Easing back slowly.

My holidays are nearly over……
I don’t mind too much, It’s been a happy month. It’s actually rather nice to be home in Rome and apart from the occasional wave of  irrational anxiety, the kind I so often experience on Sunday nights and Monday mornings, the end of a break and the start of anything new [...]

Piedmontese peppers again.

Do you mind if I talk about Piedmontese peppers again….
It has been a while since I first wrote about them and I hope you agree such a simple, good recipe deserves another outing…oh and I have made them rather alot lately.
Them being these.

It’s like this..
…red and yellow peppers are halved lenghways, the cavities sprinkled with [...]

A nice plain cake

I can count my true cake repertoire on one hand.
I have flirted and made others with varying degrees of success but trudge willingly back to these five – in the same way I reach for the threadbare, beloved items in my wardrobe I can’t bear to part with because they are so faithfully comfy – [...]

Granita days

I think I predicted that this would be the summer I ate granita.
It has been…..
Hot afternoons here interrupted and tempered at about 4 30 by a glass of  a slightly slushy grainy mass of flavoured sweetened water frozen and crushed to make something between a drink and a water ice. It was just what we [...]

Before I go…..

Take 5 things;
Tomatoes

Mozzarella di Bufala

Basil

Extra virgin olive oil

Salt

Slice, tear, arrange, sprinkle, pour…….
Insalata caprese

I am off to Umbria tomorrow so see you in a week or so.

Coniglio alla cacciatora or Rabbit hunters style

Other wise known as lunch in Livorno.

‘Rabbit‘
Lisa declared like a verbal stamp of the foot
‘Rabbit‘
She repeated, in exactly the same tone that she had announced she needed granita di limone about 30 minutes previously .
‘for lunch I want rabbit.’
We both came to a standstill in the middle of the noisy abundance, bussle and colour of [...]

Granita

Rather than berating me for my extremely overweight suitcase the security man, simply nodded knowingly and smiled approvingly at the contents of my bulging luggage- particularly the 2 kilos of almonds and the same weight of almond paste- before he quietly ushered me through the security check with a Sicilian wink whilst whispering something about [...]