giugno 30, 2011
It has been ages since the last time I had home-made fruit pops. Then the sudden heat, the still air and the cicadas have reminded me of a little good habit I used to have as a child.
At that time I was well away from the appeal of the ice cream maker and the unusual ingredients, so I used to blend some randomly chosen fruit into the big blender glass (an ugly brown plastic blender glass, dramatically ’80s fashion), to add some water or orange juice and then pour the fruit purée into round little moulds, where you could insert a toothpick to use as an ice cream stick. Then I used to tuck them into the freezer for a few hours, waiting patiently to enjoy them as refreshing afternoon snack.
How I loved those summers! Long, calm, full of books and Mickey Mouse strips, little sheds built in the backyard, long bicycle rides and shooting stars.
When Claudia was just a little puppy, there was the Polaretti fashion instead. When you ate them, your tongue would get coloured for sure, they tasted a bit fake but they were so fun and easy to make, even for a cute little blonde girl with scraped knees as Claudia. Every time she put them into the freezer, she just missed slipping into the drawer, being so tiny!
Mu – mu – mum will you buy me the po – po – Polaretti? huh? when she was very young she used to stammer the first syllables, it was so fun!
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Posted in Desserts, Summer 
10 Comments »
giugno 27, 2011
On Friday, coming back home from work, I stopped at the local farmer’s market, the one just opened a few minutes from my house, and I filled my recycled cotton bag with honey scented melons, the freshest garlic, crisp zucchini and small ruby red plums, sweet and juicy. The vegetables were still warm, freshly picked, lightly dusted with dark soil. They were so fresh and carefully grown that could have been the vegetables from my garden.
Once I got home, I could not wait one more day, I wanted to cook immediately the zucchini, firm to the touch and fragrant green. I wanted to use the fresh garlic as well. It was the first time I had found fresh garlic at the market: usually the smell of garlic cloves is acute and pervasive, but this time I was amazed, the cloves were lunar white, with a distinctive earthy tone, juicy and fragrant.
The Summer, now carefree dancing in the cornfields, suggested me a perfect recipe for my crisp zucchini: a sprig of fragrant oregano from the pot on the garden wall and a clove of fresh juicy garlic, to enhance and mark the flavours. Once again a simple dish, almost obvious, cooked in five minutes, styled and photographed in three. Yet this recipe won its place on the Monday morning post, the one that I usually study and refine the most.
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Posted in Side Dishes, Summer, Vegetarian Recipes 13 Comments »
giugno 23, 2011
I do not need a psychologist, I have my whip and my bowl.
Perhaps in some moments I really need someone to talk to, someone who can fathom the twisted reasoning of my mind, demolish my fears and insecurities and give me stronger legs to walk with. In those moments, when I’m in a dead-end alley where the only alternative is to start screaming loud, I turn to the most effective psychologists: neither Jungian nor Freudian. They are my whip and my mum’s bowl.
It usually happens this way. I get home from work, walk into the kitchen, grab the eggs and set them on the table, then I sit down and look at them. I look at them and rejoice myself with their smooth lines, the perfect shell, the soft colour.
Then the inspiration comes out of the blue, I grab my whip and the bowl and I begin to wash away bad thoughts, anxieties, sorrows and people who take away the good feelings from life just with their bad influence. And I get through the bad moment, with a subtle charm, just like Vianne casting her spells in the rear of her shops, intertwining her fate with the spirals drown into the hot chocolate pot. You stir and change direction to the events. It happens. It works.
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Posted in Baked Good, Desserts, Summer 17 Comments »
giugno 20, 2011
I spent the last weekend alone at home, waiting for the foodblogger party to be enjoyed in my garden yesterday afternoon. My parents were in Germany to visit Claudia, so I had the whole house for myself: it was a kind of rehearsal of what will be my life from November onwards, when I will eventually take the plunge and I’ll be moving into my own tiny house overlooking the valley, alone. As I’ve always said, I’m a country girl through and through.
I appreciate many small moments of life alone. Obviously, there are also moments when you’d really need to have someone with you, as when I started crying buckets watching a film, and it was even not that thing. But take for example a lunch alone, sitting cross-legged on the sofa, relaxing after a Cinderella morning: priceless. Or just imagine coming back home after the morning run, throwing your shoes in the hall and jumping into the shower, ending up outside, resting on the wall, sipping a cup of green tea, watching the fields turning golden yellow: awesome. And then the wind, it was such a windy weekend, like in Chocolat, and whenever the air is so electric and messy, my ideas are re-oxygenated, and I feel like it’s going to happen something new, something beautiful.
When I’m alone, I try to reduce the effort of cooking (quite oddly, knowing myself), combining a few good ingredients and leaving them pure. I love for instance ox heart tomatoes, pinkish and sweet, seasoned with just a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and Maldon salt. You can prepare them in two minutes, but they make me feel like a queen, perhaps due to those crunchy salt flakes, a surprise when you bite into the fleshy tomatoes. Yesterday I decided to keep me relatively light for the upcoming foodblogger feast, so I pulled out of the fridge a jar with some marinated fresh goat cheese I had prepared the previous Saturday, listening to some healthy rock music blaring out in the house … another advantage of living alone!
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Posted in Appetizers, Main Course, Quick Recipes, Summer, Vegetarian Recipes 28 Comments »
giugno 17, 2011
Every time I tell myself I need to do things slowly, one after another. You just need a bit of organization, don’t you? I bought a black Moleskine on purpose, to scribble down projects, deadlines and ideas (yes, this is the official excuse, the truth is that I like to show it out at every opportunity, I’d love to be called the girl with the black Moleskine*!). Yet every time I find myself flooded with things to do, overlapping deadlines, four windows open on my desktop with a half written post, pictures in post production (what a resounding word, it seems that we are here working on a Vogue photocall!), e-mails to far-away friends and another brilliant blog post that I’d want to comment on.
It happens the same when I’m in the kitchen: I often have only the weekend to try the dozens of recipes going on through my mind during the week, so usually on Saturday mornings I put fire to the kitchen, there’s a pot boiling on the stove, the oven timer rings , the blender is on and there’s a knife dangerously poised on the cutting board. I desperately want to try everything and I invariably find myself in a battlefield.
* Yeah, I’ve read I love shopping, and you?
Grandma is different. Last Saturday we made together these fish-balls and while we were cooking she kept on tidying up the kitchen, methodically, taking off the dirty pots, putting away the sugar on the shelf (yes, sugar, belonging to the previously baked dessert… no sugar in the fish-balls!) and so on, step by step.
This is something that I still have to learn, both from grandma and mum: the order – first of all a mental one – when I am working in the kitchen. But when I teach my cooking classes for children during the local farmer’s market I become a control freak, and before going ahead with the next recipe they have to tidy up the table. I clearly do not practise what I preach!
Is it possible to make Summer Solstice’s resolution? Am I on time? There will be more order in my kitchen. Let’s try!
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Posted in Fish, Main Course, Summer 2 Comments »
Tapas!
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