Fresh thoughts, sformato and beige food
"so much cooking is simply repetitive behaviour seasoned with fresh thoughts." Rachel Roddy 'Fresh thoughts' I'm not sure that these exist, except in the brains of those handful of geniuses scattered throughout history. The rest of us just have the same thoughts recycled over and over again. 'Repetititve behaviour' if ever there was any. It's one of those non days - nothing happening except a trip to the dentist for a checkup and clean - not a joyful thing - and nondescri
Oct 28
Pasta cakes
"peak What I Want In A Recipe" Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen I'm trying to clear my email inbox a bit. Some of the emails in there are newsletters from various foodie sources, so today I checked the oldest of these, a newsletter from Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen which celebrated 20 years of writing her blog by posting 20 of what she considered to be the 20 most iconic recipes - the 'peak What I Want in a Recipe' thing that I have quoted above. There are some pretty good
Oct 27
What can I say about parsley and garlic?
"Such an Italian flavour" Giorgio Locatelli "Parsley loves garlic, and their marriage rarely fails to be a happy one." Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall/The Guardian I'm very slowly working my way through this book - another Op shop find and gift from my friend Monika. It will take me a while as there are a whole lot of mini, and not so mini essays scattered throughout the book about Locatelli's life, and also about ingredients. One of the earliest of the ingredient ones was ab
Oct 23
So much from one plate of food
Somewhere or other I had a quote about there being a whole world on a plate of food. But I have lost it. Mostly this kind of quote -and I have seen this kind of sentiment in several places, refers to the history of the dish itself, and its ingredients. What I am looking at today is rather more personal but it has indeed been a ramble. As I have intimated in the last few posts I'm working in my head towards a post on Robert Carrier classics but then the night before last I
Oct 18
Tiny satisfaction, tiny problem(s)
"a source of joy" Nigel Slater I said I would report back on the ricotta experiment so here I go. I have to say I am pretty satisfied. This is the finished result with the milky residue below. And it was so, so easy. I used Anna Jones recipe for Home-made ricotta in The Guardian. Literally all you have to do is heat up some milk with a tiny bit of salt, take it off the heat, add a precise amount of white vinegar, stir until the curds form, leave for a couple of hours, a
Oct 16
Bruschetta first
"How could something so basic be so good?" Nigel Slater First in so many ways - a first recipe, a first dish in an Italian meal, and possibly one of the first foods eaten around the Mediterranean, at least when the skills of making bread and olive oil had been learnt. For, as you probably all know, bruschetta does not involve tomatoes. Tomatoes did not come to the Mediterranean until the 14th/15th centuries and even then were not used for a while. I know I have written abou
Oct 13
Pasta, flying saucers and grannies
"a personal undertaking to try every single type of pasta available the length and breadth of Italy" Jacqui De Bono Time for a look at a foodie blog and the next one on my list is The Pasta Project, which is probably one of the first that I recognised and visited from time to time, so I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to it with my website posts. I probably came across it long ago because - well it's pasta isn't it and I guess we are all pretty much obsessed with
Oct 3
Gremolata - to reduce into grains
"you can't have a fancy food blog without a recipe that has something topped with gremolata." Culinary Lore Or reduce into a few words, and even fewer recipes. It's curious is it not, how some foodstuffs, which are so vital to a particular cuisine, have so little to say about them? Gremolata is fundamental to Italian cooking - particularly in Milan from where it seems to have originated. Well nobody knows really. Suffice to say that one writer - Danny Palumbo on The Take
Sep 6
Veal on a skewer - old-fashioned
Lucky dip time - and I'm sitting here wondering where to start. I spent a little time wondering which recipe to choose - there were six on a double page spread of veal recipes, but then I noticed that there was a photograph of one of them, on a different page, so I decided to go with that - Spiedini di vitello alla Romana. And here it is photographed in a way that somehow looks old-fashioned. But what is it that makes it look old-fashioned? Maybe it's the faint yellowish c
Sep 1
Abundance - a challenge
abundunce - "the situation in which there is more than enough of something" or "the quality of having what you want in life" Cambridge English Dictionary Yesterday we lunched with our friends with the superabundant garden. We over indulged in the most delicious food and wine, which has led to me feeling marginally poorly - mild alcohol poisoning to be blunt. On top of the wonderful food - the best lamb shank tagine I have ever tasted, and some orangey poached pears, not to
Aug 20
Liver and onions - ugh?
"There is rarely a middle ground with liver. Either you've turned the page already, or you're a devotee who gets excited about the idea of the exceptionally savoury exterior of a piece of flash-fried or chargrilled liver and its almost jelly-like flesh." Nigel Slater So true, and I'm willing to bet that when you see that title, signalling that this post is about liver, you will go no further. But I'm going to be true to my lucky dip rules, for this is a lucky dip post. Ran
Aug 5
What's in a name? - 'marry me'/Tuscan chicken
"I know the internet has turned this dish into marry me chicken but it’s still Tuscan chicken to me!" The Taylor Table/Instagram And what's Tuscan chicken anyway? Not Tuscan whatever else it might be. But back to the beginning, although in a way it's really the end. Pondering on this and that for today's post I decided to see what was trending in the food world and found on the Taste website - a list of Trends 2026, some of which were truly awful, but top of their list of
Jul 26
A week of dining out
"Everything tastes better when it's eaten together." This is the last and in some ways the best, of four meals I ate away from home last week. Here is my glorious family in the home of my younger son - the one at back right - eating one of his pasta meals. Many of them are pulling silly faces, as family and friends often do in group photos such as this one, but you get the picture - adults at one end and loving cousins at the other. I guess you could say that it was not hau
Jul 16
A postscript - the view from India
"an 'elsewhereness' that is aspirational but not imitative." Sharanya Deepak/Vittles When looking for ideas for today I found a reference to a Vittles Magazine article by Sharanya Deepak - A brown people's version of white people's lives - it's long but worth reading if you are at all interested in the fusion of cuisines in general, and the fusion of South Asian and Italian cuisines in particular. She is Indian and so writes from the inside as it were and quite puts to sha
Jul 4
Italian/Indian or Indian/Italian?
"Arguably, two of the most loved foods of all time, combined." Devinder/East West Pizza" If you think about it, Italian and Indian cuisines are more similar than expected: rich comfort foods with generous use of tomato, garlic, and onion." clicksngiggles/reddit The photograph is of pizzas on offer from the East West Pizza cafe in East London that Devinder with his wife Manpreet run. In 2021 in a competition run by the BBC for the best pizza takeaway in Britain it was voted
Jul 3
For the coffee table or the kitchen? Or both?
"it cannot be called merely a cookbook but perhaps more appropriately referred to as a work of art." Gail Cooke/Goodreads It's time to 'review' this book that I acquired some time ago now in a kind of opshop in country Victoria. I 'read' it and put it on my desk to write about some day, and here I am. It is indeed gorgeous as a book. Gail Cooke, who wrote in Goodreads went on to say: "It is among the most beautiful books I've seen with a flower and food bedecked cover so
Jun 17
Polpette al limone from Sicily
"Please don't eat the lemon leaves" Massimo Mele/Gourmet Traveller It's a dismal day, and so I just decided to do an ordinary 'dish of the day' kind of thing, picking another kind of meatball from my meatball book Around the World in 80 Meatballs. This time I picked a Sicilian recipe Polpette al limone - meatballs with lemon. No picture in the book and no recipe online, but having now exlored a large number of options online I think there is no need, because really this is
May 18
Torta Pasqualina - an Easter tradition
"The quintessential spring dish." Stefano Arturi I have now been trawling the net for examples of this Italian - no - Ligurian - Easter dish - a pie filled with cheese and greens and eggs. I now have a large number of examples and a few things to say about it but didn't know which example to use as my header picture - so in the end I decided to go for the very first one I looked at from a website called Marcella in Cucina - after all, she's Italian and it looks pretty goo
Apr 10
Still a demon dish
They almost look alright don't they as they sit on our dinner table ready to be eaten last night? Even almost pretty good. But reader - alas - I failed yet again. Pizza is still my demon dish - perhaps I should say top demon dish - I have others. They look almost as good as the Smitten Kitchen version but obviously a long way away from the real deal on the right. But then I was never expecting to reach those heights. And actually, now that I look at all three, I'm wond
Mar 10
Demon dishes - mine is pizza
"Raise your hand if you never get pizza right when you make it at home" Deb Perelman/Smitten Kitchen Those words began one of Deb Perelman's recipes on her website Smitten Kitchen - a recipe for Lazy pizza dough and favourite Margherita pizza . She had me hooked right there, because that's me. On the left is her finished Margherita for that post, above is a world-beating pizza from Anatica Pizzeria Port'Alba in Naples, so I don't think many of us are going to taste that
Mar 8