Involtini di aringhe

Always as a part of the kilo of herrings I’ve bought, those are inspired by the much more famous Sarde a beccafico, a typical Sicilian dish.
The problem with this recipe is that I haven’t measured the ingredients, but just followed the moment…

4 herring fillets
Breadcrumbs
Fine grain couscous
Raisins
Pinenuts
Cappers
Dill
Extra virgin olive oil
Garlic

Heat the oil and stir fry the minced garlic. Add the rest of the ingredients and cook for about 10 minutes, adding some spoonful of hot water.
Lay each fillet and spread some of the breadcrumb mixture on it. Roll it and close it with a toothpick. Cook it in a pan with some oil for 10-15 minutes.

Give me my soup!

Have I already told you my childhood story about my eternal hate for minestra???
In Italy we call minestra any souplikestuff with vegetables, diced and cooked in some kind of stock or just water… In classical culinary Italian there are two different type of minestra: in brodo (in stock or water, anyway something soupy) and asciutta (dry, and we classify in this section any pasta or rice dish). What I always hated was minestra in brodo, and especially minestrone. Just thinking about it I wince… And along with my hate for minestra goes my hate for cooked celery… In fact the only thought of the smell of boiled celery make my face change in a grimace…
Anyway, all this nice useless information, just to tell you that I’m now over my hate for minestra (although I’m not over the one for boiled celery) and now I can eat soupy stuff, but do not make me see a single dice or piece: I want them smooth, velvety thick, creamy…
And as much as I like to play with what I have in the fridge, I do even like to transform cheap ingredients in something “chic” (I’m so hilarious thinking that something chic can come out of my kitchen!!! Especially on purpose!!!) or maybe “shabby chic” (my real aim in this life…)!

4 carrots
1 fennel
1 potato
Salt
Pepper
Orange zest

Clean and dice carrots, fennel and potato. Place them in a saucepan, cover with water, add salt and bring to the boil. Let it cook for 20 minutes.
Blend everything. Serve with freshly grind pepper and the orange zest.


P.S. This picture is part of the set "Piperita bought bargain linen napkins"...

HELP!!! AIUTO!!!

UPDATE: Thanks to a link that dear Sam left on a comment to the post I wrote at the Food Blog S'coll, I think I was able to fix the problem... If you see something wrong, write asap!!!!

Aggiornamento: Grazie a Sam, che mi ha lasciato un link nei commenti a un post che ho scritto per la Food Blog S'coll, penso/spero di aver risolto il problema... Scrivetemi se vedete cose strane!


Ok, a friend told me that looking at my blog with explorer on a pc (not with a mac, problems are only with pc and explorer...) the header (aka the nice jpg over here with the name of the blog and a picture of a slice of cake that took me more than 45 minutes to make...) is not visible...
Do you agree??? And especially, HOW DO I SOLVE THE PROBLEM???????

Ok, un amico mi ha detto che l'header del blog (quella cosa che dovrebbe apparire qui sopra con il titolo del blog e una bella fetta di torta per il quale ho perso un pomeriggio della mia preziosissima vita!) non si vede su pc usando explorer (ma solo su pc, perchè i mac, ovvio, non danno problemi)...
Chi non lo vede??? E soprattutto, c'è qualcuno che mi può aiutare??????????????????????????

Chestnut&Chocolate

I do not really like chestnut and I absolutely hate marron glacé: too sweet for me, too decadent, too much, really!
But once, in a French supermarket, a beautiful boite of chestnut purée draw my undivided attention and I bought it! The first time I used it I followed a recipe sent by one of this blog’s readers and made truffles. Exquisite!
As I easily make the same mistakes all over again, the last time we’ve been in France I haven’t bought just one boite: I’ve bought two!!!
So I’m at the same point of last spring: I have to find a good use of those heavenly goodies.
Last week, reading one of my favourite blogs, I remembered how I love Nigella Lawson and how she’s always inspiring. So I took How to be a domestic goddess from the bookshelf and look chestnut in the index. Et voilà!

500 g of chestnut purée
100 g of soft butter
1 tablespoon of rum
6 eggs, separated
260 g of chocolate, melted
3 tablespoon of sugar
2 tablespoon of brown sugar

Preheat the oven at 180° C.
Mix the chestnut purée with the butter. Melt the chocolate and add it to the chestnut, together with the rum and the egg yolk.
Whip the egg white until foamy, then add first the sugar and then the brown sugar. Whip until peaky.
Fold in three times the egg whites to the chestnut chocolate mixture and combine well.
Pour in a 20 cm cake mould and bake for 45 minutes.
Let it cool, dust with cocoa or icing sugar and serve.

Warning!

Do not eat this cake after this
and this

Too much, really!!! Our bellies were stuffed to impossible levels!!! And someone (not me, I swear!) took even two slices of the cake!!!

Hay Hay It's Donna Day #9: Orange Soufflés

I do not own many of Donna Hay’s books, just two… Yeah, I know, that’s a sad story, but you can’t imagine how difficult is to find them in Italy, especially in English! And in fact the two I own are in French… That’s even sadder, isn’t it??? Yeah, I know…
But I also have some good news: I just got a subscription to Donna Hay Magazine, and that’s nice! I cheered you up, didn’t I???
Anyway, this month theme, launched by Tami at Running with Tweezers, it's soufflé... In the whole two books I own I found only one soufflé recipe: Lemon Soufflés, from Modern Classics, Book 2, Gourmandises in French.
As I wanted an orange scent, and not lemony, instead of lemon juice I’ve used orange juice, and I have to say that this soufflé recipe is absolutely for dummies (as it’s one of the simplest I ever did) and absolutely foolproof: they stand up in their shape for at least 20 minutes after you took them out of the oven!

For the ramekins:
Soft butter
Sugar

For the soufflés:
43 ml of orange juice, freshly squeezed
50 g of sugar
1/2 a tablespoon of potato starch
1 tablespoon of water
2 egg whites
35 g of sugar

Place the orange juice and sugar in a little saucepan and bring slowly to the boil. Water down the potato starch and add it to the orange juice and sugar. Continue cooking for one minute stirring constantly: you’ll end up with a thick shiny cream. Transfer it in the fridge and let it cool completely.
Preheat the oven a 180° C.
Whip the egg whites with a pinch of salt, until they are fluffy and softly picked, add the sugar, whipping continuously. When the white are shining, stop beating and add them to the orange cream.
Butter each ramekin, cover it with sugar and fill it with the egg whites mixture. Place them on a baking sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes WITHOUT opening the oven door. Serve them hot, as soon as you take them out of the oven. Makes four individual soufflés.

Donna, in her book, advises you to make collars with greaseproof paper, but if you fill your ramekin to the edge line, you shouldn’t need any collar, like in the picture below…


P.S. This picture is part of the set "Piperita bought bargain linen napkins"...

Linguine con le aringhe

Last time I went to my fishmonger I found fresh herring fillets at 2.50 € per kilo! Of course I’ve bought a kilo: they are good, healthy and surprisingly cheap!

3 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
3 herring fillets, skinned and diced
6-8 cherry tomatoes, diced
few branches of dill
10 black olives
200 g of linguine


Bring to the boil a lot of water for the pasta.
Heat 1 tablespoon of oil in a big pan and fry the garlic. Add the diced herrings, let the m cook for 2 minutes, then add the tomatoes, dill and the olives. Let it cook. In the meanwhile, salt the water and cook the pasta al dente. Drain the pasta and add it to the pan, add the last tablespoon of olive oil and turn everything together.

Sformatini di catalogna

My ode to catalogna wasn’t a joke: I really love this greenery! Last time I went to the market I bought a huge tuft, cooked the outer leaves and ate raw the inside (puntarelle) following a great recipe.
As I can’t always eat catalogna with pasta (for the good of this blog), I made this little pies (albeit I’m not sure you can call them pie, as they are something between pie and soufflé).

300 g of cooked catalogna
250 g of ricotta
100 of stracchino
3 tablespoons of parmesan
2 eggs
1 clove of garlic
Salt and pepper

Mix everything in a food processor until smooth. Butter few little moulds or a big one, cover with breadcrumbs and fill them with you mixed mixture. Cook in a preheated oven for 25 minutes or until golden.

P.S. This picture is the first of a huge set that goes under the title: Piperita bought bargain linen napkins. Be ready for more!!!

SHF#27, Chocolate by brand: Cranberry and chocolate cookies

For this month Sugar High Friday, hosted by chocolate master David Lebovitz, the theme is (obviously) chocolate, not in general terms, but by brand.
As I grew up near the Italy-Switzerland border, my entire childhood has been surrounded by chocolate of different kind and shapes: Lindor all year long (bought by kilos…), bunnies end huge eggs for Easter, bars of any flavour (my favourite is the big bar of milk chocolate with whole hazelnut!!!), many different kind of pralines, truffles, orangettes covered with chocolate… One of my friends’ mother worked at the Lindt factory and her house was constantly filled with chocolate of any kind: we had it after lunch, for the afternoon break and often while we studied!
But variety doesn’t always mean quality! Lindt chocolate is good quality chocolate, with a high percentage of cocoa and I was lucky enough to have tasted some good quality chocolates in Torino and France. But recognising quality doesn’t always lead to use it to cook a chocolate cake or cookie! I’m guilty as charged: when I want to make a chocolate dessert at home I go for the cheapest chocolate. Why? Laziness? Probably… Greed? Probably too… I realize that if you use Valrhona your cake sure tastes better, but when you cook 2 or 3 chocolate cakes a month (because your friends are so incredibly voracious) you forget about high quality and you choose the cheapest with the highest percentage of cocoa!
And so it was for those cookies! The original recipe (from Nigella Lawson’s Feast, for the memory of which I have to thank THE Cream Puff: I’ve almost forgot how amazing that book is!!!) stated only white chocolate, but as white chocolate is often not even considered chocolate, I used half white and half dark.
The white is Lindt (which produces the best white chocolate you can find in supermarkets) and the black is Zaini, a brand produced in Milan, with 50% minimum of cocoa. Zaini has the main advantage to sell 400 g bars, which are quite handy when you use a lot of chocolate. I wouldn’t recommend it for a chocolate tasting night, but it’s fair enough to cook with.
And now, the cookies!!!

125 g of very soft butter
75 g of vergeoise brune
50 g of sugar
50 g of brown sugar
1 egg
140 g of flour
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
1/2 teaspoon of salt
75 g of flaked or rolled oats
100 g of dried cranberries
50 g of walnuts, roughly chopped
70 g of white chocolate, roughly chopped
70 g of dark chocolate, roughly chopped


Preheat the oven at 180° C.
Beat butter and sugars together, until you obtain a soft cream. Add the egg and beat until smooth. Then add the dried ingredients, beating constantly. Fold in cranberries, walnuts and chocolates. Let it rest in the fridge for 15 minutes.
Cover two baking sheets with greaseproof paper. Lay spoonfuls of batter, far between, and squish them down with a fork. You should have approximately 30-32 cookies.
Cook for 12-15 minutes, until golden. After cooking, let them cool on the baking sheets.

Mange-tout soup

Yesterday night I opened the fridge and all I saw were some sad vegetables that screamed, “Cook me or kill me!”
I cooked them…

1 red pepper
1 leek
1 fennel
1 courgette
1 little pumpkin
2 potatoes

1 teaspoon of red curry paste
Salt

Tarragon to decorate

Clean and cut in chunks all the vegetables. Throw them in a saucepan, add 2 litre of water, curry paste and salt. Bring to the boil and cook it for 30 minutes, or until all the vegetables are cooked trough.
Blend everything. Serve hot with some Tarragon leaves.

Pizza?

Maybe…
As you may have understood reading my blog, I’m not a big fan of strict rules in the kitchen: I like “tradition”, but I dislike close-minded vision where only “tradition” can exist. We are lucky enough to live in a big wide world made of so many different minds that the term “tradition” can mean many many things!
So pizza.
My favourite pizza of all is a simple margherita: tomatoes, mozzarella and basil. I personally cannot stand the French version of pizza, as they use Gruyere, but it’s a matter of taste. I’ve never tried the American version, but, for what I can see on TV and in movies, I don’t think I would like it either, but even this is matter of taste, nothing else… And for French and Americans their way to make pizza is absolutely “traditional”.
So, for a speedy version, maybe even shabby chic (in a good way!), of the traditional whole earth pizza, why not try this? Maybe even in individual serving…

Pizza Tatin

Puff pastry
Tomatoes
Mozzarella
Salt and pepper

Roll out the puff pastry, cut a circle bigger than the mould you are going to use.
In a cake mould lay the sliced tomatoes, season them, lay over them the sliced mozzarella, season, then cover with puff pastry, folding the edges between the filling and the mould.
Cook in a preheated oven for 20-25 minutes. Serve upside down.

As you can imagine, this Tatin has a major problem: the mozzarella tend to stick in the bottom of the cake mould. As I did it only once I cannot give you a foolproof option, but I think that if you put in the cake mould some greaseproof paper maybe you can avoid this inconvenient.
Or, you can do the pizza in the “normal” way, puff pastry under, tomatoes and mozzarella… But how sad is that?????????????????????? ;-)
(You can see it on the picture below...)