A Lake I Like

One of my very favorite places in Springfield is just about four blocks from where I'm now living. J. H. Miller Picture Framing was established in 1890 and has been getting my business for almost 30 years. Just about everything hanging on my walls that's not a hubcap was either bought at J. H. Miller or framed there.

J. H. Miller does more than framing. They sell framed and unframed art, as well as a few collectibles. Tonight was a reception for a fundraiser they're doing for WGBY, the local PBS station. There's almost nothing I like better than being able to walk over to some cool little gathering in my neighborhood, so I went over.

There was wine, of course, and cheese, and the featured prints, and a number of people I knew. One of the prints was by an artist I like very much, Mallory Lake. She's a Vermont artist who works exclusively in pastels. Almost all her pastels are landscapes of Italy, Tuscany and Venice predominantly. Pastel is the ideal medium, I think, for rendering the luminosity of her subjects.

For $10, I can get a Mallory Lake print, unframed. For $120, I can get one in a rather generic frame. For a bit more than that, I can get a print in a nicer frame. But what I'd really like is a Mallory Lake original. Of a canal in Venice. I've got the one I like already picked out. All that stands between my dream and the reality of an original on my wall is a fair-sized wad of $$$.

Singing Waiter and Talking Waiter

Tonight found me at the Macaroni Grill in Portland, Maine. It's a fairly undistinguished Italian style chain restaurant, something like Olive Garden. The kind of place that hits you over the head with the "Italian" theme, but in fact is nothing like an actual restaurant in Italy.

Our waiter was Justin, or "Justino," as he liked to be called. He wrote his name on our paper tablecloth with a marker to make his point, adding a flourish to the "o." He plunked down a big bottle of the house wine, a chianti, strongly recommending it. We did, in fact, order a bottle--in a more reasonable 750 ml size. Justino was so busy chatting us up that he heard "chianti" but not "standard bottle," uncorking the biggie before we could stop him. Unfortunately, only two of our party were wine drinkers. Or maybe fortunately. We did our best to plow through it.

I was so hungry that I ordered pasta--virtually my only vegetarian option--and enjoyed it. I won't bore my regular readers with another tirade about "Italian" menus. See my post of 3/18/2007 for that.

We listened to the singing waiter commemorating birthdays at several nearby tables. We listened to Italian lessons piped into the rest rooms. We listened to Justino's nonstop patter. But mostly we listened to each other. It had been awhile since this particular group of friends was all together, and we had a lot of catching up to do. The best thing about the Macaroni Grill was that they let us sit for nearly four hours without a single dirty look.

When we finally wandered out, most of the tables were empty. On every other tablecloth, "Justino" was scrawled. I had a piece of meat filched from another plate, wrapped in a napkin, for Taz. Another thing you don't do in Italy.

Definitive Eggplant Parmigiana

I adore Italian food, but, with the exception of Mom and Rico's in the South End of Springfield, I don't know of any restaurant in the United States that serves it. I'm talking about the same kind of meals you get in Italy, or at the tables of first or second generation Italians in this country.

It's hard to be a vegetarian in Italy. Chefs get hurt, offended, or at the very least confused when you don't want to sample the prosciutto or Parma ham or polpette. But at least the vegetables and legumes and grains and fruits are there. Where are the fungi ripieni, the potatoes mashed with escarole, the little fried artichokes, the peaches dropped in a glass of red wine in so-called "Italian" restaurants here? I have eaten enough starchy pasta mixed with bits of broccoli and red pepper or smothered with gooey cheese sauce to last me six lifetimes. Never once, though, in Italy or in the homes of Italian-Americans I grew up with, have I been served pasta as a meal. Pasta, of course, is a primo, a first course. It's preceded by antipasto and followed by a secondo (meat or fish), a contorno (sides), and dolce (dessert) and coffee.

There's no law against two or three or four of each course, or even of occasionally compressing the sequence. If you're not going to eat meat or fish, it's hard to have a proper secondo, in any case. But a meal of nothing but a huge plateful of spaghetti would be dead last on my list of options.

Or actually, next to dead last. Restaurant-style eggplant parmigiana would have to rank below a glass of wine and no food at all, in my book. The eggplant parmigiana I grew up eating and continue to make is infinitely more delicious:

Make a simple marinara sauce by sautéeing three or four cloves of garlic, some basil, salt, and pepper in pure olive oil. Add one big can of crushed San Marzano tomatoes. Rinse the can with a little red wine if you have it. (This wine can be past drinking age. If it's not, you should be having a glassful as you cook.) Simmer.

Peel and slice a medium eggplant. Salting, weighting, etc. is a waste of time. Make a batter of three eggs and some Parmesan or Romano cheese and some dried basil. Dip the eggplant slices in the batter and sautée in pure olive oil. Layer in an ovenproof dish with the sauce. Bake at 350 degrees until the sauce begins to bubble, about half an hour. Can be eaten straight out of the oven, but is so much better the next day that it's almost a different dish.

A simple marinara does not need to be simmered for days on the stove. For this dish, it can be started right before preparing the eggplant. A sauce to be used for something else is best made a day ahead--but still doesn't need to cook for ages.

Notice that there's no oregano in this recipe. No mozzarella. No onions or peppers. If you can't resist jazzing up an "Italian" meal with these, or don't use pure Italian olive oil out of economy or some misguided attempt to de-calorify your dinner, you will have made something, but it won't be what I call eggplant parmigiana.