The Sunny Kitchen - An Italian cook in Amsterdam

Barba di frate marinata (marinated monk's beard)

Monk's beard, what a strange name!
It's the common name of salsola soda, a beautiful plant that grows in my country and is known to like salty environments (think: growing very close to the sea and don't minding being irrigated with salty water).
For ages it's been a very humble plant used more for soap and glass production than for its taste while nowadays it's a real delicacy - one quite difficult to find here in Holland!
Thanks to a lovely colleague of mine who brought me a beautiful bunch of agretti (the other Italian name for this beautiful little plant) I was able to have my students of the "Basics of the Italian Cuisine" cooking course prepare it and enjoy it.

We served it cold, like a salad, and we used a recipe I found on an old Italian cooking magazine, slightly adapted to my own taste.
It's a lovely salad, very tasty also thanks to the use of Taggia olives (the very small, dark black olives from my birth region Liguria), perfect as part of a light Spring menu.

If you want to know more about barba di frate take a look at its very own Wikipedia page. :)

 

Barba di frate marinata

Serves 6-8

Ingredients:

1 bunch of monk's beard (about 300-400 gr.)
60 gr. black olives, preferably Taggia
1 organic lemon
1 clove of garlic
1 tablespoon of capers in vinegar, rinsed
1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley
extra virgin olive oil
sea salt

Chop the parsley leaves after discarding the stalks and the peeled garlic clove.

Grate half the lemon zest and mix with the parsley and the garlic.

Chop the capers and the olives very coarsely and add them to the parsley mixture.

Add the juice of ½ lemon, a pinch of salt and 4 tablespoons of olive oil.

Blanch the monk beard for 2-3 minutes in boiling salted water.
Drain and stop the cooking process by dipping the monk's beard in ice cold water. Drain well.

Put the monk's beard into a bowl and pour the dressing on it.
Allow some time to marinate in the refrigerator and take out the fridge half an hour before serving.

 

What a good idea, coffee for kisses! :)

During the whole month of June at café Metro St. James inside Hyde Park in Sidney you can pay your cup of coffee with a kiss. What a nice idea!

To know more about this nice initiative take a look at the video. I want this in Holland too! :)

 

  

Photo: cookbook paradise

@Frankfurt's Book Fair

 

Photo: greetings from Frankfurt

The view from my room. #Buchmesse

 

Photo: Den Haag (The Hague)

 

Beautiful sunset on a beautiful city.

 

My 2nd cookbook is coming!

After almost 1 year of preparation and hard work (in August it will be one year exactly since we started working at this project) my 2nd cookbook will be a reality, at last! :)
In Holland and Belgium it will be available from half September and I can hardly wait!

It's called "Cucina di casa mia - recepten van een Italiaanse familie" (as you probably understand I wrote it in Dutch ;D), it contains 85 great family recipes, lots of anecdotes and cooking tips.

Moreover, it's illustrated with the wonderful photographs of Jan Bartelsman, one of Holland's most appreciated and famous food photographers. 

The styling - yes, I even had a stylist! - has been done by Jan-Willem van Riel, also very well known in the Dutch food world.

 

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My Mum, Gabriella Formigoni, has been fundamental is the making of this book: lots of the dishes in it are hers or from her parents, Nonna Isa and Nonno Angelo, and she helped me to "interpret" their handwritten recipes and, most of all, to cook all of them!
We worked 6 very intense days in the kitchen of my cooking school which had been transformed in a professional photo studio by Jan Bartelsman. Here you can see a few "action" pics taken by me during those days, last May.

There's also a little "making of" video made by my friend Francesco Cavaliere in which you can see the whole Cucina di casa mia team at work!
And for this occasion my pubisher made me a wonderful present: a song written expressely for the video by Italian-Dutch singer Veronique Sodano! Look, listen and enjoy! :)
And don't forget to pre-order the book at one of Holland's book sites like www.kookboek.nl, www.bruna.nl or boekenvoorjou.nl!
(under the video you can see some screen dumps from the latest version of the book, still to be corrected)


P.S. If there's any non-Dutch publisher interested in translating the book in other languages, please contact my publisher Willem Warbout at Choizes. Grazie!

 

 

 

Citrus Love, my Summer 2010 cocktail

I adore all that is citrus and tend to use it a lot in my cooking.
I drink it a lot, too. Every morning I press a lime or a lemon, preferably organic, to blend it with other types of fresh fruit in my smoothie.
I'm kind of a citrus-addict. No wonder the only soft drink I drink more than twice a year - in general I tend to boycott soft drinks 'cause they're full of sugar and other not-so-healthy stuff - is Chinotto, a very old-fashioned Italian drink that now seems to enjoy a well-deserved comeback and is becoming quite popular again in my country.
I say "no wonder" because chinotto is not only a soft drink but a type of citrus. Its Latin name is Citrus Myrtifolia and in Italy this plant grows really well in the Liguria region and in Sicily.
The chinotto fruit is very bitter. So much that it's impossibile to eat it like an orange or a tangerine unless it's candied. One of my favourite treats on earth are the bitter chocolate covered chinotto's made by Domori, one of the finest Italian chocolate producers. A must if you love chocolate AND chinotto. While eating my first one I discovered the real meaning of "match made in heaven" and I need just one of those little plump candied fellas to be a happier person.

The soft drink that takes its name from this fruit originating in China is made by several Italian soft-drink producers and it's usually very pleasantly bitter-sweet. My favourite one is made by Lurisia and the San Pellegrino one is quite OK too.
These days I'm drinking it a lot "straight" and I thought it would be nice to combine it with some other ingredients in a cocktail, for a change.
So this is the result. My Citrus Love Italian cocktail.

You need 1/4 Bombay Sapphire gin, 3/4 Chinotto, preferably Lurisia, the juice of 1 lime, some crushed mint leaves, ice cubes and a slice of green lime to decorate.

Mix well and enjoy!

Handy tool for wine lovers

Seen yesterday at a wine tasting organized by Dutch importer Vinites: "My Wine Record", a cute and handy little wanna-have for everybody who wants to keep a journal of the good wines tasted during parties, meals at restaurants, drinks at wine bars et cetera.

It's a little black book with a cool and beautiful design (Dutch design!) and it contains special so-called Record Labels that allow you to remove bottle labels without having to soak them or steam them off.

You stick a transparent Record Label to the bottle label and after a short while both can be taken off the bottle together without tearing the wine label.
Then you can stick everything onto your "My Wine Record" booklet and have your "wine souvenir" for ever and ever!

With your "My Wine Record" you can record all details about your favourite wines: red, white or rosé, where and when, with whom, the dish you enjoyed it with, types of grape, year, price and so forth.
Like this you'll always be able to remember those easy-to-forget details and keep a good record of your tastings.

It sounds like pure genius! It would be, if it always worked fine... I've tried it once with a bottle of Pinot Noir from Framingham's and it tore off only part of the label.
I guess it has to do with the different types of glue used for the labels. Hopefully the makers - Rogier van Camp en Mark van Elk - will find a good solution for that shortly.

In any case, I find this little gadget quite nice. If you don't have the whole label you can at least write down your own personal tasting notes on a stylish little notebook.

Visit the "My Wine Record" site here.

Sunset on the sea, Bari, March 2, 2010

Jamie Oliver's speech at TED Prize 2010: his wish

Sensible.

Powerful.

Inspiring.

Love the man. Go Jamie, go!