It’s been utterly quiet around here lately.  At some point, I just stopped thinking about food all the time. My mind was somewhere else.

Five – no wait! six? -  years ago I made a career choice. I moved away from what I wanted to do when I was a child, because it was not quite how I thought it was going to be, and I could not cope with the differences. Besides, pursuing that career would mean no decent job for a few years at least. I took up another job, a job that was any job but that, because I didn’t want to have to deal with it ever again. It felt too painful.

I still remember the first day at the office. At lunch I sidled out to a small, sad urban park, a world away from the beautiful place I went to cry  just a week before (and there were plenty of tears even before – I do cry easily). I sat on a bench and I cried my soul out. I wanted my life back. It feels as if it has not happened yet.

It is not that I regret my decision: I’m sure it was the right one for me. I regret my illusions. I wish I could still think a beautiful job exists, one that fulfills me and allows me to use all of my skills, and even be relatively sure I’ll have an income next month. I am aware that having a job – even if it is not going to make me famous, or win me a Nobel prize or a olimpic medal – is a huge privilege, and it comes with a huge dignity. Even if that job is not going to change the world. I am lucky even among those who do have a job: my job is safe, easy to find wherever I live, and relatively well paid. It turned out, surprisingly, that I’m also quite good at it, and there are aspects of it that I find interesting. But on that first period I could not avoid the feeling of crushing sadness at being there, doing something that was not quite what I had hoped for when I thought about how I wanted to spend my life. I thought I’d carry on and either get used to it, or find something that I wanted for real, and then work to get it. All that time, I held back. I was wearing a mask at work: secretly, I did not want to be there. I did not want to keep doing that job. I was meant to do something else with my life, something different, and I never allowed my job and my colleagues to get close to me. Sure, I did my work and I did get involved to a degree, but I never gave it a serious chance.

During boring office hours – and we all know they happen – I started to read blogs about my other main passion, food. I thought that would help me to fill fulfilled and somehow happy, while I waited for something to happen, for my dream job to appear. So this is what I’ve been doing in the last few years: food is my passion and I’ve allowed it to take a lot of room in my head. However, I’ve never thought food could turn into a full-time job, not even for a second. I did not want to risk it, because I had already lost my other big passion by trying to make a job out of it.

Years later, and I am pretty sure 99% of the problem is with me, not with the job, this job or any other, for what matters. I am not able to be proud of what I have achieved. Recognizing this has helped me to accept my feelings about my job. I now want  to make choices about my career. I want to stop holding back and punishing myself for not being able to get it all, a dream job and a perfect life.  I have a choice, I have plenty of choices actually, which is great. But my reaction has not been particularly great. I don’t like the person I have become at all: I am passive, I let decisions slide over me. So, this time, since I could, I have decided to shut out everything else and take a decision with all of my soul and brain and senses on it. I have a new career opportunity. Dream one? don’t think so. Will I make myself proud? I already know this is not going to happen. But I want to try. I want to improve, identify what I like and then work out an honorable compromise between reality and expectations.

So this is what has been on my mind for the last month or so. I wanted to give my job a go, and I did it. Now I already feel happier with myself and my life. It is so true that stress is generated when you don’t feel in control. Nothing is set in stone, but I’m slowly starting to live again, finding the time to go for a walk and yes, even thinking about food. I know food is here to stay. It was there before the blogs, before I could even read, and it will be there when technology has changed so much that blogs don’t really make more sense.

At the end of this journey, I want to keep a diary again, and I want it to be focussed on food. I’m going to have less time. But I hope this somehow will push me to use whatever time I have on something I do care about. I’ve always been good with discipline and overload of work.

Spring was here in all its glory. Everything is growing and blooming. Now it looks like we have crossed into the British summer  – rain, rain and more rain, cold and unstable weather, and the occasional bright and warm day. I’ve been alone most of the time, so I did not cook much anyway. But the other day I took a new book from the library, Curry Easy by Madhur Jaffrey. I had already discovered what a great source she is. Now I am kicking myself in the butt for not buying this book any sooner.

This is the kind of book I wish I could write: recipes, simple and clear, with reasonably accessible ingredient, each a loved and tested favourite. They are the kind of recipes you can make every day when you get home from work, with a couple of exceptions. And every recipe works its Indian magic: the flavours, the spices, everything works to create a special result. All that is non essential to the final dish is cut off, and all that is essential is kept and enhanced. I wish I could do that for Italian food, the closest to me. This is a book written by a person who understands her food perfectly, and has the confidence to make it work with substitutions and shortcuts, without losing any soul in the process.

The dishes that came out of this book are the ones that made me fall in love with cooking again. I have been eating a lot of boring food, stir fries randomly thrown in together, just out of laziness. The day I took the book home, with ingredients I already had in my almost empty fridge and the cupboard, I cooked myself a three course feast in less than an hour, and had happy leftovers for two days afterwards. Yesterday I threw this stir fry together in no time at all – I barely noticed it. I could not avoid though noticing the fragrance of curry leaves. It is the first time that I buy them fresh and I never really understood them so far. Now I do. Now I recognize them from many dishes where I could not quite pin down the fragrance. I love it when this happens.

The author suggests as a bold substitution for them, basil leaves. I can sort of understand it, though they do taste different. Buy some fresh curry leaves though, if you have the chance. The smell will linger in your kitchen and in your mouth for hours, and you’ll remember again exactly why we do it.

It’s the flavour that makes life worth living.

Stir  fried Chettinad Chicken – from Curry Easy by Madhur Jaffrey

4 portions

Ingredients:

500 g  cubed chicken breast, or boned tight

salt and pepper

1 teaspoon freshly grated ginger

1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder

1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

olive oil

1/2 teaspoon brown mustard seeds

1/2 teaspoon skinned urad dal, or yellow split peas

1/2 teaspoon fennel seeds

2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

2 hot dried red chillies

20 fresh curry leaves, or 8 basil leaved

1/2 onion, chopped

4 medium tomatoes

Method: combine chicken cubes with salt, a lot of black pepper, ginger, turmeric and cayenne. Mix and leave to marinade in the fridge for half an hour (don’t skip, this makes the chicken surprisingly tender).

Heat the oil in a heavy skillet, add the mustard seeds, urid dal and fennel. When the mustard seed start to pop, add chilli, cinnamon and stir for around thirty seconds; add the chopped onion and cook until slightly soft and brown. Add in the marinated chicken and the curry leaves, cook and stir until done. Add the chopped tomato and cook for a further 30 seconds. Good hot and cold.

A few days ago a gift arrived at my door. It had travelled from the US and through time as well. I was holding in my hand a small bottle of home produced garum. I opened it and was hit in the face by a strong, strong smell. Fishy? Not quite. The manufacturer is Laura Kelley, the talented author and researcher; the recipe source is Roman. Garum is a mysterious historical relict. Fish, in this case mackerel, is piled with salt and left to mature at room temperature for a few weeks, then distilled to an almost clear liquor (read Laura’s post for much more information). Fish sauces are alive and kicking in the Far East, but they are not common any more in the Mediterranean. In Roman times, however, this great-grandfather of nuoc mam was a prized and popular ingredient.  Why did we stop using it? It is a mystery. In Italy colatura di alici is still produced with a similar process, but it certainly is no common ingredient.

The legacy in Italy from Rome is huge. At school I have studied Latin for almost eight years. I know Roman history better than any other period – this actually proves my generic ignorance in the subject more than anything else. They made us translate detailed accounts of battles, political treacheries, blood facts, epic legends, and heartbreaking love poems. But there is one topic I don’t remember studying or translating: food. If I have to tell you what I imagine about the food of the Romans, my main source is the comics series of Asterix. I’m not sure about its authenticity, but surely there is a lot of food related scenes in it, and it makes for a funny read.

One common belief about Roman food is that it was decadent. Images of wealthy Roman patrizi, leaning on sofas and eating pigs stuffed with birds stuffed with fish stuffed with grapes, served by naked beautiful slaves, come to mind. I thought Apicius was one of the main promoters of this image, but it is probably more down to Asterix, I have to say. I finally took the chance to read the book (translated, imperial latin is not my forte any more) and I found it to be refined, surely, but with very few involved and truly decadent dishes. Not to say that it was not interesting, mind you. It was. Some combinations are surprisingly modern, closer to Middle East cooking than Italian one, with its mix of sweet and savoury.

To test garum, I chose a recipe that sounded weird and exotic and decadent as much as I could. I settled for  patella de apua, or depending on the transcription, patina de apua fricta (book IV, recipe 147). A literal translation could be sardine dish, fried or not. Whether the fish is fried, or the dish, is not clear. There is no indication of frying in the recipe itself however. The main ingredients are apua, or sardines, and eggs. This is the original recipe, as translated by Vehling  (the full book is available here on Project Gutenberg):

SARDINE LOAF (OR OMELETTE) IS MADE IN THIS MANNER  CLEAN THE SARDINES [of skin and bones]; BREAK [and beat] EGGS AND MIX WITH [half of the] FISH; ADD TO THIS SOME STOCK, WINE AND OIL, AND FINISH [the composition] BY HEATING IT. WHEN DONE TO A POINT, ADD [the remaining part of the] SARDINES TO IT, LET IT STAND A WHILE [over a slow fire to congeal] CAREFULLY TURN OVER [dish it up] MASK WITH A WARM WINE SAUCE, SPRINKLE WITH PEPPER AND SERVE.

(see translation notes for additional details).
From the procedure it is not quite clear what this dish is: it could be anything from a sort of souffle to a frittata. As much as the ingredient combination sounded unusual to me, I found out that several modern versions exist egg dishes with fresh sardines or anchovies.  Most italian versions include some cheese like pecorino or parmigiano, with parsley and garlic to add aroma. Some spanish tortilla recipes sound quite similar to Apicius: many have a layer of beaten eggs, the fish is added on top after a while, more eggs are used to cover it, and the tortilla is turned at last.

I went with what I knew. I made a frittata, adding the fish in two times although that sounded a bit weird. Sardines are a good, sustainable source of fish. Although bones are not an issue in the sardines I buy in Italy, I found the bones in the Cornish ones available here to be more abundant, thicker and harder to get rid of, should you want to. This is the only caveat I feel I should add to the recipe: if you are squeamish about fish bones, this recipe is not for you. From a taste point of view, though, it was a total success. It does not taste weird, it does taste complex and delicious and slightly unusual. The eggs and the fish are distinctively sweet, and the wine and garum sauce I made up, trying to recreate the elusive oenogarum, added a savoury and acidic note that stroke an amazing balance, overall. The garum tastes of fish, but not much. The aroma is so intense it is quite difficult to describe it. It is more aromatic, indeed, that the Far East equivalent I have tried so far, although I’ve yet to try a high quality one. It is also quite salty and very potent. Initially I thought the oenogarum to be too strong and salty: with the eggs, it was not.

If you are curious about what other people made of garum, there are several entries at Laura’s. If you want to try some of these recipes without having garum, I’d probably use a mixture of nuoc mam and melter salted anchovies in oil: go for the best you can buy. There are also plenty of recipes in Apicius that don’t really include garum, or where it can convincingly be replaced by salt.

Frittata of sardines

Ingredients for two:

3 large  fresh sardines (350 gr, about)

2 eggs

salt

white pepper

1/2 teaspoon garum

1 tablespoon dry white wine

1 tablespoon water

2 tablespoons olive oil

For the oenogarum (wine sauce)

150 ml white wine

4-5 pepper corns, whole

1 bay leaf

1 tablespoon garum

Method:

For the wine sauce: bring wine, bay leaf and pepper to the boil. Boil until reduced to more than half of the initial volume, add the garum and turn off the heat.

Clean the sardines into fillets (you can keep the skin if you like it). Beat eggs, wine, pepper, a dash of garum, a tablespoon of oil  and water to a mixture. Add some salt, sparingly. Mix in half of the sardine fillets. In a smallish non stick pan add a tablespoon of oil, then the egg mixture. Cook for a few minutes until the bottom is almost set. Add the remaining sardines, cover and cook gently for a further five minutes. When the top is solid, slide to a dish, turn and put back on the fire for another couple of minutes.

To serve, drizzle the frittata with the wine sauce (taste before adding all of it, you may find it is too salty and you don’t need it all) and add some freshly ground white pepper.

Do you ever fantasize about what type of house you’d want to live in if you had access to an unlimited amount of money? Something that you would like to have, if you could and would afford a totally unreasonable luxury? I do, of course; and after careful considerations I have come up with two dreams.

One is a swimming pool – boring, I know, but I just love swimming. I need to sort out the details. I would want a house by the sea, a very warm and calm sea. However an indoors swimming pool makes sense at night or in winter: I’d want some limited winter in my dream world. Or actually, it may well be that my house is close to a very scenic ocean, which produces the most soothing background noise, but makes swimming in the sea a bit tricky. And I can’t rule out the possibility that I am going to learn how to surf and I’d want to live close to a good surf beach – again, not so great for swimming. Anyway. I still need to sort out the details, but swimming pool is totally unreasonable dream number one.

Number two is a pizza oven.

I have always wanted to have one. There is no substitute for a proper pizza oven to have a great pizza, and there is nothing like a great pizza. It is hands down the thing I miss the most of Italy. Such oven belongs to the ‘unreasonable luxury’ world. It is not as expensive as a swimming pool, but running one regularly is a luxury. Those beasts are huge, for one thing, and they need to be heated for hours, so they are just not really compatible with the scales of an average household. I even have a friend who owns one, and we used it once for a party. It was great fun and some hard work. But there are only that many times when I get to invite fifty people. And still, to make really good pizza, you need that proper oven.

So when Heather from Clay Ovens asked me if I would be interested to share with you a few tips on how to build your own stone pizza oven, I could not say no, literally. I had to know more. The Clay Oven Company is a family run business based in London, and they build ovens professionally. They build much more than pizza ovens, actually: I did not realize before how many interesting recipes you can prepare once you have the basic facility of a very hot oven set up and running. Here are the tips they have kindly agreed to share with us. I, for one, can’t wait to try them all.

How to create a stone pizza oven in your own home - provided by Clay Ovens

Domestic ovens, as a rule, just don’t generate enough heat to rival the massive clay
ovens you see in pizzerias. That’s one reason why it is almost impossible to make pizza
that does justice to the crispy, doughy, delicious ones you find all across Italy, from
Napoli to Turin.
But don’t abandon hope just yet, pizza nuts, there is a way to create your own stone
pizza oven in your kitchen, and make sure your pizzas are the best this side of Sicily.
Pizza Stones
Pizza Stones are funnily enough, stone slates that you place your pizza on in the oven
to help generate that stone-baked quality. The slates do this by evenly spreading heat
to the base of the pizza. Here’s what you need to know:

•They vary significantly in price

•It is not as simple as saying the pricier the better, read up before investing

•That said, the very cheapest ones don’t really evenly spread heat and can crack

•While they will make your pizza better, they are nowhere near as good as a stone oven

Modify your oven
The easiest way of creating a stone oven to cook delicious pizza is to adapt your
existing oven. None of the tips below will permanently alter your oven, so you will still
be able to use it normally when pizza isn’t on the menu. This method might require
you to buy a pizza stone to act as your base.

• Measure the dimensions of your oven

• Buy enough unglazed fire bricks to build an enclosure within your oven. This will soak up the heat and radiate it more intensely inside the enclosure

•The bricks must be unglazed. Glazed ones contain lead – and make sure they are fire bricks – also known as refractory bricks

•You can create a floor of bricks on the bottom rack of the oven, but you can

also cover a rack with foil and place a pizza stone on top to act as your base

•Lay the bricks that will make your roof on the top oven rack

•Prop the bricks that make the wall on their side on the base – the walls stay up easier if you use thicker bricks than the ones forming the roof

•Pre-heat the oven to maximum heat and leave the stones to absorb that heat for 30 minutes to an hour

•Make sure your hands are suitably protected when putting the pizza in – it is going to be very hot in there

•Wait around 10 minutes and enjoy the best home-cooked pizza you have ever had

Needless to say, I am already on the hunt for the bricks, now that I know which ones I need. I already own a pizza stone: it did improve my home-made pizza considerably. I did not spend much for it: it was actually sold as a replacement stone for an electric oven dedicated to making pizza. It seems the stone is no longer available, or at least, I could not find it. For more tips on making pizza at home, here is my post on the subject, and have a look at this excellent one by Melissa. Now, getting in touch with Clay Ovens has made me think that my pizza obsession has actually limited me a bit. There is more to pizza in the world of oven-baked food, although everything else comes far behind. One such thing is flatbread.

Cheating, you say? A flatbread counts as pizza? Well, I disagree. I turned to my well leafed copy of Claudia Roden for her tried and tested pita recipe.  Pita breads are ubiquitous here in the UK and normally better avoided. Most of the supermarket varieties manage to concentrate a perfect taste of preservatives with an uncanny tendency to grow mould. This is an easy bread to make at home, it freezes beautifully, and it cooks quickly. The only problem is to get your home oven hot enough to make it puff up properly. All of the above tips are working to this end, so implement as many as you can.

Wholemeal pita bread (baladi bread)

Ingredients:

250 gr wholemeal bread flour

250gr white bread flour

7 gr dried yeast

10gr sugar

about 250 ml water, blood temperature

1 teaspoon salt

about 1 tablespoon olive oil

Method:

Sift together brown and white flour and salt. Fill a glass with 100 ml blood temperature water, add the sugar and yeast to it and mix well; wait a few minutes until the yeast starts to foam slightly. Add the mixture to the flours, then add more water as you mix, until you get a soft, slightly sticky but not wet dough – it took me about another 150 ml of water, but it really depends on the flours. Err on the side of wet if in doubt at this stage. Work it by stretching it and folding it until perfectly uniform (Claudia Roden recommends working it for about 15 mins, but I found this unnecessary, although probably I did put more water than what she recommends, since my dough was quite soft). Cover the surface with olive oil and let it rise in a covered bowl for about 2 hours, until doubled in size. Heat the oven to maximum temperature (see tips above), with your pizza stone it it if you have one – otherwise use a baking sheet. Generously flour a surface, put the ball of dough on it, and cut it into about 10-12 portions. Roll each into a ball, then use the palm of your hand and flour to stretch it into an oblong shape about 1/2 cm thick. Don’t make it too thin nor too thick, aim for a uniform thickness. Cover with a clean towel and let rise for another 20 minutes, while the oven heats up. When the oven is as hot as it goes, take out your pizza stone or baking sheet,  put one or two breads on it, and brush quickly with water. Put back in the oven and don’t open it at all for at least six minutes. The bread will puff up. Make sure you take them out before they take any colour. Proceed with the other breads. If you don’t have a pizza stone it may be harder to make the breads puff up, but you can try this trick: put them on a baking tray, in a very hot oven, and cook them under the grill for a couple of minutes on each side. Make sure they don’t touch the grill as they puff up.

Keep them in a plastic bag until ready to eat them. When reheating pita bread, slightly sprinkle them with water and put them in a very hot oven for a few minutes.

I have quite a name for being easily disappointed by desserts. It has happened to me more than once to have a wonderful dinner in some restaurant, only to be let down, and quite badly, when it comes to the dessert department. Too sweet, too fat, not really fresh, just plain boring: wasted calories, really. I recently had a nice dinner in a place where they prepare dishes with tens of vegetables, each cooked to perfection with its own technique. Intrigued by such precision, and curious about the (inevitable) ‘Michelin-star trained chef’, we ordered pudding. They brought us a treacle tart so chewy that it is still hanging from the work of my dentist, tasting only of sugar, covered by an ice cream ball sized scoop of clotted cream, and a stale vanilla sable’; all probably worth the calories I normally consume in a day. When I decide to indulge, I want to get bangs for my calorie investment. I want flavours and textures so exciting I cannot stop eating.

This is one of those desserts worth each and every of the calories it contains, and there is quite a lot of them. Many of the cakes in this group have been inspired by this book of recipes from Laduree: it is, after all, one of the most famous patisseries in the whole world for good reasons. On the other hand, again, the recipe on the book was not quite right: not such a bad thing, if you think that I had to make the recipe twice just to confirm that my changes were working. Ah, the hard life of a dedicated food blogger. This is the version of the recipe I’m going to make from now on, hopefully many times.

I normally don’t include desserts in my diet, and when I prepare one it tends to hush my sweet cravings for a while. I even feel slightly disgusted with fat and sugar, no matter how good the cake. This effect propelled me to perfect my ability in the baking department: I’ve always been glutton to say the least; but to stop myself from overeating sugary and fatty food, I soon found out that if I am surrounded by butter for the hours it takes to prepare a very complex cake, my cravings are cut down considerably. I still remember the butter cream I made for a Dobos once, for my mum’s birthday. It was a painstaking process of baking layers and layers of butter rich cake, and slathering them with the richest cream on Earth (by the way, unless you plan to invite 300 persons to the party, you should know that Dobos slices freeze perfectly). I ate a really tiny slice, and, while still enjoying it, I did not even want to see it after that.

This cake is not like that. It is rich, but I made it again exactly three days after making the first one, and would be happy to make one today. And to eat it, of course. It is just the type of cake that is perfect with everything – morning coffee, afternoon tea, and even after a heavy dinner we all managed to gob down a good slice. Pineapple is an incredible fruit and here it really shines: yes, the dessert does sound a bit eighty (a tart with caramelized pineapple!), but not all eightie crazes are necessarily a bad thing.

Now, to the adjustments: the pastry was perfect, although quite different from my usual method, and very easy to work with. It does not even shrink much with cooking, which was my main worry. However the recipe does not call for blind baking it first, so the resulting cake turned out with a soggy bottom, as I was expecting it would. The second time I blind baked it first, and it was perfect  (and yes, I took the picture the first time I made the cake: the second one disappeared too quickly). The roasted pineapple recipe was weird: why would you make a syrup with equal quantities of water and sugar to make a caramel out of it? you’re going to have to boil the thing down for an hour, which is exactly what I ended up doing. I ditched the water the second time, and the roasted pineapple turned out perfect. I also doubled the quantities of pineapple, since you need a lot of slices to obtain a really full-looking top, and since you can never make too much roasted pineapple. The cream was advertised as almond and coconut, but only coconut was listed in the ingredient list. A-hem. I can only guess, but since I prefer almond over coconut any day, I decided to make a rather classic frangipane cream, also cutting down on the amount of butter and cream in the original recipe. Probably the almond taste and texture is much stronger in this version, and I can’t see how this could be a bad thing. The cake has a rich, haunting flavour. I think vanilla and rum are rounding it off and contributing to the balance, so I won’t leave them out even if they are expensive and even if you can only suspect  they are there. And if you don’t want to go over the top, the roasted pineapple is worth every minute it spends in the oven, and would make an amazing dessert on his own with a little ice cream, or even full fat yoghurt, or in a fresh fruit salad.

Another Laduree mixed feeling result, but despite this, I know I’m going to try many more cakes from that book: next time though I’ll trust my instincts – or maybe not, so I get to make the cake twice!

Pineapple and frangipane tart

Ingredients:

Almond sweet pastry:

125 butter, room temperature

70 gr icing sugar

1 egg

25 gr almond flour

200 gr flour

pinch of salt

seeds from half vanilla pod

Roasted pineapple:

2 medium-large pineapples

120 gr sugar

1 vanilla bean

1 tablespoon rum

4 tablespoon water

Filling:

100 gr ground almonds

80 gr Demerara sugar

50 gr butter

4 tablespoon rum

1 egg

4 tablespoon milk

2 tablespoon roasted pineapple syrup

Method:

For the pastry: cream room temperature butter and sugar until you have a uniform cream-like consistency, then add in the seeds from half vanilla bean and a pinch of salt. Add in the almonds, then the egg, and finally  the flour, sifted. Mix quickly with your fingertips or using a food processor just until it comes together. The dough will be quite soft and you should have no problem wrapping it into a ball and covering with cling film. Chill for at least two hours. It will keep a few days in the fridge, or it can be frozen for as long as you need. You only need half of the recipe for this tart.

For the roasted pineapple: Remove rind from pineapple and cut into 6-8 chunks lengthwise, trimming off the hard woody center. Split the vanilla bean in half, scrape off the seeds and put everything, seeds and bean, to infuse in four tablespoons of boiling water. Heat sugar on a heavy saucepan to a light caramel colour (it will take about 10 minutes, depending on your pan). When you like the colour add the strained vanilla water, the orange juice and the rum: be careful because it will splutter. The caramel with first become solid then melt in the liquids; if it stays solid a lot reheat it gently, stirring. Pour over the pineapple, coating. Roast for about 1 hour and a half, basting occasionally with the juices. The pineapple is ready when it looks slightly browned at the edges and cooked through. Let cool.

For the frangipane cream: work butter at room temperature until soft and cream-like. Add the rest of the ingredients using a little of the pineapple roasting juices to get a creamy consistency. Mix in about three pineapple logs, sliced to 2 cm chunks.

To make the tart: Preheat the oven to 170 Celsius. Butter and flour a 20 cm diameter tart tin: mine had a bottom that could be lifted, so removing the cake was easier.  Roll the pastry, fridge cold but totally defrosted (if using frozen) to about 2 mm, using a rolling pin and some flour. Line the tart tin, cover with baking parchment paper, and fill with baking beans. Cook for about 20-30 mins until golden. Remove the beans, pour in the frangipane cream and bake for another 30 minutes or a bit longer. The cake is ready when the custard is set and the top is golden. Let cool. Cut the pineapple logs into 2 cm thick slices, and arrange them regularly on top of the tart in slightly overlapping circles, starting from the external one. If you have enough pineapple it will look a bit like a pineapple top. Brush with a bit of the roasting juices if you like: they will be thick, almost dense, like honey.

There is something magical in solstices and equinoxes. They stir ancestral, deep resonances inside me. I always forget equinox days though: they are not obviously bright or gloomy like the peaks of summer and winter. But this year I wanted to celebrate. This Saturday I planted a few handful of seeds in my garden. It’s going to be a struggle with the snails – and they’ll win as I well know, but I’ll try at least.

This quiet, unassuming recipe comes from the second Riverford cookbook; actually it is from a recipe by Madhur Jaffrey, as reported in their introduction.  I expected it to be an everyday recipe, and it is: easy and quick. But it tasted so good I know I’m going to learn the recipe for this paste by heart. The problem with spice pastes is that if they are not in your DNA – and they definitely are not in mine – you have to read a recipe for them. No matter if it takes ten minutes in the end, I find I have to rummage through my overcrowded spice cabinet for a good half an hour, going back and forth to the recipe measuring, toasting, getting it wrong.. It is just not obvious to me what needs to be roasted, what needs to go in last, what needs to be ground, what can be left whole, although I am developing a feel for it. I have no such doubts when cooking a European recipe, even a more involved one. I read it once and I normally don’t even need to look at it again. So during week time, when I’m busier, I rarely venture into spice-hunting mode. Now, this recipe is not spiced, although it is hot, but it tastes as if it is. It is grown up and complex, and makes spring greens, a vegetable I find a bit perplexing (should I think about it like a mild cabbage? Or rather, a cabbage-y chard? Or rather, a sweet kale? ), find their right place in the world. Of course you could use the paste for something else, and I most definitely will.

Spring Greens with Red Pepper

from Everyday & Sunday Recipes from Riverford Farm

Ingredients:

1/2 red pepper

1/2 red onion

1 garlic clove

3-4 drops fish sauce (they call for blachan, but I didn’t have any)

1 red chilli, deseeded

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

2-3 heads of spring greens,  chopped

1 teaspoon sugar

squeeze of lemon

salt

Method:

clean and chop onion, pepper, garlic and chilli. Whizz in a food processor with a bit of water to a rough paste. Add a little splash of fish sauce. Heat the oil in  a wide pan. Stir in the paste, and cook for a few minutes, stirring, until fragrant – about 5 mins. Add in the spring greens, some salt, stir, cover until wilted. Add a bit more water if needed. Let cook for about ten minutes until the greens are tender. Adjust salt and serve, hot or cold.

Do you think it is possible to have a sort of an aftershock after moving? I think I have. It’s been a few months now, but I still feel shattered. I find it difficult to commit, to attach, to plan.  Maybe I’m just getting older: when I was younger, it was all about feeling a citizen of the world, and let us not be bothered by outdated concepts like ‘nationality’. I still think that we are first and foremost human beings. But well, there are differences in our daily lives depending on where we live, especially when we grow older and so much of life is dealing with the little details of the society around us.

It is starting to sink in that my children, if I have some, will probably have a very different childhood from mine. Not only because they are younger and the world has changed. The smell of the air, the quality of the light, it will be different. The seasons. For them good ice cream will not be a regular treat to be had most summer days. They will probably never have the kind of skills you need to order an espresso in an overcrowded bar and drink it in the tiny little space you have conquered, without burning your tongue. They may even want to drink cappuccino after four o’clock (quelle horreur!). They won’t stop in a panetteria to buy hot focaccia or pizzette. Eating sun-bursting apricots or figs when in season will be an out-of-ordinary experience, not something that happens every year, if you wait for the right moment.  They would have other experiences, sure, and I think there are many positive ones to be had in this country, with its huge coastline, the smell of the ocean everywhere, the mild climate and the careful drivers. One of my colleagues in the summer gets home from the office at five, puts on the children’s wetsuits, and walks to the beach ‘down the road’ to make them play for an hour or two in the rock pools. And he surely is no Rockefeller. I can’t think of many places in Italy where you can afford that – although, you probably won’t need a wetsuit.

But there is more that worrying about the formative experiences of  hypothetical would-be children. Cultural differences at times explode; one such moment is when I am feeling unwell. The way doctors behave changes dramatically from country to country. In Germany I have been prescribed millions of exams and met with a quite ‘invasive’ attitude. They always told me bluntly what can go wrong, without giving much hope: a five per cent chance of failure will be given as a hard fact. Here they will care more about how the patient feels as a whole, but sometimes it is a bit irritating when you are made to feel responsible for deciding your own cure – I’m not the specialist after all! They won’t prescribe a lot of medicines that will be used ‘in Europe’, as they say, but they will be even too generous with the pain killers. Also their non invasive approach can be quite challenging if you expect the doctor to ‘do something’. By the way, if you are wondering how this works in Italy, don’t expect painkillers, ever. As you may have guessed, I had some more medical problems lately. Touching wood, I hope they are solved for good now, but I’m a bit fed up of dealing with doctors.

I am not talking about huge problems here, don’t get me wrong. I did not move to a wildly different place. In Europe we have so many centuries of living in the same house, and like many too intimate neighbours, we like to underline our differences instead of forgetting about them. There are many tiny differences of course, but nothing major. I always thought the biggest one is the food. Actually, I think this one is changing. I can see what you meant when you said it needn’t be that bad. Here food is a world apart from my bad experiences in Wales. There is a lot of attention surrounding it, and I have the embarrassment of choice on local, organic, seasonal products.  There are also several places that cook this gorgeous product without spoiling it. There’s even a bakery that makes decent sourdough – nothing like Germany of course, but quite different from the inedible loaves of chain bakeries.

Lately I’ve started living with a vegetable box. I find it quite entertaining so far, although we are about to face the hungry gap here. I find it funny to have to deal with vegetables I would not have chosen otherwise. It helps that they are always very good quality and fresher than anything I can buy otherwise. As you may easily guess, the stars in this season are the usual boring suspects: leeks, variations of brassicas and variations of roots.

Which brings me to scratching the bottom of my creativity with carrots. I’ve been looking back at my past history.

The longest relationship I’ve ever had in my life so far was also the first one. It lasted almost ten years, spanning from high school to university. We changed through the years, and then as it was probably natural, at some point it did not work any more.  Given our age,  his mum was quite an inevitable presence during our years together. I realize only now that she must have been almost my age now: she had her only son when she was very, very young. She was a charming and intelligent woman with some harsh bits – just my kind of person, although our relationship was not always easy. She had an amazing talent for theatre: she could easily have been an actress, had circumstances been  different.

She did not particularly enjoy cooking, although I’m sure she enjoyed food: it was one thing that needed to be done, and she was always busy. She came from Naples although I think she spent most of her adult life in Milan, and this reflected in her cooking. Feeding her family for her was making huge pots of pasta with a lot of vegetables and an incredible amount of oil, to be stored in the fridge and reheated repeatedly. It did work quite well, if you put enough oil on it and don’t mind your pasta a bit soft. She taught me a number of dishes that I still prepare. One of them is frittata di maccheroni (see here for Simona’s lovely twists on it), another one was her favourite detox dish, scarola soup; and these roasted carrots.

I did all but forget about them until I was desperate to find yet another recipe with carrots. She prepared the recipe with an outrageous amount of olive oil; I did cut it down a bit. The main problem with this recipe is that I should really use a mandolin – I need to order one, but I’m not sure about the model: if you have any suggestions, please leave them! You slice and roast a kilo of carrots and end up with three-four scant portions (they are intense, so although they don’t look huge, they’ll leave you satisfied). Despite all the knife work involved, this has become one of our regulars, and I find myself actually quite looking forward to the next carrot delivery. If carrots are fresh and organic, and not too full of mud, I don’t peel them; but sometimes peeling is actually easier than scrubbing the dirt clean, so I’m flexible on it.

Roasted Carrots

Ingredients:

1 kg carrots (large ones are easier to prepare, but any size works), well scrubbed, no need to peel

2-3 cloves of garlic, or even more

1 cm piece of ginger

Olive oil, at least 1 tablespoon, but feel free to increase it (if your carrots are very dry, add a bit of water as well)

salt and black pepper

Method:

Preheat the oven to 220 Celsius. Slice the carrots in thin rounds, about 1-2 mm thick, as regular as possible. Peel the garlic cloves and slice them as thin as you can. Peel and slice the ginger as well; if you don’t want to risk eating a slice of caramelized ginger, grate it instead. Mix all the slices on a roasting tray (you can cover it with parchment paper for really easy clean), add in a lot of black pepper, salt and a generous tablespoon of olive oil. Mix well again: I use my hands, it is the easiest way. Roast the carrots, turning them and the pan every five/ten minutes or so, depending on how even your oven is. If they start to dry out really quickly add a tablespoon of water to the roasting pan. After about 30-40 minutes, the carrots will have wilted considerably and look dried. The actual cooking time will vary a lot with the carrots. Now you need to watch them quite carefully, because they go from caramelized to burnt in a few minutes, but it is these last minutes that make all the difference in flavour. Take them out when they are as dark as you dare – golden brown carrots will be the best morsels. Serve hot or cold.

I found this gem of a recipe in the most unlikely location. As much as I love shopping for food,  I am not a big fan of supermarkets: I don’t like being in an overcrowded, artificially lighted environment for long, if I can avoid it.  They are convenient though, so a trip there now and again is almost inevitable. One of the most annoying features are those piles of products on offer, luring you into buying, buying, buying.

A ready-made soup from  the New Covent Garden Soup brand caught my eye: the flavour combinations looked quite inviting. I did not buy any however, for fear of being disappointed, once more, by a nice packaging and some clever marketing. I have not tried their soups to date, so I can’t judge their products. But when I stumbled upon a cookbook published by them, entirely devoted to soups, I could not resist having a good look at it. And indeed, although the editorial form is nothing short of irritating (no ingredients index, a “hand-written” font that is almost impossible to read on the dark green background), there are many recipes worth trying in this little book. I started by recreating the lentil, tomato and coriander soup that had caught my eye. It is a very simple soup, with no other ingredients than the named ones, plus a sautéed onion, a bit of cumin, coriander and pepper: it tastes rich and satisfying, it can be made with products probably already sitting in your pantry, and it comes together with five minutes’ active time.

The recipe that really surprised me though is this twist on a vichyssoise, created by a reader for a competition (they call them reader, but I’m not sure about what they actually read; I assume the most correct term would be client). It is a jade-coloured, elegant, silky soup with an addictive quality. I have always admired the lush silkiness of vichyssoise. It was my go-to soup when I lived in Wales, where both potatoes and leeks are fetish ingredients. Actually, it is not by chance that I decided to try this recipe: vichyssoise is a bit of a fetish for me in general.

I am of the generation who grew up with the very first computer games (sounds like ages ago). My geeky teenage self particularly loved the adventure Monkey Island, born under the creative umbrella of  George Lucas. Now, if you have ever played one of these adventure games, you know that their main feature, apart from the now-embarrassing graphics and beautiful musics, was that the player had to spend hours, literally, trying to solve the most implausible puzzles to reach the next stage. Hours of combining banana pickers, cogs, grog, chickens, the world’s biggest wool ball, and yes, a pot of vichyssoise. I’m not even sure it was vichyssoise in the original version (I played it in Italian), but I cannot forget the green blob. I was actually surprised when I decided to finally cook one and quite liked it. Ah, youth: epic times of boredom and geekiness, even before that was fashionable. I wonder which food obsessions I would have nurtured, had I grown in the Facebook era.

Anyway, I tried this twist on the soup, half convinced it would turn out disgusting: leek, potatoes and one of my least favourite vegetables, celery;  cardamom, a spice notoriously difficult to use in savoury food, and left all alone here; milk (cream in the original); lemon rind and juice; shrimps. It shouldn’t work. Let me tell you, it is delicious. I belong to the vast majority of celery un-enthusiasts: I am ok with a bit of celery occasionally, but I’d rather avoid a soup completely made of it. Here you can taste it, but it works so well with the other ingredients, it is almost magic. You can easily avoid the shrimps if you want to keep this vegetarian, but I quite like the extra nutrition and the textural change shrimps provide (they are not really used for flavour here, so small frozen ones work really well). Like the other New Covent Garden soup, it comes together in a few minutes, and it uses ingredients I almost always have lying around, half forgotten in a corner of the fridge. And like all good vichyssoises, it is delicious both hot and cold.

New Covent Garden Vichyssoise

Ingredients:

1 small onion,

2 leeks, white part only (though a bit of green won’t hurt)

3 stalks of celery

a knob of butter

3-4 medium potatoes

water or stock (chicken or vegetable, anything light)

seeds from 4 cardamom pods

1/2 teaspoon celery seeds (leave out if you don’t have them) or celery salt

salt

pepper

a dash of milk

1 organic lemon

a bit of parsley, coriander or celery leaves to garnish

optional: a handful of frozen shrimps

Method:

Chop roughly onion and leeks and sautée in a bit of butter in a soup pot (to make it super quick, use a pressure cooker). Meanwhile peel and cut the potatoes into chunks. When leeks and onions are translucent, add the potatoes, the zest of half a lemon in one piece (cut the yellow part only with a potato peeler), and the water or stock. In a mortar, or using a large knife or a spice grinder, reduce cardamom seeds, celery seeds and a pinch of salt to a fine powder, and add to the soup. Bring to the boil, cover and cook on low heat until all the vegetables are tender (it takes about 5-10 minutes with the pressure cooker, half an hour without). At this point you can remove the lemon zest if you prefer, but I like its zing when left in. Liquidize the soup using a hand blender. Taste and adjust salt and pepper. Bring back to the boil, add the shrimps if using and wait for them to be defrosted (i.e., when the soup boils again). Add about 100 ml of milk, mix well and reheat until almost boiling. Turn off the heat, taste seasoning again, then serve with a lot of freshly ground pepper, some chopped herbs (parsley, coriander, celery leaves: they all work) and lemon wedges to squeeze in. Or you can leave this to cool and serve at room temperature or even fridge cold, depending on temperature outside.

Today is a sad, sad day. It is all grey and wet. Sad things are happening.  More challenges lie ahead. It is one of those day when I feel I need to hug all the people I love, and so many of them are not here. I am grateful for those who are, though. It is one of those days where my cat will just stay at my side, because she knows I need her comforting presence. It is one of those days when I may just hug someone I don’t know very well. Sometimes it is all that we can do.

I am learning something though. A cup of tea brings a lot of comfort. I’ve moved to a country where the last item to be packed and the first to be brought out when you move is the kettle. Where ‘I’ll make a cup of tea’ could easily replace the national anthem. And I like it. I even need it, sometimes.

A monochrome picture, since today there is just no room for colours. Sometimes grey brings out hidden beauty and warmth.

I’m sharing this picture on Flickr, waiting for Susan to start running BWW again. Get well soon Susan, and a hug to you as well.

I had half forgotten about this soup. I do this kind of things all the time. I have a leaky memory, to say the least – this is why this blog is a life saver for me, at least for recipes. I’ve always wanted to keep a diary of the books I read, the movies I watch, sometimes even the people I meet. I forget who the killer is five minutes after the end of a thriller. I forget reading books altogether: I’ve often found myself reading half of a book, and at chapter twelve realizing that yes, I have indeed already read the whole thing. I just keep little drops of memory with me from books and movies – the colour of a dress, the face of a beautiful actress, a particularly funny character. I forget people I meet, I forget technical details of vital importance. I am always embarrassed when people ask me what my favourite book or  film is – if I’m lucky I remember the title, but don’t expect anything more than the knowledge that yes, I enjoyed that book immensely. This is why I have to be extra organised. I keep logs. I have lists.

I have a good memory for other random things. I remember number sequences really easily. I used to remember loads of poetry when I was in school, and I still do know some by heart. I remember where I’ve parked my car and where shops are and German grammar. Weird.

You see, the things I remember are not necessarily the ones I loved the most. Which is just the case with the soup: I found a portion of it in the freezer the other day, and I could not believe I had forgotten about it. Luckily I have found my notes on the recipe somewhere.  It started from a visual fascination, and I remember that quite well. We visited the Eden Project a while ago. An abandoned china clay pit in the middle of Cornwall, destined to be one of those ugly holes in the countryside, has been turned into a small Eden, hosting a glasshouse containing the largest captivity rainforest in the world, and much more than this. Apart from some corporate family-fun offering,  I found this to be an interesting spot, with a beautiful garden and some thought-provoking reflections on how we want our planet to be in the future. It is incredible how secluded it feels from the outside world. Inside I was fascinated by the open, clean kitchen, where you get to observe people cooking. Two women were rolling aubergines around some filling, thousands of grilled slices of aubergines. Butternut squashes were halved and filled with herbs. Fish stews were bubbling on an open fire. A boy was cutting carrots and parsnips and putting them on large trays for roasting, with a slow, relaxed pace. I guess they would have made soup out of it.

So when I came home, I cut some carrots and parsnips in the same fashion. I added a half-forgotten beetroot, a leek and a bit of thyme. I also threw in a head of garlic, and roasted until everything was soft, browned and caramelized. I squeezed and blended everything together, with some hazelnut butter. What came out was a rich, sweet, nutty soup to keep you going for days in winter, with a bold rust colour that makes me happy. Garlic adds a vital kick and savoury note to it. I like to eat it with something acid – sour cream is my favourite, but also a squeeze of lemon works.

Root vegetables soup

Ingredients:

2-3 medium parsnips

2-3 medium carrots

1 beetroot

2 leeks

5 sprigs of thyme

1 small head of garlic, whole

salt

pepper

water or vegetable stock

1 tablespoon hazelnut butter

Method:

Preheat the oven to 220 Celsius. Wash parsnip, beetroot, leeks and carrots very well and cut into 1-2 cm thick slices. No need to peel or be fussy about the size. Toss with olive oil, salt pepper and a few springs of thyme on a roasting tray, then put into the oven. Chop the top off the garlic head so you see some of the cloves meat, wrap it in foil and add it to the roasting tray as well. The garlic will take about 15-20 minutes to be soft, smelly and ready, the other vegetables will take about 40 minutes in total. Toss occasionally. When the vegetables are soft, put them on a large pot, cover with stock or water and bring to the boil. Add a few more thyme leaves and a tablespoon of hazelnut butter, then blend everything with a hand blender. Squeeze the roasted garlic into the soup (I found the most efficient way is really to just squeeze the whole head using your hands) and give it another blend. Reheat, taste and adjust seasoning: salt, pepper and more hazelnut butter if you like. Serve hot with a tablespoon of sour cream, yogurt and/or a squeeze of lemon.

I should have told you about this first. I wanted you to have plenty of time before the Seville orange season is over to enjoy this sauce. But life goes on, and the days are short and the time to take pictures is even more compressed with these gloomy winter days, and my harissa was mouldy and I could not find it new nor had I time to make some. Whiny me.

Whining apart, I hope you have some time left, or you let me know how it turns out with oranges and limes, or other souring agents. I will stick to my favourite ingredient for this period of winter. Bitter or Seville oranges are a rare find in Italy. When we did find some, we’d always make Vin d’Orange, the most elegant and sophisticated drink ever. Very boozy too: all too easy to drink too much of it in the first warm days of spring, maybe on the first barbecue of the season.

Here Sevilles are plenty and cheap: all greengrocers stock them and they’d invariably warn me that I have picked up marmalade, not normal oranges. I buy loads of them, although I have never made marmalade with them. I make sorbet, curd, and a variety of orange flavoured cakes. I soon found out that Sevilles are brilliant in savoury food as well: wherever you’d use lemon or vinegar, roughly. Which is more or less everywhere for me.

Now, this recipe is not something I’d usually try. As much as I love dips, I never think of sauces or vinaigrettes. I dress my salads and vegetables with olive oil and vinegar or lemon juice, and for other food, either the recipe has a sauce, or I don’t make one, nor do I use a ready bottled versions. However there are some sauces that I like. One of them – in the slightly sick way you like something that is not really good – is those oriental sweet chilli sauces. I avoid it though, thinking of all the nasty stuff it must contain. Besides, my partner is so sensitive to MSG that he get a headache as soon as he touches one of those things.

I never thought of making my own to avoid any side effect. Then the other day I was browsing Epicurious looking for a way to jazz up some scallops I had just bought at the market. One recipe had a chilli glaze, and I thought ‘brilliant! Let’s make it!’. As usual for me I changed the recipe a lot. The glaze turned out too strong for the scallops, which , when fresh, don’t really need anything else anyway. It was great though drizzled on the accompanying raw vegetables, and it was oddly similar to bottled sweet chilli sauce, although much better tasting and more acidic – a crossover between sweet chilli and sweet and sour. I found myself drizzling leftovers over pretty much everything, and making another batch soon after. It takes five minutes to make, start to finish. It keeps for at least a couple of days in the fridge (it never lasted more). The only problem is checking how it will taste when Seville orange season is over.

Sweet and sour chilli sauce (makes a minimal quantity, enough for a person to dip)

Ingredients:

2 tablespoon brown sugar

2 tablespoon water

juice and zest 1/2 Seville orange

dash of chilli flakes, to taste

1 teaspoon harissa

pinch of salt

Method:

In a heavy bottomed saucepan mix sugar and water. Add chilli flakes to taste (be careful because the harissa is quite hot) and the orange zest. Bring to the boil and let it bubble until the sugar is dissolved and it is slightly caramelized. Add the orange juice, give it a good mix and turn off the heat. Add the harissa and taste. The flavours won’t have developed yet, but you may want to add a touch of salt or a little more orange juice or harissa. Let it cool. It will thicken slightly but still be spoonable.