I’ve been on holiday, AT LAST. In spite of the fact that I adore my job I was totally fed up with working – I’ve been working hard all Summer – and, horror of horrors, I hadn’t had a REAL holiday in the last four years.
So the REAL holiday I long dreamed finally became a reality at the end of October. I spent it in a lovely B&B in Pontassieve (Florence) doing nothing but eating, drinking, sleeping, going to visit nice places and nice people and sitting in front of the fireplace with my belly full of wonderful stuff that I can only dream of when I’m home (in Amsterdam, that is). :) Something like the twohundredfiftyfivemillions different types of Tuscan pecorino cheese (OMG they make so many here and they’re all wonderful!!!). Or the little wild boar salamis made in small-scale and free from additives unlike the mainstream ones. And really fresh porcini mushrooms. And what about fried artichokes the way my mum makes them? (I’m sooooo lucky, she’s was sharing this holiday with me so I was able to eat them again!).
Talking of my mum and of porcini mushrooms, , I thought of filming her during one of her cooking sessions here in Tuscany. In this video she’s making one of her many classics, porcini mushrooms and potatoes in the oven.
We found some wonderful porcini – this is the perfect season – and we decided to prepare this yummy side dish. Red potatoes are amazing and stay perfectly firm so I really advise using them for this dish. If you like, you can also slice them a bit thicker and cook them a bit longer. If you’re a millionaire or related to a millionaire – porcini are quite pricey -you can build even more layers to make this dish even more luscious and sinful. Mmmm, what a great taste, and with so little ingredients. Just porcini, potatoes, olive oil, salt and oregano. A bit of black pepper wouldn’t be bad idea at all, if you like it.
For the recipe and the video in Italian, click here.
A meal with friends. Some very old ones (Vincenzo, whom I met in Amsterdam immediately after I went to live there, 24 years ago) and some new ones like Maria, Vincenzo's sister who offered me and my dog Mirtilla a beautiful and comfortable room in her home in Pisa, plus Cristiana, one of Maria's closest friends. Three ladies and a Pisano - Vincenzo is a real pisano, very direct and sincere, qualities I really appreciate - in a wonderful restaurant run by women in Pisa (La Leopolda, Piazza Guerrazzi 11). The location used to be a railway station and is now a warm, welcoming place where you can eat some of the very simple and yet great plates of the Tuscan tradition. Think of a tortino di carciofi con lardo di Colonnata (an artichoke flan with cannellini beans and wonderful, thinly sliced pork fat from Colonnata - a delicacy even for those who normally remove the fat from the ham like I do). We ALL chose it and we ALL loved it till the last bit.
The choice at La Leopolda is quite simple: two starters (the one we don't try is the steak tartare of chianina meat with green apple), five primi (first courses), five secondi and six desserts. Simple and yet difficult: what's it going to be??? Everything sounds extremely appealing. We chose to share three primi: spaghettoni con puntarelle e alici (with chicory and anchovy, actually more of a Roman dish than a Tuscan one), pappardelle con la lepre (thick tagliatelle-like pasta with savoury a tomato-hare meat sauce) and the wonderful testaroli cacio e pepe. Testaroli is a dish served in Tuscany - mostly the Lunigiana region - and Liguria that consists of little squares cut from thick pancakes made mostly of spelt flour and then served with pesto or other sauces. Here we eat them with a simple dressing of extra vergine olive oil, pecorino cheese and black pepper.
After that primi, we go on with sharing and choose for the coscio di cinta senese arrosto con le rape (a wonderful pork roast made from special Cinta senese pigs) and the peposo, a earthy, sturdy stew with lots (and I mean LOTS) of black pepper and red wine, something so good you'll definitely want to eat again if you appreciate the strong flavors that often characterize the Tuscan cuisine. It was my first peposo and I immediately fell in love with it. What a dish! Impossible to ignore it because of the thick, dark, spicy sauce and the wonderfully tender meat slowly cooked in wine. This is real slow food!
Since in the afternoon Vincenzo and I have been visiting the village where his grandpa came from - Palaia - we chose a wine that comes from that area, a 2004 red Toscana IGT Rosso Sangervasio (80% Sangiovese, 20% Merlot and 10% Cabernet) that perfectly matches the strength of the peposo. After that, no desserts are necessary anymore even though the choice is tempting, for example the chocolate and pear cake or the goat cheese bavarois with a port, raspberry and chocolate sauce and a mascarpone cheese and coffee cream. A simple, strong espresso (simply called caffè in Italian) is more than enough.
La Leopolda changes menu quite often and the prices are really good. The most expensive meat dish - the tagliata di chianina with rocket - costs 16.00 euros. The average price for a meat dish is 12.00 euros. Bread and self-made bubbly water are two euros per person. The food is great and the atmosphere warm and pleasant, the ladies do their very best to make their clients full-bellied and happy and, last but not least, the hand-written wine list is rich and varied. Mostly Tuscan wines with - quite a peculiar detail - only French bubbles. The restaurant is also dog-friendly and that makes a big difference for people like me who like to take their four legged friends with them as often as they can. Another big plus: you can find the wine list online with labels and grape types for most of the available wines! Definitely a place worth coming back when is Pisa, thus. A big cheer for the ladies at La Leopolda: complimenti, ragazze!
As I already said, I'm very glad to be back in Amsterdam and at the same time I would have loved to stay a few more days in Tuscany. They're both two of my favourite places on earth so most of the times it's very difficult to make a choice of where to be and for how long but, hey, I see it more as a privilege than a burden. :)
In a sense I HAD to come back immediately after my cooking holiday at Tuscan agriturismo Il cantastorie because last Monday we started the second level of the sommelier course organized by AIS (the Italian Sommelier Association) at the Amsterdam Hilton and if there's one thing I definitely want to avoid is missing some of the lessons. I just LOVE this course.
Our teacher during these first two days was Andrea Gori, a young sommelier from Florence who's already reached great levels of fame and professionality in the relatively short period that he's been working in the wine business. Andrea is an enthousiastic teacher and has a very interesting wine blog called Vino da Burde plus a restaurant in Florence called Trattoria da Burde that I hope to be visiting soon.
When he told me that he blogs what he's been doing, seeing and tasting mostly on the very night he's been to an event or has visited a new restaurant I felt a bit ashamed of my extremely slow "blogging pattern" and at the same time very inspired to - at least try and - do the same. So thank you Andrea for getting me here in front of my laptop so late at night sorting pictures and writing stuff I'll need to re-read in the morning 'cause I'm too sleepy to make some sense. ;)
After the first day of the course, dinner at Segugio with some of my fellow students followed. Segugio is one of the best (and best known) Italian restaurants in Amsterdam, situated in the Utrechsestraat, one of my favourite Amsterdam streets for its many restaurants and original shops. The menu had been chosen for us by Emanuele Birtolo, studying to become AIS sommelier and working at Segugio.
The great kitchen staff guided by chef Fabio Ardu spoiled us with a crostino of self-made focaccia with buffalo mozzarella and a quite interesting bell pepper sauce, red mullet fillet on a bed of sea aster with baby fennel a butter-lemon sauce, a great - and very, very, VERY al dente - risotto with saffron and testùn (the lovely cheese from the Piedmont region), some temptingly sweet ravioli filled with home made sausage and served with a fresh tomato sauce, a wonderfully tender and juicy veal fillet with steamed vegetables in Parmigiano sauce and, dulcis in fundo, a GREAT dessert with a creamy, surprising and nicely spiced homemade clove ice-cream served with a very sexy and luscious little chocolate fondant. Even the raspberry that came with it was absolutely perfect: plump, moist and sweeter than sweet. A fantastic combination with the rich chocolate of the fondant...
Everything was accompanied by the wines chosen in "joint-venture" by Andrea and Emanuele. We've had some very good stuff like a Vernaccia di San Gimignano Montenidoli Carato 2005, a Teroldego Rotaliano Foradori 2005, a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo S. Martino Rosso Marina Cvetic (don't remember the year) and a nice and smooth Recioto della Valpolicella classico Venturini 2005 that came with the dessert.
It's been a great evening made of good food, good wines, nice conversation and a very cheerful, intelligent and inspiring company. Thanks to Andrea for explaining us so many things about the wines without making it feel like a "serious" lesson but ore like a breathtaking adventure - something he manages to do every time he's teaching.
An evening to be repeated soon, I hope. Seeing the enthousiasm and the eagerness to learn, to share and to be together of my fellow students and myself I have no doubt we'll have many more evenings like this one. Can't wait for the next occasion!
If you have just one week of holidays and yet you love to cook so much that you think your work is great fun and that it's even more fun if done with your friends, you might want to shoot a cooking video.
That's one of the things I did during my short Apulian holiday at the end of January. My friend Valentina and I decided it was time for another video recipe - and for some serious laughing during the shoots which, lucky you, we're going to spare you. It all resulted in the filming of a classic Apulian dish, the calzone di cipolla, made by a Genovese who grew up in Puglia. :)
I'm not going to tell you HOW MANY onions I had to peel, cut and fry to make this dish (if you ever decide to shoot a cooking video make sure you always have at least three times the necessary ingredients just in case something goes wrong and you have to do a shot all over again...), I'll just say that after the shooting I smelled like I had spent four days in a row frying onion rings in a fast-food restaurant (brrrr!). Not pleasant AT ALL. So now you know that, in case you were thinking of making 3 calzoni next weekend. :) Oh, and don't forget to put a wet cloth under your chopping board while cutting the ingredients otherwise everything will inexorably slide away while you're working! ;D And serve on beautiful dinnerware. Although this is a simple dish, it deserves the very best!
Here the video and the recipe. My thanks to Valentina of Nikolaus Produzioni for filming, (and for the good laugh), to Arno at helderfilm.nl for editing the video and adding all those cool special effects and to Gianni Ciardo for the beautiful jazz music!
250 gr. of plain flour (possibly of the 00 type) 250 gr. of
durum wheat flour 25 gr. of fresh yeast (or two teaspoons of dry granulated yeast) 1 teaspoon of sugar 2 teaspoons of
salt for the dough 2 dl of
lukewarm water 8 small sweet white onions (or 4 big
ones) 5 anchovy fillets in oil 2 tablespoons of raisins 100 gr. of pitted green or black
olives 50 gr of
grated pecorino cheese (Sardinian, Roman or Sicilian) 1 ½ dl. of olive oil extravergine coarse sea salt black pepper
Mix the yeast
with 2 dl. of lukewarm water and a teaspoon of sugar. Dissolve yeast and sugar properly. The sugar is going to boost the activation of the yeast.
Mix together the two types of flour (you can sieve the plain
flour first to make sure you get no lumps). Add 2 teaspoons of salt and
mix further. Add the water with sugar and
yeast and then the the olive oil, mixing everything well. Transfer the mixture on the
table and kneed until the dough is compact and yet very elastic. Use
some extra olive oil if the dough feels too dry and some extra flour if the
dough sticks to the working top.
Divide the dough in 2 balls, one
of which a bit bigger than the other one. Cut a cross on top of each ball
of dough using a knife and leave to rise under a wet kitchen
cloth on a warm place for about 15 to 20 minutes (this calzone dough doesn’t really
have to rise for a long time).
Soak the
raisins in warm water, rinse them and pat them dry with kitchen paper.
Cut the pitted olives in rings and
put them aside in a small bowl.
Peel the sweet onions and cut them
in rings. Fry the onions in olive oil until
soft and glazy, and do that preferably on a low fire and with the lid on the
pan so that they can get all soft in their own steam and caramelise a bit.
Season the onions with salt and pepper and leave them to cool off.
Mix well the onions with the
soaked raisins, the grated pecorino cheese, and the anchovies cut in small
pieces.
Flatten the two dough balls with a
rolling pin. Lay the bigger piece of dough on
a previously greased oven dish. Fill with the onion mixture.Cover with the smaller piece of
flattened dough and seal the borders.
Grease the top side of the
calzone with some olive oil, sprinkle with coarse sea
salt and put in the pre-heated oven at
200°C for about 30 minutes.
Serve lukewarm with a good glass
of wine, for example a good Locorotondo from Puglia, and buon appetito! :)
When Valentina and I were at the beautiful agriturismo called Il Frantoio near Fasano where we had a fantastic dinner prepared with the freshest vegetables and herbs from their own land - they have lots of olive trees, a beautiful citrus garden protected from the colder winds of the winter, other fruit trees and a rich production of vegetables they use to prepare the meals for the guests and wonderful preserves in lovely glass jars- we shot a lot of pictures and enjoyed the food and the wine with some of the other guests, a group of actors that where in Puglia to play Shakespeare's "Much ado about nothing" in the nearby Brindisi. The appetizer they
gave us was a simple and yet so tasty little something, as tasty as everything else in Puglia: the fave fritte (fried fava beans), extremely easy to make (see picture and recipe below).You can find dried, peeled fava (broad) beans in Middle Eastern stores. In Puglia they're also used to make the wonderful purée eaten with cicorie, a slightly bitter type of greens that grow abundantly on the Apulian land, and lot of olive oil extra vergine. The fave fritte can be eaten with the aperitivo.
In the afternoon we also went to Alberobello with its typical trulli, the lovely buildings with their cone-shaped roof that make this Apulian town so characteristic.
Valentina made a showreel with some of the pictures we've taken during our little trip. The beautiful jazz music is from Gianni Ciardo, a comedian, actor and musician from Bari.
After the very, VERY busy November and December months - so busy I didn't feel like writing anything on my blogs neither did I really have the time and energy to do it - it was high time I had a little holiday to recharge my batteries that were pretty depleted. What better way to do that than going South, to Bari in the beautiful Apuliaregion where I grew up, to get a bit spoiled by Mum and Dad, to spend quality time with family and friends and to overeat as I usually do when I'm there? My friend Valentina says that when she's with me we always get some food, one way or the other. I wonder why. :D
We got dined and wined alright, the two of us. We went roaming around Puglia(the Italian name for Apulia) in her cool black Volvo - funnily enough most Italians seem to prefer cars that are NOT Italian even though that does not include me, the 3 cars I've owned were and are all made by FIAT - for great food and beautiful places, something of a passion we both share, and got ourselves interacting with some fabulous chefs and great producers that were more than happy to let us try the results of their culinary talents. All of them where, of course, kind of "twist my arm!" occasions. ;D
On our way to stunningly beautiful Masseria Il Frantoio in the vicinity of Ostuni where we had dined the evening before (more about it later) we visited a fantastic caseificio (a cheese maker) in Speziale di Fasano, a little village, and bought all sorts of cheeses for our little colazione al sacco (packed lunch), from wonderful, juicy nodini (little mozzarella's in the shape of a knot, nodo in Italian) to lovely fresh ricotta and giuncata (soft, fresh and delicate cheese, better eaten on the very same day), smoked cacioricotta (a harder, ripened ricotta made from a mixture of cow's and sheep's milk) and a yummie caciocavallo ripened in the local Primitivo wine. Of course when lunch time arrived Valentina and I couldn't resist the temptation of eating the nodini with our hands right out of the plastic bag accompanied by some wonderful crunchy tarallini, the little ring-shaped bread sticks typical of this region, and that while still driving! I guess there's really nothing that can stop us from getting food into our mouths...
Freshly made mozzarella is too good to resist...
At home, after our tour, tarallini and smoked cacioricotta with a good glass of wine
A dinner with friends - Simona, Ruben, Marco and Gigi - at Gigi's place, the lovely old house in Amsterdam Noord with the beautiful kitchen I envy every time I'm there. :) Gigi cooked and we ate in his garden, drinking cold Lugana wine.
Before dinner I made spritz (you can see the ingredients - prosecco, Campari, gin and orange - on the table) and discovered that my version of this aperitivo is too strong from my friends from Veneto (Simona and Marco, real veneti). They prefer to make it lighter with bubbly mineral water spritzed directly from a plastic bottle: make a hole in the plastic cap and then squeeze the bottle pressing the water through the hole so that it gets directly into the glass. Marco's tip, better than a seltzer siphon! :)
Gigi prepared a wonderful pasta with fresh artichoke, squid and little red mullets on top. After that, Marco and I were left to our own devices to cook the monkfish. Very simple, you would think: just extra virgin olive oil, white wine and flat-leaf parsley. To tell you the truth I had never prepared monkfish before and wasn't really satisfied with the result. I had the feeling it could have cooked longer but I was afraid of spoiling those beautiful little white "tails" by overcooking them. One type of fish I definitely want to experiment more with.
Thank you Gigi for the always so warm hospitality and the always so wonderful food!
The chef at work while Marco is watching him to learn some of his secrets ;)
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