I hang my head in shame

For I am a terrible person not to have blogged for weeks! I know, how will you ever forgive me?

Let’s see if I can make up for it. As some of you will know I spent a week in Italy with Italian Housemate’s friends and family. We stayed in a little farmhouse in Baratti, a tiny village in Tuscany; beautiful scenery, beautiful weather and oh my, the food! The kitchen in Baratti was Massimo’s territory, and I know a territorial chef if I see one.

So instead of cooking, for my Italian week I watched and learned, asking annoying questions to Massimo who cannot speak English and receiving answers in Italian. It is not only the English that react to somebody not understanding by speaking LOUDER AND S L O W E R.

It turns out the Italians do like to stay true to stereotype; I have never eaten so much pasta in my entire life! I think I practically rolled home, but boy it was worth it.  I’m sure you don’t want to hear about each and every meal I had, but I’ll go through a couple of the highlights…

Dried Aubergines with Mint

The Italians have a rather different relationship with vegetables than we do (and food in general), they are seen more as a course in themselves as opposed to something we have to eat or to go with meat, and with dishes like this I can understand it.

Aubergines are a funny kind of vegetable, I’ve always quite liked them, but they seem to be rather hit and miss. Sometimes they can be ever so soggy and when I have one in the fridge I often am just not sure what to do with it. Well, I have a new favourite aubergine dish. Simply dried in the sun for 24 hours (that’s the Italian sun, not the English sun) and fried over with mint (yes, mint!)  they are seriously superb.

The mint was just growing wild near the house!

I have tried to replicate this dish twice since I have been home, with both fantastic and disastrous results. First time I dried them out in the sun (it was a very hot day) for a day and left out in the kitchen overnight with salt on, they worked perfectly. However, with the recent spat of good weather I decided to repeat the experiment and IT WAS NOT A GOOD IDEA! I ended up with mouldy aubergines after only a day. It seems you need a very dry heat for this dish, I’ll come back with a recipe once I have worked out a suitable alternative to good old sunlight.

Fresh Pasta

You know, I don’t think I have ever tried fresh, home made pasta before…I’ve missed out. I couldn’t even hope to give you any quantities here as Massimo just threw the flour down, I do however know he used semolina as well as flour (not in most recipes) and less semolina than flour.

I’ve just had my first go at pasta this week, I was really pleased with the results but it’s such hard work! I thought my arms were fairly used to kneading, but kneading pasta is on another level. It took the combined efforts of Italian Housemate, New Housemate and me to get this going, Massimo made it look easy.

Once kneaded, it sits covered in the fridge for an hour before rolling out. Massimo would roll it out, then sprinkle flour all over the dough and then wrap and roll the dough around the rolling pin.

I’m not entirely certain as to why, but when I was doing it myself I think it helped show up where the dough was unevenly rolled. Once thin enough, pasta was cut into long thick strips and laid on floured foil until ready for cooking.

The pasta was served with pesto, there was nothing new or different about Massimo’s pesto, it was just the quality of the basil. As he was grinding it down in the pestle and mortar (metal affects the taste of the basil) the whole house smelt of it, it was truly wonderful and a perfect complement to the fresh pasta, and that was just the starter!

I think I should probably stop now for risk of boring anybody, though I really haven’t touched on half the dishes. Mussels cooked in seawater, the mysterious ‘palamito’ fish (which translates to trawl line, not exactly a fish!), tomato risotto (with the tomato juice and no stock or wine) not to mention the Carpaccio or even the basic tomato sauces. What I really took away from the food this week was that you really can’t beat good quality, fresh ingredients…or Italian sun!

Simple Fresh Tomato Pasta Sauce

I’m pretty sure I have said somewhere before that I’ll rave about a basic fresh tomato pasta sauce. Well, as you may have already figured out, that time has come! Ready in as little as 20 minutes (though if you can bear with it doing it slower is even better) and with just 4 basic ingredients it really is a doddle (olive oil is an ingredient, sugar and salt are seasoning). Italian house mate has informed me that they only use cherry tomatoes to make pasta sauce like this, as the large ones create a rather orange outcome…so there you go, some real Italian wisdom! You can make a sauce with as few as 8 cherry tomatoes if you use good pasta that the sauce really sticks to. The key to this is to cook the onions as slowly as possible to bring out their natural sweetness. 

Ingredients

Approx 500g cherry tomatoes
1 white onion
1 clove of garlic 
Pinch of sugar
Pinch of salt
Extra Virgin Olive Oil


Dice the onions and garlic (or crush the garlic if you have a crusher). Halve the tomatoes.

Heat a pan with a good glug of olive oil in and add the onions and garlic. Cook very slowly for as long as you can stand, keep them moving so they don’t brown. After at least 10 minutes add the tomatoes and turn the heat to medium. After another 10 minutes when the tomatoes have started to break down taste and add sugar and salt as needed. Stir and continue cooking on low for another 5 minutes (or prepare earlier and turn off the heat at this point, then heat before serving).

Just before serving you can add (though it is not necessary) any mix of fresh herbs you fancy. Basil is obviously a classic favourite but parsley and coriander work nicely too.