Category Archives: Cooking

Tricolore Treats

28 Thursday Aug 2014

Posted by in Cooking, Garden, Home

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I get a real kick out of making food in the colours of the Italian Flag. Red, white and green. My favorite pizza, the Margherita, is made with basil, tomato and cheese. It was invented in Naples as a tribute to the Italian flag, also known as the Tricolore.

Tricolore

In the dish in this photo I used Basil from my garden and combined it with, tomato, bocconcini and prosciutto to create a Tricolore antipasto. I only wish I could share it with my cousin Antonello in Italy. Its been too long since we’ve shared a meal together.

Here is a link to more Tricolori dishes https://www.google.com/search?q=Tricolore+food&client=firefox-a&hs=y3r&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&channel=sb&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=_Z_-U4UOiJ2MAumogBA&ved=0CFcQsAQ&biw=1441&bih=1060

 

Sunflowers in the Garden

23 Saturday Mar 2013

Posted by in art, China, Cooking, Garden, Home, Photography, Travel

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A few weeks before we left for China I pulled up most of the vegies from the garden. I didn’t want our guests to walk out to a garden full of weeds so I scattered flower seeds randomly in the garden bed. Some of these were sunflowers and they sprouted immediately. We saw the first flowers bursting through just before we left.

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Our guests tell me that they loved walking out and seeing a patch of bright colour everyday. By the time we got back the sunflowers were at the end of their life so I replaced them with basil, eggplants bok choy and spinach. However, they were not ready to give up the garden totally and soon enough seeds from the old sunflowers started to sprout amongst the basil. I was so glad because I’ve always loved sunflowers.

When I was a child I would plant the seeds in any nook and cranny. Then when the flowers were spent I would dry them out and eat the seeds with my mum. I’m going to try this with poppet when these flowers go to seed.

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I love the way the flowers turn with the sun. In fact the Italian name for them is Girasole, which literally mean ‘turn with the sun’. Curiously, they also seem to follow me around. Where ever I go I come across them. Maybe it’s just that they’re common or that they grow almost anywhere or that I notice them because I love them so much. In any case, over the years they have kept me company and cheered me up in my travels.

Kwinana

I took this photo in 1991 in Kwinana, an industrial suburb in Perth on one of my first photographic adventures with poppet’s dad. This was long before digital photography; when you used film sparingly. This was the only shot of the sunflower I took that day and I can still remember the moment the shutter clicked.

When we went to Italy in 1999 we ran into an enormous field of sunflowers driving from Venice to Rome and had to stop and get amongst them. (This is a much younger me.)

Italy Sun

I kept seeing them in China but sadly I didn’t take any photos.  However, it did make me think about Ai Wei Wei’s installation Sunflower Seeds. I haven’t seen it but the idea of it excites me. The work is made up of millions of hand crafted porcelain sunflower seeds. Apparently, sunflower seeds were one of the few treats during the cultural revolution and friends would catch up while indulging in this simple pleasure. I noticed that this practice continues today in other forms. Once when we went to dinner with a group of friends in Shanghai bowls of sunflower seeds were placed on the table at the end of the meal and everyone began cracking the husks open. It reminded me of my childhood when I would dry out my sunflower seeds and them munch on them with my mum.

I’ve added these links to Ai Wei Wei’s Sunflower Seeds.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-ai-weiwei-sunflower-seeds

http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/72/SunflowerSeedsAiWeiwei

My Tiny Italian Garden goes to China

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in China, Cooking, Garden, Photography, Travel

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I finally have access to my blog. I promised lots of people that I would start up my blog again from China but I haven’t been able to access wordpress until today.

My idea is to try out the kinds of reflections I make about gardens, food, photography and culture in My Tiny Italian Garden blog while visiting China. Perhaps this sounds a little crazy but our little family is made up of me, an Italian Australian, my partner, a Croatian Australian and our son, a Chinese Australian. We make up a little assemblage with connections in all sorts of directions. So my life is already a mix of cultures, languages and images; and my experiences, thoughts and ways of seeing the world are a product of these various connections.

In any case I always felt there are many crossovers between Italian culture and Chinese culture. Both cultures are family oriented, food obsessed, child focused, prioritise education, save carefully for their future and have a culture of losing and saving face. In Italian its called ‘brutta figura’; to show oneself in a poor light or to present a bad image of oneself and ‘bella figura’ to present oneself in a good light. Anyway I’m not discounting the many differences but I am looking for points of connections to see if anything new and interesting comes out of them. And I’ll try to add some interesting photos along the way.

Loving the Lime: Part Two

27 Sunday Jun 2010

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I looked outside my kitchen window into the backyard the other day and noticed the lime tree was full of over ripe fruit. The limes were going yellow and Poppet had started referring to them as lemons. Now I just had to work out what to do with them. A few weeks ago we went to a two year old’s birthday party where they served curry accompanied with hot lime chutney. The mum was Indian Fijian and the chutney was a family recipe. It was without doubt the best chutney I have ever tried. I wondered it I could replicate it. I wish I had asked for the recipe but I didn’t. Instead I trawled the internet for a recipe that seemed to contain all the same elements. Last weekend my partner and I sliced up a dozen limes, a hand full of chillies mixed them up with spices and other ingredients and made hot lime chutney. It will be another few weeks before we can try it, but I have high hopes for it.

This week I used some of the remaining limes to make a lime and orange marmalade. I would like to be modest but its difficult because the it turned out to be unbelievably delicious. The family loved it. When I mentioned I was going to give a jar to a friend Poppet retaliated with a defiant NO. I had to explain that it was simple to make more. I’ve never made jam before so I’m thrilled.

Soft Roasted Vegetables For a Tender Palate

09 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by in Cooking, Uncategorized

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I had some serious dental surgery last week and I’ve only been able to eat soft pappy food since. So I’m trying to come up with interesting and healthy soft food. I roasted these vegetables a few days ago in lots of olive oil until they were so soft you could chew them with gums alone. I tossed them together to make a warm salad and then added some more olive oil. I scoff when I’m watching a cooking show and they suggest using a drizzle of olive oil to cook with, or worse still a splash. The cooking classes on Biggest Loser went even further with a spray of oil–which is basically a mist. How can food cooked in a mist of oil have any flavour? We Italians have other ideas when it comes to cooking with olive oil–the drizzle can easily turn into a downpour or even a deluge. People often ask me how I get my pasta sauce so sweet and yummy. Don’t be stingy and use lots of olive oil I tell them.

Things to do with Spring Onions (The Scallion)

23 Sunday May 2010

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I love fresh spring onions. I use them in Italian and Chinese cooking. The thing I find frustrating about buying a whole bunch, or even half a bunch, is that I never get through them before the delicate green leaves begin to soften and wilt. (I like them really fresh) This is why I decided I would have them as a staple in my little garden. My dad always had spring onions in his garden and my mother picked them as she used them. Today I headed out in the rain twice to pick some for cooking.

At lunch time I made a very basic omelette my mother would make us when short of time. You simple fry a chopped spring onion and some chopped parsley for a minute add the beaten eggs grate some Romano cheese over the top and cook till ready. You need to use the whole onion because like the Chinese, Italians use the green leaves as well as the white base.

Later in the evening I rushed out again to pick another one to use in the topping for my Chinese Steamed Chicken with Hot Sour Sauce. I’m always happy when I have Italian and Chinese food in the same day.

Pasta Frank Sinatra

14 Friday May 2010

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Rome 1999 and my Zia Franca makes the most satisfying pasta sauce. She tells us its called ‘Pasta Frank Sinatra’. The myths goes like this: Whenever Frank came to Rome he made a point of eating a particular restaurant that served a hearty pasta sauce containing fried eggplant, zucchini, Spanish onions, garlic and red capsicum. The media picks up the story and the pasta is renamed ‘Pasta Frank Sinatra’. Soon everyone is cooking it at home.

When Franca made it for me she told me the key to the dish is to fry all the different vegetables separately so they cook evenly. Only then are they thrown together in a pan and cooked in a tomato passata. When I have time I follow this method and it works beautifully. But I don’t always have time, so I’ve worked out an order in which to add the different vegetables so they cook fairly evenly. I then add the tomato passata. It turns out a treat and is incredibly healthy.

Pizza Night, Family Night

10 Monday May 2010

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I love making pizza because no one can resist a slice. It’s definitely an inter-generational favourite and a great way for me to use my oregano. Following in my mother’s footsteps, I make mine rectangular not round. It cuts into squares which fit neatly into hands of all shapes and sizes. Unlike round pizza, it doesn’t taper off into a thin floppy point that encourages the topping to slide off. My mother made it for us as a special treat. We always had it at birthday parties. The kids would literally lunge at it as soon as it was served up. She was forever warning everyone how hot it was. She’d also make it just for the family. We always ate way too much.

I made pizza last Friday night. The oven was stuck on maximum temperature so it was very difficult to get right. I had to open the door every now and then to stop the pizza from burning. The next day it stopped working all together in the middle of baking some Ginger Bread People I had longed promised Poppet. That was the last straw. I put the rest of the dough in the freezer and promptly went out and bought another cooker. Can’t wait for it to arrive!