La Dolce Vita | Feed Your Fire Podcast Episode

Living the sweet life with a bowl of pasta and a side of meatballs. A Puglia inspired menu that brings us closer to the simple pleasures of life in the comfort of our own homes. 

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Feed Your Fire Podcast Episode Transcript:

Hello and welcome to Feed Your Fire. I'm your host Kim Baker.

We're here today to celebrate La Dolce Vita, the sweet life. Allowing ourselves to rediscover that spirit within us, while we enjoy a Southern Italian meal, a cultural experience that melds together history, romance, warmth, connection, topped off with a glass of wine and a scoop of gelato.

Imagine yourself by a turquoise blue sea, an ancient medieval fortress to one side, bustling shops and restaurants to the other, the ultimate fusion of time and place. That, my friends, is a glimpse of Puglia. I just came back from a trip along the east coast of southern Italy; it's the heel of the boot on the map. It was this most exquisite integration of history and culture with contemporary life.

It's the part of Italy that my father's family was from a few generations ago, and there I was seeing it, experiencing it for the first time with my boyfriend, a love story being written in real time.

We explored about a dozen cities in the area, each one with its own magnificent and unique historic storyline. The truly houses in Alberobello, which were essentially a tax evasion scheme, and the limestone washed houses of Ostuni that are a testimony of the plague. And in Bari there's this street where women sit outside their homes making pasta on the street; it was like a scene out of a movie with men wearing white beaters drinking beer, laundry drying in the wind on the fire escapes, while women named Nunzia sell their orecchiette to tourists.

Each city was like a vignette in a larger play, a scene to absorb while sipping on an aperitivo after a day at the beach. And there's a real identity and pride around that regional heritage. The cuisine there has a unique vibe. The menu's made of the day's fresh catch. Every bread basket is filled with terrali, these ring-like breadsticks, and how many of those you eat at any given meal is an inverse indicator of how long you've been in the region. Meal one, you are gobbling those things up. After a week, you start settling down.

The olives may have been the best I've ever tasted. I probably ate a tree's worth, and apparently potato chips and Aperol Spritzes are a perfect pairing. The pasta is made from semolina wheat, no eggs, often made into orecchiette, the shape of little ears. And as it turns out, due perhaps to my Puglia roots or potentially my culinary training, I was named the Queen of Orecchiette at a cooking class. If anyone from that class is listening, I didn't set out to be a hustler. I do have the award proudly tacked on to my refrigerator. Because of that Pulgia connection and my reigning queen title, we're gonna make an orecchiette recipe together today.

Now, here's the thing about Italian cuisine: you can't just haphazardly mix and match pasta shapes with other ingredients and sauces. There are combinations that go together based on that dish's origin and the agricultural products from that area, orecchiette can be served with a red sauce, or it's often served with a garlic and oil, broccoli rabe sausage type of combination. Today we're doing a recipe similar to the latter, but leveraging fresh tomatoes from my garden.

We're gonna go ahead and bake these tomatoes in the oven, Pomodoro al forno. Preheat your oven to about 400 degrees. Slice some grape, cherry, plum tomatoes in half, whatever you've got on hand. Drizzle them generously with olive oil. Season them with salt and pepper, and then pop them in the oven for about 20 minutes. While those tomatoes are roasting, we're actually going to make some eggplant to have a meatball style side dish. Only in this case, there's no meat.

Eggplant is a very big tradition in southern Italy, and so I sort of think of this as spaghetti and meatballs, Pugila style. The first thing we're going to do is to take about two medium-sized eggplants and cut them into cubes. I like to remove some of the skin, kind of like how you might slice a cucumber. We're going to soak those eggplant cubes in salted water for maybe. 15 minutes, and then we're gonna drain them, pat them dry, and place them on a baking sheet.

Drizzle them with some olive oil, sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and when you pull those tomatoes out of the oven, we're gonna replace the sheet pan with the eggplant, cooking them for about 25 minutes until they're lightly golden. When the eggplant comes out of the oven. Let it cool for a bit, and in a large mixing bowl, combine a fistful of fresh parsley chopped up. It's about two tablespoons all in, a small garlic clove minced, about three tablespoons of Italian flavored breadcrumbs, two tablespoons of ricotta, one egg, and a couple tablespoons of Parmesan or Romano cheese. Combine that mixture really well. Add in the eggplant, and then form them into balls and coat them with breadcrumbs, and then set them aside.

Now we've kind of got two irons in the fire. We've got our pasta we're gonna make, and then we're gonna finish up our meatballs, and we're gonna put it all together.

Bring a large pot of salted water up to a boil, and we're gonna add in broccoletti or rapini, whatever you can get your hands on in the store. Par cook the greens and pull them out, and chop them up into small pieces. You'll want to cut the stems on the diagonal and the branches into small bite-sized pieces. In that same pot of boiling water, we're going to add our orecchiette. These take about 15 plus minutes to cook through.

While they're cooking, we're going to finish our sauce. In a large skillet, you're going to heat up about a quarter cup of olive oil. If you want sausage in your sauce, now's the time to add it. Take it out of its casing, crumble it up, and let it cook through. Then add in about two cloves of finely minced garlic and about a tablespoon of minced shallot. Let that cook for a few minutes. If you'd like, add in some red pepper flakes and keep the heat very low so that the garlic doesn't burn. Then add a couple tablespoons of chopped parsley and let it fry. Add up your chopped rapini or broccoletti and those roasted tomatoes that you had cooked earlier. Make sure you get all the pan juices from those tomatoes in your skillet. When the pasta al dente, you're gonna transfer that orecchiette to the skillet, along with a ladleful of that salted water. Add in some more Parmesan or Romano cheese and give everything a good stir.

We're gonna let those flavors all meld together while we fry up our eggplant meatballs in a separate skillet, heat a little bit of olive oil mixed with some avocado oil so that the oil doesn't burn. Get it nice and hot, and then put your meatballs into that oil, turning them periodically so that they get nice and golden brown. Just takes a few minutes to cook each side. I like to do it in a couple batches, so that I'm not crowding the pan.

And then, my friends, it's time to eat. If you ask me, this meal is a tribute to Southern Italy. It's a love letter, if you will, honoring the traditional flavors of the region. Before I left for Puglia, I was feeling really stressed with work. I was moving at such a fast pace that the idea of a European vacation almost felt out of reach, and yet, as it turns out, it was exactly what I needed. Just that small taste of la dolce vita rebalanced my system, bringing me back to what life's really all about.

And on that trip, I could see certain threads from my childhood woven from that cloth. Yet at the same time, it was a discovery of something completely unfamiliar, something unexpected. And I think that's part of the beauty of embracing the sweet life, the natural unfolding that occurs when you give yourself the chance to breathe. You don't have to travel far to embrace this Italian spirit. In Italian, there's a word called Pantofolaio. It's a word that means the enjoyment of being at home in comfort, and with this recipe, you can bring Puglia to your doorstep, allowing you to enjoy La Dolce Vita no matter where your feet are planted.

Until our next episode, I say so long. Feed Your Fire where food nourishes growth.

Feed your Fire is sponsored by Kasari Consulting, where insight meets innovation. www.kasariconsulting.com.