Though they usually manage to stay ahead of the ball by running from one end of the field to the other in order to avoid it,  occasionally some luckless chicken gets bonked by the soccer ball.  Please don’t alert any animal protection leagues.

Here are the three muskateers…my two boys and my niece.  Ignore little boy’s nose….I considered deleting that nasty green stuff with Adobe Photoshop but opted for brutal realism instead.  Just so you all could see how glamourous life is here on the continent.  Big boy is sporting some new accessories- he recently got braces put on his teeth.  He is also wearing a little wooden cross which he received when he made his first confession two weeks ago.  As you can see from the little tree that big boy is holding, Spring is not quite here…but don’t tell that to the kids:

or to this little guy:

Happy Spring!

Which brings me to my Bimby.  Bimby is the affectionate name given by Italians to this food processor/cooker which is known as Thermomix just about everywhere else in the world.

I’ve already spoken about my darling Bimby here but a mere mention doesn’t do it justice.  Watch how it makes mushroom risotto and you’ll see what I mean.

For this recipe you will need:
dried porcini mushrooms
1 small onion
arborio or carnaroli rice
white wine
broth
grated parmesan cheese

A note on the rice:  The only rice that will make a nice creamy risotto is italian rice such as arborio or carnaroli rice.  Any other type of rice that you use will give you very dispappointing (non creamy) results which will leave you asking yourself “what the heck is the big deal about risotto?”  You are striving for a plate full of goo that has the consistency of thick oatmeal but looks much less appetizing.  In fact, you will probably want to garnish your risotto with some chopped parsely to assure your diners that it is in fact something that is meant to be ingested.  As far as the broth goes, just about any good broth will do including broth made with boullion cubes.  Just be sure that the broth is seasoned enough so that you won’t have to add salt to your risotto while it is cooking.

Before we begin, soak a handful of dried porcini mushrooms in warm water for about half an hour.

Peel the onion, put it in the bimby and press pulse which will chop it to pieces in about two seconds.

Add two tablespoon of olive oil, turn the heat to 100, speed 1 and set the timer to 3 minutes.  This will cook your onion while stirring it.  When the timer dings, insert the butterfly piece.

It slides over and covers the blades so that the bimby stirs but does not chop the food.  Add the rice and toast it by cooking 1 minute at temperature 100.  Add the white wine and again set the timer to 1 minute, temperature to 100 and speed to 1.  Add the broth-  same temperature and speed and set the timer to 13 minutes.  When the timer dings, the risotto is ready.

Despite it’s resemblence to something the dog left behind on the carpet, risotto is pure comfort food, Italian style.  Of course, it’s quite easy to make even without a bimby and I have put up the recipe here.

The Bimby is helpful to busy moms because instead of standing over the pot alternately stirring the risotto and adding broth,  you can use that precious twenty minutes of time to do any number of other things such as:

break up the kids umpteenth wrestling match before permanant damage is done to the furniture

feed the dog, cat, chickens, rabbits, ducks and fish

toss yet another load of laundry into the washer

hide in the bathroom with a good book until the Bimby’s timer dings, signalling that dinner is ready.

I normally opt for the last choice.

Buon Appetito!

Once upon a time I lived in China.  I taught English in a school which in September of 1992 was in the countryside surrounded by rice paddies and by March of 1993 it was bordered by a superhighway on one side and a shopping center on the other.  As my chinese students were so fond of saying, “China is a developing country.”  The point being that during this feverish burst of infrastructural development the water and electricity at my school were often interrupted for something like three or four weeks at a stretch.  When the school officials finally decided that that they could no longer ignore the fact that the entire student body and faculty had no water, they arranged to have a truck bring water in every afternoon.  Everybody lined up and was allowed one bucketful of water per day.  Bear in mind that the students and faculty lived at the school so this one bucket of water had to suffice for drinking, cooking, cleaning house and personal hygiene.  So- first I took away about a liter of water, boiled it and bottled it.  That was for drinking and brushing teeth.  Then I took away the couple of cups of water necessary to make the evening rice.  The water that was left was divided with the smallest possible amount to rinse the dishes and the other part was used as bath water.  (Bath being a relative term since we’re talking about three liters of water here.)  Rather than dump out the bathwater, I used it to rinse out my clothes.  I hesitate to use the word wash as there was only enough water to sort of tickle my laundry rather than actually clean it.  The challenge was in getting as much use out of my five liter bucket of water as possible and organizing things so that I could actually reuse the “gray” water without ending up with hepititis.

Just I learned to use and reuse that one bucket of water, I’ve learned to use and reuse a chicken and can get three nice meals out of just one chicken- with absolutely no threat of hepititis.

The first meal is a nice whole roast chicken, stuffed or not as you like.  This is how I make mine:

You will need a chicken

some sage

some rosemary

and a couple of bay leaves.

Rinse and pat dry the chicken.  Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper both inside and out.  Shove the herbs up the…er, umm ..place the herbs in the chest cavity and put the chicken in a roasting dish just large enough to contain it but not so large that the juices will spread out and cook away.

Roast in a hot oven until your meat thermometer tells you that your bird is cooked.  After your family has thoroughly demolished the chicken  put the carcass back in the roasting pan until the next day.  The next day, pick off any remaining meat, place the carcass in a soup pot with a carrot, an onion, a potato, salt and a few grains of whole pepper.  Make a nice chicken stock which you can then strain and freeze for future use.  This stock makes a great base for minestrone, creamed vegetable soup, risotto or even just soup with dumplings.  That would be meal number two.  If you look in your roasting pan where you roasted your chicken you’ll find the drippings and quite a bit of chicken fat plus the leftover meat which you picked off the bones.  Heat up the pan so that the fat separates from the drippings.  Skim off as much of the fat as you can, add some cream, season with salt and pepper.  Whisk everything together until well blended.  Cook over medium low heat for just a few moments until the sauce starts to bubble a bit.  There won’t be a whole lot of sauce and it will be quite thin but it should be enough for about four servings of pasta.  Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and toss in some pasta (spaghetti is a nice choice with this sauce).  When it is al dente strain the pasta and put it in the roasting pan.  Toss well with the creamy gravy and bits of chicken, stir in lots of grated parmesan cheese and serve.  Meal number three!

Buon Appetito.

Since we live in northern Italy, we cannot produce our own olives for oil (don’t think Nonno hasn’t tried) so our oil comes from a cousin in the southern region of Basilicata.  He grows and presses his own olives and we arrange to have a barrel shipped up to us now and then which we decant into bottles.

Given the abundance of fresh healthy food at home, Nonno and Mamma Ida couldn’t for the life of them understand why I would force my children to eat  (gasp!) mass produced, reheated lunches in the school cafeteria…and suffer the added humiliation of HAVING TO PAY FOR THEM!  Mamma Ida was nearly ill worrying about whether or not the children were getting enough to eat and Nonno was constantly reminding us that an entire family of four could live for ten days on what it cost to buy a school lunch.

The upshot was that I signed a permission slip allowing the kids to come home every day for lunch.  Nonno picks them up at 12 and brings them back at two.  Yep, that’s right, Italian kids have a two hour lunch break.  Mamma Ida spends a good part of the morning getting ready for lunch and is careful to always tell me that the boys are big eaters and eat everything on their plates.  Of course, she only prepares things that my kids like to eat but  I diplomatically pretend not to know this.  My children, recognizing an easy mark, do not hesitate to place their order the night before for what they would like to find at lunchtime the next day.  Big boy wants polenta and little boy wants pasta?  No problem…Mamma Ida makes both dishes!  It’s enough that one of my kids looks sideways at his plate and Mamma Ida is up out of her chair and pulling all sorts of delicious alternatives out of the fridge.

Now, I grew up in a house where you ate what was put in front of you.  Period.  If you didn’t like what was for dinner you either ate it anyway or waited with an empty stomach until breakfast the next day. I firmly believe in passing this ethic along to my children.  As you may imagine lunch with Mamma Ida and dinner with Mommy are two completely different dining experiences bordering on schizophrenia.

Case in point:

The other night I made pasta with eggplant.  I was out of parmesan cheese so I grated some pecorino (which is a bit tart) to sprinkle over the pasta. My big boy (who navigates the often turbulent waters of a bicultural home with remarkable ease) slowly but steadily ate his dinner without comment.  He doesn’t particularly like eggplant so he sort of mashed it up with his fork and mixed it into the pasta so it wasn’t too noticeable to him.  Bless his little heart.  He knew the battle would be lost so he didn’t bother to engage the enemy.

My little boy, on the other hand, either doesn’t understand yet or simply doesn’t care that  Mommy isn’t running the same five star operation that his grandmother is.  The conversation between little boy and me went something like this:

L.B.  “What’s that?”
Me: “Pasta”
L.B. “Can I eat upstairs with Nonna and Nonno?”
Me: “No”
L.B. “I don’t want this.  Can I have a chicken sandwich?”

Unlike Mamma Ida, I don’t usually have a roast chicken just lying around in the refrigerator.

Me “No eat your pasta”.
L.B. “I want pasta with meat sauce”
Me “But I made pasta with eggplant.  Eat it.”
L.B. “What’s for second?”
Me “There is no second”

I got home at seven fifteen, for crying out loud, they’re lucky they got the pasta.

What follows is a back and forth between me and my six year old with both of us becoming increasingly agitated and stubborn.  Finally little boy puts a forkful of pasta in his mouth and with a theatrical performance worthy of a neopolitan opera star, starts gagging and spitting out the food.

Me “What’s wrong now?”
L.B. “Ugh” he says.  “You know I don’t like pecorino cheese.”

Let’s ignore for a moment that my first grader is able to tell the difference between parmigiano reggiano and pecorino romano.  (At six years old I thought the only cheese worth eating was Velveeta.)  The larger issue here is that my kids are getting treated a little bit too well at lunch time and my culinary efforts just aren’t making the grade.

But I have a secret weapon.  And I don’t hesitate to use it.  When I really want my kids to love me (and let’s not comment on how unhealthy it is to show affection with food) I make AMERICAN FOOD!  That’s right, my kids LOVE exotic foreign foods like sloppy joes, chicken wings, fried chicken strips, chocolate milkshakes and most of all waffles.  But their all time super favorite of favorites is (drumroll please) grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.  When I make that they think that I’m the best cook in the world.  And even though I can buy fresh bread at the bakery and fifty seven varieties of cheese at the cheese shop, I make my grilled cheese with regular store bought sliced white bread and processed cheese singles…but please don’t tell my six year old.

Buon Appettito!

It’s a dairy vending machine. It gets stocked every day with the morning milk and dairy products from a nearby farm. You just bring a bottle, or you can buy one from the vending machine. Open the little door, place your bottle under the spout.

Tell your big boy to put one euro into the the slot.

Wait until your little boy finishes complaining that it’s his turn to put in the money. Tell your little boy to press the green button to start the milk pump. Scream at your big boy because he shoved your little boy out of the way and pushed the green button.

Wait while the milk fills up the bottle. Pretend that the two boys who are now wrestling down on the sidewalk don’t belong to you. Cap the bottle, yell at the kids and start to go back to the car. At this point, the fighting stops and the two boys become instant allies in the “convince mom to spend more money” campaign. Besides giving out milk, this machine also sells fresh yogurt (both chocolate and vanilla) butter, cream, ricotta cheese, mozzerella cheese, goat cheese and eggs.

My big boy always wants a chocolate yogurt. He never actually finishes it because chocolate yogurt is (let’s be honest) really pretty gross. But it is brown and it does say chocolate on the label and for this reason, my big boy won’t budge until I let him buy it. I know that resistance is futile and even though I also know I’m being a bad mother by giving into his demands, I fork over the money. He can discuss the consequences of my passive behaviour with his therapist when he gets older. Besides, the vending machine is just SO cool. Vending machines are almost nonexistant in Italy so the idea of putting in a coin and pressing a button and getting something to eat INSTANTLY is irresistable to my guys. My little boy wants a mozzerella. He loves fresh mozzerella balls and eats them like apples. I pull out another couple of euro. With everybody happy for the moment we go home and boil the milk which is necessary because this is non pasturized milk.

At this point, my big boy starts asking me to make him a cup of hot chocolate. It can be ninety five degrees in the shade but this is a kid who has practically been mainlining chocolate since birth and the sight of all that fresh hot frothy milk without any chocolate in it just pains him beyond belief. So, in honor of my firstborn son, here is how I make hot chocolate. It’s actually like a thin chocolate pudding and it’s really worth ignoring your diet for:

1 1/4 cups milk
1/4 cup sugar
2 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa
1 tablespoon flour
a dash of cinnamon (optional)

Mix the sugar, cocoa, flour and cinnamon (if you’re using it) in a small saucepan. Slowly add the milk while stirring so that no lumps form. Cook over medium high heat until it boils, turn the heat down a bit and stir at a slow boil for two minutes.  Pour it into a cup and serve with vanilla wafers or some other cookie suitable for dipping…

…and consider how a good cup of chocolate can change your world.

Buon Appetito!

Years later when I met Marco, we moved to Greece and lived in Athens for two years. There a whole new culinary chapter opened in my life. We ate out quite a lot and one of our favorite places was a small family run restaurant in Sounio, on the tip of Attica. We would go there on Sundays around lunchtime and order fried sardines followed by octopus with cannelli beans, accompanied by a nice salad and a few bottles of that wonderfully dry white wine that only the Greeks know how to produce. After developing a taste for seafood, I tried buying it at the market and preparing it at home. Those were the days before internet cooking so the only thing I had to navigate by was a book of Greek recipes and what I could learn by watching others around me.

Marco has always loved pasta with octopus so I bravely decided to tackle it for dinner one Friday. I hopped on my vespa and drove down the coastal road to a small port where several fishing boats docked every day. They would unload their catch by dumping baskets full of fish (still wiggling) onto a long table and the housewives would line up to make their purchases.

As I waited my turn, I scanned the day’s catch and was pleased to see a nice plump octopus. The octopus on the other hand was less pleased to see me than I was to see him and slithered along the table, dropped to the floor and oozed his way to the edge of the dock in a desperate bid for freedom. Mr. Fisherman, evidently used to this sort of activity, never missed a beat in his negotions and while arguing over the price, he reached over, grabbed the octopus, wonked it on the table to stun it and continued about his business. Who knew that octopi were so tough? This little ballet was repeated two or three times until I finally gave in, paid the extra fifty cents he was asking and bought the thing. Now I had my stunned octopus in a plastic bag…what to do with him? The beach nearby was full of women who were whacking their octopi against the rocks. “Ahhh” I said to myself- “Watch and learn. Beating the living daylights out your octopus must be one of the great secrets of Greek cooking”. Not willing to demonstrate my inexpertise in public I drove home with my octopus and in the privacy of my own kitchen, tried to tenderize it by whacking it against my marble countertop…my white marble countertop which looked very nice in my white kitchen with its white walls and white appliances. Too bad I never paid attention in biology class when we learned about the anatomy of cephalopods. I missed the fact that octopi have an ink sac. A black ink sac which ruptured and sprayed my kitchen with black ink. It looked like Jackson Pollack meets helter skelter. Note to self: 1) remove ink sac 2) beat the heck out of the octopus 3) Don’t invert steps 1 and 2.

Now, many years later, I can whip out octopus salad and pasta with octopus as casually as a grilled cheese sandwich. I’ve added lots of other fish recipes to my repetoire and in keeping with the habit acquired when living in my in-laws house, we usually eat fish on Friday. Suprisingly, although Milan is not close to the sea, it is a great area for buying fresh seafood. One of the most important wholesale seafood warehouses in Europe is located in Milan and as a result the local weekly markets are well stocked with an amazing variety of fresh (though conveniently lifeless) fish.

Since rocky beaches are pretty scarce in this neck of the woods, I must forgo the traditional Greek method of tenderizing my octopus by pounding it on a rock. Instead I use this:

it’s a very heavy brass kitchen weight which is used to pound meat to make it a bit flatter. So for anyone who can get their hands on a fresh octopus, here is my recipe for octopus salad:

a fresh octopus
1 large potato peeled, boiled and cubed
olive oil
red wine vinegar or lemon juice
salt and pepper
chopped parsley

Remove the beak, the eyes, the ink sac and whatever else you find inside the body. Take something big and heavy like a can of soup and tenderize the octopus by beating the heck out of it. This breaks the tough fibre of the meat and makes it more tender. Place the octopus in a large pot with a tight fitting lid and place over medium heat for twenty minutes to half an hour. You don’t need to add any water because the octopus will release all of its water and make its own broth. It is ready when you can easily pierce it with a fork. Let the octopus cool in its broth then, when cool, drain it and cut it into one inch pieces. Place in a shallow bowl and combine with the cooled, cubed boiled potato (or boiled cannelli beans or both beans and potatoes), olive oil, a dash of red wine vinegar (or if you prefer the juice of half a lemon), salt and pepper to taste. Mix in about two tablespoons of finely chopped parsley. Arrange on a plate and serve with a dry white wine or if you opt for full body paralysis you can knock back a couple of glasses of ouzo. Accompanied by a recording of the Ballad of Mauthausen and a gorgeous sunset you will have an authentic Greek experience. I promise.

Buon Appetito!

I’m happy to have passed on my appreciation for very fresh fish to my children…

The Mama Ida way is to put some flour on a wooden pasta board, make a well in the center, crack in an egg then stir and knead until the ingredients are throroughly combined.

Then she rolls out a rope of dough, pinches off inch long segments and rolls them out on her fusilli needle.  ONE AT A TIME.  When you consider that a modest Sunday lunch in our house consists of at least twelve people you can understand why the traditional Italian grandmother rarely gets out of the kitchen.  I prefer the renegade American daughter in law approach which is to use any and every electrical powered labor saving device available on this side of the Atlantic.  Unfortunately for me, there is as yet no household appliance that can produce fusilli because (and this is crucial) they must be ROLLED and not EXTRUDED.  Therefore, although I have my choice of two different machines to mix and knead the dough, I still have to roll my pasta with a fusilli needle.  As a result I make fusilli about once a year and cross train diligilently for at least two weeks before the event.

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For this recipe, you’ll need one egg.  I keep mine here.

Pardon me ma’am, I’m just going to reach under your bottom a moment.

You’ll also need about 300 grams of flour.  (Sorry about the metric system but once you’ve crossed over there’s just no going back.)  Use 150 grams of regular white flour and 150 grams of semolina flour.  Mix the two flours together with the egg and just enough warm water (perhaps a quarter of a cup but it varies) to form a smooth ball of dough.  I put the ingredients in my Bimby to mix them all together.

No, this is not the beginning of a dumb blonde joke.  “Bimby” is the name of a legendary food processor here in Italy.  It makes pretty short work of kneading pasta.  Although it looks like a blender, I don’t recommend that you use your blender for this job.  Bimby has an  engine strong enough to grate nails.  Your blender would probably never forgive you if you used it to knead pasta.

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When you have a nice, smooth somewhat elastic ball of pasta, break off a piece and roll it out into a long rope.  Cut the rope into pieces about an inch long.  At this point it’s a lot like playing with play doh.

You can even get your six year old to help. No baby, that’s a pizza…I told you to make a fusilli.  Child labor is so unreliable these days.

Take your fusilli needle (mine is part of a spoke from an old bicycle) and press it into the piece of dough.  Rub up and down until the dough spreads out and becomes wrapped around about four inches of the needle. Pull it off and set it aside.

Try not to squeeze it so that it doesn’t lose it’s nice straw-like shape.  Now repeat about 250 times.  When you’re done, pick up the phone, make reservations at your favorite restaurant, leave the kids with a baby sitter and go out to dinner.  You’ve earned it.

If, on the other hand, you’d rather eat the fruits of your labor, bring a big pot of salted water to boil, toss in the fusilli and cook until al dente.  Drain and toss with your sauce and of course, lots of grated parmesan cheese.

Buon Appetito!

Its super-fast preparation time-  it actually takes more time to think about making it than it does to make it.

It’s finger food.  No dirty dishes.  This is a real advantage unless you live in Greece in which case you don’t care because you can smash the dishes at the end of a meal if you feel like it.

Everybody loves them.  Including me.  Herein lies the sole disadvantage which is that it’s very easy to eat too many of them.

You will need some dates.  Dates were not in my shopping repetoire when I was living in the US so I’m not sure which varieties there are and how easy or difficult they may be to find.  Today I am using these

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because I received them in a Christmas food basket but if I were to buy them in the store I would buy these-

which are nice and big and still attatched to their branches.

You will need halved walnut meats.  Any cook with an ounce of integrity buys walnuts whole, cracks them open and halves the walnuts.  Pretty much everyone else in the world buys a bag of Diamond shelled walnuts.  I like to think that there is a big difference in taste.  After nuts have been shelled, exposure to air alters their very nutty just hatched flavor.  I always shell my own walnuts.  Though I must admit nobody has ever bit into a stuffed date and said, “Wow, Eileen, this tastes like you just shelled these walnuts this morning!”  You decide.

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You will need some sugar.  Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you that it tastes better if you harvest the cane and refine the sugar in your kitchen.

You will need some marscapone cheese.  Yes, it can be used for something other than tiramisu.

You will need some form of alcohol.  Then you need some extra to put into the dates.  You can use just about anything you like except for beer or schnapps. Schnapps and I have an unfortunate history dating back to my college days.  But that is not a story I can tell on a family oriented website.

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I like to use whiskey in this recipe- it must be the irish in me.

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No, not that whiskey- I just put that one in the picture to impress you.  My tunisian dates aren’t worthy of 18 year old whiskey so I give them this:

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It’s in a plastic bottle.

Mix together the marscapone, whiskey and sugar in a bowl.  Slice open (but not all the way through) the dates the long way and take out the pit.

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Pinch the two ends of the dates toward each other a bit so that the opening gaps and the date forms a little bowl.

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Place a dollop of the marscapone mixture in the date and top with a walnut half (or whole if it fits and looks nice.)  Arrange on a plate and serve.

It’s that easy!  These actually taste better if they are prepared the day before because, like tiramisu, the flavors need time to mingle and get to know each other before they go out on a date!

I crack myself up.

Buon appetito.

I’m using these tomatoes which I canned this summer while cursing the fertility gods that gave our tomato plants such startling reproductive capabilities.  This is actually a canned tomato sauce rather than canned tomatoes which means that it has no seeds or skin and it has been crushed until very smooth.  Sort of a plug and play ingredient…you just open it up and dump it in.

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.This is his distant cousin from the city:

While it has no seeds or skin, it is crushed and has chunks of tomato pulp in it.  For this recipe I would pass it through my ricer to get it nice and smooth.  You can use a blender if you like.  In America you can find peeled whole seedless tomatoes in cans which work fine (just blend until smooth).  Maybe you can find smooth tomato sauce in a can.  You definitely DON’T want to use precooked spaghetti sauce in a jar.  Also, don’t confuse tomato sauce with tomato paste…that’s something else entirely.  So once you have the source of your tomatoes worked out, gather up the rest of your ingredients: an onion, a carrot, some celery, pork ribs and some olive oil.

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Brown the pork ribs in a pan with some olive oil.  Let the pork fat start to melt and pop. Think about the calories, think about the fat, think about the cholesterol. Then gather up all those thoughts, put them in a little box and lock them away in a corner of your brain.  Get those ribs nice and toasty all over then remove them to a plate.  While those guys are browning in the pan, take a small pot and add some chopped onion, chopped carrot and chopped celery.

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.Here you can see Mamma Ida chopping and adding her vegetables.  She actually chops them in her hand.  Cooking with Italian grandmothers is not for sissies.  Since I received a set of genuine Miracle Blade knives for Christmas, I prefer to use a cutting board.  I can cut my finger just looking at my new knives.

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Pour off the olive oil and pork fat into the vegetables and sautee them until they are a bit soft.  Add your tomato sauce, the browned pork ribs and some salt.

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About this much.

Cover and let it simmer away until the meat is cooked and tender.  .

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You will know that it is cooked and tender because it starts to shrink away from the bone.

If there is tons of grease floating on the top you can skim some of it off…or you can just stir it into the sauce before you add it to the pasta telling yourself that fats are an important part of the food pyramid.  Cook your pasta in salted water.  Drain it when cooked but still firm (al dente as we say here in the boot).  Put the drained pasta back in the pot it was cooked in and ladle in some sauce.  Toss it well and serve with lots of grated parmesan cheese.  That’s your first plate.  Your first first plate (congratulations!)  For the second plate just put the ribs on a platter and serve with a salad.

You’ll be glad you did…

(And so will everyone else!)

Buon Appetito!

Nonno was asked to perform the required ritual sacrifice and the freshly plucked duck was delivered to my kitchen on New Year’s morning.  Having a slight hangover resulting from too much raclette and red wine the previous evening I couldn’t look Mr. Duck in the eye until after a pot of coffee.  (A hangover requires a good old cup of joe, American style).

I then prepared the duck as planned and transported it to my brother in law’s house, the venue for our holiday spread.  When it was time to carve the duck…Oh my!  I should have brought along my Miracle Blades.  It was one tough duck.  It seems that not being content with his life as free range poultry, our duck had been doing some pretty serious body building out behind the chicken coop.  Giulio’s carving knife literally bounced off the breast.  What to do?  We already had our appetizers and first plate but the show just couldn’t go on without the second.  Not to be undone by the ghastly circumstances, Giulio whipped out a four pound roast beef that he had prepared just in case the duck wasn’t enough.  Collective sigh of relief.

Fast forward to two days later.  We still have the duck.  I used it to weigh down the duck liver pate that I made.  I used it to prop open the garage door so I could unload the car.  Now it’s time to see if we can rescue it and make it edible.

I chopped it into pieces with my Miracle Blade “Chop and Scoop” and put it in the pressure cooker with a a cup or two of broth.  I told the kids to stay out of the kitchen in case the pot exploded (you never know) and I let that baby cook for one and a half hours. The result?  While not exactly mouth wateringly tender, it was definitely edible.

The duck was saved. My culinary reputation was saved. We can all sleep soundly at night.

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Yeah I’m tough…wanna make something of it?