Risotto with fennel and courgette

I used to make a sausage version of this (and sometimes still do) but I've gone semi-vegetarian over the last few years so one of the key flavourings in the sausage version (fennel) gradually took centre stage. I often do variations on this - leaving out the fennel altogether, throwing in some peas or plenty of fresh basil, squeezing some lemon juice into it... A good recipe should have a method at its core, and the details should provide one way of implementing this. I'm always in favour of simplifying recipes where possible and also of taking advantage of whatever may be available - in your fridge or the local shops.


Ingredients
100g butter
1 fennel bulb
1 courgette
2 cloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
300g arborio rice
900 ml of boiling water
1 vegetable stock cube
freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan

Method

1. Roughly chop the fennel bulb, slice the courgette, finely chop the garlic
2. Dissolve the stock cube in the boiling water
3. Put 50 g of the butter, the fennel, courgette, garlic and salt into a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan and fry gently for about 10 minutes, until the fennel and courgette have softened.
4. Add the rice and stir thoroughly.
5. Add a few ladlefuls of the stockwater to the rice, and stir gently until the liquid is almost absorbed.
6. On a low heat, add the rest of the stock, a ladleful at a time, stirring while you cook, until the rice is tender but not mushy. (This should take about 30 minutes).
7. Remove from heat, add the remaining butter, stir well, cover and leave to sit for 2 minutes. Serve sprinkled with black pepper and Parmesan.

Risotto with Italian sausages and dried porcini

Every cook has a repertoire of dishes and techniques that grows and changes over time. I can't always put my finger on when I started cooking a particular dish, but I know that this is one that I first cooked when we spent a few months in Bagni di Lucca in the autumn of 2009. It was a regular for a while, and then my kids became less than enthusiastic about it so I stopped making it. I was reminded of it the other day when I spotted a packet of arborio rice in the cupboard, so I decided to give it another go. The original recipe is from Maxine Clark's Flavours of Tuscany, although I have tweaked it a little bit.

I'm always slightly in two minds about committing a recipe like this to the page - there's a danger of obscuring the flexibility of the whole business. So long as you have the right kind of rice, the key proportions (three parts liquid to one part rice) and the basic technique (slowly add the liquid to the rice), you can make risotto.

Ingredients
800 ml of hot chicken stock
100 ml of white wine
10 g dried porcini
100g butter
300g fresh Italian sausages
1 onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
100 ml of sieved tomatoes
1 tsp fennel seeds
1 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp salt
300g arborio rice
freshly ground black pepper
freshly grated Parmesan

Method

1. Soak the dried porcini in the hot stock. Remove the skins from the sausages.
2. In a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan, gently melt 50g of the butter, add the skinless sausages and fry slowly, breaking the sausage meat up as you go.
3. When the sausage meat has browned, add the onion and garlic and fry gently for another 10 minutes until the onion is golden.
4. Add the tomatoes, fennel seeds, thyme and salt, and simmer for 5 minutes.
5. Add the rice and stir thoroughly.
6. Remove the porcini from the stock and add them to the rice.
7. Add a few ladlefuls of the stock and the glass of white wine to the rice, and stir gently until the liquid is almost absorbed.
8. On a low heat, add the rest of the stock, a ladleful at a time, stirring while you cook, until the rice is tender but not mushy. (This should take about 20 to 30 minutes).
9. Remove from heat, add the remaining butter, stir well, cover and leave to sit for 2 minutes. Serve sprinkled with black pepper and Parmesan.

Focaccia

I've been making focaccia on and off for a few years, but I think the method below is the one I will be sticking with. It isn't too involved, and the end result is as good as any other focaccia I have tasted.

Ingredients
400g strong white flour
300g warm water
7g instant yeast
1 tbsp olive oil

10g salt

coarse salt, more olive oil and some sprigs of rosemary for topping

Method

1. Combine the flour, salt, water, yeast, olive oil and salt in a large mixing bowl. Mix well, then work the dough in the bowl until it smooth. Cover and leave to prove for 1 hour.
2. Set the oven to 200oC. Lightly grease a baking tray. (Mine is 22 cm by 33 cm).
3. Gently work some of the air out of the dough, then transfer it to the tray. With wet hands, stretch the dough out to fit the tray (you can do this gradually, leaving it to rest in between) and leave the dough to rise for 30 minutes.
4. Dimple the shaped dough by pressing your wet fingertips into it, sprinkle with salt, put a few wet sprigs of rosemary on top, and drizzle with olive oil, then transfer to oven and bake for 20 minutes or so, until golden brown.

Squirrel sauce for pasta

I usually jump at the chance to eat something new, so when I noticed some grey squirrel meat for sale at Edinburgh's Stockbridge Market I decided to give it a try. It looked fairly rabbity, so I decided to give it the same treatment and make a squirrel version of the classic Tuscan pasta dish, pappardelle sulla lepre (pappardelle with hare sauce). It was good - less meat than rabbit but more flavour. I even made some fresh pasta to go with it but, like a great klutz, managed to delete all the photos! Fortunately I had this one in my library:

Ingredients
2 grey squirrels, quartered
500ml red wine
6 cloves
olive oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
3 tinned tomatoes, roughly chopped
2 tbsps tomato puree
1/2 tsp salt
black pepper

Method

1. Marinade the squirrel with the red wine and cloves overnight.
2. The next day, fry the onion in plenty of olive oil, and when nearly done add the finely chopped garlic.
3. Add the squirrel together with its marinading liquid, bring to a boil, turn to minimum and simmer gently for 2 hours, until the squirrel is very tender.
4. Remove the squirrel from the pan, set aside and allow to cool.
5. Meanwhile, add the tomatoes, tomato puree and salt to the pan, bring to a boil and simmer gently until you have a thick sauce.
6. Remove the squirrel meat from the bone (it's easiest just to pick it off with your fingers), return to the pan and cook slowly for another 5 minutes. Season with freshly ground black pepper before serving.

Rabbit stew, hunter's style (coniglio alla cacciatore)

I posted a recipe for some rather dry lentils the other day, and was happy to receive a comment from a reader about the right proportions of liquid. I've since corrected my lentil post (lentils with chorizo and dried wild mushrooms) and updated the photo, but in the meantime I also took a wander over to my reader's site, which is dedicated exclusively to the art of the pressure pot and goes by the name of hip pressure cooking. This recipe is inspired by a version I found there, and I think the combination of a bit of non-pressure cooking (sauteeing, browning etc.) and then pressure stewing is perfect. Incidentally, I was a bit scared of tipping in the brine from my tin of olives, but I did, and the result was great. (For this reason, no salt is listed in the recipe.)


Ingredients
1 rabbit, cut into joints

marinade
150 g white wine vinegar
150 g white wine
150 g water
6 bay leaves

stew
plain flour
olive oil
3 sticks of celery
1/2 onion
2 carrots
3 cloves of garlic
350 g tin of black olives
1 tin of tomatoes
250 ml of red wine
1 teaspoon of dried rosemary (or a large sprig of fresh)

Method

1. Put the jointed rabbit in a large bowl with the bay leaves, cover with the vinegar, wine and water, and leave to marinade in the fridge overnight.
2. Remove the rabbit pieces from the marinade, and discard the liquid. Peel and finely chop the onion, slice the celery, peel and slice the carrots, peel and roughly crush the garlic.
3. Heat plenty of olive oil in your pressure cooker (with the lid off, obviously!), dust the rabbit pieces in plenty of flour, and brown them on both sides in the hot oil. You will probably need to do them in three batches. Remove the browned pieces to a plate.
4. Gently fry the onion, celery, carrot and garlic in the oil. After a few minutes, remove to a bowl, together with any oil.
5. Deglaze the pan with a good splash of wine, scraping the pan with a wooden spoon, then add the rest of the wine, bring to a boil and simmer for 10 minutes to boil off the alcohol.
6. Return the browned rabbit pieces and fried vegetables to the pot, add the tomato, olives (including the brine) and rosemary, and put the lid on. Bring up to pressure, reduce hit to minimum and cook for 20 minutes.

Pasta with chick peas, tuna and lemon

This is a really quick 'store cupboard' meal. I'm a bit wary of putting things like this on the blog, but have decided to record the ones that come out well to help jog my memory and get me out of my 'tomato sauce' rut. Pasta with pulses seems like an odd combination to British (and Spanish) palates, but is actually quite common in Italy.


Ingredients
1 packet of pasta
1 large jar of cooked chickpeas
2 small tins of tuna
1 lemon
1 teaspoon of oregano leaves
1 teaspoon of salt
olive oil

Method

1. Cook the pasta in plenty of boiling water. When it is nearly done, add the strained chickpeas.
2. Once the pasta is cooked, strain the pasta and chickpeas into a colander, drain and return to the saucepan. Slosh a bit of olive oil over them, add the drained tuna, the juice of 1 lemon, the oregano leaves and salt. Mix well and serve.

Fried purple artichokes

I didn't think I would be doing quite so much deep-frying in Italy, but I have a real weakness for anything battered and fried. I saw these beautiful purple artichokes on the fruit and veg stall at Bagni's little twice-weekly market and asked the market lady what the best way to cook them was. She gave me a slightly dismissive list of possible methods, but this was the one that appealed to me so I quizzed her a bit further.



Ingredients
4 purple artichokes
1 lemon
salt
flour
2 eggs
olive oil



Method

1. Remove the stalks and all the tough outer leaves from the artichokes. (Don't be a miser here. If you're in doubt about whether a leaf is too tough or not, then it probably is.)
2. Cut off the tips of the artichokes. (Again, be brutal.)
3. Quarter the artichokes lengthwise, and run your finger down the inside to check for spikes. If there are any then just trim them off.
4. Put the artichoke quarters in a large bowl of cold water into which you have squeezed the juice of 1 lemon.
5. Drain the artichokes but not too thoroughly - a bit of water will help make the flour stick to them.
6. Coat each of the artichoke pieces in plenty of flour then dip them in beaten egg, making sure they are completely covered.
7. Heat a large pan with plenty of olive oil. Don't let the oil get too hot, or the eggy batter will burn but the artichokes won't cook. When the oil is hot enough, fry the artichoke pieces in batches, turning when they are cooked underneath.
8. Remove the cooked artichoke from the oil, drain and serve with some lemon quarters. They should be crispy and light on the outside and juicy and tender on the inside.

Cardoon Schnitzel

"He stared balefully at the half-empty bottle of Scotch on the coffee table, and the bottle glanced dismissively back at him. Only he and the bottle knew how tired he felt, and neither of them was about to tell. The lurid pinks and violets of a Los Angeles dawn were beginning to bleed over the horizon, but Cardoon Schnitzel's mood remained unremittingly dark. His latest case was proving harder than he had expected, and he was beginning to wonder if his formidable powers of detection had finally met their match."



Ingredients
cardoon stalks
salt
flour
egg
breadcrumbs
olive oil

Method
Steam the cardoon until tender, drain and leave to dry for 10 minutes or so.
Coat the cardoon in seasoned flour, then dip in beaten egg, then coat in breadcrumbs.
Fry in plenty of oil until golden brown.

Deep-fried green tomatoes

I've been keen to make the most of my time in Italy to improve my Italian, and have therefore been taking every opportunity for conversation. I've already had more conversations than I would have thought possible about the relative merits of different types of wood for burning in open fires as compared to stoves. (You don't want anything which will explode or give off too much smoke in a fireplace, so apparently chestnut is out.) And I think the Jehovah's Witnesses who visited me last week were rather surprised when I eagerly bounded to the garden gate and started talking to them about the history of the treatment of the Jehovah's Witnesses during World War Two. Unfortunately, after a few minutes they made their excuses and left.

Anyway, another good topic of conversation is food. I first heard about these deep-fried tomatoes in my Italian class and was intrigued. Then this morning I saw some nice green salad tomatoes in the local shop and thought I'd give it a try. I had a long chat with the woman behind me in the queue about how thickly they should be cut, how runny the batter should be, and whether it is best made with sparkling water or with beer.

I'm not sure how easy it will be to get tomatoes like this in the UK. In Spain and Italy, green tomatoes like this are sold for salads, although people usually avoid the ones that are totally green. For this dish, I think the greener the better.

Ingredients
3 large, green tomatoes
2 eggs
1 cup of plain flour
cold sparkling water
2 teaspoons of salt
vegetable oil for deep frying

Method
Slice the tomatoes into thickish slices (a little less than 1 cm, I guess) and sprinkle with 1 teaspoon of salt
Make the batter by gently beating two eggs, then adding about a cup of plain flour, before thinning out with some cold sparkling water. (I know this is terribly vague. This is basically just a deep-frying batter. I don't measure these things - and neither should you!)
Heat plenty of oil in a deep-frying pan.
Coat the tomato slices in the batter, and fry in batches. The oil should not be too hot, or the batter will cook on the outside before the tomatoes are cooked on the inside.
Cook the slices for a couple of minutes, then turn over and cook for a further 2 minutes.
Remove to a plate, sprinkle with the 2nd teaspoon of salt and allow to cool for a couple of minutes or so before serving.


Frying tonight
Bagni di Lucca, where we are staying, is close to the town of Barga, in the Garfagnana region of Tuscany. Many of Scotland's Italian community have their origins here, and connections with the old country remain strong. Every summer, when Italo-Scottish chipshop owners and their families head to Barga for the summer, Barga holds a "fish and chip" festival. This is always viewed as a bit of an oddity, and there is an assumption in Scotland that the Barga locals must be appalled by what their expatriate cousins do for a living in Scotland. However, if this local recipe is anything to go by, then I doubt that anyone was particularly surprised. After all, if you will deep-fry a tomato, then why not do the same to fish and chips?

Coniglio alla cacciatora: rabbit with tomato and wild mushrooms

For the last four years we’ve been spending September to June in Cadiz and July and August in Edinburgh, but this year we decided to break with tradition and spend the autumn in Tuscany. We’ve rented a house in Bagni di Lucca, about 20 miles north of Lucca up the Lima valley. Before going, I had a quick browse in the local bookshop and bought a copy of “Flavours of Tuscany” by Maxine Clarke. It’s beautifully illustrated, the recipes are not too fussy, and there aren’t too many of them. I’ve only been here for a week, but I’ve already cooked half a dozen things from it, all of which have turned out well.

Ingredients
1 large rabbit, jointed
½ bottle of red wine
4 large garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
a handful of springs of fresh rosemary
1 teaspoon of salt
olive oil
a handful of dried porcini mushrooms
1 kg of fresh tomatoes, roughly chopped
2 tablespoons of tomato puree
100g whole black olives
fresh parsley

Method

1. Put the rabbit pieces in a large bowl with the wine, garlic, rosemary and salt. Cover and leave to marinate in the fridge for at least 2 hours (and overnight if you have time).
2. Put the dried porcini in a bowl, cover with boiling water and leave for half an hour, then remove the mushrooms, keeping the liquid for later.
3. Remove the rabbit pieces from the marinade, keeping the marinade liquid for later, and setting aside the rabbit’s liver.
4. In a large pot, heat plenty of olive oil, fry the rabbit pieces quickly to brown them, then add the marinade liquid, the tomatoes, the tomato puree and the porcini. If necessary, add enough of the mushroom liquid so that the rabbit pieces are just covered.
5. Bring to the boil then simmer very gently for two hours until the rabbit is completely tender.
6. Quickly pan-fry the liver and put on a separate plate.
7. Serve with plenty of crusty bread.

Wild mushrooms

Fresh porcini are only just starting to appear in shops and restaurants as I write this (early October), but I bought some dried ones at the little market. I’m not sure what the going rate for porcini is in the UK, but these were just under 20 euros the kilo, which works out at about 2 euros for 100g. This might sound expensive, but if you remember that the dried mushrooms bulk up when soaked and that they have a lot of flavour, then they’re not such a luxury item. 50g or less is enough to add plenty of flavour or character to quite a large dish (25g if you’re cooking for one or two), so this works out at about 25 cents worth of porcini per person.

Safety tip
The taxi driver who brought us from Pisa to Bagni di Lucca was a keen mushroom collector and told me that you should always disturb any piles of leaves with a long stick before putting your hand into them to pick mushrooms, just in case there are any adders lurking in them.

Tagliatelle with rabbit sauce

This is vaguely inspired by the classic Tuscan hare sauce, pappardelle con il sugo di lepre. I've never managed to buy hare, so I substituted it with rabbit. Also, whenever I've tried following a recipe for this dish I've never managed to produce the velvety texture I remember from the time I ate this in Lucca. so I decided to forget about the recipes and just make it my own way, and this is what I came up with. (The original version wouldn't have either tomatoes or paprika in it.)



Ingredients
1 rabbit, cut into joints
3 bay leaves
olive oil
1/2 an onion, very finely chopped
1 clove of garlic
2 teaspoons of paprika
2 finely chopped tomatoes
2 tablespoons of flour
salt

Method

1. Put the rabbit in a pot with the bay leaves, sprinkle over a little salt, and just cover with water. Bring to the boil, reduce to minimum, and simmer for one hour until the rabbit is very tender.
2. Remove the rabbit from the pot (reserve the cooking broth as stock and for use later in this recipe) and allow to cool. Remove all the flesh from the bones. (Discard any flaps of meat, as these are sheet muscles which tend to be a bit fibrous, but keep the liver, kidneys and heart.)
3. Fry the onion gently in plenty of olive oil, adding the garlic towards the end. Once the onion and garlic are cooked, add the paprika, stir and fry for another 30 seconds or so. Add the tomato and cook until the sauce is quite thick.
4. Add a good slug of olive oil, and then sprinkle the flour into the sauce, stirring well. Cook for a couple more minutes, and then gradually add a couple of ladles of the rabbit broth. (The sauce should thicken at this stage, a bit like a bechamel.) Add the rabbit meat, check for seasoning and add salt if required. Serve with tagiatelle.

Rabbit has a bit of a bad reputation, which I guess is due in part to people's reluctance to eat little furry bunnies, in part to the fact that it can be a little dry if not cooked properly, and in part to its stigmatisation as a 'poverty' food. Last Christmas a minister in the Spanish government turned herself into a bit of a laughing stock by recommending that families struggling to make ends meet could eat rabbit instead, inadvertently putting cunnilingus on Spain's festive menu.

If Picasso cooked rabbit:

Fresh anchovies in a fiery red pepper sauce

This is inspired by a Calabrian speciality known as rosamarina or mustica (also sometimes called Calabrian Caviar). This consists of anchovy fry, which are dried, salted and conserved with oil and hot chilies. The resultant preserve is then eaten on bread or used to flavour pasta.



When I went to Calabria in April, I took an empty bag in my hand luggage. For the return trip I filled it with two kilos of spicy sausages, some nduja (a very spicy, spreadable salami), and a jar of rosamarina. The recipe below is inspired by the rosamarina, although all the details are different: instead of anchovy fry I used fresh adult anchovies, I replaced the fresh chillis with cayenne pepper (red chillis are very difficult to come by in Cadiz – they do appear in the market from time to time, but not in a predictable manner), and I cut down on the salt. The result is a sauce which is fresh, spicy and fishy all at the same time. It is excellent with pasta, and also goes well on toast. If you can’t get hold of fresh anchovies, then I imagine this would work well with herring fillets.








Ingredients
500g of fresh red peppers
500g of fresh anchovies
olive oil
3 teaspoons of chilli powder
½ teaspoon of salt

Method

1. Chop the red peppers into small pieces and sweat them gently in a large frying pan with plenty of olive oil.
2. While the red peppers are cooking, prepare the anchovies. There are two ways of doing this. Either take the whole anchovy, insert a sharp knife into the back just below the head, push it right through so it comes out of the front of the anchovy, then slide it down. Remove the top fillet and the guts. Slide the knife under the backbone and along to the tail and remove the other fillet. Rinse the fillets in plenty of cold water, and drain. This sounds fiddly but is actually quite easily. It should take no more than 10 minutes to process 500g of anchovies. An alternative method is to gut the anchovies (by sliding a sharp knife into the fish’s anus then up towards its head, pull out the guts and rinse under cold water), then blanch them in a saucepan of boiling water for 30 seconds or so. Once you’ve done this, you can just slide the fillets off with your fingers. They will be slightly cooked, but that doesn’t matter.
3. Once the peppers are soft and thoroughly cooked, transfer them to a food processor and liquidise until you have a fairly smooth sauce.
4. In the saucepan, heat a little more oil, stir in the chilli powder and fry for 10 seconds or so to release the flavours, then return the peppers to the pan. Season with the salt, stir well and cook for another 5 minutes or so. Add the anchovy fillets to the sauce, stir well, cover the pan, reduce to a minimum and simmer for 5 minutes. Serve as a pasta sauce or spread on toast as a spicy hors d’oeuvre.

Sometimes I think we worry too much about authenticity – becoming too obsessed with always using the original ingredients can stop us from improvising and finding ways of doing new things.

Pasta with beans and Calabrian sausage

Here is a recipe for pasta with beans and spicy Calabrian sausages. (I brought back a couple of kilos in my luggage, but they can be replaced with any Italian sausages, or indeed any good quality coarse British sausages.) The end result should be a stew served with pasta, rather than pasta served with a sauce. (The picture at the top shows the stew before the pasta has been added.)



Ingredients
500 g of haricot beans
olive oil
1 head of celery
500 g of carrots
6 cloves of garlic
1 kg of spicy Calabrian sausages
salt

Method

1. Soak the haricot beans overnight. The next day, chop the celery, and fry gently in a large saucepan for a few minutes until it starts to soften. Add the whole, unpeeled garlic cloves, fry for another minute or so, then add the strained beans and enough stock or water to cover. Bring to a boil, skim off any scum which floats to the surface, reduce the heat to minimum and simmer until the beans are almost done but still have a little bite. (Probably about an hour.)
2. While the beans are cooking, peel and chop the carrots, and slice the sausages into thick slices. Add the carrots and the sausage to the cooked beans, add a little stock if necessary, and some salt. Simmer until the sausage is cooked. (About 20 minutes.)
3. Cook your pasta, drain, toss with a little olive oil, and add it to the stew.

Calabrian food is characterised by the generous use of chilli. It’s used both fresh and dry, and in lots of preparations. Two of my favourites are a salty sauce made with fresh chillies and salted anchovies, and ‘nduja’, a type of soft very spicy sausage which you can spread on bread or melt into a pasta sauce.