(The Tucci Cookbook, page 96)
Strawberries In Prosecco
(The Tucci Table, page 204)
Chicken Wings With Homemade Barbecue Sauce
(The Tucci Table, page 140)
Joan's Chicken Wings
(The Tucci Table, page 141)
Ponticello's Orange Cookies
(The Tucci Cookbook, page 328)
Roasted Potato Salad
(The Tucci Table, page 20)
Sailor's-Style Sauce
(The Tucci Cookbook, page 120)
Pizza
(The Tucci Cookbook, page 99)
Super Bowl Sunday!!
Up early, the two of us set about making Kate's Banana Bread. This was problematic for Tom, since he has a severe aversion to bananas. He helped where he could, sifting the flour and baking soda (using a strainer and whisk). But once the bananas showed up, he had to don a hazmat suit and gas mask.
The recipe never stated when to add to flour, so we opted to mix all of the other ingredients into a slurry, and gradually whisk the flour in. We poured the batter into a parchment-lined baking dish and placed it in the oven for forty-five minutes.
Tom threw out the rest of the bananas.
While the bread was baking, we prepped strawberries for Tucci's Strawberries In Prosecco (Lunetta Prosecco) breakfast cocktail. Of course Michelle dusted the strawberries with the optional confectionary sugar!
Next, we began to prepare two separate Tucci chicken wing recipes; one with a simple homemade barbecue sauce made with soy sauce, honey, and ketchup ... and another, more gourmet version (Joan's Chicken Wings) made with sage, rosemary, oregano, scallions, and Campari tomatoes.
Our pantry was surprisingly devoid of dried oregano, so we searched online and found an 'herb substitute' website that recommended basil. We also used two medium scallions in lieu of one large scallion. The cutting of the wings was another learning experience, as we needed to fold the wings backward, against the joints, in order to expose the proper location to cut through them with cooking shears.
Michelle hand-mixed the spices with the wings and it smelled and looked fantastic! The dish was placed in the oven to cook. The simple barbecue wings continued to marinade in the fridge.
In the oven, the banana bread was browning on the outside while still liquidy on the inside, so we placed foil on it (to keep the top from burning) and returned it to the oven for a while longer. When we finally pulled it, we weren't really sure what the inside would look like. The moment of truth ... we cut the bread open ... it was perfect!! Soft and delicious! We toasted our success with strawberry prosecco. Touchdown!!
Even Tom tried a small bite!!
Someone else really liked the banana bread.
The wings were baking separately in the double oven. We noted that Joan's Wings had not yet browned when we added the wine (Santa Margherita Pinot Grigio, 2015), so we turned the temperature up to 400 degrees.
We let Joan's Wings cook for an extra ten minutes. Then we plated both sets of wings on a serving dish and dug in for lunch. Wow, these dishes were worlds apart! We couldn't believe that the barbecue wings could taste so good with only three ingredients.
Joan's Wings were also phenomenal, with sage and rosemary giving it a simple sophistication. We honestly couldn't decide which we liked best. We scored big-time with these dishes!
We gave the kitchen a brief rest, while we settled in for the Puppy Bowl.
For a half-time snack we made Ponticello's Orange Cookies. The recipe seemed easy-enough, but without pictures, we had no idea how to shape them. Based on Tucci's description, we rolled them and cut them so they looked like miniature cinnamon rolls. We made a few regularly-shaped cookies too. They didn't brown at all while baking and seemed washed-out when we took them out, so we embellished some of them with powdered sugar and others with icing. The chefs were initially disappointed with the results, but Tom's wife, Tam, thought they were delicious.
It began to occur to us that baking was a more difficult task than cooking.
Michelle went rogue and launched into Roasted Potato Salad, since we had extra ingredients laying around and the oven was still on. The most difficult part of this recipe was the decapitation of a large head of garlic and roasting it in foil along with the potatoes.
While the sauce was stewing, the orange cookies had all but disappeared. They had quietly become a major success! Tam shrewdly observed that they were more like a European-style biscuit, rather than an American-style cookie. In any case, they seemed to get better with each bite.
Michelle mixed together the hot potato salad, including the oil-infused garlic cloves that had roasted in the pan. It was scarfed-up immediately ... a complete success! She shoots, she scores!!
We let the pizza sauce simmer on very low heat to allow it to thicken for a few minutes while we caught up on the game.
Oops. Somehow we lost track of time, and more than a hour later, we ran into the kitchen and lifted the lid to the sauce pan. OMG! It was incredible! It had cooked down into the most delicious coulis imaginable!
We began to make the pizza dough, again using flour, yeast, and our Kitchenmaid mixer. We doubled the recipe, so that each of us could experiment with our own individual pizzas.
The material tended to be sticky, so we gradually added additional flour in the mixing bowl and it eventually became a uniform, if tacky, ball of dough.
Then, as instructed in the book, we briefly kneaded it on a dusted surface and placed it in a large container for two hours to rise.
And rise it did!! When we dumped it out, it was the size of a basketball!
Each of us rolled a section of dough out, covered it in sauce, and loaded ingredients, such as bacon, Genoa Salami, basil, parsley, and tomato ... and then dressed it out with microplaned mozzarella and provolone cheese.
Dan (Michelle's husband), Michelle,
and Tam making pizzas
Unfortunately, someone had given away our unused Williams Sonoma pizza stone a few weeks earlier, when we didn't think we'd ever need it. Timing is everything.
So our pizzas were placed on foil-covered pizza pans in the oven for fifteen minutes. But the dough never looked like it was cooking. So we added more time. Mistake. Our pizzas came out slightly over-baked and the dough seemed flat and flavorless.
Is it possible that we have become so used to modern American-made pizza, with all the butter-garlic, sesame-seed, pretzel, and cheese-filled crusts that eating an old-fashion traditional Italian home-made crust just seems boring?
Or did we just do it wrong?
We need to revisit pizza crust at a future date to remedy this. Nevertheless, we had many culinary victories, and considered our Super Bowl Sunday to be a super success.
We look forward to the next experience!!
