Country women in Romagna used to bake these potatoes each week along with their homemade bread. Cloaked in olive oil and flavored with bits of cured pork, rosemary, garlic and tomatoes, the potatoes roasted near the opening of the big bread ovens, where the women could easily turn and baste them with the pan juices. The feast of the day was the crusty potatoes, fresh-baked bread, and homemade wine. Not a bad idea today, but these roasted potatoes are good with nearly everything from a green salad to chicken to seafood.
This vegetable ragu is one of those sublime one-dish meals that for me captures all the nurturing goodness of the Italian food I was raised with. What Ciambotta is to southern Italians, Stufato is to northerners—the concepts are the same. Vegetables, from greens and beans and zucchini to tomatoes and peppers, all cook together, making their own sauce and becoming a lavish vegetable stew. Merely heat a little olive oil in a big shallow pan, stir in whatever is fresh and good at the moment, sear everything, then cover. When vegetables cook in their own juices, their flavors open up and their textures go from crisp to silken.
Ingredients
Eat these like candy; they are that good.
An ideal spring dish and one of those combinations that always surprises people with it goodness. Slow braising sweetens and mellows turnips and garlic into a superb side dish.
An oven-roasted potato pancake with a few new twists. Try substituting rutabaga, turnips, parsnips or white potatoes for a quarter of the yams. And do use organic ingredients if at all possible. Serve this as a main dish with a salad or as a side dish with grilled pork or eggplant, and salad of fresh cabbages.
The dish is best eaten right away.
There are few vegetables that are not improved by grilling. Flavors intensify with browning. Many vegetables become so robust that they can easily stand in for meats as second courses. If you are looking for a meatless second dish that is light yet satisfying, a variety of grilled vegetables could be the answer. I like the touch of bitterness in grilled radicchio and Belgian endive. Other Emilia-Romagna favorites are eggplant, zucchini, peppers, onions, curly endive, and escarole. This recipe for oven and stove-top grilling stands in nicely when grilling out-of-doors is impossible.
Excerpted from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison (10th anniversary edition, Broadway Books, 2007). Copyright 2007 by Deborah Madison.
Talk about a centerpiece dish, with the first slice this dome of dark glossy greens turns into pure Technicolor. You've got yellow and red peppers with tomatoes, corn in the form of hominy and black beans. In the taste department you've got shots of fresh lime and a new spice blend straight from the Caribbean.