Pretty good meal, all told.
The octopus salad offers a good technique for grilling octopus that intensifies its flavor without the requisite pounding of a fresh octopus that I’m otherwise accustomed to. (It’s sort of fun to keep slamming an octopus into a sink or on a stone, in a way, but it gets tedious and if it’s in the kitchen sink, it tends to make a mess.) You start by cooking the octopus in red wine, fresh herbs, and a mirepoix mixture for about 25 minutes, then marinate it until grilling in garlic, olive oil and lime juice.
The red wine treatment is somewhat similar to a Greek octopus stew I often make around Christmas time (which I typically end up eating by myself, sadly), but this doesn’t cook as long. The salad itself is more or less grilled octopus with some garnishes (radicchio, endive, cooked chickpeas) but it’s a fine and simple dish that I think would wow anyone who likes octopus and horrify anybody who doesn’t. (It wasn’t quite as tender as I expected, though it looked damn good.) The big surprise for me is that the simple vinaigrette that included lime juice, mint, and chunks of green olive was just damn amazing. I could have eaten that straight.
The pasta went pretty well.
Pasta-making feels a bit fluky to me—it’s never the same. But it’s easier to fix or adjust than conventional baking—I know when the dough is off-balance in terms of egg and flour. Refolding and rerolling dough gets you to a pretty good place. I chose not to make straight agnolotti but to use my stamps to make small stuffed pasta. That worked pretty well.
The chicken stayed moister than I expected but I still think there’s a problem with firing chicken pieces at 425 F for an hour. The skin ended up tasty, the flavor on the meat was great, but for something marinated for the better part of the day with some reduced marinade on it, we were getting uncomfortably close to dried out.
The balsamic vinegar flavor is great. I might think of fiddling with the marinade a bit. Some basil for one might help a lot. More than just the marinade might be good on the chicken itself. I might think about going 350 F for the first 3/4 of the cook and then going super-high to get the skin right. But I can also see, as per the recipe, that this would be great as a room temperature picnic chicken—I plan to make chicken salad with the leftovers later in the week. It doesn’t quite compete with my favorite other long-marinated chicken, which in tomatoes, cinnamon, lemon juice, garlic, hot fresh chiles, and basil, but it lives in the neighborhood, at least.
VERDICT: Eh, I’ll keep the book. These are pretty good recipes and I can see a few others I’d likely use. I didn’t find it the best guide to pasta-making I’ve read or anything else—it’s a marginal keep, honestly.