Red fruits

Whenever I travel back to Italy, I gorge on fruit. My favourite season is the beginning of summer. In June you’ll get apricots and the first peaches and figs, but also cherries and the last strawberries. Don’t forget the not very popular abroad nespole. Also melons are present, even though not at their best yet. Autumn brings its share of pleasures: the end of the summer usually means the best figs, pears, prunes and peaches. The season evolves into grapes, apples and mandarins, and also in winter you can find comfort in oranges.

When I moved abroad I was disheartened. Fruit was almost all imported, which means expensive and flavorless. It is true that I could find rhubarb, but there is only that much rhubarb that a girl can enjoy. Spring arrived and went  and no cherries made their appearance. I was ready to face a gloomy cherry-less summer. Also for strawberries,  possibly my favourite fruit, I was ready for the season to come and go in a blink of eyes.

But how wrong I was. How wrong.

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Gelatine 2.0

The traditional everyday desserts at my grandparent’s home were two. In winter, it was pears, or apples, with some dried prunes, cooked with a little wine, sugar and spices; in summer, it was fresh fruit marinated in wine: strawberries in spring, peaches in summer, various berries when we picked them up in the mountains. My father still retains a passion for these desserts. My mother hates them. I have a kind of mixed feeling for them.

A few of my favourite things

There exist millions of interesting  blogs out there. Billions of wonderful recipes. We can’t reasonably try them all. Of those that we do try,   just a few enter into the ‘all time favourite’ list. Others, you make a couple of time, and then you forget. Then a year goes by, and something reminds you of that great recipe that would just be perfect for the particular occasion.

Sometimes you remember it all: who where and when posted it. Maybe you made a bookmark or a clipping or whatever. Then you go there, and the blog is gone.

However, that is not what usually happens, for me at least. Most of the time what happens is that I simply forget where the recipe came from. Even if I did save the recipe in my ‘ to do ‘ list, well, the list is a bit too long to find it easily.

Sometimes I like the recipe so much, or I tweak it so much, that I like to actually rewrite the recipe here, in my space.

But sometimes the original post is so good and clear that there is really no need for that. So I thought that for me it is going to be useful to post a roundup of my favourite recipes, now and again. I also thought you might like me to share it, just to get a few new (at least double tested) ideas. I’ll start with a few recipes I’ve been collecting in the last months – I hope this becomes a regular habit.

Lazy Sunday

Looks like summer is coming very quickly. Before the trees have had time to grow out all the leaves, actually. The landscape is still a bit bare here and there: the woods are starting to dress up with  a huge variety of green shades. There are many types of trees, which you don’t notice in winter, but are bound to in Spring or Fall. On Sunday we took advantage of the weather and had a barbecue in our garden with a few friends. We grilled German bratwurst and krakauer from the market, Pakistani chicken kebabs (courtesy of this book), Moroccan beef kebabs (courtesy of this other book), mushrooms skewers, and zucchini. We also had a considerable amount of cold  pils. It was our first barbecue here, and we really enjoyed sitting out in the sun, even though in the end all of us – most people grown up in warmer climates than Germany – were quite dizzy from the excess of heat. You are just not used to it any more after four solid months of snow. So for the dessert we moved back to our flat. Time to blink my eyes, and the cheesecake I had prepared was gone.