Author: Alison Kay

Breaking food habits has often been very revealing to me. I don’t want to give something up, but when I do, I notice what life is like without it. Sometimes, I never go back to it.
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Not true of sourdough pancakes though. Me and them will go a long way I think! I’ve just got back from 3 days away, at lake Trasimeno, 2 hours on the train, with my hubby and son. It was wonderful. I lake swam (I miss swimming since ditching chlorine), I ate lake fish (my idea of local food!) and I sat around a lot.
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And now I’m home, I get to cook up a breakfast pancake again. Yum.
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I’ll try to get some pictures off my camera and share the glorious lake – aka My Happy Place – with you in my stories 🙂

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The first time I’ve grown beetroots. This is our harvest: leaves and roots. Is one a turnip?!
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I’ve learnt a lot. That hailstones the size of massive olives can ruin most of your leaves and that beetroot seeds are actually a cluster of many seeds and should be thinned out when they shoot (whoops). Here’s to next year’s growing season. Maybe I’ll get enough for a jar of beet kvass then?

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When I looked through the lens and saw my pizza and this empty seat, my heart ached. I love, love, love sharing my food – in all its local, seasonal, sourdough gloriousness – with my two boys, but I want to share it further.
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For now, that’s where #ancestralcookup comes in. I share my most-loved dishes with you, holding your hand through the process. I know, you’re not at the table with me, but you are cooking, eating and sharing food with other wonderful people. And I hope that comes with lots of love and smiles.
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This month’s cook up is my Wholegrain Spelt Sourdough Pizza. The recipe is in my profile. It’s super good and a wonderful way of celebrating food together. Give it a go and let me know how you like it.

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I’m determined to get supermarkets out of my life. I was almost there in the UK, but moving to another country set me back somewhat! I’ve managed it for meat, some flour and a lot of our vegetables, but I’m not there yet.
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Over breakfast, I got super-focused on my next food moves. They are:
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1/ Go to the Florence Fierucola bread festival and scout for locally-grown and milled wholegrain spelt and rye flour.
2/ Visit our local co-operative store and try to find a super local organic vegetable grower.
3/ Get on it with fish! Go visit Fabio Gallerini at the Sant’Ambrogio market in Florence and see what local fish I can find.
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And my general foodie plans also include:
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4/ Finding a butcher to teach me how to cut up a pig and how to make the wonderful Italian sausages I see all around me, and
5/ Getting more offal next month from Flavio at @lavalledelsasso, maybe even cooking some brains for the first time?
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I’m very excited about all of this. That’s what keeps me going when I find dead ends and my language skills fail me. I will get there!

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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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