Salsiccia con lenticchie

Claudia Roden's 1989 The Food of Italy is one of my most used Italian cookbooks. From Norcia in Umbria (not that far from the home of sagrantino, in Montefalco), she transcribes a traditional sausage and lentil dish using the tiny brown lentils of Casteluccio. I do versions of this with Australian-grown puy lentils.

While your cup or more of lentils are soaking, fry off a bit of bacon or pancetta, then follow with onion, garlic, celery, salt and pepper. Sweat off until soft and a bit coloured, then add the drained lentils, cover with water and simmer until done. It should take 20-30 minutes, and you might need to top up the water. When nearly done, fry some Italian or other good pork sausage and serve the sausages on a bed of the lentils.

A good variation of this is to finish the lentils with an addition of chopped spinach or silverbeet and braise until done. Occasionally, when the sausages are cooked and resting, I'll transfer the lentils and juices into the sausage pan for deglazing and taking up flavours from the sausage fry. Not the healthy version, but tasty.

And wine? Sangiovese goes well with this, or older cabernet. You could also try a montepulciano from Abruzzo.

Mushroom pasta, Italianate wine

Here's a simple mushroom pasta that works well with sangiovese or Hunter shiraz with some age on it.

Starting with a cold frying pan, turn heat on to the lowest setting, slice three cloves of garlic, cover the base of the pan with olive oil, scatter in the garlic. While the cold pan and the garlic are slowly warming, strip a handful of fresh thyme and scatter into the pan with the garlic. Without letting the garlic colour, let the flavours steep into the warming oil. Ten minutes or so is good.

Take a double handful of mushrooms and chop them into reasonable chunks. I used flat cultivated mushrooms, but a mix can work well (perhaps some king browns, chestnuts, or even a bit of porcini). When the oil infusion tastes good, hit it with some sea salt, then add the mushrooms and let them braise (a knob of butter can be good now as well). When the mushrooms are soft and their juices released, turn up the heat, add pepper and a glass of dry white wine. When the wine has reduced a little, add a little pure pouring cream and simmer the sauce while your pasta is cooked. I quite like this with spaghetti or fresh fettucine.

It's a minimalist dish that gets flavour from the oil and the mushrooms, and is a good foil for Italianate red wines such as those made with sangiovese, or as last night, a 1998 Tyrrell's Vat 9 Hunter Valley shiraz. After a bretty start (medicine cabinet, band aid, alfoil) the wine opened up and looked fantastic. Bright acid, some development and youth at the same time, savoury flavours and tannins - confirmed for me how Hunter shiraz can share so many of the characteristics I love in sangiovese.

Fog lifting at Quarry Hill

Walked through the vineyard this morning with Mark Terrell and Shane Hackett. Shane was there to look at the fate of the grafting he did last Spring, and take new budwood for further grafting. It was a very foggy morning, with heavy dew. Though we are about to go into the second week of winter, the vineyard is not yet fully dormant. This is especially the case with the younger vines, such as the grenache rootlings planted in 2009, some of which still had active tip growth. Shane took budwood from the 2006 tempranillo plantings, and the grafted sangiovese and sagrantino. The photo is of the fog lifting, looking across sauvignon blanc (left front) down to savagnin, sangiovese and tempranillo. The block on the right starts with 1999 plantings of pinot right at the top, then shiraz, until some grafted tempranillo and sagrantino at the bottom.

Terredura Irpinia Falanghina 2008, Campania

Falanghina is not a grape variety I am familiar with, so when I saw it on the by the glass list at Italian and Sons in Braddon, I gave it a look.

Not quite brassy in colour or flavours, there are aspects of viognier to this wine (in a good way). Served with salt cod fritters (a good match), the colour is around the middle of the yellow spectrum. It had good texture and palate weight, shy of being viscous. The texture balanced well with some crisp acid to avoid any risk of being cloying. It finishes fairly short, but there are some nice, grippy phenolics to give the finish character.

Good to have had, and something to keep a lookout for if you are keen on an Italian white with some texture and palate weight.

10 year old Australian nebbiolo - 2001 Parish Hill (Adelaide Hills)

So, what might a ten year old Australian nebbiolo taste like? I opened a 2001 Parish Hill nebbiolo last night to find out.

The usual pale red to brick light colour and edges. Somewhat muted nose, on-again off-again dull florals to smell. The same on-off pattern stretches through the palate, sometimes evident aged fruit, other times tar, dried herbs and a hint of the medicinal. Screwcap has not let this wine down - it is evidently nebbiolo, just lacking some stuffing and drive. The tannins have resolved themselves and the wine went well with organic chicken schnitzel, pan fried mushrooms with thyme, new potatoes and steamed green veg (brussel sprouts and zucchini).

Nothing to write home about, but evidence that some of the early Australian nebbiolo (my grand sample of one) is able to make a credible showing ten years from vintage. I'll look at some older Coriole nebbiolo in a coming post.

Building a wood fired oven

I currently do a bit of cooking in a stone-framed fire pit surrounded by gravel out in the garden. Kind of a permaculture meets Japanese gravel meets Tuscan grill kind of thing. Mounds of dried prunings from a bay tree make for excellent grilled meats, eggplant and capsicum.

It's pretty primal cooking.

For a while now, I've been looking at an area under the bay tree as somewhere to build a wood fired oven to cook pizza, breads and other things. Not being especially handy, I have been keeping an eye on the workshops offered by Alan Watt (www.woodfiredovenworkshops.com). Alan used to teach ceramics in Fine Arts at the Australian National University, and running these two day oven workshops has been a bit of a retirement project.

The workshop we did last weekend (a group of 20 or so people) built two ovens over the two days. One a high-tech oven (permanent placement, dome covered with high temperature concrete and a thermal blanket), the other a low-tech earth oven on a sort of portable metal frame. A 400kg weight counts as sort of portable to me.

The photo is of the high tech oven as it looked at the end of day two.

I had been thinking of building a basic brick oven, but have learned a lot from the course and am now thinking of doing something more like the two ovens we built. A good weekend to be learning something new in stunning autumn weather, with good pizza at the end of it.

Dinner at Italian and Sons

Last night was dinner at Italian and Sons, in Braddon. This is a recent (2009) new venture from the owners of Mezzalira restaurant in the city. Sporting a food and wine badge, as well as a woodfired oven and a good review from Terry Durack, I had hopes this would be good, interesting, Italian food in Canberra.

I had a Menabrea beer from Piedmont while making sense of the menu. We decided to start with a braise of vegetables (jerusalem artichokes, asparagus and peas, mainly) and two choices from the smallgoods: a salami and some prosciutto. The smallgoods were well-salted and flavoured, the prosciutto cut for soft texture with the salami pleasantly chewy. The vegetable braise offered layers of sweetness and a dominant flavour of jerusalem artichoke. The grissini provided lacked the handmade touch of the smallgoods.

We then had a dish of ravioli filled with spinach and ricotta, sauced with burnt butter and sage. Simple but well-executed, if a little unbalanced in the salting. A highlight of the dish being a clean and clear flavour to the pasta itself - not something you can often find in Canberra. The other main was a mushroom pizza from the wood oven. Brought out colder than it should have been, the taleggio was of excellent quality and the crust thin, crisped and pliable.

With both courses, we had a bottle of the 2006 vintage of Masi's Campofiorin ripasso wine. Not a vintage I'd had before, but a very good advert for how corvina, rondinella, molinara and rossignola grapes put through the partial referment ripasso process do not have to produce rich, dense, sweet wines. This was a lighter end of ripasso, and very easy drinking with the salty and savoury food.

To finish, a slice of chocolate torta, a little bitter praline and a somewhat under-flavoured mandarin sorbet, with an OK short macchiato.

I ended up 70% satisfied. The food is good, including the handmade smallgoods (sourced from Sydney), but it isn't quite good enough to compare with similar places in Melbourne. That aside, I'll be back to try more of the menu. The winelist could benefit from a few more Australian wines made from Italian varieties, but offers plenty of interesting drinking in a town short on Italian wines.

Cost, including wine and tip, $180 for two.