Year: 2020

Garbage Pail (or if you’re English Rubbish Bin) Pasta is a thing: Sicchie d’a Munnezza, Neapolitan dialect for the kitchen waste receptacle and a pasta dish! 
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This is more of my homemade sourdough wholegrain spelt pasta (check out my stories if you want to see it coming to life). I got a little carried away with the toppings, so let’s just call it Rubbish Bin Pasta! If you’ve never put walnuts on wholegrain pasta, it’s a good match.

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Sometimes, just sometimes, I get breakfast by myself. This morning was one of those times. Oh. How. Wonderful.
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This is what accompanied me: A local soft-boiled egg, a thick slice of sourdough rye slathered in butter, a tomato, still warm, from the garden sprinkled with salt and my teapot filled with roasted chicory.

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Milk kefir-leavened wholegrain spelt sourdough nestled in my wonderful Emile Henry ceramic loaf tin.
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For me, baking bread takes priority over comfort in the heat of August in Italy. Still, I try to time the baking for first or last thing and have two fans provide relief.
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Taking the lid off the tin and seeing this makes it all worth it.

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Here’s the non-egg garlic mayo (aka allioli) in progress! I’m reading from ‘Honey from a Weed’, a book I have completely fallen for.
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It goes on to says this precise method is also used in Languedoc as a sauce for snails.
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We didn’t eat it on snails, but atop home-made burgers and I roasted the garlic first to soften its flavour.
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There are more adventures afoot with this sauce as a base. Perhaps capers or some anchovies? And apparently it’s traditional to fry some bread and then pestle (is that a verb: to pestle?!) it in with a big bunch of parsley.
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My arm muscles are going to get a workout!

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Local strawberries in a #waterkefir second ferment give their beautiful colour to the liquid, making for such colourful, fun and tasty bubbles.

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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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