Polenta

Polenta is another traditional course from North Italy. It is quite rich and therefore requests either a long walk with the dog or an hour on the sofa to bring back the forces.

It goes with meat dishes (my colleague eats polenta with rabbit meat) or "pure" with butter and aged cheese. I'm not a traditionalist, so I eat polenta fried! It goes with creamy soups, as a Japanese-dish surrogate or, why not, as a nice starter at Valentine's day. 

There are plenty of recipes on cooking polenta on the web, like the one I've chosen for you. But I must be honest with you, I'm not cooking Polenta for 45 minutes stirring and stirring all the time, no, I'm using parboiled polenta ready in five minutes.

For polenta as a pleasant starter, I use the quantity of corn flour indicated for 1 person and instead of water I use some broad perfumed with concentrated tomato paste.

Verse the cooked polenta on a backing plate and with the help of a rolling-pin and a piece of transparent film roll it to a 1/2 cm. thick sheet.

When cooled, cut it in pieces as you prefer and fry them in hot oil.

Christmas biscuits

On Friday, the Italian winter has come back, burdening - with wet snow - the branches of the shrubs.  It's not the right weather to build snow men or play with the dog in the garden, but the right one to light up the candles on the artificial Christmas tree  that's still placed in our living room.

Maybe next week-end I will remove its decoration and store the empty tree in the carton ... !   

So, we have some snow in the garden, the romantic lights on the tree, and the candles.  The only things that are missing are the 2014 Christmas biscuits and a nice cup of good Kenyan or Assam black tea for today's tea-time. 

 

The cookies are easy to make, so I will prepare only few ones for one baking sheet.

You need :

• 150 gr. of mixed nut kernels (hazelnut, almonds,  walnut), toasted in a pan for few minutes and the cut in pieces with the knife like in the photo.  (1)
• 50 gr. margarine (2)
• 50 gr. brown sugar (2)
• 1 tablespoon of maple syrup (2)
• 50 ml. of fresh orange juice (2)
• 100 gr. of wholemeal flour (1)
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder (1)
• baking powder and potato starch

1. Preheat the oven at 180 ° C.
2. Cream  the (2) ingredients adding a spoon tip of baking powder and 1/2 a teaspoon of potato starch.
3. Mix the (1) ingredients.
4. Add the (2) cream and then mix it all together with a hand whisk.
5. Using two teaspoons, scoop 35 walnut-ball shaped cookies onto the baking paper.
6. Bake for  about 15 minutes and  then leave the cookies to cool on a cooling rack.

 

Risotto with pumpkin

 

 

As a child, when I was living in a small and remote village in the South of Germany, eating pumpkin always felt as eating alien-food.

During my years here in Italy I begun to open my mind and taste new vegetables, including the pumpkin. At first I used it only in cakes but today I also use it to make a nice risotto. Risotto, which is the Italian way cooking rice, is a typical first course dish that is usually followed by fish or meat.

For a good Italian risotto, you need home-made stock that tastes better than the stock cubes you can buy.

You need a good rice, not parboiled obviously, maybe an Arborio rice or Baldo, a type of rice which grows about everywhere around the Mediterranean. We use Baldo brown rice. It's a little bit different using brown rice because the brown one will not release much amid that gives the rice a creamy texture. Instead, I use nutritional yeast just before serving.

In the original Italian receipt the pumpkin is cooked in the stock with the rice, but this way the pumpkin becomes a mash. I prefer vegetables "al dente", so I start with cutting about 250 gr. of pumpkin into little cubes and marinate them in a mix of olive-oil and curry powder. After an hour, the pumpkin cubes are ready to be fried in a large pan, that I will user for all my cooking actions. I fry the cubes until they have a golden colour. Then I pour the cubes on a plate.

Cut 100 gr. of smoked tofu un slices and fry the slices in the pan until they are crunchy. Pour the slices on another plate using  kitchen paper to absorb the oil in excess.

In the same pan, toast 500 gr. of rice in some olive-oil until the rice becomes translucent. Remember that you don't have to wash or rinse it before cooking.

Add a glass of good white wine. A good white wine is the wine you will combine with the meal you're preparing.

Once the wine is evaporated you can add the stock and the white part of a leek, cut in rings.

Keep the pan over low heat and add, a little a time, boiling broth so that it gets absorbed by the rice. It is not necessary to stir the rice.

After the rice is ready, add salt, pepper and, to underline the smoked taste, some Piment della Vera, a Spanish smoked paprika spices.

Add part of the pumpkin cubes, and half of the tofu stripes, cut in small pieces and stir all ingredients. At last, add  some parsley, the remaining  pumpkin, the tofu, and the nutritional yeast.