Riffing

My friend Charlie, is an expert in jazz. I don't know much about jazz, but I know a few things - or at least I think I do. One of the things I know is that improvisation is important, in fact, probably essential to jazz. What many people don't understand, I think, is that improvisation does not mean "make it up as you go." No sir. As I understand it, improvisation is so valued in jazz, or any other kind of music, because you show what you can do with a basic idea: how you can play with it, turn it around, make something new, without distancing yourself from what is your "source text." In music, it's the original score. In cooking, it's the classic recipe, and BANG, we're back to "canons" again, and how we vary from them.

One of the elements of the Italian canon for meat is vitello alla milanese. This is one of my favorite dishes, and I need to have a big appetite for it. In this dish, a large veal chop is pounded thin, breaded, fried in a combination of olive oil and butter, and then served with a warm salad of arugula and tomatoes, dressed in balsamic vinegar. The salad is put right on top of the chop, and it helps to cut the richness of a very succulent piece of meat.

Tonight, I like to think I "played jazz" in the kitchen. Unexpectedly, I was making dinner for four, instead of two. Our two friends are dear friends, so something good was called for. I had veal tenderloin in the freezer (I had chops also, but not enough for four). I had thawed the tenderloin overnight, and salted it in the fridge this morning. On the way home, I began to think of what to do with it. As I've written before, tenderloins are relatively lean, and mild in flavor. They need something to push them forward. I began thinking of cream and mushrooms, but I had no fresh mushrooms in the house. I DID have cream, but I wasn't in the mood for something with that kind of richness. Even as I was panfrying the tenderloins (more on this below), I was still wondering what to do.

I had been planning on a tomato salad, and then the thoughts began to come together. Tomatoes: veal alla milanese. I didn't have arugula, but I did have radicchio, which is a little more bitter than arugula. I didn't want to serve it raw, but if I cooked it....

It was REAL good. Here's how it went. I took the tenderloin out of the fridge, and put it in a big pan, with heated olive oil. I cooked it on both sides, five minutes a side, to get a good sear. Then I put the pan in the oven for fifteen minutes to finish cooking. When it came out of the oven, I moved the meat to a plate to rest and let the juices resettle, and got to work on the vegetables. While the meat was cooking, I had chopped four heirloom tomatoes: two yellow and two red, but you could use what you have. Then I shredded the head of radicchio.

I dumped almost all of the left over oil out of the pan, and in order to get the good brown parts dissolved, I added about a cup of chicken broth to the hot pan. The steam was amazing, and everythig dissolved (do this, by the way, with an oven glove on. Your pan is going to be hot. You WILL burn your hand. And if you're a jazz pianist, this isn't good. It isn't good generally. Trust me). Let the broth cook down until it's almost gone, and then add the radicchio. It will wilt almost immediately. Add the chopped tomatoes, and stir them into the radicchio. Finally add a few tablesoons of balsamic vinegar. Take this off the heat (KEEP THE GLOVE ON), and let it rest.

Slice the tenderloin into diagonal slices, and either put them on top of a pile of your radicchio mixture, or alongside of it, or put the radicchio on top of it. And then serve it forth.

Guy is usually very quiet about his dinner, but this time, he whispered to me "this is WONDERFUL" And it was.

Charlie, thank you for riffs. Hope you like this one