Penne with pumpkin-sage sauce crispy bacon and amarettini crumbs

Penne with pumpkin-sage sauce, crispy bacon and amarettini crumbs by Alessio Fangano on 500px

For one of my cooking class I wanted to develop a recipe inspired by the famous "tortelli di zucca" done in Emilia-Romagna in Italy. Pumpkin, sage, bacon, amaretti is what I came up with. Inviting enough? What do you think?

Sicilian Pasta e Broccoli in Support for Sandy

Last week the New York area got hit by a terrible "hurricane" that crippled the city and the surrounding states. From this side of the Ocean, we couldn't help but feel the angst of the people getting ready for what was to come. Those who didn't have to evacuate were getting ready to live without electricity for a few days.
Being from Sicily, I am used to loosing electricity power almost at each storm that hit my town, but this never last more than a couple of hours. I can't imagine what it means to remap our life around camp stoves and charcoal grills with the fear that most of the food was spoiling away in a dark and warm fridge.
Furthermore, when trees fall not only the power lines are affected but also the telephone ones are and this is enough to send far-away siblings into fibrillation.

Pasta with Zucchini and my second Cooking Class

It never happens but when it does it is in the worst moment possible. How often have we said these words with a cursing tone toward the stars (or the municipal house).
I have been living in Germany for roughly 7 years now and can still count on the tip of my fingers the times that transports have gone on strike, actually I think they are quite under 5 in total and yesterday was one of these.

Cooking classes and my Tomato sauce

March is starting to look like a pretty busy month. Long time has passed since I had so many deadlines and possibilities to earn some money.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I have started giving cooking classes in my town, Bonn. It took some time for the city (represented by the Volkshochschule) to realize the need of offering public classes in English but once they started I was right there to offer my contribution.
Nothing better than some tasty Sicilian food, right? So I decided to offer two classes delving on Sicilian cuisine (one of them for vegetarians) and so far the answer has been excellent!

Top 24 recipes of 2011

And this year is gone and it is almost my blogversary too! Many (but not too many) are the recipes I have proposed you across the past 12 months and it was very hard to choose some that have stuck in my flavors library.

After skimming my picture catalog I have reduced them to a Top 24. With one new recipe every two weeks may this list help you bringing a little more happiness into your 2012.

Top 24 of 2011

Risotto with broccoli, poached prawns, roasted sesame seeds oil and dark chocolate shavings

Tagliatelle with Walnuts and Pork sauce Sicilian style

Free food... What is the power of food offered as a gift? Does it depends on the subtlety of the offer or is just linked with the food itself? Is our ability of evaluating a meal influenced when it is offered to us? Naturally it is different if a sibling, friend, colleague offers us a morsel of his/her sandwich as answer to our starving-puppy eyes or if the meal is offered by complete stranger. In this case, do we always approach food guided by our instinct of self-preservation? Food has deep power toward any living being. As rooted into our DNA, food inherently means life and we will always be grateful to anybody who offers us some (that doesn't make us sick). I have just finished to listen to an episode of the "Crimes Against Food" podcast on "Free Food" and it just resonated with me. As blogger, we are often offered goodies to sample or to review. Rare are the occasions nowadays when this offer comes honestly without any analytic or critical duty attached.

Peanuts on your pasta

For this month Secret Recipe Club, I got to pick a recipe from Laura's blog "This is how we eat". Faithful to its name, her blog is pretty a straightforward account of family recipes that punctuate daily meals carried out with that touch of inventiveness that can make a little kid eat her veggies.
Going through her articles, I found a few that sounded particular interesting in terms of flavors and news to my repertoire. The one I chose sounds quite American in the essence and a perfect disguise for greens for your kids: peanut noodles.

Green, Magenta and a wicked screen

Lately I have been eating quite light meals, trying to avoid meat when I can. This is quite hard when I keep on dreaming of juicy, steaky beef cooked in tomato sauce with vegetables like a ragú would. I would so gladly live on beef or pork products cooked in tomato sauce with celery, carrots, onions, garlic, white wine and potatoes, wouldn’t you?
Fish is my meaty outlet; few days ago it was the turn of salmon, but how to cook it?

The decision has been made

Here we go, also for this month the PaperChef challenge has gone by and, judging from the submissions, surely not unnoticed; the hosts (Ilva and Mikey) have received in total 10 submissions.
As monthly co-host my duty was to choose a winner among them. Let me first remind you the ingredients you were supposed to use in your creative efforts: Dried cranberries, dates, candied orange peel and flour.
It was very interesting to see what these magic four have inspired in you. The entries may be divided in roughly 3 groups: leavened goodies, savories and baked desserts.
Let's start with the breads and rolls.

To Karen from Prospect in the Pantry, the monthly ingredients were simply speaking tea-times with her siblings in Scotland. She wanted to share with us the relaxed and elegant atmosphere of these occasions with a Date-Nut Bread with Cranberry Orange Cream Cheese.

It is not always black or white

You probably have noticed already that this month I was pleased to host among this creative walls one of the most interesting challenge out there in the blogosphere: Paper Chef.
Strangely from the usual chaotic recipe development process, the first idea to come out and to be scribbled over one of my notebooks was the winner. Do not get me wrong, I wrote down short of a tenth of candidate dishes but either sleepiness or the recognition of a sparkle of efficiency made me concentrate on the first pasta dish.
The perfect Teutonic efficiency stops here because it was only when I had almost completed the dish that I realized one of the four PaperChef’s ingredients in my head was wron. Peaches went in instead of candied orange peel. No big drama, the two fit quite well with each other so, more fun for our papillae!
What I propose you today is a sweet and earthy savory dish, a really lovely and elegant one that I really won’t mind having in a tete-a-tete dinner by the candle light even if with a mirror.
Cutting it short, here I present you my

Middle Eastern raviolo served with cranberry-sage butter sauce, fresh peach crescents and thyme leaves

TweetPost #4: Tortelloni with Eggplants, garam-masala turkey nuggets and a long peppercorn scented milk-olive oil emulsion sauce.

Yesterday night I came back home a bit earlier than usual and I was so hungry that I took a big chunk of bread, made some olive oil and lemon juice emulsion and married the two together over and over again. Naturally, at dinner time I wasn’t starving as usual. That is a good thing since I then have more energies to invest in something worth posting and so I came out with the recipe you will read in this post and spend most part of the night shooting pictures before realising that it was almost 3am.

Tortelloni with Eggplants, garam-masala turkey nuggets and a long peppercorn scented milk-olive oil emulsion sauce.

Dining with a foot in China and another in Sicily

It is already a couple of months ago that an Italian friend of mine returned to Bonn to pay us a visit. We met up in the local vegetarian restaurant for a coffee and some catch up talk on our busy lives. Between a gossip, a complaint on our social life or our studies, she mentioned that she was guest at a couple of good friends and old colleagues. To thanks them for their hospitality, she asked me to prepare a traditional Sicilian dinner for the four of us.
I put together a very simple menu that required minimal cooking to do ahead of time and showing fresh and fragrant flavours typical of my island and, as it is traditional in Italian cuisine, I have divided the starch from the protein course.
The result was a summery four courses menu:

• Fried eggplant rolls with parsley and orange peel & Zucchini rolls with mint and lemon peel;
• Pasta alla Norma;
• Codfish gratiné with an almonds, thyme and black olive crust served with a fragrant orange salad;
• Mini cassata cake with home-made pistachio marzipan.

The pistachios post

We in Sicily are quite blessed by the production of yummy almonds and pistachios. The city of Agrigento has a festival for the blossoming of the almonds tree that grow in its countryside and in the Noto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noto valley. Pistachios are instead grown on the sides of the Etna volcano in the city of Bronte. We use both nuts quite a lot both in savory and sweet recipes but while almonds are more assertive, pistachios are quite subtle in taste (and more expensive too).
Almonds are omnipresent in my pesto sauces but I have not worked extensively with pistachios before; I have then decided that it was due time to face the nut.
In this post, you will find a series of experiments I made with them, mostly savory with a great classic as sweet. Let me know what you think of them.

Double potato salad with green onions and pistachios

Mac&Cheese aux trois oignons

Sometimes I am cheesy I know but who isn’t? I love cheeses wherever they are from whichever is their smell; the important thing is that they should not move by themselves on the plate. Often I make pasta with cheese (parmesan is almost in each and every of them, I just cannot get enough of umami I suppose). This time I went orange with some Old Amsterdam cheese http://www.hollandsbest.com/cheese/_popup/old_amsterdam.htm . It is such a nice cheese, firm in texture, orange in colour, fully flavoured like an aged Parmesan but creamy in texture without any discernible crystals.
To compliment its savoury nature I chose to use caramelized onions in the sauce. A sprinkle of lightly toasted black onion seeds (nigella seeds) added some crunch and an aromatic bitter note to the dish while fresh julienned spring onions bring a nice herbal spicy notes to keep the palate interested.
So here we go:
Mac & Cheese aux trois oignons.

It’s ShowTime: Alexander’s birthday dinner.

Last Saturday, the 12th of September, I was asked to prepare the birthday dinner for a friend of mine, Alexander. The location was the same as the last times and only one of the guests was new to me. This time I felt the menu preparation a bit differently, probably for laziness I pushed it almost to the last minute. That did not feel right while cooking at all... Still having doubts about the interplay of the different dishes featured in the dinner can feel like a weight and impede you in the movements. Anyhow, I managed to deliver the dinner and the guests seemed pleased with the food, which is what counts.

As inspiration this time, I opted for going in Asia and be influenced by the Chinese culture. In my usual potpourri, I even added a Mexican and Italian touch to some dishes. Long story short, the menu read like this:
• Spicy pineapple salsa over whole-grain crackers;

It’s ShowTime!

The show went on yesterday night. Starting 4pm the ponytail was in place, the hat was on and the apron wrapped around me (do you get the tacos look?). Part of the shopping was delegated to a friend of mine (also guest for the dinner) that kindly performed it with success (only the mint was missing, no big deal compared to my forgiveness of the precision scale and small pots at home).
All started from the cookie dough: butter and brown sugar creamed together, egg in, then the roasted sesame seeds, oatmeal and flour. Once the sweet sausage was shaped, it was time to let it firm up in the fridge.
Time to prep the carrots! After peeling them (with a lefty-peeler) they were cut in a bias in chunks and braised in some butter and brown sugar.
By then it was the good time to move to the canapés and appetizers (did I tell you already that I was preparing a 4 courses dinner? actually 5...). The kalamata olives caviare was the next one on the list. Oh man, isn’t pitting a boring job?? But you get so much more taste! So pitted kalamata and fresh thyme leaves ended their journey under the blade on my sharp knife RIP.
The cookies were then ready to be shaped and baked.
To continue with the appetizer, the next ones on the list were the chocolate-cilantro rolls. So cut the big sheet of the bric dough, brush them with butter and fill them up with fresh cilantro, chocolate, red chillies and mascarpone. Roll them up brushing them with a bit more butter and voilà!
Second on the line of the appetizers were the salmon pouches. This time I needed rice paper. After having moistened it a bit (it comes in brittle hard round sheets) they were filled with diced salmon fillets, some red currants berries, mascarpone cheese and a pinch of Melange Noir from Ingo Holland. All is ready for the oven!
Once all the guests were arrived, I served the cocktails canapé: Sesame-Oatmeal Cookie with Kalamata Caviare and Strawberry.

 

Time to start putting together the main course.

There is always a first time…

It was few days ago when I had the pleasure to try what I would like to be my future job; but let’s start from the beginning.
Some time ago a friend of mine told me about the birthday of a friend of his, nothing peculiar so far; the nice part came when he told me that he was thinking of gifting him a dinner. Nice idea, no? You get to sit with your friends, drink good wine, chitchat, listen to good music and eat a meal especially prepared for you. The bottom line is that he wanted me to prepare that meal.
Pointless to say that I was very happy of this opportunity; my first dinner as a cook! I, in the kitchen cooking, plating and so on; them enjoying the results in the living room.
It was a very nice experience indeed. The kitchen was quite well equipped in tools and space but a cook’s knives are irreplaceable, don’t you think so too? Thankfully I already learned to travel with some of my equipments whenever I have to cook at a friend’s place.
It took me a couple of days to figure out the menu to prepare. I opted for a combination of traditional, regional and seasonal elements.
It’s asparagus time and Germany is quite a good producer of them (especially the white ones but I prefer the green). Strawberries are another hit of the season. The specimens coming from Bornheim are a nice orange read, roundish and of a wonderful smell; so aromatic, they are amazingly good!

Tonight’s Dinner – Penne rigate with creamy-spicy Tuna sauce

Here we are, at the end of another day; the last day of Carnival somewhere but here, the day of sleepiness. :p Carnival finished yesterday night and today the mood in the city was very relaxed, quiet, melancholic… Well… I am not such a big fun of the Carnival as it is declined here in Bonn; but it is nice to see people having fun (as long as you don’t have to pick up all the barrels of beers emptied every day).
What did I have for dinner tonight? Yesterday, before falling to sleep, I realized that it was quite long time I did not cook Italian “cotolette” (breaded and fried slices of beef) but, naturally, I forgot about them again this evening only for being reminded by my mother (they were also having cotolette for dinner, what a coincidence!); I was already planning of cooking myself some pasta in tuna sauce. This time I wanted to try some creamy tuna sauce. So here you are the results (sorry, no picture today… just forgot about it :P)

What do you need?

Tonight's Dinner – Penne rigate with Pork Belly in Spicy Tomato sauce

Here we go! Just finished dinner :) Tonight I had a quintessential Sicilian pasta!

How to proceed if you wish to try this at home? Nothing more simple.
Have a nice piece of pork belly in your fridge (my piece had bones and weighted roughly 300g), cut it in thick slices (removing first the bones if there are any, but do not throw them away!!). Take away the skin from the meat and put it with the bones in a hot pan to roast for a while.
While skin and bones are browning, cut the meat in chunks and add them to the pan. Sear well the meat and add some olive oil. Add then 1/2 teaspoon of red chilli flakes (depends how spicy you want your sauce) and stir. Skin and chop a few garlic cloves (more or less 1 per person) and add to the meat. Be careful not to burn the garlic, the oil in pan is fairly hot, so stir the mixture carefully.
After a few minutes add some tomato purée (250ml for 2 people) and the same amount of water. Lower the heat, cover and let reduce. In the meantime boil some salted water for the pasta (I always taste my water to judge how much salt I need). When ready, cook the penne.

Tonight's Dinner – Duck Panzerotti with Juniper Hazelnut-Butter and Bitter Almonds

Yesterday, a very good friend of mine gave me a few fresh Panzerotti pasta filled with duck. What’s best for tonight’s dinner! I had to cook them.
I decided to use Bitter Almonds and Hazelnut-Butter, I had only to figure out how these things were going to work together.
Time to start cooking! :D
Once put the salted water for the pasta to boil, I started browning a nice chunk of butter over low heat.
In a small saucepan, the butter started melting, the milk solid create an opaque white mass that floats inside the clear yellow liquor. Foam starts forming, the smell becomes warmer and more complex and slowly the whole turns a nice hazelnut color. When the temperature reaches 145deg C the hazelnut butter is ready!