overwintered & ready

 In the fall when I was feeling sad about the days getting shorter (circa this blog post) I planted bulbs around the tree in front of my house, as an act of hope. It’s still very chilly here in Chicago, and I was pretty surprised to see some bright green leaves peaking out of the ground the other day. 

I hadn’t fully forgotten about them, but it was not on my mind, and I definitely didn’t recall the way I lined the front walk with them, a happy little trip. I don’t have much experience gardening, so I wonder if I keep it up, if I will internalize the calendar a bit more, and maybe many Marches from now, I won’t be cheered by the shoots. But really I think no matter how prepared you are, the spring is always a revelation. 

Bulbs are good for people starting out with growing plants, because they’re not too expensive, and they almost always yield results. As I’m learning about gardening I’ve heard about this concept called overwintering. Overwintering is a process where some life forms wait out the winter season, when conditions make normal activity or even survival difficult. Hibernation and migration are the two major ways of overwintering. Overwintering in the world of farming and gardening refers to planting some crops in the fall to achieve a spring harvest. I first heard about it with regards to planting garlic in the fall and letting it lay in the ground over the winter, you can also do this with things like radishes, (radishes in a green house) arguably it deepens the flavor. 

Bulbs are not just sleeping beneath the surface, however, there’s a little bit going on with them during this time. In this dormant period the bulbs do not grow in size or produce leaves above the ground, but they still quietly work away at an ever larger and deeper root system, and offshoots are expanding. Root and offshoot formation is an essential part of the life cycle. 

Last week I had a wine that we overwintered, so to speak, at Rainbow. We keep some wines to age a little before releasing them when we think they will be different to drink later. Deciding with Em what wines to lay for rest is one of my favorite parts of working together. We almost always say ‘yes’ if either of us has a sense the wine will shift. Having the ability as a retailer to satisfy the question, “how will this be” doesn’t come easy from a commerce perspective, but is greatly gratifying.

Traveling long distances can rattle the wine, prolonged vibration will shake up those compounds, and so sometimes it just needs to recover. If the finish of the wine feels uncomfortably full, if there’s a strong bacterial aftertaste, if the energy just doesn’t feel quite right we will want to wait. 

In wine science one aspect of maturation in bottle is attributed to oxygen, basically the idea that a tiny controlled amount of air is getting into the juice through the pores of the natural cork closure. Oxygen acts on the wine in a complex way, depending on various factors like the phenolic structure of the wine, the result is that air smooths and softens that structure, so it’s good for wines high in tannins. (Phenols are chemical compounds that come from the skins, pulp and pits or the grapes. Tannins are one kind of Phenol, they give grip and gum-drying bitterness to the wine). Besides oxygenation, there’s still a lot going on with the wine otherwise, and there isn’t enough research into oxygen and bottle age to speak definitively. 

What we do know is that the reactions taking place are mainly chemical reactions between the alcohol, acids and water inside. Over 500 different compounds have been identified in the aroma of a mature wine. These include alcohols, volatile acids, esters, aldehydes, ketones and more. 

There are slow chemical reactions going on between these constituents the whole time in bottle. The reactions result in a greater variety of chemical compounds and thus a more complex

You can also age wine! All you need is a cool place, the cooler the better down to about 50 degrees, where the temperature doesn’t fluctuate violently, and where it’s dark. This isn’t that easy in a Chicago apartment, but if you have a cupboard or closet area and don’t let your place get too cold in the winter or too hot in the summer, it works. Especially if you age *over the winter* - the summer heat here is the biggest threat to wine. 

When we received Michel Guignier’s Bonne Pioche 2019 in the fall it felt very full, like you were imposing on it a bit by drinking it,  like getting into a tub and your body displaces the volume and the water overflows, it was over the brim. Sometimes this is a nice tension but in this case we have another wine already from Guignier which felt more ready to drink, from the 2015 vintage, Moncailleux. Bonne Pioche is fluffy and purple and salty, not as deeply fruity and sanguine as the more elaborate Moncailleux. 2019 was a difficult vintage in Beaujolais, very hot, resulting in uncharastically juicy and bold wine at the cost of delicateness and brightness. Drinking it now it has found a lighter footing, it is gently juicy. 

In the case of Bonne Pioche I probably wouldn’t have opened it for another few months, I like to go for about 6 months, but my husband suggested we bring a bottle with us on vacation that we had bought from Diversey Wine, we were going to be eating a lot of fish, and Guignier wines can be the best red wine for fish in my opinion, especially oysters. When it arrived in the shop in late November, we did not try this wine. We looked at the alcohol percentage, we tried a different wine from the same vintage (which we are still cellaring, I suspect but don’t know fully that it is not ready yet in that the water still spills from the tub) and felt to let them rest. 

Seeing wine change just like seeing the seasons change makes me believe in the ability of me to grow and change too, which is a comfort to me, that there are options ahead. 

I read a book that I finished while drinking Bonne Pioche, it’s by Henry Green and called Party Going, it’s British and published in 1938. Green does this funny thing where he parks little clauses about the human potential for change. For instance, he will input between lines of dialogue, “…and here she began to speak like the older woman she was to become.”

 The short novel centers on a group of youngish friends trying to get out of the fog of London to the south of France for a getaway, an escape to the Continent. There’s a character called Max, a charismatic man the kind all the men want to be and all the women want to be with type thing. What an old problematic idea that saying is, yikes, but that’s the feeling, which is not as much of the times, maybe, because the whole thing feels very contemporary, as much about class and power. Max is the host of the group. In one part of the story another man named Robert pays the bill for a hotel doctor visit. Max has just found out from one of the friends in the group, Amabel. He says,

“Can’t have that, you know.” 

“Oh Max, you are so sweet!” she said, “but really, after all, it is his own aunt and she was not in our party; really she’s got nothing to do with you.” 

“Can’t have it,” he said this cheerfully, as people do when they are living up to their own characters.”

I thought about the wine as Max stepping into itself, or maybe more like me knowing what its character was about. This is a good book to read while drinking wine because it’s mostly dialogue, it’s engaging but light, it doesn’t benefit from a pen in one hand and cup of coffee in the other. You can read it in an afternoon or a rainy early April evening. 

☔️

We are open this weekend and Bonne Pioche as well as Moncailleux are available in the shop! Many other nice things to drink too. As always feel free to email us at rainbowwinechi@gmail.com with any questions. 

Sources for this post: 

Understanding Wine Technology by David Bird 

The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch

natural wine folk science pt i

Working in hospitality, in the way that I have been working in hospitality, we talk a lot about the impact of what we are serving has on your body. I used to think about publishing a zine with folk remedies for bad digestion, the only one I remember is extra spicy radish. Eating just one would feel like your belly full of bread was being dissolved, less of a thing to carry during service. The rest are a casualty of time but that’s ok, the tradition is bigger than I knew as its alive and well in natural wine.

Wine inspires all sorts of folk science and it seems like it invites continued contribution. For instance, I believe that when you drink wines from many different places you’re inviting a lot of different bacteria into your body that might be hard to process the next day. As if you were in the whole of France, north of Spain, and central Italy all at the same time. Another thing is that this bacteria puts a lot of energy into your body, especially from healthy wine, and if you just sit down and eat and then sleep you are going to have to experience the unused energy dying in there. I find dancing or a long walk home with a friend to be the best cures. It works for some people to sweat it out in the morning, for me it’s too late. It has to be in the moment. This isn’t something we normally talk about outside of ourselves because it’s driven by a gut feeling and it feels like a secret. But we love gossip and spilling (our own) secrets here so why not. 

I’ve also had a thing (aka a thought that feels half assed) about Covid changing trends in what wines people get excited about. There is more of a thirst for higher alcohol, more structured, maybe higher sugar, definitely higher intensity wines. Which came up again a couple weeks ago when tasting Axel Prüfer’s new vintage with him. He was about to pour a taste of his new Fou du Roi, a mix of Grenache, Cinsault, and Carignan. He layers the grapes “like a sandwich” in tank, and like sandwich construction, how you layer really matters. The Carignan was in the middle and had a lot of influence on the wine, Axel is known primarily for his light but detailed red wines made with carbonic maceration. This wine is not that. He asks what we think about the wine, about redder reds in general. I tell him that in the past two years I have found the patience for them, that the pace of our life has maybe helped us catch up to those wines. Being able to sit with them and appreciate their sprawl or their density. Axel says he has too, but he thinks it has happened since he had Covid. He is fine, but has lost a bit of sensitivity to something that can be harsh because of the virus’s relationship to our capacity to taste and smell. I’ve never heard this before but I like it, in my mind I am propping it up against the bigger wines of recent warm dry vintages and leaving it there for now.

Axel also gave us a book with interviews of influential Catalonian producers, he is featured too and had a few copies at home. It’s in French and while my speaking is impossible my reading is semi-okay. We accepted it because I thought it would help me learn to listen to French winemakers talk about their work. I skimmed the whole thing but the first interview I sat down with was the chat with Laureano Serres, a winemaker in Pinell de Brai referenced by almost everyone in the book.  We got to see him a few weeks ago too, but there was a lot going on and the possibility for quality time was minimal, especially across our languages. So there was a desire to connect those moments with his voice. It really did help, and I want to share this part that expresses both the feeling of his wine in particular and the sentiment of this writing:

…Je compare toujours les personnes avec des raisins. Nous sommes à 80% de l'eau, pareil pour le raisin ou le vin. Le raisin, c'est de l'eau et du sucre. Le vin c'est de l'eau et de l'alcool. L'alcool fait battre le cœur, l'eau nettoie les reins. C'est parfait dans le cycle de la vie. Nous avons l'opportunité de vivre ce moment de perfection, non?

Basically he is saying we, grapes, and wine are all 80% water. Grapes also have sugar and wine also has alcohol. It is perfect because the alcohol makes our heart beat and the water cleans the kidneys. And it’s perfect in the cycle of life, and we have the opportunity to experience this perfection.

One might not feel that this is true but it doesn't really matter, that exact notion of truth. Sometimes better to have a light heart, sense of humor, and trust in someone else's experience.

tender hearts

 i feel stuck in the kitchen a lot this time of year, when the midwestern larder of apples and root veg is running low, and been relied on long. it turns out, however, that many simple preparations are excellent even when you have squash you’re sick of or less than fresh grocery store vegetables to work with. 

we can make these things great with good olive oil, salt, lemon and wine to drink. i’m thinking of ems pantry wines post, in particular. 

gabrielle hamilton has an episode of the PBS show Mind of a Chef from 2015 that I think I always remember because it gives a rare glimpse of chefs who are parents feeding their kids with grocery store items. 

https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/mind-chef/episodes/mind-chef-season-4-episode-1-prune

It also reminded me of my Mom who makes what she affectionately calls “a chop,” which is - thinly sliced celery hearts, and whatever else is available to make it shine. orange zest and juice, smashed olives, minced onion, shaved fennel, herbs, etc. 

hamilton says, “this comes from scanning the produce aisle at the average grocery store, and the crappy shit thats for sale. This is not fresh from the farm, organic fennel. very dry, aged, bruised. but i know i can cut down and get that heart…I’m finding the heart of the matter here, getting down to the tender heart.” She peels the outer husk of a bunch of celery, and chops through the heart. “That’s tender celadon interior…You took the fluorescent tube right out of it, and now it’s all incandescent.” 

pickled butternut squash 

from food & wine magazine 

12 ounces butternut squash, peeled and cut into 1/8-inch-thick slices (nice to cut them into half rounds, like little demi moons)

1/4 sweet onion, thinly sliced 

6 dried pequin chiles, or other small dried chiles 
3/4 cup white vinegar 

1/2 cup water 
2 teaspoons sugar 
1 teaspoon salt

Cook the squash in a medium pot of salted boiling water for 2 minutes. Drain in a colander and run under cold running water until cool. Drain well.

Pack the squash, onions and chiles in a 4-cup container.

Put the vinegar, water, sugar and salt in a small pot and bring to a boil over moderately high heat. Boil, stirring, until sugar and salt are dissolved. Pour the boiling vinegar over the squash mixture. Let cool completely, then seal tightly and refrigerate for 1 day before serving.

eggplant mush 

for two people 

2 japanese eggplants (available at fresh market and joong boo) 

half clove of garlic, minced very fine

2 tablespoons good olive oil 

juice of half a lemon 

handful of pine nuts 

basil 

salt 

roast the eggplants on a baking sheet in a 400 degree oven for 5 minutes per side. When done they should feel squishy, almost about to fall apart. let them cool for a few minutes and when they’re no longer too hot to handle, peel the skin with your hands over a bowl, letting the flesh fall in. season generously with salt, the olive oil and lemon, and garlic. 

this is great on its own but you can add sesame seeds, toasted sunflower seeds or toasted pine nuts for a crunch. and torn basil leaves for fragrance. you could make this a full dish like the one from prune if you served it with some flatbread :) 

roasted red pepper 

i particularly like this because you come close to the flame, it feels subversive and i kind of feel like a housewife lighting a cigarette from the stove, that crazy blue methane ignition 

light your stove and get your peppers on there charring on the open flame. turn as needed. you really want to singe them all over, if you’re too careful you will wind up with tough uncooked peppers. when black all over, soft and starting to ooze juice, put in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap. let steam for 10 minutes. remove plastic and peel the skins off with your hands, over the bowl. you want to catch and keep all the delicious juice. 

remove seeds and slice peppers. 

em likes to marinate them in good red wine vinegar, and serve with torn basil and olive oil, this is delicious, i will eat all of it. em told me, “ no it’s fine, sometimes i char them on the stovetop but sometimes it takes forever and i just put them in the oven and serve them with the skins like yolo” 🌈💗

i also like to make the following salad: 

lay down some bibb lettuce, put your roasted peppers on top, finish with some small capers, shaved red onion and anchovies. bathe in olive oil, season with lots of lemon juice and salt. 

marilyn’s chop 

celery hearts 

fennel bulb 

orange 

lemon 

green olives 

salt 

olive oil 

peel away the tough exterior pieces from the celery and fennel. finely slice, pretty much shave the hearts. zest the orange and lemon, then halve and juice them into the veg. pitt your olives by crushing them with the flat side of your knife blade. toss everything with plenty of salt and olive oil. 

making stuff

I think it’s time, about a year into this project to be clear about one of the intentions we have with the blog. Cub, my biweekly editor (one of many of Cub’s roles at Rainbow, in my life), knows that I usually avoid legibility. But I want to tell you that one reason we write about cooking is that we want to write about making, in a way that we can possibly do together if you’re interested, and it’s important that it’s something you consume. We can be hostile toward what we don’t understand, so while cooking cannot help you read a tech sheet it can help develop a sympathetic ear when listening to a winemaker’s process. Because you too navigate choices, working with raw materials that are ideally of the highest quality but not always. Cooked dishes shifting with the slow touch of experience. And while you can make meatballs 20 times in a year, it would take a winemaker 20 years to make wine 20 times. Certainly an oversimplification but still a useful one I think.

Meatballs were the first food where I started making those considerations, trying to imagine my process more sensually (this blog post from last year also touches on that). It was in 2018, my old boss Ethan Pikas texted me the recipe I use most often. Except I’ve never used the same ingredients he does because my pantry is different so it’s like Pikas karaoke. Also his recipes feel extremely tailored to his sensibility which will never be my sensibility. Even if I did use the same ingredients my food will not taste like his. I think that’s related to what we call gesture around here (“[gesture] encompasses the movements of the body as well as the mind”). Again another lesson for when you hear about mentorship and traces of influence.

Aside from ingredients (flavors) there is the technique. How you prepare. Once I was making breadcrumbs for the recipe and was having a hard time getting them to a uniform smallness. So I thought what if they were chunky? What is that like? I imagined the small crumbs melting and binding and the large ones announcing the work they were doing. Like how Ina Garten suggests to put lemon slices on a lemon cake, so everyone knows what to expect. Sometimes I want to get the studded effect from a nut or currant. Shifting the feeling texturally and the flavor.

Once you’ve made your mix you get to choose what shape and size they will take. There are spheres, torpedoes, sort of flattened balls as well. My dad likes to make huge meatballs to put on top of spaghetti. We didn’t grow up with this dish and there is something nice about the hyper-American, personal meatloaf decision. Mine are typically the “meat/protein” on the table along with some vegetables on the side so are sort of a medium size. I also like them served on top of a chunky romaine salad for the classic dish “meatball salad”. As you cut into the meatball you cut into the lettuce for something hot and cold and soft and crunchy. After Cub’s blog last week I thought of a more conceptual orb dish where your gnocchi and your meatballs are the same size; arranged on a plate or low bowl with a shower of cheese. I also imagine them as little polpettini sitting back in the spaghetti, so you can stab one with your fork while wrapping the spaghetti around the rest.

For this recipe, what I hope is a site of experimentation and play, I’m going to just give the ratios and let you go. Because they can be seared and braised in tomato sauce or baked in the oven, poached in broth, turned into the patties and fried. It calls for half lamb half pork though I’ve also used beef and veal. You want the weight to be the same so the proportions of the rest of the ingredients are correct. The key to making the meatballs is imagining the result of your actions whether for yourself or others. Like, if you’re trying to evenly mix crushed red pepper into a meatball would it maybe be nicer to distribute all over the surface of the contents of your bowl rather than dump it? Should you use pine nuts, if you do should you toast them? Should you soak the breadcrumbs in the kefir or yogurt before mixing them in or are you gonna skip it and see what happens? Did you make the breadcrumbs or use panko? How hot do I want the pan when the meatballs go in, which shape caramelizes best, do I keep the fat when I add the sauce? What do I want people to feel? I don’t think I can tell you those things. The thing I do recommend is refrigerating them before cooking because it helps the meatballs retain the chosen shape.

Meatballs inspired by Ethan Pikas

makes maybe more than you need but you can halve the recipe or freeze the leftovers (cooked or raw). Cooked they can break down into a nice sauce for later, raw you can experiment with the same base but different shapes and sizes.

Lamb 455g

Pork 455g

Salt 22g

Parsley 15g

Parmesan 80g

Kefir or watered down yogurt 80g

Pine nuts 52g (optional)

Eggs 100g

Garlic 20g

Crushed pepper 6g

Dried oregano 8g

Bread crumbs 35g

Mix just till bound

70g ea (Ethan’s suggestion)

vagano, vagano, vagano! / gnocchi di parigi

 If you’re like me, there are certain cooking and baking techniques that you just connect with, and some you really just don’t. I don’t have a happy knack for making macarons, for instance, but I have an affinity for making choux pastry or pate à choux. I don’t think there’s something innate in me that made choux pastry more comprehensible- I think I just had a really good teacher show me how to make it at cookery school. I think I was hungover for the day we made macarons. Also they are harder to make. 

It’s also been a self-fulfilling prophecy that I enter into making this dough with confidence, and so I am more inclined to cook it whenever I can. I have that faith that it is going to work out. These opportunities arise not very often but not totally infrequently, as the dough has savory and sweet applications. 

Last week we were a little short on something for dinner but without time to venture out to the grocery store. I had taken some meat out of the freezer earlier in the day, so there was that. A piece of bavette steak, a thin piece that needed something more to complete the meal, more like a side of steak. We had some kind of limp greens but enough to make a salad. We didn’t have any potatoes. We had rice the night before. I was searching for something. 

Most days we have on hand flour, eggs and some sort of aged cheese.  I remembered how this steakhouse my family went to for special occasions growing up had parmesan gnocchi as a side, it was the seared, non-potato kind, called parisian gnocchi or gnocchi parisienne. I consider eggs and aged cheese cold pantry items, and I felt really good that I would make something with hot water and staples. 

I’m not sure what the historical connection with the potato gnocchi of Italy is, apart from being a somewhat similar shape (although as you’ll see I went a different way with these). Parisian gnocchi is easier to make than potato gnocchi. Making the choux pastry for these little pastas is even a little easier than how you would make the dough for a sweet application. 

It’s hard for me to organize all my thoughts on these brilliant floury gnocchis. To start, J Kenji Lopez Alt on Serious Eats explains it very well, “Parisian gnocchi are somewhat of an oddity in the Western repertoire, in that they're made with a hot water dough—much like Chinese-style dumpling or stretched noodle dough. With most Western breads and pastries, cold or room temperature liquid is added to flour before kneading it.” Indeed when I first made this dough, it felt really strange beating this moush of eggs water and flour. I find it so satisfying how it comes together and resolves into a smooth dough as you beat it.

the dough appears to break after adding each egg, before then re-forming

You boil the dough like a pasta, and then pan fry or bake it. When you pan fry them you get a little seared edge on all sides, it gives a nice crispiness. I’d actually never baked it before, and was really happy with the result - they puff up even more than when you fry them. This way they are kind of little somewhere between gougeres and pasta. 

The thing about this recipe is that while there are many steps, you can break them up without cost to the end result. I was on a zoom training when I made these over 5 minute breaks. I made the dough in five minutes. I boiled the dumplings in 5 minutes, and I baked them at the next 5 minute break. They were ready for dinner when the training was over. 

The most novel thing about this recipe is the shape. Normally when you put the sticky dough into a pastry bag, hold the bag over a pot of boiling water, and use a knife to cut underneath the tip at intervals, so that you are cutting little pieces. If you’ve made spaetzle before (another unsung steak house side) you may have used this cutting technique. 

I’ve never really mastered that technique. It is a fun thing to do with another set of hands, if that sounds fun to you, it’s a nice way to collaborate in the kitchen. 

I kind of had this vision of ricotta gnudi I had once, and also of matzo balls, and also of dumplings like in chicken and dumplings. So instead of cutting in I used an ice cream scooper to make rough rocky edged shaped dumplings. This is also less time consuming than using a pastry bag and making the small cut pieces. You can also use larger two spoons in place of the ice cream scoop. I also kind of like how the scoop makes them look like ice cream.

As I made and remade this new recipe, I found such comfort in this shape. I thought of the puffballs called "le manine" - the pollen (? it's never fully explained) that floats through the air in the intro and outro to Federico Fellini's 1973 film Amarcord. Amarcord means 'I remember,' this film is his ode to Fellini's childhood. It takes place in a small Northern Italian coastal town, Rimini, his own hometown, in the late 1930s. It is beautiful and stirring, and I love so many scenes from it. Le Manine are the harbingers of spring that come in late winter, a celebration for the town. 

We hear a couple sing: "When the puffballs come, then winter is almost gone." Children chant, "When the puffballs soar, then winter is no more." They try to catch the biggest ones and head to the seashore. And a local character explains, "In our town, the puffballs arrive hand in hand with spring. These are the sort of puffballs that drift around, soaring over the cemetary, where all rest in peace, soaring the beachfront and the Germans, newly arrived, who don't feel the cold. Drifting, drifting, swirling...swirling...drifting, drifting, drifting!

These puffballs do drift and float and puff. The 'drifting' here is translated from the Italian, "Vagano!" which can also be read as "They wander!" 

What really completed the dinner was the wine, which was as odd and novel feeling as these shaggy dumplings, as fantastical as the film too. It’s a new wine we got in from Podere Pradarolo, Libens, made entirely from the Croatina grape. Pecorino is a very sharp cheese that can be bracing with another tangy wine. The Libens offered umami to match the cheese, but also a rich and slightly sweet fresh and fried fruit depth, plum/prune and amarena cherries. Can't think of anything more appropriate for an Amarcord tribute.

This is just one of many new wines in store, including several from Italy. Check out the shop and as always please email us at rainbowwinechi@gmail.com or dm rainbow_wines anytime! Cheers! 

Gnocchi Buns 

Adapted from Jacques Pepin  in Food & Wine 

1 c water 

3 tablespoons salted butter 

½ tsp salt 

¼ tsp nutmeg 

¼ tsp black pepper 

1 c all purpose flour 

½ tsp smooth dijon mustard 

3 eggs 

1 c grated pecorino romano, plus ½ grated for sprinkling before baking 

A little olive oil for a drizzle 

Tip ~ 

Prepare to be working your mixing arm, and use a wooden spoon. You want to work pretty quickly in each little section of assembling the dough. 

Put a pot of water on to boil. Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees and place a small cast-iron skillet in the oven. Put water, butter, salt, nutmeg and pepper in a saucepan and bring to a boil. As soon as the water is boiling, shoot in the flour all at once. Vigorously stir the mixture on medium heat for 1 minute, this brings the dough together and also cooks out a little of the flour flavor right away. Turn your dough out into a bowl and let it cool for 3 - 5 minutes. Add one egg and beat in until incorporated. Add half the first cup of cheese and another egg and beat again until incorporated. Repeat with the final egg and remaining half cup of cheese, as well as the mustard. 

Prepare an ice bath (a bowl of water with equal parts ice and cold water). Once the pot of water is boiling, add a large handful of salt. Take an ice cream scoop and drop one ball at a time into the water. There should be enough for about 5 balls with a standard scoop. The scoop to use is the kind with the metal ring that slides around the inside of the cup to clear out the dough. 

Boil until the dumplings start to flour to the surface, about 5 minutes. Transfer them immediately to the cold water bath, and let cool there for about 2 minutes. Remove them from the water to a plate to drain a little. 

Take your heated skillet from the oven. Swirl around a bit of olive oil in the skillet. Arrange the dumplings, then top them with the remaining grated cheese, allowing some to fall onto the skillet around the dumplings. This will make a nice crispy frico. Grate some black pepper on top as well. 

Bake for about 30 minutes. Before serving, drizzle with more olive oil.