Alisa has been talking about risotto lately, so at the store today I examined the selection and picked out the plainest looking bag i could find:
After my work calls and catch up, I threw this together:
saute for a few minutes, until onion is soft:
1 T butter
1 T olive oil
6 garlic toes
2 slices of red onion
1/2 t dried rosemary
add and bring to boil:
1/2 chicken bullion cube
250 ml water
150 ml last night’s juniper-chestnut beer (although the recipe on the bag called for white wine or spumante, i couldn’t get my bottle of prosecco open, so i thought… i have this leftover beer… and really the juniper taste was a bit too strong to just drink…)
toss in:
1 small zucchini
1/2 green apple (the recipe on the bag suggested this)
after a few minutes add:
170 g arborio rice
handful of dried porcini (this was an after thought… i just saw them sitting on the counter and thought, sure…)
let cook for 20 minutes (it really was done, just like the bag said)
I decided to try something different with the zucchini flower: stuffed with gorgonzola
I didn’t feel like mixing up the batter (we’re almost out of eggs, too) so I just fried it in olive oil with a bit of dried sage and ground pepper.
lazy caprese:
chopped tomatoes
left over olive oil
fresh mozzarella
fresh basil
fresh olive oil
balsamic vinegar
ground pepper
Tonight’s beer is Beltaine Cervogia Bianca. I was a little scared that the rice might be too strongly junipered, but it turned out really good! I’m very pleased. I have some left in the pan for breakfast tomorrow… And the zucchini flower was a total experiment, but you know it’s so delicate so as long as you like the filling you can’t really go wrong, and I absolutely adore gorgonzola.
One good way to pick up a language when you’re in that country is to listen to the popular music. That method worked really well for me in Berlin and Moscow, and even in Wales, although there wasn’t quite enough environmental conversation around me to reinforce it there. In Italy we’ve been listening to Radio Italia (solo musica italiana) and can now recognize the top summer hits. But, we could never catch the titles or artists!
Thanks to Ms. Adventures in Italy we now know the titles and singers. So, our field trip today was a trip to Marlia. On the way we were subjected to a massive thunder and lightning rainstorm, but when we arrived, it was all sunshine once again. We checked out the rug store (found an Italian modern design I might splurge for…) and the computer store (got a new mouse and asked about monitors… they’ll have some in at the end of the month). I was so pleased that I was able to converse with both salesmen entirely in Italian and understood everything they said. The boy at the computer store was especially impressed that I seemed to know what I was talking about with respect to resolution (thank you, David).
Then we went to Esselunga and picked up the CDs we’ve been hearing so much of: Tiziano Ferro, Negramaro, Nek and Irene Grandi. Plus a few ex-rental DVDs to watch (since we don’t have broadcast TV).
Bella loves the Raffaella song, and the lyrics were in the cd, so she was able to sing along to it perfectly in the car.
Last night we made a late night run to pick up our friends Janet and Kristen at the Florence train station. As usual, I got a little lost without the GPS trying to find the station. One wrong turn there and you’re an hour late.
They patiently waited and were happy to see us. We drove back to our place, Bella made them dinner (ravioli) and they had some of the percoche surprise for dessert. We all finally went to bed around 5 am.
Now, after a week of trying to finish the last half of a Russian translation I’ve been working on for the last month, I had just under 2 pages left to do. I got up around 10:30 and started to work, but then everyone else got up too. Janet and Kristen convinced (dragged) Bella to take them up to Rocca. Less than an hour later, I was FINISHED. Huge relief. Life is good again. I walked up to meet them and to once again enjoy our place of refuge.
I tried to get some photos of the wild flowers, but the refreshing Tuscan breeze that makes our sunny days perfect, renders the tiny blooms unphotogenic with a little digital camera. Maybe I should have taken videos instead…
Bella says that when she visits her grandma, they have a tradition of making apple pie. It’s true, my mom’s pies are really good, the best I’ve ever had. The ones I remember most often and love are peach, pecan and lemon meringue. I crave them… the gourmet pies from the upscale grocery stores aren’t even half as good.
Here in Tuscany, peaches and apricots are the fruit of the season now. I still had these percoche, and Alisa had sent me recipes for peach cobbler and apricot galette… but I couldn’t see making something so rich, especially since I just lost 10 pounds! So, I hybridized them, just like the percoche (which taste like much juicier apricots):
First, the filling
mix together in a saucepan:
2 large percoche, sliced
cinnamon
~1/3 c sugar
~1 T chestnut flour
add: ~1/4 c water
~1 T sunflower oil
and cook for a few minutes until tender and glazed
Meanwhile, make biscuit tops
mix together:
~ 1 c. flour
~2 T sugar
~1t baking powder (vanilla flavored)
cut in ~50 gr. butter (or less)
(I hate doing this… it’s the main reason I *don’t* make pies very often. But Bella seems to enjoy it! Hmmm….)
stir into the flour/butter until just moist:
~1/8 c milk
1 tiny egg
1 t. sunflower oil
Now for the special treat…
cover the bottom of the pan with amaretti:
layer on the cooked percoche and glaze:
place spoonfuls of biscuit dough on top:
Bake at ~205 C for 20 minutes.
Take a piece to Giuliana (who provides the eggs):
Sit, chat, bere un caffe… Come back with freshly picked plums!
With all these eggs and our fabulous confetture di fragole, plus having obtained baking powder…
In Moscow things like that were hard to find, unless you were willing to pay 10x for them in the hard currency stores, so I imported a lot of baking ingredients. But I remember in Germany having to get it in these little pre-measured packets. I don’t recall that it was already vanilla flavored though, I guess that’s kind of convenient. It definitely made the pancakes taste good! Although usually I put amaretto in them anyway…
