So it's been a while ....

Sorry folks, vacation, family and business have taken my attention for the last few months. But I am so excited to tell you about why I haven't been posting: My husband and I are opening a restaurant!

Enzo Restaurant & Bar is something we've been planning for a long time. We'll be sharing our passion for great food with our community. We'll be serving dishes inspired by Northern Italy but interpreted back through New England's seasons and ingredients. Imagine if your grandmother came to Massachusetts from Genoa and had to prepare meals for her family. She'd use what she had available to her locally to make the dishes of her homeland.

Ciao for now!

Use Your Booty: Barley Salad with Burrata

I meant to to get this post up before this holiday weekend started. This salad is a great healthy, vegetarian, colorful side dish that goes well alongside grilled meat. It also improves with age - so you can make it a day or two ahead. I fancied it up with a large chunk of burrata cheese - feel free to omit it if you prefer.

Black Barley Salad with Burrata

Serves about 8-10 as a side dish, makes a generous 4-6 main course servings.

I liked the richness added by the burrata - if you don't have any at hand, fresh mozzarella, goat cheese or ricotta salata would be great. Or go dairy-free and toss on slices of hard-boiled egg.

• 1 cup uncooked black barley or 4 cups cooked barley (or pearl barley or "regular" barley - this salad would also work with farro or wheatberries)
• 2-3 small zucchini, diced
• 2 large tomatoes, diced
• 2 handfuls purslane leaves
• 1 small onion, sliced into thin rounds
• red wine vinegar
• olive oil
• salt and pepper
• 8 ounces burrata, left whole (preferred) or torn into shreds

Cook the barley, if needed: pick through the uncooked grains to remove any stones or bits of twig or chaff. Place in saucepan and cover with water by two inches and bring to boil. Reduce heat to a simmer, add a healthy pinch of salt and cook until the grains are tender. This will take from 45 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the grain you're cooking and how old it is. Add more water as needed to keep the barley covered.

When the barley is cooked, drain it in a colander and set aside to cool.

Toss half of the cooked barley with the vegetables. Add more barley until you have the vegetable/grain ratio you like. (You may not use all of the barley. Any leftovers can be frozen for future use.)

Sprinkle the salad with red wine vinegar and a healthy glug or two of olive oil. Season to taste with more vinegar and oil and salt and pepper. Top the salad with burrata and serve.

This Summer, I am chronicling my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) experience. My CSA share is from Arrowhead Farm, a farm based in Newburyport, MA. Each week, I am posting about what was in my share and what I'm doing with it. By way of full disclosure, I won my share through a raffle and am not paying for it. However, Arrowhead did not know I was entered in the raffle, and I received no special consideration because of this blog. I paid for my livestock share. A full set of all the photos I've taken of this share is here.

The Porchetta Project

I have been dreaming of porchetta lately: a big roast of pork, redolent of rosemary and garlic and wrapped in crispy, crackly pork skin. This is a dish that's easy to get if you live in Italy, or near the eponymous shop in NYC, but up in my neck of the woods, not so much.

So what's a girl to do but take this porky problem into her own hands? Technically I needed what's called a "long middle" (a pork loin with the belly still attached), but my favorite pork supplier Tim Rocha at Kellie Brook Farm let me know that might be a tough cut for him to get. So, I decided to cobble together Frankenpig from a loin, some fatback and a skin-on belly.

I made a rub of rosemary, garlic, black pepper and salt to use for seasoning the roast and got to work assembling the beast: I laid the belly out and rubbed it liberally with half of the seasoning. I laid the loin over it and rubbed on the other half of the seasoning. I took the fatback (I did trim it down as it was really thick, so it ended up with a piece that was about 1/3 inch thick ) and laid it over the top.

I then did a ridiculously poor job of trussing this amalgam into a cylinder. I put it onto a rack on a sheet pan and left it in the fridge for for a day, to let the rub's herbiness perfume the meat.

Since the roast was so thick (almost 10 inches) I took it out of the fridge an hour before I started roasting it. I followed the basic instructions that Molly Stevens used in her porchetta project. I put the roast into a 475-degree oven on a roasting rack on a sheet pan and let it crackle away for 30 minutes (this will create A LOT of smoke; turn off the smoke detectors first). Then the oven went down to 325-degrees and the porchetta roasted away for another 3 hours.

I popped into the oven every now and then and basted the skin with the fat that was accumulating in the pan. I also siphoned off a lot of this fat as it rendered. This was a necessary chore as a lot of fat rendered off: nearly 2 cups.

While this wasn't my perfect porchetta: it was a little too fatty, the loin on the ends was a little dry and the skin wasn't crispy all the way around. But, holy moly, it was a delicious. The skin that was crisped up was super crunchy and toothsome. The rosemary and garlic flavor permeated the meat and made for a great flavor. While the roast was resting, I roasted potatoes on a sheet pan with some of the rendered fat. We enjoyed our porchetta and potatoes with a fennel salad.

Two days later, we had an amazing sandwiches of gently-warmed porchetta, tomatoes and Swiss chard salad for dinner. Nom nom.

Changes for next time:

• Remember to score the skin before you truss the roast - very very hard to score skin without cutting through the trussing twine.
• Don't put the rub on the outside of the roast. I did and it started scorching up right off the bat.
• Trim back a little more fat from the roast: a had a double layer of fat on the top (the loin fat against the back fat was too thick a layer).
• Roll the roast during the skin-crisping stage to make sure that all the skin gets exposed to the heat.

Use Your Booty: Grilled Sausage Sub Platter

Yesterday I asked Dave what he wanted for dinner and he sheepishly asked for sausage and pepper subs. I'm not a huge fan of this type of sandwich (and he knows it): the roll is always too big and fluffy, overshadowing the filling; the filling needs to be inserted perfectly, otherwise everything slithers out the back end when you take a bite; and frankly, I like to eat with a knife and fork most of the time.

So this was a great compromise: we took the traditional insides threw them all on the grill and served it all on a platter with fresh tomatoes, olive focaccia and some spicy kale (not in the picture) on the side.

I made garlic oil and brushed it on the peppers, onions and eggplant prior to grilling. I'll admit the eggplant is not traditional, but I love grilled eggplant and it stretched the sausage so we had enough left over for another meal. The peppers and kale came from my CSA and the eggplant from the farmstand down the road. The tomatoes were a gift from the lovely ladies at The Herb Farmacy (a fellow farmer's market vendor).

A note about the sausage: This sausage was INCREDIBLE. I got it from Tim Rocha at Kellie Brook Farm. His booth is two over from mine at the farmers' market, so I was able to do some shopping in between customers. I bought a pound each of his hot Italian and chorizo sausages. Last night we grilled the hot Italian sausage. It was everything you want sausage to be: fatty enough so it didn't try out on the grill (even though we had a fiery flareup or two), good seasoning (not too salty, just enough heat), and deep porky flavor. Seriously, we sat at the table, chewing the meat and saying over and over how good it was.

Tim raises Berkshire hogs and the flavor is just great: rich and porky with just enough fat (although it is a leaner breed than some other heritage breeds). In addition to Newburyport, MA, Tim also sells his meat (pork, chicken, veal) at markets in Portsmouth, Exeter and Hampton, NH.

This Summer, I am chronicling my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) experience. My CSA share is from Arrowhead Farm, a farm based in Newburyport, MA. Each week, I am posting about what was in my share and what I'm doing with it. By way of full disclosure, I won my share through a raffle and am not paying for it. However, Arrowhead did not know I was entered in the raffle, and I received no special consideration because of this blog. I paid for my livestock share. A full set of all the photos I've taken of this share is here.

Use Your Booty: Quick Pasta Dinner

What can I say? I'm a sucker for an egg and some crispy crumbs. If you've been reading this summer's posts, this dish may look a little familiar, but it's a nice go-to for when you don't know what's going on the dinner table. I boil some pasta, make a quick sauce of sautéed vegetables and top the plate with a poached or fried egg and some crispy bits. The crispy crumbs add a nice textural contrast to the plate.

This plate was: linguine and a sauce of bacon, chunks of plum tomato, and shreds of Swiss chard and onion. I drained the pasta (I lifted it out of the pot with tongs), and added it right to the skillet containing the sauce. Then I poached the eggs right in the pasta pot. In the meantime, the crumbs were toasting in the toaster oven with a little olive oil.

Dinner in about 15 minutes!

This Summer, I am chronicling my first CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) experience. My CSA share is from Arrowhead Farm, a farm based in Newburyport, MA. Each week, I am posting about what was in my share and what I'm doing with it. By way of full disclosure, I won my share through a raffle and am not paying for it. However, Arrowhead did not know I was entered in the raffle, and I received no special consideration because of this blog. I paid for my livestock share. A full set of all the photos I've taken of this share is here.