Dinner for a Tuscan

Yes, it’s November 1st but I cooked this meal last night, promise! I’m a procrastinator by nature… but I also did not find myself inspired by a platter of figs. I sat with it in my lap numerous nights trying to figure out what I wanted to cook. I felt intimidated by many of the ingredients: liver, pig’s ear, duck breast. The palate of the Bonura house is just not that fancy!

This cookbook is organized to cook with the seasons so it was important to me to find something within the fall menus. With the end of October happening this last weekend I finally settled on menu seventeen: Dinner for a Tuscan. I had big plans to cook the entire menu: green lasagna with greens, bistecca with fried artichokes and potatoes and castagnacia. I’m currently training for a half marathon and after completing10 miles on Sunday... there was no energy left to cook an entire menu. I decided to simplify: bistecca and for dessert sheep’s milk cheese with membillo (from a winter menu).

We headed to Whole Foods for the ingredients. We try not to eat very much meat and when we do eat meat we spend the extra money for the organic stuff. Since it’s just two of us, I had to significantly adjust the recipe as it originally made enough to serve 8-10. I couldn’t find baby artichokes so I took home small artichokes. Then we stopped by the cheese counter for our sheep’s milk cheese and membrillo. If you haven’t ever stopped to chat the with cheese dudes at Whole Foods, do it the next time you are there. They are happy to share their knowledge and slice up samples. We chose all Basque cheeses since I’m Basque: Petit Agour, Idiazabel and Abbaye De Bel’Loc.

The bistecca was a much simpler recipe than I had anticipated. Chris heated the grill (and singed all his arm hairs, sorry honey!) while I prepped the potatoes and artichokes. I didn’t let the steak marinate overnight or for a few hours but still found it to be perfectly delightful. It was also a mistake to use the small artichokes as the leaves proved to be very difficult to chew. The only other adjustment was chopped basil instead of parsley. Plating the dish on a bed of arugula with lemon slices as garnish elevated a simple Sunday night dinner. We found the potatoes and artichokes to be a little too oily for our taste. I did however copy this recipe to add to my recipe binder.


Onto November with a new cookbook!