Month: August 2020

Bitter. How are you with it? Italians are masters of bitter greens. Historically it comes from #cucinapovera roots of foraging for wild food, so much of which was bitter and finding a way to make it nice!
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Bitter greens were often eaten with pork. The flavours pair, but here the wisdom of tradition comes through: bitter helps stimulate the compounds that digest fat. Genius.
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Much of my Italian ‘language-learning’ these days is reading historical food books. I love what I am learning. And then, I try it!
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Here we have chicory. I soaked it in water for an hour, this helps remove excess bitterness. I then boiled it for about 10 mins, before draining and transferring it to a hot cast iron pan that contained chopped onion and garlic, lightly-fried in olive oil. I then generously squeezed lemon over the top.
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My 6-year-old loved it! Not bad, eh?!

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Do you need an excuse?
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Really?!
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OK. Well, here goes:
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It’s an ancient grain.
It’s pre-fermented, so your body won’t have to work as hard.
It’s the whole grain – no waste and you get all the good oils and fibre.
It tastes gorgeous.
It’s crispy.
You can top it with whatever you fancy.
Whomever you feed it to will be really grateful.
It’ll make your house smell amazing.
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It’s pizza!
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Do I need to say anything more?!
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I’ve written up my recipe, described my techniques and taken lots of pictures and videos to hand-hold you through. You can find the link in my profile.
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I’m cooking it up loads this month and I’d love it if you wanted to too.
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‘Nuff said 🙂

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3 lunches, each with a different twist, displaying many moments in time together at the same meal. I’m sitting at the plate nearest you. I have feta that I popped out to pick up from our local health food store this morning. On the left sits my husband (his bread is too spacious for his plate!) and he has cold fave beans that I cooked yesterday in the day before’s beef bone broth, adding rosemary and garlic. My son’s plate is the other side of the table. He has chopped liver, left over from our lunch yesterday.
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We all have salad that I made yesterday (I make a huge salad every couple of days and leave it in the fridge) and sourdough bread made at the weekend. There’s sauerkraut a-plenty (made weeks ago) and a jar of local lard to adorn our bread.
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The dish in the middle of the table came home with us from the same beautiful shop where I bought the mortaio I posted yesterday. The white flower was picked my my son during a park trip yesterday and given to me as a present.
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Phew, a lot of words, a lot of work. But somehow it doesn’t feel like it. It just feels like a gorgeous, delicious lunch with my family.

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When you come to Florence, I want to go with you to Pasquinucci in via Gioberti. It is a kitchen and table-lover’s heaven – full of things both super-useful and ever-so beautiful.
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This piece, made from Tuscan marble, came home from there with me on Saturday. I was lucky to get out of the shop without spending much more!
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It’s much desired though – I’ve wanted a large mortaio, mortar and pestle, for ages. Just this week, I found a traditional Catalan recipe for an egg-less garlic ‘mayo’. The garlic for it is in the oven roasting right now.
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I can’t wait to get pounding!

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My sourdough pasta worked! I wasn’t at all sure it would – I’ve never seen anyone making sourdough pasta from whole grain spelt flour.
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I made an extra thick, dough-like spelt starter, let it rise overnight and then added more flour, water and salt in the morning. After an hour this pasta dough had got a lot bigger, so I knocked it back and we got the beautiful Imperia hand-crank pasta machine out. Using this machine you have to make the dough into long sheets of lasagna-like thickness first, then put those through a ‘shredder’ to cut the tagliatelle.
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I managed to film the ribbons of sourdough pasta coming out of the machine with one hand. Check out my story today to watch it – it’s kinda mesmerising.

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Are you making sourdough pizza with me this month? I’m up to another one today, so thought I’d share how I stretch and fold my dough.
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I’ve always found it really helpful to see how something should look. Obviously, I want you in my kitchen so we can do it side-by-side, but saving that, at least I can use the magic of IG to show you a vid.
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The recipe is in my profile. If you have a starter ready, you could be eating pizza for lunch tomorrow!

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These are 5-month-old sourdough rye bread crumbs. They are my bread kvass starter. I’ve been using the this same sourdough bread over and over again to make a bottle of fermented kvass each week since March.
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The more time passes the stronger the starter gets. I know this as my kvass has been turning sour more quickly.
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Swipe to see the sugar that I use, the rye bread settled in the bottom of the jar ready to start its work, and the strained, bottled kvass second-fermenting with some fresh mint from the garden.

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Wholegrain spelt, beets from the garden and psyllium seeds.
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This sourdough was one of those thrown-together experiments. We pulled the first beetroot from our tiny container garden. I’d just watched @ellys_everyday video about using psyllium husk in wholegrain bread.
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Our local health food store only had *whole* psyllium, not husks, but I tried it anyway. It wasn’t as firm as it would have been with husks, so I put it inside our ceramic loaf tin to bake with support.
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It was more spongy then my normal sourdough, and lost most of its beetroot purple in the baking (if you look back pics on my feed you’ll not miss how purple the dough was!). But the taste was good and the feeling of having had fun along with eating something I had grown from seed was wonderful.

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For me, it is both a driving passion and an absolute duty to get as close as possible to my food sources.
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The pics above are a beautiful example of that: we visited Flavio, and his animals, at @lavalledelsasso a few miles from here.
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I start with the pigs because I could hardly drag myself away from them, such wonderful animals. But swipe to see the engine of the farm, Flavio, and one of his cows, along with the raw beef we ate under the shade of a tree.
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I often feel sad at the mess we’re making of agriculture in this world. Being part of something real and regenerative lifts me and I can do nothing other than give thanks for the work being done by so many to make a difference and give my resources to support it.
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The food we bring into our houses has the power to change the world. I feel that when I work with it in the kitchen. It moves me. It drives me onwards. It brings me hope and joy.

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Carrot-top pesto nestled with some fish and sauerkraut atop rye pasta. We made this with home-grown carrots! My son has been waiting for it since April – when he planted the seeds. It was a treat to enjoy the pesto together whilst also munching bugs-bunny-style on the raw carrots.
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The recipe/process is in my story today!

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