Guy’s Tomato Sauce

This recipe is taken from:

“Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes: The Best of Anna Del Conte” (Anna Del Conte)

I’m always searching for a quick and easy tomato sauce, as it forms the basis of so many recipes. I have this ideal of a freezer chock full of home-made stock and sauces, ready for whatever culinary whim comes my way. However, since my freezer at the moment is just big enough to accommodate a couple of ice-cube trays and the odd wine cooling emergency, that’ll have to wait. But this sauce, one of the many tomato sauces in Anna Del Conte’s fantastic book, will be first on my freezing list.

The one thing that I’ve learned about sauces living in Italy is the art of the barely-moving simmer. If you want your sauce to have depth of flavour, you need to be prepared to cook it for at least an hour on the lowest possible gas so it just burbles. This sauce is simplicity itself to prepare, but the only thing it needs is time. My rule of thumb for sauce quantities is one 400g tin of tomatoes for every two people. Quantities below are for two, multiply for the freezer accordingly.

I first cooked this to serve with zucchini and feta cakes.

Technorati Tags: food, food and drink, home cooking, italian, recipe, sauce, tomato, vegetarian

Zucchini and feta cakes

This recipe is adapted from:

“The Kitchen Diaries” (Nigel Slater)

As I’ve mentioned, here in Milan we’re going through something of a heat wave, so I thought I’d at least nod to summer and make these delicious little fresh tasting cakes. Well, that, and the fact that I had a bag of courgettes lurking at the bottom of the fridge looking a bit sad and neglected.

Nigel Slater’s recipe included dill as a main seasoning, which I have to say that I’m not a fan of, unless it’s fringing some excellent gravlax. I used the aromatic fresh herbs that are around right now – a mixture of fresh marjoram, oregano, lemon thyme and flat-leaved parsley – but you could use, I think, any selection of soft-leaved fragrant herbs with great results. A bit of mint would be lovely, I’m sure.

Really, rather than cakes, these remind me of individual frittatas but where eggs are used just to bind them together, rather than being the main ingredient. It struck me as I was cooking them, that you could probably cook one big cake filling the whole frying pan rather than individual ones. This would also help to cut the fat used for frying too.

The original recipe suggests that you serve the zucchini cakes with a fine-quality coarse chutney, which I think would be spot on for a summery lunch, with some crusty white bread along side. We were eating this quite late in the evening, and it was a very dark night, it being only March, so a completely salady supper seemed wrong. I decided to make a tomato sauce to go alongside, and serve rice instead of bread.

Technorati Tags: cheese, courgette, feta, food, food and drink, home cooking, cooking, recipe, summer, vegetables, vegetarian, zucchini

Leek and potato soup

Here in Milan, we’re having a pseudo-spring. It’s 21°C, sunny and judging by the resident birds on my balcony, the animals are full of the joys of it too. The cherry blossom is nearly over, and they’re having to fly in frozen mimosa for the Festa Della Donna on March 8th, and all this after only a few days of having to wear a winter coat. I think everyone feels a bit guilty about enjoying this weather, what with the tv news blaring on about climate change, and the uncertainty of whether winter’s going to come back and give us one last nip before a proper spring. It certainly does feel a bit weird to have skipped straight from autumn back to sunshine.

This one’s another winter warmer – judging by the sky today, it’ll probably be the last of the year. I didn’t cook it to warm us up, but because we needed a bit of TLC, and this is classic comfort food, for me at least. I know that it is not a good idea to associate food with psychological reward, or use it as an emotional crutch, or as comfort. But given that I do, together with most of the population, I think if you balance this with some food that actually does you good (soup rather than the proverbial Cadbury’s Milk Tray), then you’re not going to enter that cycle of feeling rubbish because you ate rubbish because you felt rubbish.

This is my soul food, simple though it is, and it is perfect with buttered wholegrain bread, preferably nubbly with seeds, and some sort of cheese, either grated on top, or in chunks to eat alongside. I used grated parmesan because it was around, but I longed for some cheddar, grated thickly on top and melting oozingly into the soup.

Technorati Tags: food, food and drink, home cooking, leek, potato, vegetables, recipe, soup, vegetarian

Mushroom risotto

I have a risotto jinx, which I try to overcome periodically. I’m not going to list the things that have gone wrong with mine, in order not to jinx any readers in return (that’s some very Italian thinking for you), but suffice it to say that I have somehow made risotti that were both too crunchy and too mushy… yeuch. I know that the method I’m following is right (thanks mum), but somehow that doesn’t usually translate into the actual execution. However, yesterday’s attempt wasn’t too bad when measured on the Husband Eagerness For Seconds scale… so I think it’s fit to share.

Obviously the more wild and interesting your mushrooms are the better. Yesterday I could only get boring old champignons, but I soaked some dried porcini in boiled water and added these to the sauté, which helped to deepen the flavour. I also added some of the soaking liquid to the stock.

This recipe is more than enough for two, but with the leftovers you can follow Nigel Slater‘s advice and make shallow-fried risotto patties – I’m going to try that one over the weekend.

Technorati Tags: food, food and drink, home cooking, mushroom, vegetables, recipe, rice, risotto, vegetarian

Roast chicken

You could probably get through life without knowing how to roast a chicken, but the question is, would you want to? Nigella Lawson

Many cooks have written about the joys of roast chicken, and I don’t know if I can add anything particularly poetic to what has already been written. However, there is something spookily energy-produced-from-nowhere about the roast chicken equation – a minimal culinary effort that delivers a vast beneficial effect to stomach and mind. And, I don’t know about you, but seeing my man carve up a bird and pass me a burnished leg makes me go weak at my unreconstructed knees.

Technorati Tags: chicken, food, food and drink, meat, home cooking, recipe, roast

Rice pudding

There’s no pudding rice in Italy, but Arborio is a great substitute with its starchy covering that makes risottos, and this pudding, even more creamy. I like my pudding with raisins in it, rather than adding jam or golden syrup afterwards, so that you get little bursts of fresh-tasting warm fruit to go with the unctuous rice. Really, the recipe depends on your container and what you have available – add as much or as little cream, double cream, milk and butter as you dare. This version came out fairly stiff, so next time I would experiment with adding more milk to rice to get more creaminess.

Technorati Tags: dessert, food, food and drink, home cooking, pudding, desserts, recipe, rice

Apple and walnut crumble

This recipe is taken from:

“How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food (Cookery)” (Nigella Lawson)

Sometimes, only the flavours of your childhood will comfort you, especially on a drizzly February Wednesday. My mum makes the best crumble in the world (no, really), simple and unadorned, using as little sugar as possible, just to bring out the flavour of the fruit, and often with a bit of wholemeal flour in the topping to really increase the homely quotient. Last night, I wanted to make something just a little different from her plain but splendid pudding, so I got Nigella out, as per usual, and found this slightly fancier, delicious version for 2 hungry people. I think Nigella prefers her puddings to be a lot sweeter than Mum and I, so although I used her quantities for sugar as below, next time I would probably add a little less. If you have a different sized dish, slice the apples first to see how many you can fit in, then adjust the crumble quantities accordingly.

Technorati Tags: apple, dessert, desserts, food, food and drink, home cooking, pudding, baking, recipe, walnut

Pasta al forno for T

This recipe is adapted from the Baked Veal and Ham Pasta in

“How to Eat: Pleasures and Principles of Good Food (Cookery)” (Nigella Lawson), in itself a really delicious, tomato-free dish.

Italians, particularly Tuscans, are famous for talking about their food – conversation at the dinner table with my husband’s family always involves food – what we’re eating at the moment, what we ate at other memorable meals, what we’re going to eat tonight and what we’d really like to eat in the future when it’s back in season.

This cultural obsession with food does make it a little daunting for an outsider to dare to try to replicate at home. Italians are not shy about giving criticism or about grilling you as to the exact method you used, even if they happen to be your husband, and sometimes you feel a bit more diplomatic silent chewing might be in order. So I have generally shied away from the classics (particularly pasta) to avoid, let’s say, helpful comparisons. But with a husband seemingly obsessed by pasta al forno, sometimes I do have to try, and sometimes, as last night, I succeeded.

Technorati Tags: food, food and drink, home cooking, italian, pasta, recipe, veal

Almond and orange cake

This recipe is taken from:

“Amaretto, Apple Cake and Artichokes: The Best of Anna Del Conte” (Anna Del Conte)

This is a delicious moist and fragrant cake from Anna Del Conte’s wonderful collection of her best recipes. It also keeps well, as I found out after leaving it behind, not very well wrapped, before going away for the weekend; it was still great on Monday morning.

She suggests that you blanch, peel and chop/grind your own almonds rather than using readyground nuts. I did as she suggests, but I do find that it’s difficult to get the almonds finely ground enough without them turning to paste. It might just be practice, but I think next time I’ll just use ground almonds from a packet. I used fantastically juicy tarocco oranges which gave lots of bright pinky orange juice.

Technorati Tags: almond, baking, cake, dessert, food, food and drink, home cooking, orange, pudding, cooking, recipe