I was in NYC this past weekend, so as I’ve done before, I will photo bomb your browser with low quality camera phone shots! Let’s start extra blurry, shall we?

Why are your scallops $41 at Marea? One of many reasons is likely the single piece of golden onyx that backs the popular, social bar they have.

The crudo (raw sea creatures) menu is extensive and expensive, but no regrets on ordering these four little bites of citrus laced langoustines on cucumber. A bright flavored firmness with which my mouth was not familiar.

Uni and crab spaghetti. Excessively beautiful. Their inimitable fresh spaghetti provides a base that would amplify even the humblest of sauce.

Even more well known is Marea’s octopus and marrow fusilli. While I could not exact the marrow flavor, I’m sure it was the well-heeled benefactor behind this rich sauce, which featured suction cup free red wine braised octopus, the most tender to pass thy lips.

Three superlative scallops, seared wonderfully with salsify, hip root vegetable du jour. Quite good, but at $41 not including tax & tip, I expect the mollusks to levitate from their beautiful shells like a Criss Angel illusion (tricks are things whores do for money), right into mi boca, where the taste continues its transcendence upwards directly to my flavor brain. This culinary feat was not quite achieved.

Onwards, I tried a plainly great sausage and rabe sandwich from City Sandwich. Next time I’d go for one of the Portuguese blood sausage offerings.

Monday was Katz’s, my first try, as my family’s always been partial to the packed house (and even more packed sandwiches) at Carnegie.

Gotta say, I was a bit more smitten with Katz’s. Less stress, more open, well tested ordering format…

.. and an epic sandwich. I’m much more of a corned beef than pastrami guy, and this specimen was as good as I’ve had. Along with a Brooklyn lager, it was a fine way to spend a Monday morning.

Then we made the walk South to Chinatown, to try Xi’an Famous Foods, the darling of many food shows from No Reservations to Bizarre Foods. The spicy lamb soup in noodles was a dish to remember. The cumin/Sichuan peppercorn flavor profile is nothing new to fans of Peter Cheng’s, but the noodles are unlike those I’ve had in Atlanta, and the mix of rich broth, lamb, cabbage, herbs was just so damn well done.

$3 lamb burger. My mom considered getting one for the plane home, a move that would have surely resulted in the riot of Delta Flight 561, row 31.

OK, let’s hoof it back up to Little Italy, to check out Torrisi for a sandwich. What’s that? Your new casual fare restaurant next door just opened for the first time ever today? Well you are in luck, Parm, for I am a blogger, an expert in such early assessments. If Torriso is a step forward in the amalgam of Italian American cookery, Parm is out to prove that classics earned such labeling for a reason.

Baked clams, butter, and hot sauce converged for about 90 seconds in the space/mouth continuum.

Chicken parm hoagie. Bright sauce. Crisp hot chicken. Sesame bread especially notable.

Beet tartare at Babbo. This was the best photo I could get. Not pictured – beef cheek ravioli in squab liver sauce with black truffle, or the duck breast/duck confit dish with figs. We had an enjoyable meal for sure, fun with friends, and I mopped up my food, but in terms of pasta genius, finesse, menu interest, and overall excitement, Marea overshadowed the now mature, well oiled machine of Babbo. Though I did sit next to Isaac Mizrahi, who has been singing the praises of Babbo since 1998.

As a friend said, if you want to try Babbo, just head over to La Pietra Cucina on Peachtree. Chef Logue’s menu is of the same style, even featuring a few of the same dishes.

Sunday I dined on a half a banana, a bagel, and five caffeinated power gels as my mom and I ran the NYC marathon, along with 47k other crazies willing to travel by subway, ferry, and bus to Staten Island, than run back from whence we came (Midtown). We had a blast, a weekend to remember. Thanks Mom! Thanks for pulling me through those last few miles!

A while back I came across a recipe from a dish at The Purple Pig in Chicago, which featured pork blade steaks and nduja. Fortuitously, I had just received some blade steaks from Caw Caw, a thin, beyond fatty, delicious, and inexpensive cut of pork. But where to find nduja?

The only online source I could find was Boccalone, the famous producer of “tasty salted pig parts” in San Francisco. I further inquired with the twitterverse, and to no surprise, Cured Meats replied that I should avoid the Boccalone product which isn’t anything like the traditional Calabrian style, and if I wanted some I should go see him, as Sausage Debauchery had sent him the real deal.

Apparently the only way to get a true Calabrian nduja in the US is to make it yourself. The ingredients are simple: very fatty pork cuts (often jowl, belly, and head), chili powder, salt, cure, and maybe some other spices. Stuff in a hog casing, ferment, dry in a curing chamber. More info can be found in the book My Calabria (related nduja website by the cookbook’s author here).

So the other weekend I went to go see the “pork Godfather” to give it a try. The nduja was the heat, in the badass colloquial sense, but also quite literally. Spicy and fatty and rich, it’s spreadable consistency means it can be used in a wide variety of applications. I first tried it simply spread on some bread. Later at home I used it to make a savory grilled cheese with cheddar, feta, and basil.

Per Cured Meat’s instructions, I’ve been making an amazing pasta with the nduja as well.

While boiling some noodles in very salty water, I saute sliced onions in a small amount of oil, later adding the mostly cooked pasta, cherry tomatoes, torn basil, 1/2 cup of pasta water, and a healthy dollop of nduja to the pan. Then toss (with tongs, or a nice wrist flip if you got that in your bag) until the nduja literally melts, coating the pasta and creating an instant sauce, rich with fat and fiery flavor.

The sad part is, I only have one tablespoon left. As they say, ’tis better to have loved spicy cured pork fat, than to never have loved at all.

Bonus photo! Check out Cured Meat’s new meat slicer, the hand crank design is a work of art.

I made this porchetta a week or so ago, one of the easiest, most excellent, and least expensive things I’ve cooked lately. The most difficult part is waiting for it to cook while the pork and herbs permeate the air of the whole house.

I cooked it for almost an hour longer than the recipe specific. It could have gone longer.

This was the pork shoulder “picnic” from Whole Foods.

After it was done I cut the skin/fat cap off and broiled it.

Then sliced some pork off, cut up some crunchy pork fat/skin, and got all up in there. Some of the skin popped up like chicharrones. Those pieces were the best.

The last six months I’ve begun to dabble in simple cured meats like the pancetta pictured above. The local blog Cured Meats (thanks Jason) has been my main resource for all the how-to, but really these are stupid easy once you understand the basics.

Below is the pork belly going in the cure. Salt, pepper, and some herbs. You can use cure #2 (aka pink salt aka nitrates) to prevent botulism and retain color but it isn’t really necessary for these types of cured meats. Of course, this is just my basic understanding and I am still alive.

After a few days in the cure, turning every couple days, the seasonings are rinsed off and the belly is dried. At this point you can hang it in your fridge, or if you don’t have space like me, you can set it on a plate or rig some sort of setup to allow air to circulate around the meat. In a few weeks it will have dried significantly and you are done. If you aren’t hanging it, you will need to turn it every few days. Below is a belly I just rinsed and is getting ready to dry in my fridge. Look at the cute little pig whiskers.

If you were to smoke the belly after the cure, it’s American bacon. If it goes straight to drying, it’s pancetta. Then pancetta does not need to be cooked to eat it. After curing and drying, it is effectively “cooked”. Slice it thin and eat it like salumi.

This same process can be done with jowl to create guanciale. Below is completed half jowl from a large pig. Once I cut into it, I noticed some parts of the fat had taken on a pinkish hue, but I’m not sure why. There is more fat in the guanciale, and the fat tastes different and becomes translucent when cooked. It also has more of a crunchy than chewy fat texture.

Below is the raw jowl.

Jowl in the cure.

Jowl drying in the fridge.

There was one litte piece of jowl that I ended up smoking after the cure. It was pretty good.

My favorite dish for using guanciale is pasta all’amatriciana. The rendered fat from the guanciale is the oil used to cook the garlic and onion and lends an unmatched flavor to the sauce. You will see pancetta or bacon in some all’amatriciana receipes, but this is a fairly unacceptable bastardization. Then again, many people get crazy caught up in authenticity of Italian dishes. The Babbo recipe I linked above uses red onion, which is a debated addition.

Food & Wine had the Babbo-based recipe in an issue and not only tells you to replace guanciale with pancetta, but also says you should save time by purchasing sauce, which is dumb. The basic tomato sauce from Babbo is fantastic and takes less than forty-five minutes from start to finish. Buy the 106oz can of San Marzano tomatoes from Costco for $4 and make a bunch and save it.

One of my favorite homemade pasta sauce tricks lately is right when ready to plate my final dish, I take my sauce, my pasta, and toss them both in a hot sauce pan with a moderately sized chunk of butter. Toss until the butter is melted and incorporated. Obviously it will add richness and flavor, but also creates a more cohesive sauce.

Another easy cured recipe to try is duck bresaola. I tried a batch of Rowdy’s the other day, sliced super thin and served over seared duck breast. It’s the same process as above, with different spices.

Never again should anyone reading this purchase that mushy Boar’s head pancetta-like stuff. Make your own, it’s easy and more gratifying.

I made Timpano for the first time last night, a dish I first read about on The Food in My Beard. It’s like an Italian pie, filled with all the cheesy, savory Italian dishes you love. The great part about this dish is you can riff on it any way you want.

I still follow recipes quite a bit, but I’m trying to get better about cooking from feel. I just start cooking and do what I think is right. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes…it’s chalked up to a learning experience. People don’t trust themselves enough in the kitchen. Recipes are often created for print, for revenue. It’s often the case that an interesting recipe is just a base recipe and technique, with variations applied at different phases. Learning the fundamentals will allow you to come up with your own variations and interesting dishes, and will make you a better cook. That’s what I’m working on. There is a great article on this topic with Thomas Keller in Food and Wine, I highly recommend reading it.

Anyways, this was a lot of fun, though a lot of work. Here are the steps involved:

• Make the sauce (San Marzanos, garlic, onion, shredded carrot, olive oil)
• Cook the pastas
• Pan fry the Italian sausage
• Create the cream sauce (onion, garlic, fresh herbs, flour, cream, milk)
• Toss the pastas in the sauces
• Make bread crumbs in food processor, soak in milk
• Mix the three meats with egg, parsley, Parmesan, bread crumbs
• Poach the meatballs in some reserved red sauce
• For eggplant and boneless chicken thighs – dredge in egg, bread crumbs, cheese, parsley, pan fry
• Roll out the puff pastry, fill as desired
• Cook for 40-45 minutes, let it rest for 10 minutes

It was as stupifyingly good as it looks. The only thing I would have done different is take the pastas out of the fridge at least 30 minutes before I was ready to fill the pastry. The cold pasta kept the whole dish from being warm enough inside when the pastry was done cooking.

The cook time could be cut down significantly if you purchased some store bought sauces and bread crumbs, but I love spending an afternoon in the kitchen, listening to music, and drinking wine(s). Then of course, sharing the food with friends and family is great. Best Saturday in a while.

I made these gnocchi last weekend based on a technique I saw on Ozersky TV. It seemed so simple, I couldn’t wait to try it. Gnocchi can easily get too overworked and gummy and this method reduces the chance of that happening.

If a recipe says to use two pounds of potatoes and two cups of flour, to follow that blindly makes no sense. You aren’t going to have exactly two pounds of potato. Even if you manage that, the potato will have different levels of starch. Flours vary greatly too. You just have to add flour to feel, a little at a time, similar to making pizza dough. This recipe helps with that process as you spread the potato out it’s easy to see how much flour you need to dust on the potato, and it’s easy to determine when the dough is coming together.

I don’t have a ricer or a food mill, so I use a food processor with a grater blade attachment. While not ideal, it produces a light, loose potato like below.

Then I used my dough scraper to chop out the potato, Scarface style, and dust with the flour. Once the dough came together, I wrapped it and let it rest for twenty minutes. The rest time makes it more workable when it comes time to roll out the dough.

I froze a bunch of the gnocchi. They freeze fairly well, though the texture wasn’t as smooth and pillowy after freezing. They became slightly grainy and the integrity of the gnocchi was slightly disintegrating, I believe due to the amount of time it takes to cook them from frozen vs fresh.

This method is highly recommended. Video below.

Yet another recent Scoutmob inspired meal was at Pacci in Midtown. I attended a media brunch months ago, but this was my first visit to Pacci for dinner. I’ve heard good things about Pacci lately, so I was very much looking forward to this dinner with my friend Brandon, also a wino. I’m actually meeting up with Brandon (and then later, Hardy of Dirty South Wine) in Napa Valley & Sonoma this weekend for a quick post-race vacation. I plan on getting fat and highfalutin drunk. If Hardy has to “shush” me in the middle of a meal at a 2 star Michelin restaurant such as Cyrus, I’ll know I’ve achieved my goal.

Which brings me to my appetizer, the kobe beef carpaccio, which is super thin, meltingly tender, and dreamy. The salad atop these heavenly cuts can be pushed aside easily.

We also tried a hot appetizer with clams and mussels in a bread-friendly sweet and creamy anise flavored broth. This was another winner with plenty of tasty shellfish, even if the sauce was a touch too sweet.

What could be deemed the simplest dish we sampled, the papardelle bolognese, is in my running for dish of the evening. Fresh al dente ribbons of pasta, hearty and tangy sauce, and some cheese…that’s it. The sauce wasn’t really quite that color, this is just the best I could do with my camera considering how low the lighting was in the plush bromantic booth we shared.

Similar to my risotto at Sotto Sotto, the mushroom risotto distracted me with its banal use of truffle oil. The fried egg was an unorthodox but welcome addition though.

The short rib dish was…a braised short rib. I don’t order them often lately. Short ribs are good but tend to be very similar from restaurant to restaurant. But if you are feeling like a short rib, it won’t disappoint.

The veal chop special with quinoa and a questionable amount of hollandaise was something to be seen. The amazingly large hunk of tender calf was cooked wonderfully, and really I would have been pleased if they had just served me this steak on its own, maybe with an accompaniment of asparagus with that hollandaise diverted to some place where it belongs. Or perhaps a side of their finest jelly beans.

We brought in our own wine, including this ’07 Copain James Berry Syrah. Quite elegant Cali syrah, though young. I also brought in one of Sebastien Riffault’s crazy freaky unfiltered Sancerres. Rich honey, acid, and fun in a glass.

When Brandon made the reservation, they told us they’d waive corkage. I’m not sure why, but I’ll take it.

I recently took a page from Kessler’s book and visited Sotto Sotto and ordered a few appetizer sized pasta dishes. It’s a good deal. We ordered two salads (if you consider my bresaola above a salad), three pastas, sparkling water, and three generous pours of wine, which totaled to roughly a $100. Considering a few of the entrees are in the $30-$35 range, it’s a relative value. Sneak in a flask, and you’re sitting pretty at $60.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the mushroom risotto. The mushrooms weren’t as varied or seasonal as I had hoped, and the truffle oil overpowered the mushrooms anyways.

The gnudi, on the other hand, were awesome. Soaked in butter, the exterior did just enough work to contain the lush spinach. They sit heavy, so the $10 half order is plenty.

The cappellacci (“Pope’s hat”) pasta in sage brown butter sauce filled with butternut squash is a seasonal layup, but is well executed and was also quickly attacked.

Pasta is so satisfying to me, and for $10-$12 a half order, I’m not sure I’ll visit Sotto Sotto any other way. Thanks again to JK for the tip.

I put this picture up on my aMinus3 photoblog website, which I post to roughly every other day. Sometimes photos from EIA posts end up there, but mostly they are photos that I like and don’t belong to a full post.

This pasta was the result of my watching the No Reservations Techniques episode last weekend. It was really easy, but different than how I usually prepare a quick pasta with tomato sauce.

• confit garlic in olive oil with thyme, basil, red pepper – 30 to 40 minutes on as low as heat as possible
• hand crush a can of Roma tomatoes (remove stems and seeds and excess liquid), add a fat pinch of salt or two
• saute the tomatoes with some of the reserved liquid, ensure it doesn’t get too dry by adding liquid as needed
• cook pasta – I used bucatini from toscano & sons (westside ATL) – don’t cook the pasta all the way
• add some of the infused olive oil, garlic confit, a little slab of butter to the sauce, and a few splashes of the pasta cooking liquid to the sauce
• add bucatini in the pan, flip a few times to finish cooking and distribute sauce

Simple, rich, satisfying.

My list of go-to Italian places in ATL is very short, even though I love the genre. It’s comfort food, and I love the stark contrast of simple ingredients prepared with an intense attention to detail that is presented in a quality Italian meal. Lately I’ve been finding this at La Pietra Cucina, where a simple fresh made tagliatelle with mushrooms in butter sauce sounds so uncomplicated, but is so memorable.

I like Sotto Sotto, especially for their risottos, but I haven’t been there in years. It’s just one of those restaurants that isn’t very close to my home, so I often forget about it when tossing around dining ideas. La Tavola, a Fifth Group restaurant, is another worthy Italian destination of which I’m guilty of doing the same thing. I’ve only been there two or three times over the past five years, but I have always had good experiences, at what I think are fair prices.

For an even better deal than usual, La Tavola has a Monday evening special called “Molto Monday’s”, where you are able to choose from five pasta dishes and pay only $10 for them. Based on the regular pasta dish prices, it appears to be a savings of $4-$6 per entree.

Of course, the bill goes up if you add appetizers, but I can’t resist simple classics like a well made Caesar salad. I also ordered the burrata with tomato conserva pictured above. The burrata doesn’t stack up to what the cheese pusherman can get you, but the crostini and tomato were the perfect accompaniment and I did enjoy this.

I’ve been craving carbonara frequently lately, so that’s what I ordered off the $10 pasta menu. It was a huge pile of pasta, served very hot with lots of cheese, pepper, guincale, and of course, the raw egg. My waitress tried to judge my reaction when the dish arrived and sheepishly asked, “you know you mix in the egg, right”? She wasn’t being condescending, I just think she was unsure why I was just looking at it (I was waiting for her to leave so I could be a huge dork and take a picture) and she wanted to help out. It was a funny moment.

Katie got a rigatoni dish, served with mozzarella and spinach. It was somewhat of a play on the classic orecchiette with broccoli rabe. That’s something the menu at La Tavola tends to do – the dishes have regional/classic roots, but they allow the menu to change constantly and they tweak things a bit, resulting in something new and enticing.

We had a great time, I didn’t spend too much, and I was waddling out of there after almost eating the entire plate of pasta. La Tavola definitely needs to be more of a part of my regular rotation.

A Recent Visit to La Tavola by RowdyFood