Spiedini Rustici con Salsiccia

The December issue of La Cucina Italiana seemed to have been written just for me. Page after page, every dish was something I wanted to eat. When I first read the issue, I immediately made the ribollita which was delicious topped with fontina. Last weekend, I tried a couple of other meals from an article about hearty, festive, holiday season dishes from the northern, alpine region of Italy. The first was spiedini rustici con salsiccia. I used chicken, hot Italian sausage, but that was my only change to the instructions provided.

Polenta was cooked and allowed to cool in a loaf pan before being cut into skewerable pieces. The sausage was browned on top of the stove and then sliced. The spiedini were built with alternating pieces of sausage and polenta with sage leaves on the ends. Then, and this is the important part, they were dotted with butter before being heated through in the oven. So, think for a moment if anything bad ever results from dotting something with butter before placing it in the oven? I don’t think it does. These spiedini are as simple as it gets, but the butter made them something special. I added a touch of chopped sage with a sprinkling of black pepper before serving.

As I made these, I was thinking about how spiedini make good party food. Smaller versions of these, with just one small slice of sausage and a smaller chunk of polenta, would make great hors d’oeuvres. I’ve served a similar mini spiedini before using rosemary sprigs as skewers. Full size or miniature, be sure to dot with butter for rich flavor and nice bits of crust on the polenta.

Spiedini

On Saturday evening, I tried a couple of recipes from Mario’s latest, Italian Grill, with mixed results.

The Calamari Spiedini in Lemon Leaves looked delicious on the page, and I had Meyer lemons and leaves at the ready. In real life, it looked good, smelled good, tasted good, but the texture wasn’t perfect throughout. The problem could have been that some of the calamari tubes I purchased were thicker than others. Also, I may have packed too much onto each skewer thereby preventing good heat transfer to all the pieces stacked together. Some of the tube pieces could have used one more minute on the grill. The flavor was fantastic, and the texture of the thinner tubes and that of the tentacles was fine. I served this dish with a garden fresh arugula salad, and the peppery greens were a nice complement to the marinated squid.

Up next was Charred Tuna Spiedini with Spicy Peppers. The spicy peppers included red and yellow bell peppers and jalapenos which were sautéed and then served as a bed for the tuna spiedini. Turns out the jalapenos were both large and piquant this weekend and managed to completely overpower all other flavors. The tuna was to have been dusted with a combination of fennel pollen and dried oregano and then seared briefly on the grill. First, Austin has no fennel pollen. Huge oversight, Austin! Second, to get a good char on the tuna, I really should have turned it in oil rather than just drizzling. While delicious itself, the tuna suffered from the very spicy, jalapeno-forward pepper mélange.

Our conclusions were that while I quite enjoyed the marinated calamari and had less chewy pieces than Kurt did, Kurt was happier with the tuna but wished the pepper pile hadn’t disappointed so.