Pot-roasted chicken with gnocchi

This is a kind of Italian version of chicken and dumplings. It is the first recipe I've tried from my new Canal House Cooking #5, and it appealed to me because it's a simple recipe for a weekday meal, given that I skipped the gnocchi-making and just bought fresh gnocchi at Whole Foods. It turned out well enough but I'm not convinced about this cookbook series.

You are supposed to rub 2 Tbl spoons of softened butter onto the chicken. My butter was soft and my chicken was dry, but it just clumped along the skin and did not spread at all. Oddly, then, I thought, you also rub 2 Tbl of olive oil onto the chicken once you've put it in a enamel cast-iron pot. You salt and pepper it, pour in 2 c. water and 3 sprigs of fresh sage. Then you cover and put the pot into a preheated 375-degree oven.

So far, so good. But then it says to roast a 3-4 lb. chicken (mine was 3.5 lbs.) only 30 min. before taking off the lid, basting the chicken, adding 4 carrots, peeled and sliced into rounds, and returning to oven uncovered -- for only 15 min.!

I was skeptical about the time and I was right. The chicken was still snow white after 15 min. (supposed to be crispy, golden), so I turned up the heat and after another half hour (total 1 hr 15 min -- about what I would have expected), it was golden enough to be presentable and the juices ran clear. It was still plenty moist (I basted it some more in between). You remove the chicken and let it sit 10 min. before carving.

You cook the fresh potato gnocchi in batches in simmering, salted water, removing with a slotted spoon after they float on the surface for 10 sec. and put on a heated plate. When the gnocci are done, you toss with melted butter and parmesan. Then you serve gnocchi in a wide bowl, with slices of chicken on top, spooning over some broth and carrots. The chicken has a great flavor, the broth is rich and rounded from the sage and carrots, and the gnocchi are a lot like dumplings.

It worked fine for a weekday meal. I see a problem for serving it to guests, though, because getting it to the table with everything hot is a challenge. I'm also concerned that the timing was so far off. Added to that, the cookbook has a quirky selection of recipes and I don't see too many that I'm interested in doing. Bottom line: May not get another Canal House cookbook. I got this one because one of the authors in a book I'm reviewing recommended the series. Pretty photos seem to be the main attraction.

I may try to follow their recipe for gnocchi some weekend, though. It doesn't look that hard, just a little time-consuming for a weekday.

Assaggi Mozzarella Bar

Assaggi means "tastings," though for a while I thought it meant just plates because of the nice collection of ceramic plates on the wall. The specialty is a mozzarella plate with buffalo mozzarella, buffalo ricotta and burrata along with condiments like grilled zucchini, roasted peppers and green tomato marmalade. This is ideal for sharing and the four of us also shared the salumi plate with prosciutto, salami, speck and a couple of other cured meats.

The cheeses were creamy and delicate and paired very nicely with the condiments. While the portions were not huge, the combination of plates was enough to make us all comfortable with just ordering pasta as a main course. I got the dill tagliolini with Dungeness crab meat and green peas, which was different and tasty. Others seemed quite happy with their choices as well, though I didn't taste any of them. The hard crust bread was delicious and they brought more when you asked.

We accompanied with a very nice Aglianico, a black grape varietal from the Basilicata and Campania regions of southern Italy, which I don't think I'd ever had before. It was among the more moderately priced selections (the online menu doesn't have it so I don't have the details) and turned out to be very good value, with a rich, mineral taste, quite velvety. We liked it well enough to order a second bottle.

It's a testimony to the richness of Italian cuisine that this Bethesda restaurant can carve out its own distinctive niche among Italian offerings and introduce us to things that are new. All in all, very pleasant and worth revisiting. Note to those who care about this, it is fairly noisy and we even had a table at the end of the bench that was not in the noisiest part of the restaurant.

Montalcino in DC

Montalcino, according to Dean Gold's email, is the highest hill town in Tuscany and the inspiration for a special menu at Dino. We bit and really enjoyed one of the best deals in town.

The menu, served family style, starts with crostini -- with white bean, herbed ricotta, and wild boar salami. Then comes the ribollita -- a vegetable soup with bread, a nice broth with some winter vegetables perfectly suited to warming you up and whetting your appetite. This was followed by a second primi, Pappardelle all'Aglione, house-made pasta tossed in a tomato essence they cooked up this summer with roasted garlic and herbs and which is truly delicious. The main course is a stew, scottiglia, that includes three meats braised separately -- pork, wild boar and duck. It's worth hearing Dean's description of the stew in full to get an idea of the care in sourcing and cooking that this restaurant takes.

"Our version is based on Angela Costanti's: the meats are stewed and then served separately....Our scottiglia is made from a trio of meats via slow braising with red wine and just a drop of tomato. Our pork from EcoFriendly Foods is grown by a family of farms from a cross of heritage breeds using open pasture when Virginia's weather permits. This results in a silky pork rich with flavor and luscious, mature fat. We use lean cubes for the scottiglia; and all the meats have a little pork belly mixed in. Second is wild boar from Texas. We use a wild gathered product. Wild boar used to be thought of as simply a nuisance to the ranchers of Texas. But some forward looking folk saw them as a resource to be managed. Now the boar are a source of income to the farmer; and the ecosystem is better off for it. Plus, we get to enjoy this wonderful, lean meat. The third is the leg and thigh from Dr Joe's ducks. These are grown on small farms in Pennsylvania from breed stock developed by Dr Joe, a duck fanatic & former veterinarian. They have a rich and almost spicy flavor: a superb duck."

The menu -- all this for $30 -- includes a dessert (I had a delicately creamy tiramisu, not usually my favorite dessert but this was delicious) or a choice of two cheeses. We also ordered a bottle of Mastrojanni Rosso di Montalcino 2008 because Dean listed it as using a more "modernist" method of winemaking and that the vineyard had been revived by the Illy (coffee) family, and it was very nice despite being young -- fruity, smooth and indeed modern.