Posted in Musings on August 3, 2012| 25 Comments »
My beloved friend Dan and her family are over for a visit from the US, so I’ll be taking a small break from blogging to spend a bit of time with them. I’ll be back next week. ♥
Oh, and don’t forget that the second week in August is Scone Week! I’m hoping to try and master traditional scones once and for all this year (instead of the cheaty Lemonade version I always make).
Anyone feel like baking scones next week? I’d love to see what you come up with!
Posted in Musings, Recipes, tagged amatriciana sauce, spaghetti all'Amatriciana on July 27, 2012| 78 Comments »
Mrs M’s glasses, which were given to me when she passed away…
I love Italian nonnas.
When we moved into this house over twenty years ago, our neighbour Mrs M was already in her mid-70s. She’d arrived from Italy at the age of thirteen and had gone straight to work in the canefields of Cairns. She was sharp as a tack, stubborn as a mule and tough as nails – she used to trim the edges of her lawn with a cane knife (machete). I adored her.
Our house was a deceased estate that had been empty for nearly two years, which gives you some idea of the state it was in. There was no shower or inside toilet, the kitchen had 53cm (21″) of bench space – divided into three sections, and the front bedroom had layer upon layer of rotting carpet.
We were in our early 20s, and had borrowed money from everyone we knew to make the purchase price. We were also stupid. We laid a white tiled kitchen floor – because I liked how shiny and clean it looked – and spent $2500 of the $3500 we had allocated for furniture on an antique Kilim hall runner. We sat on beanbags for the first year.
Mrs M, bless her soul, took pity on us. She would bring over covered plates of pasta and peas, and vegetables from her garden, and figs from her enormous trees. She would make me espresso coffee strong enough to dissolve a spoon, and hem my jeans so that I didn’t have to pay $12 to the drycleaner. She taught me how to be a good neighbour.
And I grew to love the older Italians in our neighbourhood. They’re incredibly kind, brutally honest, and passionate about life.
. . . . .
Jump forward twenty years to last week when I was having a chat with Chicago John about his Zia’s tripe dish which traditionally began with a batutto.
Batutto is a soffrito which uses a specific type of Italian salted pork. I decided to see if it was available at the cheese shop. When I arrived, Johnny’s mum Rita and her friend Teresa were both there.
I couldn’t see anything marked as “batutto” in the fridge cabinet, but I did find guanciale, speck and pancetta. I asked the ladies if one of those would do.
No, no, no, batutto had to be made at home, using pork belly bought from a butcher in Campsie (not from a regular butcher, as the pork would be too lean).
What, I asked, was the difference? The guanciale, speck and pancetta were all salted pork products – couldn’t I substitute one of those?
The speck, I was told, was too smoky, the pancetta wasn’t the right flavour for tripe, and guanciale could only be used in Amatriciana sauce. A vigorous discussion then ensued as to whether Amatriciana sauce should or shouldn’t have onions in it.
As I said, I love Italian nonnas.
So I bought some guanciale, made from the jowl of a pig, and used it to create Spaghetti all’Amatriciana. My apologies, Teresa – the only recipe I could find included onions.
I followed this New York Times recipe very closely, substituting half a fresh cayenne for the dried chilli flakes. If you need guanciale or San Marzano tomatoes, Johnny carries them in his cheese shop, but ring first to check, as both items are frequently out of stock.
Here are the ingredients I used:
The recipe only required a small square of guanciale, but the flavour was strong enough to permeate through the whole dish. Make sure to remove the tough rind before chopping it up. (More about guanciale here.)
It was a big hit with the boys – while I was taking the photo above, they ate the entire pot!
Posted in Musings on May 21, 2012| 88 Comments »
Sheesh. I’ve had a hell of a week.
My credit card details were stolen, Small Man was frantic at school, then Sydney Water cut off our mains supply while the dishwasher was on, and it jammed on the draining cycle. And that was just the small stuff. I woke up on Sunday morning with my jaw locked tight from gritting my teeth in my sleep.
So…I opened a bottle of vintage oporto (at times of stress, default to alcohol). I have a case or so leftover from my wine drinking days, and at 29 years young, this bottle of Taylor’s was due to be drunk. Like all fine Portuguese vintage port, it needed ten hours or so to breathe before drinking…
Around lunch time, I heard on the grapevine (aka Twitter) that Stefano Manfredi, one of the really good guys in Australian food, was giving a pasta making class at Pirrama Park in nearby Pyrmont. Pete and I traipsed out in the rain and watched him turn plain flour and eggs into cooked pasta in under 15 minutes…
We bought a couple of Stefano’s cookbooks, and he was kind enough to sign them for us – the red one appears to be a compilation of his Sydney Morning Herald articles. The recipes are approachable, flavour focused and, happily for those of us who live here, the ingredients are readily available…
I made his simple and tasty chick pea, pea and prosciutto salad, using frozen baby peas, chick peas that I’d soaked and boiled earlier, self-sown cherry and pear tomatoes from the garden, and San Daniele prosciutto…
After dinner, I texted the neighbours, and they met us at their front gates with empty stemware as we wandered down the street, pouring out vintage port…
Then I came home and enjoyed my (very full) glass while video chatting with my beloved friend Joanna of Zeb Bakes…
What can I say? It ended up being a great day after all!
Posted in Musings, tagged iPhone photography on May 3, 2012| 67 Comments »
I have a confession to make.
I’m a sucker for historical romances. I know, I know, it’s incredibly tragic. Personally I blame the education system – if Pride and Prejudice hadn’t been compulsory reading at school, this might never have happened. Thankfully, I married a sensible man, or our sons would have been named D’Arcy and Jean-Luc (I’m also a big Star Trek fan).
Historical novels always cause me to reflect on what life must have been like at a time when change occurred slowly. Living in the 21st century certainly doesn’t allow for gradual adaptation – progress and technology move forward so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. It takes a particularly agile brain to cope with these modern times.
Recently, we upgraded our mobile phones to iPhone 4Ses, and we have been completely and utterly blown away by what they can do.
One of the most impressive features of the device is the camera. I had some inkling of how good it was going to be when Peter Bryenton and Chris D, two highly talented and experienced photographers, both stopped using their traditional equipment and started taking photos almost exclusively with their iPhones. In fact, Peter has an entire website of wonderful photos, all taken with his iPhone.
When my Pete showed me the photo he’d taken of the flowering gum in Nic’s garden, I was astonished. The clarity at full resolution is very impressive – it’s almost possible to make out reflections in the raindrops. And it was taken with a mobile phone.
Pete has installed an app called Camera+. It comes with a stabilizer function, which meant that even though it was raining and the flower was swaying in the wind and Pete was leaning over the fence holding the phone with one hand, we nevertheless ended up with a photo that could grace the front of a greeting card.
Less than three years ago, I blogged about my portable Lumix camera, and how easy it made taking photos on the go. Now that I have the iPhone, I can’t see myself ever using the Lumix again!
Dead leaves in the garden herald the approach of winter...(as the historical romance authors might write). One of Pete's photos.
Posted in Musings on March 18, 2012| 130 Comments »
I thought this might make you smile…
I uncovered a photo yesterday. It was taken in the early 1980s, when we were still in our teens. It had to be the 80s – surely I wasn’t sporting shoulder length hair, owl glasses and a beret at any other time in my life. And there were stuffed toys on the shelf, for goodness sake.
Our relationship didn’t start off on a good note – I was a dorky, sheltered seventeen year old, living away from home for the first time in my life. He was nine months older and didn’t suffer fools easily. We lived in the same university college – I was on the fourth floor, he was on the second.
A week after I moved in, the light in my room blew, and I didn’t know how to fix it. Pete was walking down the hallway, saw my distress, and changed the globe for me. Then he shook his head, frowned condescendingly, and said, “I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t change a light bulb before..”
Needless to say, I wasn’t immediately smitten.
That was nearly thirty years ago. Thirty years! How is it possible that we’ve spent a lifetime in the kind of relationship I used to dream about as a little girl? One where, after all this time, my husband still calls me “my love”, holds my hand when we walk down the street, and sneaks kisses in the kitchen when he thinks our sons aren’t looking?
I don’t usually mention this here, but life has been, and continues to be, hard. We’ve dealt with cancer, chronic pain, and innumerable other hiccups over the past three decades. But none of those challenges can take away from the sheer joy that permeates our daily lives, which in turn is underpinned by our relationship. His and mine. Him and I.
So now you know. When you read our blog, when you hear the excitement and laughter in my voice, you’ll understand. That young girl in the photo got to live happily ever after with the love of her life. Is it any wonder that the exuberance can be a little hard to contain sometimes?
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