Le gioie del food blogging

About two months ago, I received a gift from a food blogger friend. I was so amazed and happy! Bee from Jugalbandi sent me a little packet containing a wonderfully cute key holder, a chocolate bar from Scharffenberger, peanut chikki (a delicious Indian version of peanut brittle) and.. a secret ingredient!
You can see it in this picture, together with the key holder:
This packet was part of a sort of 'food blogger chain', where people receive a secret ingredient from a food blogger, and in turn send another ingredient to three more food bloggers. What Bee sent me is a spice mix called 'Kootu Podi'. She explains how to use podi in this post, together with a recipe for the spice mix itself.
I loved the smell of the powder, when I opened the packet. But I didn't get to cook with it until very recently, when I finally got my own new apartment. Since then, I already made it twice, in two variations. The beauty of Kootu Podi (the dish) is that you can make it with any sort of vegetable, and apparently, even different types of dal, and various seeds or nuts. So, in my understanding, almost anything could go with Kootu Podi :)
Here you can see my two versions:
In this case, I used green lentils instead of toor dal, bok choi and mushrooms as vegetables and sunflower seeds instead of peanuts.
Whereas in this case, I used split yellow peas (probably not exactly split pigeon peas, but I didn't have enough time to actually go to an Indian store and buy the toor dal), red cabbage, broccoli and zucchini as vegetables, and again sunflower seeds.
I tried the first version with Melynda (my housemate) and the second with Simona. We liked both of them! Simona was so happy about it that I gave her part of my mix, so she will try to cook with it too :)

And I was so happy with this exchange, that I followed the chain by sending my secret ingredients to Meeta, Simona, and actually.. my mom. :) I then proceeded to buy a fourth batch for myself, as these ingredients can be found only in Italy, and I still have to try to make the secret recipe with them.. so, Meeta and Simona, be patient and hopefully soon enough you'll find on this blog the recipe to use the ingredients with!

Pizza alla zucca?!?!?

I mentioned that for the 'bagna caoda' party I prepared some pizza just in case someone didn't like the bagna caoda. I prepared three types: one was my favorite ricotta and pesto focaccia, another was a traditional grilled eggplant/cheese pizza, and the last one was an experiment (again inspired by the 'San Francisco flavor' cookbook!). I decided to try it as it involves my ingredient of the month - squash. No one would ever make pureed squash pizza or focaccia in Italy (at least not that I'm aware of), but I decided to give it a shot anyway!

Focaccia con zucca / Squash focaccia
The recipe in the 'San Francisco cookbook' suggests using delicata or butternut squash for this focaccia. Instead, I used turban squash. I bought it at the Berkeley Bowl intrigued by its beautiful shape and color, and it turned out to be absolutely delicious. I think it's now in the list of my favorite squashes. It tastes a little like pumpkin, and the yield is really high. It smells delicious after baking.

The preparation of this focaccia is quite straightforward: prepare pizza dough (recipe here). When ready, spread on a baking pan, previously greased with olive oil. Bake the squash of your choice, until soft. Scoop the flesh out and puree with a spoon. Add olive oil, salt and oregano (amounts to your taste) and mix. Spread on the pizza dough, and add pieces of cheese on top (suggested by the recipe: cheddar cheese. I used Vermont farmer's cheese). Bake at 400 F for ~10 min, or till the crust starts becoming golden in color. Serve hot.

This squash focaccia turned out quite good - in my opinion not as good as the ricotta and pesto one, but definitely worth trying. I believe homemade pizza or focaccia is one of the best foods for a party: tasty and easy to pick up with your fingers without being too messy. So, I'll send this focaccia recipe as my entry for the 'Game night party' event hosted by Mansi at Fun and Food just for this month! - If you want different pizza/focaccia recipes, look here!

And I hope this recipe also inspires you to send me a contribution to the event I host, the 'Fresh Produce of the Month', centered on squash.. Still a few days open for submissions!

La migliore ricetta del 2007

Another blog event on the same theme of 'The best of 2007' was the one organized by Zorra and Sandra, who asked us to point out only one best recipe among all those that we made this past year!
Now, this is a hard task. I really loved cooking all the things that I posted about, and I think a lot of them were very good to eat too :) I was very undecided: should I award one of my wonderful breads, that everyone always enjoy so much? Or one of the great cakes that I found recipes for? Well, in the end, I decided that the most memorable one was actually a drink.
It's limoncello. It took three weeks to prepare, and it disappeared in one evening... amazing, what some lemon and sugar and just a little alcohol can do to people :)
So, now I'm curious to look at the I'm sure huge collection that Sandra and Zorra will come up with! Check here for the roundup.

Il meglio del 2007

I like the idea of thinking back about 2007 and deciding what were the best things that happened and were recorded on this blog. There are a few events that encourage this, and so I'll join my voice to the 'Best of 2007' event proposed by Nupur at 'One hot stove'.
On a 'culinary level', the best things that happened to me were:
1) I learned how to bake bread, and found out it's easy, fun, and the results are always good!
This is the summary of four different bread recipes, which you can find here.

2) I also learned how to make home made pasta! This was a big discovery too, although I don't do it as often as baking bread, as it requires a much longer time investment.
If you want to see a pasta-making session, click here.

3) I started participating to a lot more food-blog events. This has been really good in many ways: I was pushed to try and make different types of food, create new recipes with new ingredients, and also, I got to know a lot more food-bloggers, who are now almost like friends for me.. Also, I found out about a lot of interesting recipes. I truly believe that some of the blog-events roundups are little jewels, which no one would have ever thought of before this big blog word started existing.
This is an example of one of the events that pushed me to think about something new: it was 'Waiter, there's something in my.. dumplings', and I made some steamed chickpea flour dumplings filled with nuts and raisins, which is something I would have not really thought of if I hadn't been inspired by the guidelines of the event.


4) I also started to host a food blog event here on my blog, called 'Fresh Produce of the Month'. It's exciting and instructive for me to choose which produce can best represent a month, and see what people come up with! This month we have Apples as theme, and I'll post the roundup quite soon.

5) I became almost vegeterian, and stopped cooking meat except for very special occasions (like Christmas or so). I've never been too big on meat, but now I really enjoy more vegetables than meat! I still really like fish, though. This is just an example of some cute vegetable dish I made at some point, Grilled veggie and tofu bruschette with mango and tomatillo salsa!.

6) Being more vegetarian also made me become inventive and experiment with fruits in savory dishes, such as in this veggies, fruit, tofu and somen noodles

7) I made my first liqueur! I made limoncello when it was lemon season here, and the result was so good that it disappeared in one evening.. :)

8) I also made my first jams. I haven't posted about all the jams I made, in the end, as they are always very simple! I found out cooking any fruits with sugar, lemon and spices makes the best jams ever, and there's no need to buy them anymore. Here is an example of my peach jam

On a non-culinary note, this blog witnessed a few big changes in my life that occurred this year.. most important, our move to Berkeley!
This meant saying goodbye to many dear friends, although luckily, as I said, some of them actually moved on the West coast too. And it meant knowing many new great people, and experiencing the lifestyle of Berkeley, which I really enjoy.

It also meant visiting a lot of nice places around California. I particularly enjoyed going to Yosemite Park with Lucas's parents. It's a wonderful place, and we went when the falls were in their greatest beauty. Here is a picture of Lucas and I, taken by Debbie:

This year was also the year when most of my friends had babies. This made me realize how life goes on around me, and also made me think about the beauty of having a baby! I think next year will see a few more babies born among my friends. Here is baby Crystal, Yan Li and Dazhong's baby, when she was very little:
My other friends' babies were Giulia, Clementina, Sara, Eleonora - all little baby girls! I'm really happy for all of them, and I wish all of them joy and happiness.

Today is actually the 'anniversary' of the end of my third year in a row in the US. So far, it's been a very nice time of my life. I enjoyed a lot of things of this country, and of the people here. It does feel a bit strange, though, to know that I haven't been living in Italy for so long. Who knows what will happen in one year? Things will change again. Well, we'll see, and hopefully this blog will witness the most important events again!

Ringraziamento

I already spoke a little about Thanksgiving for the benefit of my Italian readers last year. Every time, though, I seem to forget why Thanksgiving is a holiday - the historical event behind it is, in fact, a little odd. Supposedly, it is the day when Native Americans and the Pilgrims got together to celebrate and thank for the harvest before wintertime. Most people I talked to told me that after that the massacre of the Native Americans started.. As usual, it's impossible to disentangle good and bad, and memories slip away. In any case, I don't think many people really think about the original meaning nowadays, and this holiday is transformed into a moment of general thanksgiving for all the good things we have, and for the possibility of getting together with the whole family. In this sense, it is really a great occasion for American families, who are often scattered through this large country.
So here we are in Virginia! It's actually very nice to be here, and who knows when we'll be able to come back. To begin the post, here is a picture of trees wearing fall colors, taken from the front of the house. It's such a beautiful view, and we miss it a bit in California.

The house got bigger since we last came here. You can see on the left the addition that Lucas's dad Jim recently made. To me it's quite amazing, I'd never be able to do anything like this. He still has to do the interior - and I guess, then, figure out what to put in this new part of the house. :)
As it also happens in Italy, family reunions occur around tables loaded with lots of good food. Lucas's mom Debbie is a great cook and here is just a small sample of what she made for us.
This was for the dinner before Thanksgiving - all the children had already arrived, and it was good to be altogether.
There's fried apples, salmon, baked mac and cheese and salad. The salad was my contribution to the dinner (a variation on the theme of my usual cabbage salad) - I was very pleased by the fact that everyone enjoyed it, knowing how hard it is for some of the family members to eat veggies ;) For my Italian readers: fried apples are apples cooked in a pan with butter (ehm, a lot of it :) ), sugar and ground cloves, and mac and cheese is a casserole type of dish where layers of small pasta and cheese and cracker pieces are layered, and then cooked together with a mixture of milk and eggs. Mac stays for 'macaroni' - interestingly enough, it doesn't have anything to do with what Italians call 'maccheroni': the former is a small, elbow-like pasta, whereas the latter is a tubular, hollow and streight type of pasta about 1.5" long. So, mac and cheese doesn't really have anything to do with 'pasta al forno', and if Italians go to the US they shouldn't expect that. It's actually quite good, but it's a different thing.
And here is a sample of our Thankgsving meal!
This is a very subjective view of the meal, because it's what was on my plate - so, the meat part of it is very underrepresented. But it does show the variety of things we had: the two things in the middle are stuffing (on the center left) and turkey (center right). Then, at the right side of the turkey, there's a small amount of mashed potatoes, and going clockwise, cranberry sauce (traditionally eater with the turkey), gratin cauliflower, a bread roll, collard greens, broccoli/yams/peppers "martatouille", and spinach sformato. As you may have guessed, I attended the preparation of the veggie sides. I used all my experimented recipes - you can find the cauliflower recipe here, the spinach here and the martatouille here. The collards were brought by Joanne, Jim's sister (they're a traditional southern side - I had a small explanation in Italian about collards here). In case my non-American readers were wondering: the turkey meat I had on the dish was of course part of a real 20 lb turkey, that Debbie started cooking at 6 in the morning for it to be ready by 1 pm!
Everything was really good, and of course, the dessert side wasn't less important. We had coconut cake and three different pies (chocolate, pumpkin and pecan) that Debbie made. The pies are a very big tradition for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Debbie always prepares about 5-6 of them. :)
As a side, for our breakfasts and afternoon snacks, Debbie baked a few more things:
The softest and most delicious rolls ever, cinnamon bread, banana muffins, almond cookies, Christmas balls (my favorite, the round spheres, made with mostly eggs and nuts), and sausage balls (in the front, they are made with cheese and sausage). Keep in mind that everything that's shown on this plate was prepared in batches of hundreds, more or less. :)
Debbie also made just 'a few' hot crossed buns:
(Apparently these are supposed to be Eastern buns, but no one seemed to mind their presence for Thanksgiving.. :) - they are small rolls filled with cinnamon and raisin).
She also made a dessert that I really loved:
\It's a pound cake, served on custard and covered with a sort of fudge chocolate cream.
Now... do you understand why I gained a few pounds during this short vacation?!? :)
Unfortunately I don't have many people pictures.
Here is the Thanksgiving meal - and Jason with a small amount of mashed potatoes in front of him
And here is Rowen, one of the two cute cats belonging to Alison, who always join the family reunions!

Tanti auguri Sonya!

Yesterday it was my friend Sonya's birthday. We had dinner in a 'fancy restaurant' (her definition :) ) on 4th street, in Berkeley, and then we went to our place for a small after dinner party with cake, candles, and birthday song! I love this part of birthdays - otherwise I feel like something is missing! So, it was really nice to be able to host this in our new place.
The cake is a chocolate-rum layered cake that I made on purpose knowing Sonya's taste. :) - Keep reading for recipe and more pictures!

Torta a strati al cioccolato e rum / Chocolate-rum layered cake
(I found the recipe online here. Notice how it's said to be 'Martha's chocolate and rum cake' :) )
(Notice the nice dish the cake is on - it's a gift from Stefano, it has also a super-nice glass lid, very high, for super-tall layered cakes :)

Ingredients
1 oz. unsweetened chocolate for dough + 3 oz for filling
1/2 cup butter + 1/4 cup for filling
1 1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar
3 eggs
1 3/4 cake flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/4 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/3 cup rum + 1/2 cup for filling
4 cups confectioner sugar for filling (I used 2 cups of regular sugar)
1 tsp vanilla extract for filling (I used powder)

Procedure
Melt 1 oz chocolate with half a cup of water (I did this in the microwave). Let cool down. With a mixer, cream butter, add the brown sugar to it, then eggs. In another bowl, mix flour, baking powder, salt, baking soda. Add this to the butter mixture, alternating with the rum (add 1/3 cup total).
Originally the recipe says to divide this into three 8 inch pans, lined with waxing paper, and bake separately for ~20 min each. I had only one 9 inch pan, and the amount of dough didn't seem enough to make 3 disks, nor my patience. So I baked it altogether for ~30 minutes, and cut later. I'd think if you baked the three disks separately they'll probably raise more. In the future, I'll try to buy some smaller pans on purpose for this type of cakes.
Make the filling by melting 3 oz chocolate with 1/2 cup rum in a pan over low heat, then add the sugar, a little at a time (the regular sugar that I used gives kind of a nice crunchyness to this, but if you want a smoother version, go for the confectioner sugar. Not sure if 4 cups would be too sweet or not, in that case). Then add the vanilla and the butter, let it melt, and use warmish to fill and frost the cake.

The cake was really good: rich, but not excessively sweet, and very rummy! I served it with some whipped cream made on the spot, which I also used to (try to) decorate. I'm really happy that Andrew at Spittoon extra accepted this as a super late entry for 'Waiter there's something in my layered cake' event, but I'm really past the deadline. You can check out the wonderful roundup and be inspired with even more amazing layered cakes!

And here is Sonya cutting the cake:
And here are the other party friends: Robyn and Megan, and Al and Lucas.
I really enjoyed the evening.. again, happy birthday, dear Sonya!

Siamo tornati!!

Hello everybody, we're back! We've had three really wonderful weeks full of events and visits, from North Carolina, to Virginia, London, Turin, Milan, Vicenza, Padova, Fubine, Bra.. so, quite a lot of places! I uploaded all the nicest pictures on picasaweb, so you'll be able to see them at this address.
I'll summarize here some of the nicest moments and images of the trip. You can read this post if you want to know something about all these nice things we visited!
Everything started with my dear friend Crissy's wedding!
Crissy and David got married in Raleigh on Sept. 22nd. It was a beautiful day, and they are a wonderful couple. Here you can see them at the ceremony, celebrated with a Methodist ritual. The ceremony was very short, compared to Italian Catholic rituals. It was celebrated outside, as you can see in the picture.
After this, the party started! Being an American-Peruvian party, you can imagine how most of it was focused on dancing :) The party lasted till almost midnight, and I really enjoyed it. All the people were happy, and there was a nice mixture of the young and the 'old' generation crazily jumping around on the dancing floor! This was very interesting for me, because no one ever dances in Italian weddings. Too bad, it's actually a nice way to move around instead of being stuck at the dinner table all the evening.
Going to Raleigh was great also because we got to see some friends that we hadn't seen in a while. So many nice memories.. I particularly enjoyed staying at Luisa and Jorge's. It was a lot of fun for me and Luisa to get ready together for the wedding. See how cute they were?
Before leaving for Europe, we visited Lucas's parents for just a few days. It was a nicely relaxing interval in the busy trip we were having. Unfortunately I don't have almost any pictures of this part of the trip :(
Then, our next step was London! This has been a really great part of the trip. We met here my friend Eleanor, whom I hadn't seen in about 4 years, and we also met her boyfriend Steve and another old friend of mine, Simone. Eleanor and Steve hosted us - I liked every moment of the stay, and it was so nice to see that even though I hadn't seen Eleanor in years, our relationship was as fresh as always. I also found out that I really like London. It has so many different faces - I didn't realize this last time I was there.
Here you can see the Thames and the big wheel they recently built to see London from a special viewpoint. I could live in this city if it weren't so rainy, cloudy and expensive. :)
After London, we finally landed in Torino. Still, we didn't stay long there. Almost the day after we arrived, I had to go to Milano to renew my visa to be able to enter the US. I have to do this almost every time I go back to Italy, and it becomes more and more painful every time. There are a number of annoying things in this process, including calling a number that costs $2 per minute just to schedule an appointment with the consulate to be interviewed for the visa, going to Milan, wasting a morning in line, and recently having to pay another private company to have the passport delivered at home. This is a new introduction - earlier on, one could have it home the day after the interview, delivered with regular Italian mail. I was quite annoyed at this innovation: not only for the much increased cost, but also because I didn't want to have to wait at home one whole day for the FedEx-like people to come and have me sign the receipt for the passport. So I decided to just stay in Milan and withdraw the passport at the end of the day, and take the occasion to visit the city. Lucas joined me, so it actually turned out to be a nice day. This is just a shot of one of the most impressive things in Milano: the Cathedral.
The inside is as impressive, especially because of the contrast with the exterior part - one bright and full of statues, and the other dark, almost empty if it weren't for the gorgeous stain glasses that are there. I love it. This short visit made me aware of a number of other really nice things of Milan, which I never really considered. I'd recommend visiting around the Castello Sforzesco - there are some small roads with not much traffic, and lots of nice trattorie.
Another nice trip Lucas and I did was to Vicenza and Padova, to visit my sister. We met her in Vicenza, and we stayed there for about one afternoon (it takes ~4.5 hours by train to get there from Torino). Visiting Elena was really nice. I hadn't seen her in such a long time, and it was a pleasure to see her in that nice small town. Vicenza has some really pretty views, such as la Piazza dei Signori:
We didn't have time to visit all of it, but from what we saw it seemed like a pretty little town. The day after, we met Elena in Padova. Padova is an amazing place. Downtown is almost completely pedestrian, and there are some gorgeous squares, which are used as open-air markets during the day and for restaurants and cafes to put outside their tables at night. It's a pleasure to walk there, and all the details are taken care of:
One of the nicest things was visiting the 'Cappella degli Scrovegni'. It's a jewel, painted by Giotto. I studied it at school, and seeing it in real life was awesome. The 15 minutes that they give you to look at it are definitely not enough. Another artistic wonder we visited was the Battistero, painted by Giusto de' Menabuoi. We didn't have enough time to visit the great Church of Saint Antonio, who's a greatly loved Saint from Padova. Well, this means we have to go back. :)
We went back to Torino with Elena to participate to the baptism of my cousin's daughter, Giulia. You can see her here:
She's four month old! The ceremony was about one hour long, as usual in Italy, and at the end of it there was a first open reception, and then my aunt invited us for lunch at her place. The food was delicious, both at the reception (big chunks of parmigiano to eat with grissini, salame from Calabria, cheese from Sardinia, and lots of other things that are unknown here in the US), and at the lunch. I'll show here the wonderful display of sauces that my aunt prepared to eat with the meat that she cooked:
The meat is from cow - you boil different parts of it, until it becomes really soft, and then you eat it with olive oil and salt or (more traditionally) with these special sauces made with parseley and garlic, tomoatoes, or even fruits, as you can see in the picture. She also made some more delicious food, which we were all quite amazed of.
We had some more wonderful food at my grandparents' place, in Fubine, and at Alberto and Franca's place, in Bra. In both cases we had homemade pasta (lasagne and tagliarin), such a treat! And then roasts, and great desserts.. Too bad I didn't take pictures :(
Finally we stayed in Torino for a while. Here is when I started taking less pictures, unfortunately, since I know the place so well. We visited a lot of dear friends. Most of my friends recently had babies, so seeing all of them was a great joy. I also noticed some nice changes in Turin. For example, around the Duomo, they finished the recovery of some Roman ruines, and now it's wonderful to see them and go through them. Lucas and I went to visit the Antique Museum, which is there, and we were impressed by the beautiful collection that they have. They recently added some Roman mosaics, that they found close to the Duomo, such as these:
I also noticed that the city has become more international. Lots of foreigners everywhere - it was a pleasure to see that! I will end this post with a picture of my hometown taken from the park where Cinzia and I always go to:
Isn't it pretty?

Sono stata intervistata!!

A few days ago I saw a quite interesting post on Candace's blog 'Italian woman at the table': she was answering five questions specifically thought as an interview to her, and she was also asking if someone wanted to be interviewed by her now. So, it was too tempting and I was really curious to see which questions Candace would come up with, and I asked her to interview me.. So here is our interview!! If you're interested in it and you want to know how to get an interview yourself, keep reading!
(drawing taken by this website)

1. Italians think Americans are loud. Americans think Italians are loud. Now that you're lived both places, who do you think is loudest? Explain.
Italians. :) Italian families are really like in some of the movies you may have seen directed by great directors like De Sica, Antonioni.. People can scream really loud if they get nervous, or cry and mourn loudly if they lost a dear one, or laugh 'a squarciagola' (literally, breaking your throat: you see, there's not even a term for this in English) if there's something funny. Americans usually don't show their emotions as much. I had troubles understanding that someone was upset, at the beginning.. now I am used to it, and I think it'd be hard to be again in the middle of an Italian 'fight' :) - but I am still definitely louder than most people here. :)

2. Do you come from a big or small family? How do you think that's affected your life?
I come from a small family: I have one sister, and my parents both have only one sibling with two and three children each. I guess this means that I'm used to having some privacy, which would be hard to get in a large family. In my youth I was quite shy, which may be related to not being used to dealing with big groups of people. I think it also affected the idea of the family I want to have.. having many children is not in my plans (of course, now that I speak about plans, I know they're going to be flipped upside down and instead I'm going to have 6 kids...... :) ).

3. What's your favorite meal—breakfast, lunch or dinner? Tell us why and describe a typical meal you have that time of day.
Dinner. It's when we are all more relaxed. The day is finished, and we can eat altogether without any hurry, enjoying the food and the company. The typical dinner would be the one we have on a week day (there are more week nights than weekend nights. :) ). So usually we cook one main dish and then we'll have a salad or a light dessert. The main dish usually contains some vegetables, some form of protein (if I cook, tofu, cheese or beans, and if Lucas cooks it can also be meat), and usually some starch (rice, pasta). We cook something different every evening, and we'll make enough so that we can bring something for lunch at work the day after. Usually we don't plan what we cook, on week days. We buy whatever inspires us at the Berkeley Bowl on Saturday for the whole week, and then every evening we put together the ingredients that we feel more like eating. If we feel like it's a particularly nice evening and meal, we'll have some wine with it, otherwise we usually drink water on week days, if it's just the two of us (it's hard not to have the wine go bad if we drink only one glass each per night..).

4. Your boss fires you. You break down. You're in tears. Who's the first person you call? Why that person?
Well, for sure it would be Lucas (my 'significant other'...). Poor Lucas, he is always the one who has to deal with the worst of me. :) Usually he is very good at listening and calming me down when I need it, and he has very good suggestions on how to react to things. We behave differently when we deal with problems (probably some of it it's really related to the different cultures, Italian and American, we've been brought up in). Sometimes his way is better than mine. :) Also, it's good to hug him and have him comfort me - when I'm not upset because of him!!!! :) :)

5. You're thrown out of Italy and the U.S. and told never to return. What country would you choose to live in next? Explain.
Eheh, interesting question :) - I don't know any other country as well as Italy and the US. Probably the one I feel closest to is France. I know that lots of both Italians and Americans think French people are snobbish, but I've never ever felt that on any time I've been to France. It's close enough to Italy, I like their way of being politically active, they have some of the best food and wine in the world, the architecture is similar to what you can find in Italy, I have a few French friends.. and I speak French. So, yeah, I think I would live pretty well in France if I could find a job there. :)

So, this is it! My interview is over. :) It was a lot of fun!!! Thank you so much, Candace. It's a really great way to share something of oneself with the rest of the blog-friends :)
So.. who's up next?? It's now my turn to ask questions!

If you'd like to be interviewed by me, follow these simple rules:
1. Leave me a comment saying "Interview me."
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. I get to pick the questions.
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Tortillas di mais fatte da noi!

My passion for cooking is now well-known among my friends, and so I received four cookbooks for my birthday. There are never too many cookbooks at home, right? :) One of them is a wonderful, original, Mexican cookbook given to me by Romelia, a mexican friend of mine. It's written by a Mexican writer, Susanna Palazuelos. The book is gorgeous, there are wonderful pictures of Mexico and of the food - the title is right: 'Mexico, the beautiful cookbook'. Romelia gave it to me at the University, and when I brought it to my office, Nicola and I started looking at it and decided it was a great excuse to cook together a Mexican-inspired meal!
Nicola had 2 huge packets (4 lb each) of Masa Harina - both he and his mom bought one, thinking it would be a good corn flour to make polenta. Too bad it really isn't. :) Masa Harina is not corn flour the way we usually intend: it is made by boiling corn kernels in water and calcium hydroxide, then the kernels are washed and ground to make a flour. The masa harina we buy in the stores is then dried (I don't know if it's possible to buy fresh masa, here). So, this treatment gives the flour a very peculiar taste and consistency - definitely not good for polenta... but exactly what you need to make a huge amount of tortillas, which is what Nicola, Giovanna and I did last night. :)

Tortillas di mais con verdure, fagioli e formaggio / Corn tortillas with vegetables, black beans and cheese
Making tortillas turned out to be extremely easy: just mix ~2 cups of masa with 1 1/4 cups water and a pinch of salt. Knead for 2-3 minutes, then devide the dough in about 8 balls, the size of a big walnut. Knead each ball for a few more seconds, before pressing it. It would be very cool to have the tortilla press, which of course, we didn't have. So, we used a rolling pin. To do so, place a sheet of plastic wrap on the table, then put your ball of dough on it, press it with your hand a bit. Place another sheet of plastic wrap on top, and roll the dough down with a rolling pin, trying to make it round and thin. The final round shape should be ~4 inches in diameter. Remove one sheet of plastic wrap, place the tortilla on your hand, peel off also the other sheet of plastic, and place the tortilla on a hot anti-sticking pan. Cook for ~20 seconds, then turn, cook for another 20 seconds, turn again and cook for a final 15 seconds.. and you're done!! Really easy. Of course, our tortillas weren't as round and pretty as the store-bought ones, but they were _much_ better in taste.

We prepared some vegetables and beans to put inside the tortilla: we made a stir-fry of onions, zucchini, poblano peppers, red peppers and mushroom (with olive oil, sprinkled with pepper - really good and spicy, thanks to the poblano peppers). For the beans, we went for the easy canned black beans, and we added them to sautee onions in olive oil, cooking them until almost all the liquid was adsorbed. I added salt, pepper and honey to them, while cooking. Both the beans and the vegetables were delicious.


We also prepared some Queso fundido con champinones y rajas de poblano (melted cheese with mushrooms and poblano peppers) (idea from the Mexican cookbook)- you can see the pepper version here and on the right bottom corner of my tortilla. This was easily prepared by microwaving for 1 minute some good mild cheddar cheese decorated with stripes of pepper or pieces of mushrooms.




The cheese was great to eat also with our home-made tortilla chips:
We prepared these by cutting into pieces some of our tortillas, and baking them in the oven at 450 F for ~ 5 minutes. We went for the baked healthy version, but traditionally they should be deep fried. Still, the healthy version was quite good! You can see here Giovanna kneading the dough and Nicola eating the tortilla chips with salsa. :)
Making tortillas and eating them in such a nice company was a lot of fun. Must be repeated! :)

Un interessante modo di arrostire un agnello

I haven't posted in a while! Well, last weekend it was my birthday, so I was busy :) - now the problem is: Lucas is gone with the camera for a week, and I forgot to download all the last pictures.. so I have plenty of time to post and no pictures. :) So, I decided in the next few days I'll post about something that I took a picture of in the near past.. fun things or food, we'll see.

Let's start with this: a memory from one of the two Fourth of July parties we went to! This party was thrown by Alex and Jen, and it was a lot of fun. They both like to cook, wonderful quality to throw a good party. So while Jen prepared a lot of food at the stove, Alex was taking care of the "grill":
He was cooking this whole lamb using a very interesting system that he and his roommate prepared: the skewer was connected to all those gears that you see in the picture, and these were connected to a pully which arrived on the top of the roof of the house, where a bucket filled with wood slowly fell down (paced by the big hammer you can see in the bottom part of the picture). The vertical fall of the bucket was converted into rotational movement of the lamb on the charcoal. See what can come out from the minds of a bunch of drunk physicists?!? The system was completely inefficient (you had to spin the bike wheel to have the bucket come back on the roof every seven minutes, instead of just turning a handle of a quarter of a turn every 15 minutes), but of course, the goal was to have fun!!!!!
The vision of the whole lamb being slowly roasted slightly upset my almost-vegeterian feelings, but I must say, their system was quite fascinating. Too bad the lamb took too long to cook and we didn't get to try it!!!! But we were told it was delicious. :)

Tagliatelle e trofie fatte in casa!

I've been super busy this past week, and I didn't even have time to post about this really cool 'event' that we organized last weekend! My friend Andrea who lives in Berkeley also loves to cook and we've been thinking about organizing something for a while. So last weekend we decided to invite a bunch of people over at his place and have a 'Pasta workshop'!
The idea was to make tagliatelle and trofie ourselves, and prepare three different sauces.. whoever wanted to come help was welcome. My Japanese friends Keisuke, Miako and their lovely son came from the very beginning and were some of the most supportive fans of our pasta!
Making pasta for 25 people turned out to be tiring but fun! And the result was really delicious. I was very happy, also because I never made any of that pasta before. Below is a little summary of what we did and the recipes.

We prepared two different types of tagliatelle - one with sapphron in the dough and one with mushroom water in it, because we wanted to give them a little flavor that would go well with the sauce we were planning on making.
Tagliatelle is an egg rich pasta, so don't be surprised for how many eggs you have to put in the dough! It's going to be enough for a lot of servings, anyway.
We also made trofie, which is a type of pasta typical of Liguria, always hand made, and mostly eaten with pesto.

Dough for tagliatelle:
2.6 lb flour
12 eggs
2 tbsp water
Make a 'volcano' with the flour on a big and clean working surface, break the eggs in the volcano hole and start mixing them together with the dough, kneading them in. You should add as little water as possible to this dough, to make it workable. Then you should work it for at least 10 minutes, until it becomes softer and elastic.
Note: to make the sapphron taqliatelle, dissolve 1/2 tsp sapphron in the water, and to make the mushroom flavored tagliatelle, use water where you boiled dry porcini mushrooms instead.
When you're done, wrap the dough in plastic foil and let it rest for one hour.

Dough for trofie:
2.4 lb flour
2 cups water more or less
2 tbsp salt
Mix all the ingredients and knead for at least ten minutes. Add water if necessary. When done, wrap in plastic foil and let it rest for one hour.

Preparation of tagliatelle:
You need a pasta machine like my wonderful 'La Novecento Torino', which belonged to my greatgrandmother, or a more modern and fancy one. :)
This machine can make very thin sheets of flour like this one:
You have to devide the dough into small flat 'squares', and then pass them through
the machine many times decreasing the width of the slit they go through every time.
You probably shouldn't get to the point of having such long pieces like the one I showed in the picture above, but that was for fun. :)
It's very helpful if you have someone like Luisa with you :)
She was passing me the pieces in the right order, so we could go much faster, and decrease the slit width only every few pieces of dough.
Once you have your dough sheets of the right thickness (i.e., for tagliatelle, the smallest setting I had on the machine), you can add the cutting attachment to the machine and start the real fun part: actually making the tagliatelle!
When you pass the dough through the sharp rolls, the tagliatelle come out.. it's such a wonderful view!
Suggestion: add some flour on the dough before cutting it, and sprinkle more flour on the tagliatelle just made. Set them on a large tray so they don't stack on each other, otherwise they will clump and they won't be as good.
This is how fast we were moving them around on the tray to avoid them clumping:
And this is the tray with the sapphron tagliatelle ready to be cooked:

Preparation of trofie:
Another group of us was making trofie. Trofie don't require and particular instrumentation, just a lot of patient friends. :)
(Elif and Vardha at work)
To make trofie, you have to take tiny pieces of dough and roll them either between your fingers or on the table, and obtain those funny little worms that you see in front of Elif above.

Of course now you're only half way done. Good pasta is nothing if you don't have a good sauce. For tagliatelle, we chose to make a zucchini sauce and a mushroom sauce, and trofie go traditionally with pesto. So here are the recipes for the sauces:

Zucchini sauce
10 small white zucchini
1 white onion
1/2 lb small tomatoes (romanitas)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sapphron
~3 tsp salt

Cut the onion and the zucchini in small pieces, heat up the olive oil. Sautee the zucchini for a while. Add the sapphron dissolved in water. Add salt. Cover with a lid and let it cook for ~15 min. At the end, add the tomatoes cut in half. Sautee for a few more minutes, add salt, and it's ready to pour on the pasta.

Porcini mushroom sauce
3 porcini mushrooms
1 lb brown mushrooms
6 small shallots
White wine and mushroom water to cook
Parseley

Gently scrape the mushroom surface to remove all the dirt. Remove the parts that are too soft. Cut the mushrooms in thin slices and cook them in a little olive oil, on low heat, adding some salt. Add the shallots finely cut, sautee them with the mushrooms for ~5 minutes, then add ~1/2 cup total white wine and mushroom water if you still have some from the dough and let it cook covered for 5-10 more minutes. Pour on the pasta and add some finely cut parseley before serving.

Traditional pesto sauce
This is the recipe for traditional pesto from Liguria. Anywhere else you won't find the green beans and potatoes with pesto. But it's a really nice addition, you should definitely try it.

1 lb green beans
6 small yellow potatoes
1 big bunch basil
1/2 cup pinenuts
4 cloves garlic
a chunk of pecorino (size depending on how much you like it)
Olive oil

Cut the green beans and the onions in small pieces. Cook them in salted boiling water for ~10 min. Drain and cool down with cold water and set aside. In a blender, finely chop basil, pinenuts, pecorino, garlic. Take out of the blender and add enough olive oil to cover well. If you didn't add much pecorino, you may have to add some salt. When the pasta is ready, mix the basil mix and the beans and potato mix with it. Serve hot with trofie for a real Liguria dish.

All the pasta must be cooked in a lot of salted boiling water, turning from time to time to avoid clumping. Tagliatelle take only ~ 3 minutes, whereas trofie take a bit longer. Trofie will start floating after a while, but they'll need to cook a little longer before they're done.

Nicola took care of this part:
When the pasta is cooked, mix with the sauce immediately and serve as soon as possible.
Here is Andrea serving the first pasta that came out:
And here are the final creations!
Tagliatelle con zafferano e zucchini (Sapphron and zucchini tagliatelle):

Tagliatelle ai funghi porcini (Porcini mushroom tagliatelle)

Trofie al pesto
Every time we brought one of these bowls out, they were completely finished in the first 5 minutes. Everyone was really impressed - it's not that common to have fresh pasta here! And to be honest, I was also really impressed. I never made it before, and it was absolutely delicious!
I'm submitting this entry to the "Presto pasta nights" hosted by my friend Ruth at Once Upon a Feast, although the whole pasta making wasn't presto at all: we started at 4.30 pm and we were eating at 8 pm.. but it was a meal for 25 people, starting from scratch! If you buy your pasta, making the sauces I described above is really fast indeed.