaled
¼ cup plus 2 tablespoons Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 large red onion, thinly sliced
1 cup Ligurian black olives. I used one jar of Mediterranean olives from Whole Foods
2 pounds red Swiss chard, *trimmed and cut into 1-inch wide ribbons.
Grated zest and juice of one lemon
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
½ cup olive paste
2 lemonds cut into 6 wedges (for serving)

*trim the leaves of the internal stalk of the chard but make sure to save these pieces for the recipe! To create 1 inch wide ribbons, roll the trimmed leaves up like a cigar and cut horizontally against the rolled up greens.

Preheat grill or broiler. Heat a 12-inch sauté pan over medium heat, and add ¼ cup of the olive oil. Add the onion and cook until wilted, about 2 minutes. Add the olives, chard, lemon zest and the juice. Toss until the chard is wilted, about 3 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Remove from heat and cover to keep warm.

Season the fish inside and out with salt and pepper. Brush with the remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Place on grill or on a cooking sheet under the broiler for 3 minutes on each side, for a total of 12 to 15 minutes. Cook until cooked through yet still moist.

Just before serving, reheat the chard (if necessary). Place the
fish on a large serving platter, arrange the chard around the border, and serve immediately with the olive paste and lemon wedges along side.

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You know you’re a food blogger when–

1) Every meal inspires you to write.
2) Every meal requires a camera.
3) You are unavailable to meet or talk with friends because you are too busy to writing or photographing food.
4) You cook and re-cook several recipes a week in order to “perfect them”.
5) You read newly published cookbooks first, then you’ll start on best selling novels
6) You’d be more star struck if you ran into Mario Batali, Orangette, the Barefoot Contessa, Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, the Amateur Gourmet, or Chocolate and Zucchini than if you saw a movie star at your local restaurant.
7) Spending an hour on the computer food blog hopping is like taking a multi-vitamin. It’s a daily requirement.
8) News about restaurant openings makes your heart race.
9) Going to said new restaurant is considered a fact finding mission.
10) You read a blog and suddenly you’ve dropped everything and are in the kitchen cooking up that very same dish. Because you crave it.

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Chef Crush Confidential: Dario Cecchini

Over the past few years of living in Los Angeles and working in the restaurant industry I’ve become very aware that it takes a very specific kind of person to make me star struck. I’m nonchalant as rock icons shop at the local farmers market, blasé* when movie stars eat pizza at my restaurant, and giggle at the B-List actors hanging out at the neighborhood mall. But God help me when a famous chef or Food Network personality walks into the room. Get me a few feet from a great chef and I suddenly become a blabbering idiot.

(*With the exception of the appearance of Barbara Streisand, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen or any of the cast of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire)

Take for example the night Gordon Ramsay came into the restaurant. The minute I saw Ramsay walk in, I almost swallowed my tongue, whole. Later, I tackled a busser, just so I could clear his table. The night that Scott, the Hell’s Kitchen sous-chef came in I spit on myself while describing a dish. I shudder to think what the poor man thought of that. Another, equally embarrassing time, I rubbed a note in my pocket while I waited on one of the Top Chef contestants just so I wouldn’t blurt out “you should have won!” during his meal. You should of heard me the day I waited on hand-crafted meat king, Paul Bertolli. That time I got a case of the stutters and c-c-c-could barely make it through a s-s-s-sentence.

So when Nancy Silverton told me that Dario Cecchini, the world’s most famous butcher was in town and planned to have lunch at our restaurant, I hoped that my previous visit to his butcher shop in Panzano, Italy had inoculated me from my chef-crush sickness.

Not so much.

MEETING THE MAESTRO

Let’s go back to 2007. After working several months at Mario Batali and Nancy Silverton’s newly opened restaurant, Pizzeria Mozza, I got engaged. My husband to be, Hans, shares my love of food, so it didn’t take long for the two of us to decide to get married at a vineyard and honeymoon in Italy. Hans and I thought that perhaps a part of our honeymoon would include a visit to Dario Cecchini’s butcher shop after reading Bill Buford’s New Yorker articles on becoming a butcher (“Carnal Knowledge”) and later, his captivating non-fiction account of working in Batali’s kitchens in “Heat”. So when my culinary guru Nancy S. sat me down and gave me the list of MUST VISIT restaurants and life changing pastry shops, I listened. And when Nancy insisted that we make the drive through Tuscany in the direction of Dario Cecchini’s butcher shop, we knew we had to go.

So with our list of restaurants and well wishes from Nancy to Dario, we packed our bags and flew to Italy. After almost a week in Florence, my new husband and I followed the voice of our GPS lady to our eastern destination. We followed the insistent voice through the twisting mountain streets of Tuscany and all the way to the little hillside town of Panzano. By the time we parked our car on a steep side street by the tiny town square, it was mid-afternoon and we were ready to eat some freshly butchered meat. Thanks to the long, Italian lunches of shop keepers and locals, we had an hour to kill before Antica Macelleria Cecchini (the Ancient Cecchini Butcher Shop) opened.

The day was Saturday, a crisp October day, and we took our time as we walked the perimeter of the town center—maybe half a block in total—as we watched the locals bundled up in scarves buy hot sandwiches from a truck and families eye clothing vendors shelves of socks and bargain garments.

When it was time, we walked up the cobblestone street to the open door to Dario’s shop. An older man with a bowling ball sized belly sat in a chair by the open door reading his paper. Once inside, we were surprised to find that we were the first and only people in the shop. As we waited for the store to come alive with customers and employees, no one was behind the counter, we scanned the shelves of the shop and ogled the contents of the display cases. Behind the glass were gorgeous salumi, plump sausages, sumptuous cured and freshly butchered meats and a breathtakingly large bowl filled with whipped lardo. With or without Dario’s presence, we were in heaven.

What pushed our happiness over the top was discovering the food covered table behind us. Unlike any butcher shop in America, at Antica Macelleria Cecchini almost all of the prepared foods are offered to the customer free of charge. The table held baskets of rustic bread lined with fat arms of rosemary, wood bowls of oil-soaked black olives and a butcher’s block lined with slices of prosciutto and salumi. While I struggled with understanding the etiquette of the butcher’s table (were we to pay to sample? Do we help ourselves?) my husband wasted no time in pouring himself a glass of Dario’s house red wine and piece of bread slathered in the whipped lardo speckled with Tuscan rosemary.



Behind me I heard a booming voice, loud like a ship’s horn, blasting orders to the man reading the paper. Behind the counter was a rather tall and imposing man in a black leather vest and a red bandana knotted around his thick neck. His short hair stood straight up off the top of his head, making him look like a devil from Dante’s poem, the Inferno. With the hands and broad shoulders of a super hero, this man was clearly Dario Cecchini. He was everything Bill Buford said he’d be.

As expected, I immediately became star struck. Gl
assy eyed and frozen like an Italian marble statue, I could do nothing but stare at Dario as he bantered with two gentlemen newly arrived at the store. I forced myself to grab a jar of house-made mostarda and a package of profumo dei Chianti off a shelf so I could give something for my strained brain to do. I pushed my purchase across the counter and smiled weakly as he rang up the order. I paid without saying a word. Luckily, my inability to speak Italian kept me from revealing the entire extent of my weakness as a star-struck foodie.

As I shuffled out the door, my courageous husband (an Italian speaker) introduced himself to Dario in order to pass on a message from our mutual acquaintance. I was surprised to watch Dario’s expression change at the simple mention of Nancy Silverton’s name.

“Naaaaaaaancy!” Dario grinned and threw up his arms.

When my husband explained that we were on our honeymoon, Dario hugged us both. “Braaaaavo!”

Through all of this, I maintained my inability to speak. I nodded like a bobble head.

Dario grabbed a jar of mostarda off the shelf, wrapped it in butcher paper and handed it to Hans. “For Nancy,” he explained. As we left the store, Dario called out to us in Italian—“I’m coming to LA soon! Tell Nancy I’ll come by the restaurant!”

VALENTINE’S DAY GIFT

Long after we returned to the states from our amazing honeymoon, I wondered when we might see Dario. Months passed and then, just last week, I heard that the famous Dante quoting butcher was spotted at the Santa Monica farmer’s market. It was said that Dario would be lunching at my restaurant on Valentine’s day. Of course, I immediately rearranged my plans for the day and invited fellow blogger, Leah of Spicy, Salty, Sweet, to join me for lunch at the restaurant.

With a box of chocolates and chocolate covered fruits from Susina Bakery clutched to my breast (more about the girls later), we patiently waited for a seat at the Pizza bar. Leah and I sipped crisp Fiano and kept an eagle eye on the door.

An hour passed, and still no Dario. Once seated, my very tall co-worker quickly swooped in to take our order. As he cleared our empty wine glasses he did a double take when he looked at me.

“Woah,” he said, eyeing my low cut dress. “Never seen those before…The girls are out in full force today.”

Well when the world’s most famous butcher comes to town, a girl has to represent. I might not be able to speak a lick of Italian, but the girls will do all the talking for me.

And talk they did. When Dario finally arrived (wearing a canary yellow down vest and matching yellow clogs) I swooped in. Doing my best hand gesturing, I mimed a “thank you”, a “great to see you again” and then shoved the box of chocolates into his hand. Leah, god bless her, saved me from the awkward silence and swooped in with her camera and snapped a picture. Thirty seconds later, we were back in our seats and I was hyperventilating.

I had done it.

I was, for the first time ever, a certifiable groupie. And, thanks be to sharing no common language, I was able to cover up my apparent star-struck symptoms.