Apricots and tuna, the sun and the sea

The past days have been again pretty devoided of any creativeness of sparkle.
Don't get me wrong, give me some nice ingredients, challenge me with a "I will never ever eat XX with YY" and I will be more than happy to try and change your mind creating a nice recipe for your palate. The hardest part I found these days to be writing the forewords to the recipe itself.

I have been made you used to have often almost a novel preceding the recipe itself. Being it a story telling or more often educational in nature, I like to have a deeper drive to my posts than simply "XX and YY go quite well together, try this recipe". This actually could be another nice series of pithy posts but I am not sure how you would receive them; leave me a comment and let me know please.

Call it the crazy weather, the lack of sun or of farmers’ market strolls, the result is that I haven't had any summer fruits till this week. Summer is the best fruit seasons for me. Peaches are above all my most beloved fruits of the whole year but they somehow need a warm weather, sun and breeze to be enjoyed at best.
This post is actually about apricots since I haven't find nice peaches out there yet.

Sweet, Sweet Awards

Sugar; we all know this fella, don't we?
A mysterious substance able to give us pleasure; not guilt free unfortunately.
Coming in all the shades of brown, tawny to sparkling white we are used to sprinkle it on many of our food items to enhance their flavors. Present in many natural products it represents the way nature is able to store easily accessible energies; it won't come to any surprise then that it is made of just about the most abundant chemical elements present on Earth: Carbon, Oxygen and Hydrogen.
Since few years we have been coming accustomed to choose among different varieties of sugars. Being them of natural origins or artificial, the main reason driving research in this field is the delivery of guilt-free low caloric substitutes for saccharose.

If from one side we restrict our kids' sugar intake, we as society have been over-exposed to sweetness for the last century or so; the result is a sort of dependency on this chemical.
"A spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down!" sang Mary Poppins to the whining kids and that's what we tell to ourselves often and again.

Milky sweetness for a healthy dessert

"At last we meet!" told he to the bowl in front of him. Filled with a creamy syrup, it hosted little white sponges. What were they made from? "Cheese", somebody said.
The history of me and this sweet, rich Indian dessert dates back to at least two years ago when exploring the meanders of a virtual video gallery, I stumbled upon this video from "Show Me The Curry":

Autour du Pho – Part I

You know when you feel blank, like somebody has wrapped your brain in a comfy duvet that doesn’t let anything escape? Perfect, now you can get why this cover story might be silly and laughable; the main point here is that I want to share with you all a very yummy recipe for my perfect digestive cookies.

Fragrant Almond Laksa with noodles, fresh herbs, Oriental garden crispy prawns and southern Italian Har Gao dumplings

Another month is passed and the Velveteers are back! This time was Pam who threw down the gauntlet challenging us on making Laksa.
I might say that this came quite at the right moment, when the increasing cold weather makes our bodies crave for warm soups. Laksa is indeed a satisfying and aromatic soup typically done in Singapore. As consequence to its origins, this doesn't really say it all. Singapore is quite a vibrant, multi-ethnic and voracious city. Its citizens, spanning the whole Asian nationalities and not only, can delight themselves on hundreds of food establishments able to answer that midnight crave for Dim Sum or to fill the emptiness left by a disappointing day. Singaporean cuisine is then a happy fusion of influences contextualised to the local produces. Fish and crustaceans are paramount among the available on high quality standard ingredients hence all the various typical way to cook and enjoy it, Chilli Crab the most famous.
Laksa is a way to enjoy more humble fishes along with the products of land.

Sicily Sweet and Sour

When at the Velveteers tavern we planned the hosting calendar, I chose the month of September when I would have been in Sicily.
Despite the good propositions, life in my family house can get easily out of hands. Too lazy, too relaxed, with rhythms other than my owns and the possibility that at any time somebody could drop in my room startling the hell out of me; it is not an easy environment where to concentrate in front of a screen, let alone that the TV right there, beside me. TV is indeed a strange beast, if you don’t have it you don’t miss it, but if it is around it will inevitably attract you like a magnet and so you are lost zapping between channels trying to find something watchable; settling often over a re-run of decades old TV-series (god bless Angela Lansbury and her Murder, She Wrote series!).
Days pass by like sand between your fingers; a coffee and chat with mom, some TV, some more chat with sis, more TV, brainstorming with mom about dinner, more TV. You don’t even notice and it is already dinner time and for me that means that I get to cook when all the others are already sit to dine (we have got only 3 working hobs). And so here I am, rather late for my monthly Velveteers post.

When I proposed to cook Caponata as the September Velveteers’ dish, I wanted to make it a family business but actually only I ended up eating the plated dish at the end of the shooting since we had already planned a chilli con carne night. I did though brainstorm with mom about the traditional way we are used to make this dish in my household so it still involved all the needed family members.

White Jade aka Almond Tofu

What is that nut revered and featured in many ancient cultures cuisine in the highest festivities? That nut that divided Medieval courts aside the white granular gold? The nut that is cited in the Holy Bible with pistachios?
Yes, you got it right it is the almond.
Its mellow, round, heady aroma refreshes us during summers and titillates our palates with little delicacies at coffee time year round. It was introduced in Europe most probably by the Phoenicians through the south of the Mediterranean countries and it has been for centuries a status symbol. Combining them with the precious