banana bread

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zucchini ribbons

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“insalata avenale”

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tomato soup

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jerusalem artichokes

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ginger and finocchietto

A friend of ours has recently discovered the joy of candied ginger and tried to find a way to make it himself at home. Seeing as I like it a lot too and that ginger is really good for you, I asked him for his recipe. I tried it out and it turned out pretty well, even though it is considerably different than what you find in the supermarket.

--peel the fresh ginger root and slice it about 5mm wide.
--put the ginger in a pot, cover with water (I put enough to cover it and then doubled that), and let it boil about 20 minutes.
--drain the ginger, putting aside the boiled water. let both the ginger and the water cool.
--weigh the ginger, then put it back in the pot and cover it with the water from the first time around (which should be just enough to cover the ginger).
--when the water boils, add the same weight of sugar as there was ginger. let it boil 20-30 minutes, stirring every so often and being careful that the sugar doesn't burn. in theory the ginger should start getting a bit transparent, but we only managed to get it slightly so at the edges.
--remove the ginger and let it dry. the water is delicious cooled and used as a syrup with cold water for a refreshing drink.

Last summer we spent a few days at the beaches of Acciaroli, sleeping at Pollica, a truly beautiful place where we've gone for years. You can't help but eat super yummy stuff there and one of the things that we love is cooking with finocchietto selvatico, wild fennel flowers. It's a plant that grows in the summer with wispy green parts and yellow flower umbrellas that look sort of like Queen Anne's Lace flowers. Here's a picture of it with the background of the beautiful hills of the Cilento. I've always wanted to make liquor from finocchietto and finally I did it. Unfortunately I'm writing this a bit late, so if you want to try it, you'll have to wait til next summer. Here's how I did it:

--wash and completely dry a couple of handfuls of wild finocchietto flowers.
--put them in a jar which closes hermetically with 1 liter of alcohol. put it in a cool dry place for about 30 days.
--when the 30 days are up, make a syrup by boiling 1 liter of water with 800 grams of sugar for 15 minutes. then let it cool down.
--when it's completely cool, filter the flowers from the alcohol, mix the alcohol with the syrup and put it all back in the hermetic jar. let it sit about 4-5 days out of the light.
--filter and put it in a nicer looking bottle. wait at least 3 months before drinking.

Buon appetito!

pesto x 3

For me the summer is pesto time. I recent saw a facebook friend's status about sundried tomato pesto and obviously I had to ask her how she made it. She told me to toss basil, pine nuts, sundried tomatoes, olive oil and salt in the food processer. But that she sometimes makes it with parsley, walnuts and olives. Seeing as my poor basil plants are still tiny and I love parsley, I mixed up parsley, pine nuts, sundried tomatoes and olive oil in my immersion blender (I don't have a food processer). There wasn't any need for salt because the tomatoes were already very well dressed. You only need a little for each plate of pasta and it's so good!

Then there's obviously the traditional pesto alla genovese, not all that genovese (from Genova) when made by an American near Naples. Normally when the weather starts getting nice, I buy three basil plants and I put them in a huge pot and let them grow, grow and grow until they get to be something like a bush. Then I harvest and blend them with minced garlic, pine nuts (or walnuts, almonds, pistachios), grated pecorino (sheep's cheese) and olive oil, and voilà! Seeing as I make a good amount, I freeze it for the winter in little portions in those plastic cups for espresso covered with aluminum foil. But I hate using that disposable stuff so this year, if my poor little basil plants ever grow (they were given to me by a friend who grew them from organic seeds), I'll freeze them in ice cube trays and then, when well-frozen, will put the pesto cubes in a closed container so they don't lose their nice smell. This is what I did when preparing food for my daughter before she could eat "normal" food like the rest of us.

And lastly there's zucchini mint pesto, which that same friend of the basil plants taught me a few days before my daughter was born. You steam the zucchini, but not too much. In the meantime, put the almonds with their skins still on in a bit of boiling water for a little, just long enough so the skins peel right off. If you have almonds without their skins, you can obviously skip this step. Then into the blender go: lots of fresh mint leaves, the almonds (or pine nuts or whatever nuts you want), a little olive oil and a bit of the water from steaming the zucchini. When it's well-blended, add the zucchini, parmesan and pecorino (sheep's cheese) and more oil. You can also put in a little salt, but it's better to just get the right saltiness by adjusting the pecorino. But usually it's good to put the same amount of parmesan as pecorino. You can freeze it as with regular pesto or put it in a jar, cover with more olive oil and keep in the fridge. I wouldn't suggest keeping it frozen for very long, though, because with time all the flavor goes away.

mint syrup

So I've already written about the wonderful elderflower syrup I made a few weeks back, which you dilute for a lovely summer drink. And I thought, there MUST be some way to make homemade mint syrup, like the ones you find in every Italian supermarket when it starts getting summery. I have a wonderful mint plant on my balcony that supplies me with more mint than I can ever possibly use. I googled it and found a good recipe on a great blog that I'd never seen before. Basically boil 1 liter of water with 100 grams of fresh mint leaves and 450 grams of sugar until it's reduced by half. Let it cool and put it in a bottle, straining the leaves. You can put a few extra fresh leaves in the bottle, but I find them annoying when I'm pouring the syrup. I actually made mine with only about 75 grams of mint leaves because it already seemed like an insane amount. But it really does need the whole 100 grams and after just a minute or so they wilt down so they don't fill the pot anymore.

Yes, I do realize that it's been raining constantly and is once again quite chilly and nobody's in the mood these days to drink a refreshing drink. But let's all hope that the good weather comes back soon!

it's spring! time for elder-ly stuff

Oh how I love spring! The sun, the heat (without that horrid summer stickiness), everyone's happy, all the kids can play outside! And it's the end of the year for all the kids and teachers (like me) out there! I haven't have much time to be able to write much of anything because I've been hiding out under masses of end-of-the-year work: tests to make up and correct, a whole bureaucratic mess of stuff to do for the government-funded PON courses I'm teaching, preparing my students for their Trinity exams. So I'm stealing a topic that I found on another blog and I actually had the time to try out. And that would be...

...elderflower syrup! I had no idea how to recognize the plant. I thought it was a smaller plant, but I finally found my elderflowers on huge trees. This is the recipe that I used, but it's in Italian, so I'll summarize it for you anglophones. Pick about 10 big "umbrellas" of flowers, rinse them off nicely and let them soak for 48 hours in 1 liter of water and 1 kg of sugar. After 48 hours of soaking, filter it and put it into a container, preferably one that you can put in the fridge. Put a bit of syrup in a glass and fill the rest with cold water. Yummy and thirst-quenching! Though next time I'm going to try putting in less sugar because it was a bit too sweet for my beverage tastes.

"I can't stop eating meat!"

I've recently heard a few people say this, that they'd like to stop eating so much meat, but don't know how to get by without it. How would they get their protein?! And meat is so fast to get ready! Once I saw one of those shows where a judge puts in his two cents' worth after two people fight it out in which a divorced and vegetarian mother was against the fact that her ex went out hunting with their son and they ate the meat together. The whole audience (and also my mother-in-law) kept saying that the mother was pretty much abusing her son by not feeding him meat because how in the world was he supposed to grow big and strong?! I can't remember the judge's ruling, perhaps because it was so stomach-turning that I had to leave the room.

First off, I want to say that I'm not a vegetarian (though I do eat very little meat) even if I would like to be. But I've found that very few people realize wat harm eating meat can do, not only to the poor animal, but also to the environment, your wallet and your own health. And people often don't realize that vegetable protein is very valid, as well as being better for the human organism without harming the environment or mistreating animals, not to mention while costing much less. There's a wide range of legumes (beans, that is) that can be cooked and eaten as they are or prepared into products such as tofu and seitan. And they are really really good.

I've recently started using soy protein, dried chunks of soy which can be used instead of meat. I made a lovely vegetarian bolognese sauce (bolognese is a sauce full of ground meat), first sauteeing garlic and chopped-up carrots, then adding whole canned tomatoes and the soy protein (after having boiled it for about 15 minutes to soften it). Tossed with penne pasta and... voilà! Preparing this soy protein this way, this bag which cost me about €2.50 was worth 6 portions of meat. Not bad! I also made a yummy fennel and orange salad, one of my favorites, cutting raw fennel into strips and peeled oranges into chunks, mixed with a little oil and salt (or gomasio, crushed sesame seeds, instead of salt). No meat and we were stuffed full at the end of dinner.

limonì, limonà

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vanilla sky

Mmmm, vanilla! It's funny that a lot of people have no idea what a vanilla bean even is (including yours truly, I admit, up until not too long ago), forget about how to use it. Then a dear friend of ours from Bologna who loves good cooking came to visit. He wanted to make his homemade vanilla ice cream and was aghast to hear that it's nearly impossible to find a vanilla bean in Naples. Finally a few months later I found vanilla beans in a supermarket, but they cost a small fortune. So in the end I turned to the ever-faithful eBay.com and ordered a big bag of organic vanilla beans for what it would've cost to buy just a couple of those non-organic ones at the supermarket. I went off to work.

First with "Vanilla Ice Cream alla moda di Villiam":

1 liter of whole milk
1 vanilla bean
100 g. (3.5 oz.) sugar

First cut the vanilla bean lengthwise with scissors or a knife. Boil the milk with the cut bean and sugar. Simmer until it evaporates down to half what it had been before. Let it cool down a whole day in the fridge so at to mature the cream and make the final ice cream creamier. Then put it in the freezer and blend it every 1 or 2 hours with an immersion blender (or whatever it's called, I can't remember right now!) or a fork so it doesn't form one block. When it looks like ice cream, it's ready. And gobble it up! But be sure not to forget it out of the freezer for too long because it starts melting pretty quickly.

In the USA we use vanilla extract to make desserts, not that powdered "vanillina" that Italians use. In the past I've had to buy it in the States and bring it over here. Then one happy day I saw Angry Chicken's post mentioning giving away homemade vanilla extract. So I checked out her link to VanillaReview.com and I followed their recipe. I made it up in December and just today filtered and bottled it (even though I had already used it before filtering). And it's soooo good! And now I have a life time's supply of vanilla extract! Yum! At some point I'll put up some recipes I use it with, be patient!

Tea Time

This afternoon the inevitable happened: Raffaele asked me to cut his hair. About 3 years ago he got sick and tired of his barber giving totally different haircuts than what he was asking for, and he convinced me to do it for him. Since then I've become the whole family's hair stylist, including for myself, which is a pretty good explanation why my hair's always a big mess. I'm always happy to save the money and it's a great satisfaction when it turns out well, or even when we get complimented on our hair, but it always stresses me out. So today, before the big event, I prepared myself a nice ginger and tangerine herbal blend.

I really love tea and blends, even if I'm not English and I only last month saw a tea cozy in use for the first time (which our English hosts were aghast to hear). Two friends of mine introduced me on two different occasions the joys of Rishi Tea, a fair-trade company selling tons of teas, herbal blends and chais, many of which are organic. Tons and tons! They are super yummy and I suggest that anyone who even slightly appreciates a good tea go immediately and order some. They also sell very cool teapots and cups. A friend gave us two jade-colored porcellain cups in three pieces: the cup, the part with a bunch of holes to brew the tea, and the cover. This way you put the loose tea in, brew, and take out the holey part, thereby straining and leaving the leaves inside to use another time (Rishi claims their teas can be brewed three times, but I think that's a bit much. The third time is a bit weak for my liking). A good hot tea in one of these cups never fails to put me in a good mood!