R is for…

R&R!

That’s right. Danda and I are leaving these wintery shores (well, not exactly wintery, it’s quite nice and sunny in England now) for warmer climes abroad (my weather app says there’ll be cloud but I’m hoping otherwise).

Yes, we’re off to Italy. To the beautiful island of Capri. To the coast. To the sea. To the pizzas of Naples. To the ash-preserved ruins of Pompeii. To the volcanic heights of Vesuvius. To the colossal sights of Capua. To the porcini mushrooms and fresh asparagus of the street markets. To the truffle laden plates of pasta. To the bowls piled high with homemade icecream. To the strong palate-cleansing espressos. To the mountains and the blue skies and bays of the Amalfi coast.

Off we go! Here’s hoping my phone works over there!

Omygoodness, you HAVE to see this

Readers, prepare yourselves. Prepare yourselves for a post filled with horror and awfulness. For we are going to take journey into the world of….

1970S COOKBOOKS!

I came across this in a box of old cookbooks a friend was giving away and boy, was I glad I picked this one up! It is called Hamlyn All Colour Cookbook. And let me tell you this, it is all colour. It is proud and gregarious in it’s all-colour horror. It would have done better to leave the photographs off, for I shall show you the pictures of what the 1970s considered haute cuisine. Are you ready?!

Mmm, I just love a mysterious lumpy white mass for my dinner.

Wowzers. More lumpy white nonsense, this time surrounded by green leafy stuff. Can we have that for dinner today, Mum? Can we?!

Ah, some white nonsense on top of salmon steaks, again the obligatory green leafy nonsense. This is actually a jellified mayonnaise layer, in case you were wondering.

And again, jellified mayonnaise, this time on top of chicken. LOVING the decorative anchovies… Kind of.

Talking of things being jellied, check out this turkey-slices-set-in-jelly type of thing.

Next up, a small roasted chicken, sitting on a bed of jelly stuff squares. WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH US? Why, Britain, why did we do this to ourselves? Mary Berry has a lot to answer for.

More chicken related nonsense. A cake type thing, made of chicken. Vomit. And the asparagus on the top. That’s quite fresh and lovely, you think, at least that bit’s ok. Well, no, no it isn’t. Because it is FROM A CAN! In fact, I am instructed to use many things from cans.

This ‘peach tart’ requires 1 can of creamed rice for the filling. Ridiculous. On another recipe I am actually told to get frozen chips! Honestly now, frozen chips. If I have frozen chips at home and I choose to eat them, that is different. But to actually include it as an ingredient for a meal in a cookbook?! Has the world gone crazy?! I think probably the worst sentence I have ever seen written down in a book anywhere is the line, ‘Fry the frozen chips in the lard.’ What. On. Earth.

Fry.

The frozen chips.

In the lard.

Honestly. I’m not making it up. Look.

This book has a continental section though. We’re aware of the fine cuisine offered in other countries. Let’s get fancy in our kitchens. Ok, check out the next recipe. I’m sure it will be delicious. Mmm, continental food. Italian pasta… French fancies… There’s bound to be something good here.

Frankfurter salad. I have no words.

This one’s good. It’s cheesy buttered noodles. The ingredients? Cheese, butter and noodles. Brilliant.

Last up, some lovely desserts. Don’t let me down here. The British have contributed some well-loved cakes to the world of food. Come on. What will it be? A Christmas pudding? An eccles cake? An apple crumble? A rhubarb crumble? Something cakey and warm. A hearty cake to heat one up on a cold winter’s evening.

That’s right. We’ve gone with a dish of pasta shells in chocolate sauce with lines of cream for ‘decoration.’

And now, the award for the most attractive sounding dish in the history of the world ever, goes to….

Woop woop! Can I get a round of applause for the LARDY CAKE! Mm mm. Don’t you think? Yes, a peice of lardy cake for me please! Am I allowed seconds? Oo, hold me back, hold me back! I can’t get enough of good lardy cake, me.

Well, after that romp through the annals of British food history, I feel thoroughly disheartened and can only apologise in earnest to the world for our below-par cuisine ramblings. We have failed ourselves as a nation.

I understand if you would like to un-follow me, fellow bloggers.

A review of recent truffle products

My adventures in the land of truffles began just four months ago after an encounter with this amazing truffle butter…

It’s the type of thing that, at room temperature, you could eat in one go, with some breadsticks and/or some thin crackers. It’s a dangerous thing to have in the fridge, due to the desire to just eat it in one go. Now I’m not a health expert or anything but I think that eating sticks of butter isn’t really recommended. But once you peel back the pack and catch a whiff of its truffley goodness, you become helpless.

My next encounter was with truffle honey, which I was initially puzzled by. I liked it but had no idea what to do with it. Then someone told me to drizzle it over homemade pizzas and it was brilliant! When figs were in season and dirt cheap at Waitrose, I would bake entire trays of them on a really low heat for 4 hours, drizzled with truffle honey, orange zest and grated nutmeg. Mm mm.

I then discovered truffle pasta. I tried a few different brands but this one was my favourite as it was nice and thin and the taste strong enough to carry a meal without too much help.

It was like the most gourmet meal ever to cook the pasta and toss it with some sauteed oyster mushrooms then finish it with a tartufo formaggio cream by a company called Vallebona. So simple but so so tasty.

Next, someone bought me some truffle salt.

I didn’t want to just throw it into anything, the way I would with normal salt. So I made a foccaccia bread in which I used a bit of the truffle butter in the dough. When oiling the pan I baked it in, I used truffle oil. When sprinkling the bread with chilli flakes I also added the truffle salt. When baked, I sprinkled a little more truffle salt on and let it cool. And it was phenomenal! It was easily the best bread I’ve ever eaten.

My next truffle product was truffle oil.

The white is more delicate than the black so is good for finishing things with, like a homemade pizza or a risotto. The black truffle oil works well in a homemade pesto, with pecorino, pine nuts and tons of basil.

Next, a friend brought back some truffle breadsticks from Paris and I scoffed them in one go! They were great, especially with a little knob of truffle butter on the end.

The next encounter was extremely unexpected. Out for Christmas drinks with work, we decided to get a few platters to all pick at as no-one felt like an entire meal of their own. The vegetarian platter was near me so I grabbed a pita and dug into the houmous….. And I could taste truffle! I checked with the waitress and she confirmed that it was truffle houmous. Truffle houmous! It was phenomenal. I haven’t found it to buy anywhere. If you see any, you have to buy it. It’s amazing.

Lastly, yesterday, while in Nottingham with a friend, we wandered into a deli and found black truffle pecorino! I ate almost the whole block by itself on the train ride home!

On chocolate

More Nanny Rhino today…

 

I’m not one of those girls who’s mad on chocolate. I like it, don’t get me wrong. But whenever I think of chocolate lovers, I think of a girl I went to secondary school with, Gwen, who would go around the common room in sixth form, asking if anyone had chocolate with them and could she buy it from them. She’d be brandishing a fifty pence piece to back up her request and asking around desperately. At the time, I was a bit young to wonder why she had such a thing for chocolate. I just thought it was a little strange.

 

Alternately, a girl I went to junior school with, Louise, was allergic to chocolate! Allergic! It’d be a pretty sad existence if you couldn’t give in to the odd chocolate moment.

 

When my brother and I were younger, I distinctly remember being a massive fan of Yorkie bars. It was always my favourite. If we got given 50p by a generous relative, we would scuttle off to the sweet shop around the corner and giggle excitedly, while we looked at all the sherbet sticks and flying saucer sweets and fried egg sweets and Mr Freezy flavoured ice sticks. A lot of the time, though, I’d get a Yorkie. Now I think about it, I fear I may have been wasting a fantastic opportunity for potential sweetie-induced happiness. I just wanted a big bar of solid chocolate. Then Yorkie brought out these adverts on TV which said, “Yorkie! Not for girls!” So I had a little-girl-tiff and stopped buying them. I switched my allegiance to Dime bars, which were about half the price anyway, and shook my proverbial fist at the the Yorkie makers, knowing they’d notice my missing custom and regret their silly no-girls advert.

 

Speaking of chocolate, actually, there are lots of new weird and wacky things happening with chocolate, which take inspiration from it’s original use as a savoury drink, mixed with chilli, when first discovered and drunk in South America. So chilli chocolate bars abound the shelves of high end delicatessens or your local Whole Foods. I like the idea of liking chilli and chocolate together. I have tried, and failed, to get myself to like it. I just cannot stand the prickly heat in the back of my throat after I have swallowed a lovely mouthful of sweet melty chocolate. My senses scream at me to stop. It is just wrong, I’m sorry for those of you who love this combination.

 

Another thing which doesn’t work for me is chocolate pasta. I had originally thought that it would be great with something savoury. A friend told me he had it with a veal dish. Great, I thought, let me be gourmet and get into this chocolate pasta scene! Then someone told me that I had it all wrong. Chocolate pasta was a dessert and I must warm some cream up, add walnuts, cook my pasta and then add it to my warm cream and walnuts, mix around and then serve up, as my dessert. Ok, I thought, that sounds interesting, I can do that.

 

And I did it.

 

And it tasted like…. pasta with cream and walnuts. Normal regular pasta with cream and walnuts. In all honesty, cream and walnuts are not my usual accompaniment to pasta so I put it aside, disappointed. All that anticipation, all that planning… and it just tasted like regular pasta. Maybe I got it from the wrong company. Maybe I should have looked around for a really great quality one or asked for recommendations. Anyway, that’s the end of the road for my chocolate pasta journey, I think.

 

Now, another chocolate thing that I have reached the end of the road with is chocolate mousse. Not eating it! No, I am of course still eating it. Making it myself at home though, no more! In the early days of cooking in my kitchen, I didn’t have an electric whisk so I whisked my egg whites by hand. I would get severe arm ache and give up before it had quite finished being whisked. I’d just keep on with the recipe, in blind hope that it would be fine. It wasn’t. It would come out to dense and hard, instead of soft and fluffy. I tried it a second time, having convinced myself that the eggs must have been rubbish or something. The same thing happened. So I stopped making chocolate mousse. Maybe that’s silly, because now I have an electric whisk so I could try it again. I think I have a mental block with chocolate mousse now though.

 

I did go through a stage of drinking unsweetened hot chocolate not too long ago. It was an unexpected pleasure which grew on me. I used Bournville cocoa powder, steamed milk and vanilla or almond extract. I occasionally used orange oil but it tended to overwhelm the whole thing. Peppermint did the same and almost tasted toothpaste-ish. So I stuck to vanilla or almond. Because it’s bitter, it takes a few times to get used to it but I started really looking forward to my evening vanilla hot chocolate after a while.

 

Another of my favourite things to do with chocolate when I have guests over is a kind of help-yourself thing. I grate a load of dark chocolate, finely chop some mint, mix them together and put it in a small dish. I grate some more and zest an orange in with it and put that into a dish. Sometimes I do one of plain dark chocolate grated. You can play around with what flavours you want to add. Then I get loads of those mini pots of icecream and tell everyone to pick a pot and top it with whatever they want from the dishes of chocolate. Or you could go even simpler, get a huge bowl, half some strawberries and throw in some cherries, then get some dark chocolate and break it roughly into pieces and throw in aswell and get get nibbling.

 

With Christmas approaching, I am guessing my chocolate intake will increase drastically. Not because there is far better chocolate around at Christmas and I will be unable to control myself. It’s more because it will be there, freely available and right in front of my face (of course, I could choose not to stand directly in front of the Christmas chocolate and sweeties aisle at the supermarket but I like it there, ok?). So I will eat it. Because I can see it. Advent calendars, not a favourite or any special memories but a nice reason to eat chocolate first thing every morning. A selection box, again no amazing memories, just that my grandfather used to get us one every year, without fail. But if I bought all those individual chocolate bars in a shop and ate them all in one day, people would judge me, quite harshly I should think. Wrap it in a plastic packet with a fun Christmas picture on the front and call it a ‘selection box’ and it’s suddenly fine! Eat them all, no problem!

 

In Namibia, my friend Lucy and I, used to get a chocolate bar called Top Deck, if we had any spare money. This was an exciting time for us, when it happened. It was white chocolate on the bottom and milk chocolate on the top. It looked beautiful and we loved it, although I’ve no memory of how it tasted.

 

Reflections on Rome

Since returning from Rome, I have introduced some new habits into my daily routine, in an attempt to pretend I’m still on holiday.

I have at least one espresso a day. I have it quite short, a bit less than a single shot of coffee. I don’t put any milk or sugar or anything in it. And it is much tastier. I think the longer you run the espresso for, the more bitter it goes. As my previous dislike of coffee generally arose from the bitter taste, I am well on my way to liking coffee if I can figure out how to make it not bitter. So I just have a short one.

I also eat little Italian pastries quite often and, as yet, am unsure whether this is a reliving-the-holiday thing or a greedy-cow thing. I will usually have one with my espresso. Maybe that habit needs to calm down…? (When I was wondering aloud with a friend about how the Italians are not fat, she said, in an ominous tone, “O but they are! Check them out after they’ve turned 30, it’s not pretty.”)

I have eaten risotto both evenings for dinner since my return. Both times, I made it with porcini mushrooms and when it was cooked all the way through, right before I put it on the plate, I mixed in white truffle and parmesan. Porcini mushrooms and white truffle with dinner every evening will start to make me a poor Laura, if I don’t watch it…!

On the truffle front, do you remember when I went mental on discovering the truffle butter at the Fine Food Fair?

Well, I was worried about trying to find it online because I thought it could turn into a real obsession, if I knew how to get it. Stupidly, I was having a truffle moment and was ordering some truffle pasta online and found the EXACT truffle butter I tasted. So I ordered one black and one white. This could be the beginning of my downfall, people. I’ll be writing posts about how I’m scared to go outside and I just stay inside all day, eating sticks of butter as though they are chocolate bars. I’ll quit my job and have bad cholesterol and turn my nose up at green vegetables. I may need you all to help me through.

I also wear my very Italian apron, when cooking my risotto, as it helps me feel all Italian. I got it at a little shop near the Pantheon. Here is a photo of me posing in it….

I asked Danda what things he learned from our Roman Holiday and what habits he has kept up. He said “Ice cream.”

Theatres, baths and lunch on the Tiber

The last day of the trip was my favourite. That is possibly something to do with the fact that I started it by eating tiramisu. Maybe. We packed our bags ready to leave and left them in the apartment til later.

We started out with coffee, obviously. I was doing a great job at attempting to develop a coffee habit. Their cappuccinos don’t come hot, which confused me. I think it could be to do with the fact that coffee is very functional there. People don’t walk around with huge coffees in takeaway cups. You have a small cup standing at a bar or sitting in a cafe and you drink it quickly before going to work in the morning, hence it comes lukewarm, instead of hot. Anyone know anything about how Italians drink coffee who can prove or disprove my theory?

Anyway, after coffee and tiramisu, we headed around the Colossuem to the Palatine Hill, where all the rich people and emperors lived.

The weather was beautiful and I think the area surrounding it is still quite upmarket. Something about it felt different, nicer. There was a sports ground near the ruins on Palatine Hill where tanned older gentlemen ran around the track in pairs, looking like retired film stars.

We went to the Baths of Caracalla, the ruins of the world’s largest leisure centre. It is so immense, you can’t quite take in what you are seeing.

The entire thing was for bathing. It had all those cold rooms and hot rooms and parts where you swim and parts where you plunge before going into a different room, etc. The complex was on two floors and also had shops and other things in the building.

Entire sections of the mosaic floor are still in place and there are huge chunks of mosaics from the second floor dotted around from when the upstairs sections collapsed.

After this, we kept following the Palatine Hill down to the Circus Maximus, where the chariot races used to take place. It was the world’s largest arena. (There are lots of ‘world’s largest’ things in Rome.)

Both ends have building work going on, which looks a bit like reconstruction work on the ruins of the seating area but we couldn’t see for definite. This is what the chariot race scene in Ben Hur is based on, if any of you have seen it.

After this, we headed through Roman Holiday territory, past the Mouth of Truth that Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn go to, and to the Teatro Di Marcellus. This might have been the thing that I liked the most, in terms of old and new Rome meeting. The two thousand year old building has a new section built on top if it, two floors of apartments.

I really REALLY want to live there. How amazing would that be?

Once we had spent a while wandering around the old porticos, we were in what had once been decreed a Jewish Ghetto and the Jewish people who lived there had all their rights as citizens taken away from them. There didn’t seem to be a reason apart from that the emperor at that time had decided it.

We were right next to the Tiber by this point so we stopped for a quick espresso and ice cream break. I had tiramisu flavoured ice cream. Danda had an ice cream who’s flavour we couldn’t read on the label and that he loved. He said it was the best ice cream he had ever tasted.

We headed to Tiber Island next, which has always had a connection with medicine. Even now, it still has a hospital run by nuns. On the other side of the river is Trastevere, where we had lunch. Friends had recommended the restaurants in this part of town so we stopped in the first place we saw, Ristorante “la Cornucopia”.

We shared a tomato and mozzarella salad then had a sea bass dish, which looked a bit normal but tasted phenomenal.

There we were, the sun was shining, we were surrounded by greenery, street musicians were serenading the diners and my lunch was amazing. That was probably my favourite moment of the trip. I was just revelling in the luxury of being able to do nothing for a while.

Soon after this, we had to think about making our way to the airport so we walked back to the apartment to get our bags and headed to the tube station next to the Colossuem.

Espresso, ice cream and truffles

…not all together!

We started yesterday morning by walking to the end of our road, where the Colossuem is. See it there at the bottom?

We picked up some fairly pricey, but tasty, breakfast over the road from the Colossuem and sat marvelling at it’s size. At the bottom of our road, before you cross the road to the Colossuem, is a gladiator training ground. There was an underground passage for the gladiators to go direct from their training ground, to the rooms and corridors under the floor of the Colossuem. The emperor also used this corridor to get into the Colossuem to avoid the crowds in the piazza.

We then pottered over to the Roman Forum area where there were once lots of temples and senate buildings. It's amazing to think, as you wander past the little kiosks with their bunches of fruit and slices of coconut for sale, that thousands of years ago, the men and women who would shape our world were swishing about (swishing? did the Romans 'swish'?) in their robes, discussing points of law and bathing.

The world of two thousand years ago and the world of today coexist surprisingly well in Rome. Sometimes you forget the gravity of what you are seeing, the magnitude of these ruins and their importance, because the local Italians are going about their business as usual. Buses and trams snake around the edge of the Colossuem and life goes on as usual for the policemen hanging out by their cars in the Piazza del Rotondo, which houses the Pantheon.

On our way to the Pantheon, we happened across the Campo Di Fiore, an amazing market, selling everything that you imagine to be quintessentially Italian.

I found a man doing tasters of white truffle butter with crackers and was transported back a few weeks ago to my amazing truffle experience in London. Danda turned up his nose at this heart-stoppingly beautiful truffle butter and located instead some humorous pasta shapes.

Shortly after this, we were in the Piazza Navona, admiring street painters and debating which of the many gelatarias to buy our ice cream from.

We decided on one and asked the guy behind the counter which flavour was the best. He pointed out an illuminous blue one and when I looked closely at the flavour on the label it said Viagra! Viagra flavoured ice cream! Hilarious. Surprisingly, I opted for something else. Pistachio. It was amazing.

The fountain in the Piazza Navona is huge and impressive. In fact, everything in Rome is huge and impressive. They seem to take the original plans of the building before they start it, zoom it by at least 200%, THEN build it.

Every time we came across a huge building front, we’d scramble for the map, to see what it was. It would usually turn out to just be a regular church or something. They’re all like that. If the Romans were trying to intimidate by showing off about how much power they had with the size of their buildings, then it has worked. I am intimidated.

Next we found the Pantheon and went inside for half an hour or so, soaking up the atmosphere.

It is a beautiful building, well preserved as it has been in use the entire time up to the present day. Often, buildings like the Colossuem were abandoned, ransacked, left to the elements, then given new life as a tourist attraction, which means a lot of work needs doing on them. The Pantheon is still pretty much as it was when it was built. I kept running my hands over the huge columns and thinking how thousands of years ago, someone else was probably running their hands over the same spot, admiring their size.

Next, we were on a mission to find coffee. I had read that the Tazza D’Oro did the best coffee in Rome and, as a non-coffee drinker, thought this might be the thing to change my mind. We dawdled about, trying to catch the barista’s eye, feeling a bit awkward and getting ignored. Danda suddenly remembered that you have to go to the till and pay, then get a receipt and bring your receipt to the barista and he makes your coffee. No wonder he was ignoring us, we didn’t have a receipt. Without further ado, we paid and got our coffees.

It was bitter… And strong…. And quite small. And I think it was tasty. I couldn’t say for certain. But I think it was tasty. This was a step in the right direction!

Soon after, we realised our legs were about to give out and we headed back to our apartment on the Gay Street of Rome. On our way, we stopped for dinner in one of the little family run restaurants which has seating on the pavement outside. I ordered a pasta dish with porcini mushrooms and a hint of tartufo. It was delicious. Simple and delicious.

On the way back, we visited the shop which provided us with the tasty wraps the night before and I got a cannolo almost the same size as myself.

With no shame at all, I scoffed it down and wondered aloud if there weren’t another to be found close by. Danda shook his head in disbelief and banned me from going and getting another one…..