aprile 19, 2012
It is not the green nor the honey scented air. Shifts and shades are what makes the spring interesting, just as it happens in life. The green that gradually fades from hill to hill, the fields decorated with arabesques of yellow flowers or still the skies sailed by the heavy clouds of a quick-tempered spring.
Spring is made of surprising shifts from rain to clear weather, of shadows dancing over the fields following the path marked by the clouds above. It’s the variety and the unexpected surprise that make spring the most enigmatic of the seasons.
I made this salad for the first time to use a bountiful amount of spring ingredients, then I tried it again, savoured it on many occasions with different people, with friends and students at a cooking class. As it happens with spring, the shifts and the shades are what makes the salad interesting: cold, warm and hot in the same dish, the metallic taste of the artichokes and the milky cheese, the fresh herbs and fruity olive oil. It’s a game, ingredients are playing hide and seek to represent spring in a bowl of warm salad.
Then it seemed natural to repeat the salad once again in my second video recipe, to give a deeper dimension to the green of fava beans, peas and asparagus, to make them alive.
We decided to try again to tell a recipe through moving images, spoken words and (strong) Italian accent, I hope you all will appreciate it as much as I appreciated your loving feedback last time… so this is the result, once again thanks to the precious collaboration with TVedoTV.
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Posted in Spring, Vegetarian Recipes, Video recipe 
10 Comments »
aprile 16, 2012
Before Elizabeth David and Joanne Harris, before collecting cookbooks, memoirs of passionate cooks and any other book about food and the related world, before of all this there were two books that had unleashed persistent culinary fantasies that still come back to visit me.
The first is a book of my childhood, one of those first serious books that children read, one of those of the old times: it’s Heidi by Johanna Spyri. I still have here before my eyes the vivid images evoked in the chapter where Heidi arrives to his grandfather’s mountain cabin in the Swiss Alps, the precise words describing her first frugal dinner made of rustic bread, cheese and warm daily fresh milk. I still feel on my tongue the genuine taste of the cheese, of the buttery milk and crispy bread.
The second book dates back to my teenage years, two short lines in the book Voices written by Dacia Maraini, a writer who had already inflamed my imagination in the Silent Duchess and Bagheria, bringing me into a baroque world of Mediterranean flavours.
Voices it’s a crime novel dense of sensations and questions as well as the inebriant smells of a hot Roman summer. The protagonist is Michela Canova, a journalist trying to to shed a light on the murder of her neighbour. She invites some friends over for dinner and makes them a dish of lemon spaghetti.
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Posted in Fresh Pasta 27 Comments »
aprile 12, 2012
In my other life, when I used to study and work in marketing and communication, there was a theory founded on the four Ps, namely to build a successful marketing strategy you have to work on the following aspects: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.
Then – as it usually happens – the theory was developed and they added a fifth P, People. The people working to sell a product or a service should know everything about what they are going to sell, be perfectly aware of the story behind a product, the advantages in buying it. In a few words, they should convey to the customers emotions, passion and experience.
In La Petraia the place was beautiful beyond any expectations, calm and almost mystic, the food was soulful and unconventional in its presentation, the idea behind the project revolutionary…
But I was sold on the people. It’s not that they knew everything about la Petraia and were brilliant in communicating this, all of them were enthusiastic about the place they were working in. You could sense from their words that they truly believed every single word they were spending on the project.
The road to get there is breathtaking, both for the views over the tumbling hills patterned with vineyards, and for the steep white road you meet on your way there.
Though, as soon as you spot La Petraia at the bottom of the hill, surrounded by a lavender field that will give its best in the blooming season of June and July, you cherish every single bend and slope you drove through to get there. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Travel 6 Comments »
aprile 10, 2012
Chiara has been my pen pal in the last 17 years, we started writing long and passionate letters with sharp colourful drawing pens and a round teenager handwriting, now we exchange quick messages and e-mails, to play along with the family busy schedule.
In seventeen years we exchanged a thousands of letters, e-mails and some photos, two phone calls and just one visit three years ago, then we managed to meet again eventually and we spent the Easter time together, in joy and disbelief, with her, her husband Luca and her two smiling babies, Sara and Davide.
We talked and talked, till we lost our voice, we talked in the car, at the table, on a seesaw, in the park and under the porch to skip the sudden downpour, while the kids run and run to fall asleep in the early evening, just after a quick dinner.
We pretended to be tourists – cameras, water and cap – in Colle Val d’Elsa and San Gimignano, where we ate the famous schiacciata (in this case a real savoury flat bread, not that schiacciata): fluffy and tasteful, with tiny puddles of olive oil and salt, still the same since I was a child and my mum was a child, too.
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Posted in Desserts, Spring 17 Comments »
aprile 4, 2012
Its name is schiacciata (flat bread), but it is anything but flat. It’s the typical Easter sweet bread of my areas, popular in most of the Tuscan region with slightly different names and small changes that could allow an expert eye to attribute undoubtedly the schiacciata to the Sienese area, the Elsa valley or the empolese county.
To tell the truth I call it sportellina, the very same name they use in San Gimignano, because my grandfather Remigio had really a sweet tooth for it, and as soon as you entered the Easter period he began to send us thick slices of schiacciata, tightly sealed in plastic bags to keep it fresh. Mum usually took it home just in time for tea, she came in and put the sportellina in a dish with a knife, in the middle of the table already laid for the afternoon tea.
Its name is schiacciata (or stiacciata) because they used to break (schiacciare in Italian) many eggs: it’s spring and the hens begin to produce eggs at a fast pace. You make an omelet, you cook a fried egg, you make also a fricassee, but then you must find a way to use so many eggs… so the women baked the Easter schiacciata, but not just one or two, they kneaded them in large quantities with those arms accustomed to hard working in the fields, to give to their neighbours, relatives, the doctor, the pharmacist, all of the notables of the time.
My mum’s cousin, Gelsomino, as well as moral owner of the recipe that got me over my yeast performance anxiety, to this day still bakes about fifty schiacciate every Easter… what can I do, I know so many people…
He has generously given us well proved ingredients to use: I would say that after an annual output of fifty schiacciata they will guarantee for sure perfect results. As for the method to follow, the advice was to look at the dough. And so I did, and among us developped an old fashioned love story, one of those stories that followed the right rhythms and pauses, without hastening the steps. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Baked Good, Desserts, Spring, Tuscan Recipes 15 Comments »
Red Velvet Cake and Happy New Year!
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