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.

A tradition out of traditions: Chilli con carne

I was visiting my family till few days ago but unfortunately I had rare occasions to cook for them. My mother though always wanted to try one specific dish: chili con carne! She kept referring to it every now and then without a real decision being made, then she bought kidney beans and all was set.
Being from Sicily, spicy dishes are not uncommon; dishes featuring meat and beans together are quite uncommon instead. In the Lazio region they are used to cook their beans with cotiche (pig' skin) or sausages but here the meaty element doesn't realy play the leading role in the dish.
So there we stand wanting to cook a proper chilli con carne in the hot Sicilian weather.

Project Food Blog #1: Me, myself and Mr Hyde

This post is all about clarifying or better investigating who I am and what I am doing here in the food world; you can call it a self-improvement experiment.
We are only given rare blissful moments of clear inner vision, when thoughts start flying around our minds like doves at the sound of Sunday bells. Unfortunately, those Silicon Valley geniuses haven't yet invented an interface that would allow the transfer of these sparkles onto "paper". Yes, we could speak those words aloud to a recorder but Heisenberg's principle would hit on us. Observation of a phenomenon will irremediably influence it and that clear insight will become muddled by the social rules of communication. Then it might be worthy to resort to a stream of consciousness. I fear though that in this context a patchwork of sentences, for how beautiful and meaningful they might be, could result too hermetic; I will have then to edit what comes out (rather heavily I suppose).
The framing of oneself is always a process in fieri. Daily experiences, inspirations, desires and decisions continuously shed new light on our souls, on our place in society and eventually on our call.

Clafoutis and the wondrous world of baked custard

Few weeks ago Rebecca from Chow and Chatter asked me to contribute a guest post to her blog.
Discussing with her about what to write about, we convened that a light and yummy dessert would fit the occasion. It is a very easy, light, sweat fix that showcases mostly a very useful dessert category: the clafoutis. I decided than to share with you all my Clafoutis of peaches and apricots with caramelized fennel and blackberry-lavender sauce.
Hope you will enjoy!