Bella Italia

When one thinks of Italian cuisine, it’s hard to go past pizza and pasta. Having had the luxury of visiting beautiful Italy during our honeymoon, we were excited once given this country – so many potions to choose from, where do we start. After reminiscing about the trip and once the initial feeling of wanting to return to Italy for another holiday subsided, we decided upon our menu for the evening. Most of our recipes this evening came from our recipe book, The Light of Lucia, a beautiful Italian cookbook that focuses on great tasting, home-cooked authentic Italian cuisine. Click here if you would like to see the book in question.

Ok, now time for the menu…

Aperitivo:

To start the meal, it is customary to have an aperitif as an appetiser before the meals. The usual suspects generally would be a Campari, Cinzani, Aperol, or a Spritz, but we were in Clayton the other day and came across an Italian deli that a huge range of imported drinks from Italy, (of which we could not refuse), so we opted for an Abbondio of grapefruit and strawberry as it had such an awesome label. It tasted great too!

Antipasto:

Antipasto, an absolutely necessary part to Italian cuisine (and something I can’t live without) was served next and it tasted amazing. I have found a new shop in our local shopping centre in Cheltenham called Ivan’s Deli (it’s in Southland, near Aldi, for those that know the area), and can I tell you, I think I’m going to move in there. It’s awesome, awesome, awesome! As you can see, we prepared a range of traditional cured meats (the Italian variety only) and various other antipasto yummies which were devoured in no time at all.

Italian antipasto

Primo (First Course):

This usually consisted of a pasta when we were travelling through Italy, so we chose to do a Pasta cooked in a paper bag. This pasta was beautifully rich and full of flavour due to the passata sauce which was made in advance by Alicia and then finished in the oven in little paper parcels.

Spaghetti cooked in a bag

Secondo (Second course):

As we couldn’t leave pizza off the menu for the evening, we opted to cook a pizza (or two, as I couldn’t decide which to do) for the second course, as opposed to the traditional meat or fish which is usually served. In our travels through Italy, we ate many a pizza, but the ones that we remember the most were the three cheeses pizza and the fresh basil and tomato pizza. Simple, fresh and flavoursome ingredients thrown together on a pizza dough (home-made of course), mmmmmmmm….does it get any better than that. The only slight negative to the pizzas was that I didn’t flour the pizza stone prior so it cooked on to the stone – lesson learnt for next time though!

Pizza - mmmmmm

Contorno (Side Dish):

Generally a salad, so I decided to make the very traditional and great tasting Panzanella or Bread and Tomato Salad. This salad is so tasty and simple to do as the bread soaks up all the beautiful juices of the super ripe tomatoes and the extra virgin olive oil (of course), along with the freshness of the basil (just picked from our garden).

Panzanella - Italian tomato and bread salad

Dolce (Dessert):

Tiramisu, the obvious choice here. Again, so easy to make, but so full of flavour and taste. We have made this dessert before and it tastes just divine, so we had to make it again, this time, but with a purpose – Italian Pseudo Iron Chef!!!

Tiramisu

We would have traditionally ended the meal with an espresso coffee but as it was such a hot evening, it still would have been about 30 degrees outside at 8pm, we opted out and just settled with cold waters for the rest of the evening.

Next time, we venture over to Korea with Katherine & Raoul.

Arrivaderci

– Spiro

Mexico

There seem to be two broad types of Mexican food: the Tex Mex style, dripping with cheese and mushy refried beans, or the more authentic style, with a wide range of dishes which actually use very little cheese. While on occasion I am a little partial to the Tex Mex style, we went with more authentic Mexican cuisine for this meal.

It was hard to know how to narrow down the menu – there are so many good things to cook. The good thing is that – while a little labour-intensive in the preparation stage – once it’s all out on the table, it’s a great way of communal eating and sharing.

To procure the necessary ingredients, I went to Casa Iberica in Fitzroy for the first time. It was a great place and was really bustling on a Saturday. I spent quite a long time there looking at all the stock. I also bought quite a lot of things there that I have not cooked with before, including nopales (cactus) in a jar, tinned tomatillos (related to cape gooseberries, but like little green tomatoes) and fresh corn tortillas.

We started the evening with some quesadillas. They are a flour or corn (we used flour) tortilla, with filling, folded over to form a half-moon shape, grilled for a few minutes, and cut into wedges to serve. Our filling was sliced boiled potato, chorizo, corn and cheese but you can put almost anything into them. We served it with red and green salsas, sour cream and guacamole.

Our main meal consisted of lots of different dishes, all served at once on the table for lots of mix-and-match tacos and burritos with both the corn and flour tortillas.

We made two meat dishes:

• Carne asada – thin beef steak that we marinated in pepper, salt, lemon juice, olive oil and coriander, then cooked on the barbecue.
• Carnitas – slow cooked pork shoulder (three hours in the slow cooker), and then crisped up in the oven. This is so easy and really delicious – and very similar to a braised and roasted beef we did for Madagascar several weeks ago.

Then for lots of essential, delicious side dishes:

Ensalada de nopales – Nopales salad – this was so interesting! We had never eaten this cactus before, and it goes really well with the rest of the meal.
Rice with lime and tomato – a nice accompaniment with the zesty lime.
Salsa verde – made with the tasty little green tomatillos.
Salsa roja – fresh tomato salsa – you can never go wrong with fresh tomato, onion, herbs and lime juice.

Guacamole, sour cream, jalapeños, and sauce picante (had to buy it when I saw a dorky Mexican guy’s face on the label).

We washed all this down with some different Mexican beers.

For dessert, we made platanos fritos (fried bananas). So easy and so good! You just melt butter in a fry pan, add brown sugar, some orange juice (and I added a splash of orange curacao for good measure), stir banana pieces around for several minutes until cooked through and coated with syrupy sauce. This is topped off with some drizzled condensed milk as they’re served up. Yum!

The leftover condensed milk was devoted to some lemon slice in the following days. Never want to waste things.

Next time to Italy with Alicia and Spiro.

Lithuania (almost unplugged)

Our Lithuanian dinner almost suffered the same fate as the Philippines dinner – our power went off about lunchtime and stayed off for a few hours. I was starting to work out how we could cook all the dishes on the BBQ when it finally came back on – phew!

We would have been ok with our entree – a very popular Lithuanian cold beet soup called Šaltibarščiai, which is obviously favoured in the warmer months with a milky broth and a range of different textures. The key ingredients are beetroot, cucumber, hard boiled egg (wedges served on top as well as finely chopped throughout), dill and buttermilk. On a separate plate, we served plain boiled potato (hot), as traditionally Lithuanians would scoop off a piece of potato and dunk it in the soup to eat them together. Although the soup was quite unlike anything I would normally eat, I really quite liked it, though I did find the bright pink colour a bit unappealing at first. Spiro wasn’t overly keen on it, but Katherine and Raoul seemed to enjoy it, so 75% in favour!

Šaltibarščiai - cold beet soup

For main we had Zrazai (Lithuanian beef rolls) with a side serving of Kugelis (Grated potato and bacon bake) and a small serving of fresh salad leaves to lighten the meal. I noticed a lot of websites had Kugelis listed as a main which I thought was a bit weird. Both the zrazai and kugelis was really tasty – the zrazai in particular was very tender and rich in flavour. We used dried shitake mushrooms instead of porcini, as that was all that was available in our local supermarket.

Zrazai with a side serving of Kugelis

I’m still a bit confused by dessert – Lithuanian rhubarb cake. It is essentially rhubarb sandwiched in between two layers of “cake” and baked in the oven. The cake is made from butter, sugar, baking soda and flour, but seemed to be missing a few steps as the mixture was almost completely dry. I resisted the urge to add a couple of eggs and gave it a shot. When I pulled it out of the oven, it almost looked exactly the same as when it went in – dry flour. I was surprised when I put my knife in it that it didn’t just scrape away, and seemed to be holding it’s shape. It actually went down quite well as it wasn’t overly sweet, and the cake was a sort of crunchy texture. If I made it again, I would fiddle a little bit with it though, perhaps more butter or a couple of eggs or a touch of milk.

Lithuanian rhubarb cake

Next time – Mexico comes to Melbourne at Katherine and Raoul’s house.

– Alicia

Philippines unplugged

Our challenge was the Philippines this week – suggested by a reader of our blog. Thank you FSK.

This pseudo was one with a bit of a difference. It got to about 38 degrees Celsius in Melbourne on the Sunday that we were to cook. Given our house is a little, unpleasant hot box in that temperature, we decided to do as much cooking as possible outside on the barbecue.

It’s lucky we did decide to do that because our power went out at about 5.30pm that day, and apart from a brief re-emergence early into the evening, it was out until 12.30am. We even missed the Nadal v Djokovic final of the Australian Open!

But to the food. A Filipino meal tends to be presented all at once, rather than in courses. There are also lots of Chinese and Spanish influences in Filipino cooking.

We had four different dishes. While they may not be the most representative of Filipino cuisine, they were selected because of how they could be cooked.

• Prawns on skewers, with a dipping sauce of fish sauce, lemon juice and sugar. Simple but good.
• Inihaw Na Bangus: this translates to grilled milkfish but we used small whiting fillets. We put tomato, brown onion, spring onions and a bit of lemon in between the fillets, wrapped them in foil and grilled them on the barbecue. The whiting was sweet and delicate, and the filling went with it really beautifully. Next time I would do a whole, larger white fish.
• Cocreta de patatas: Croquettes! This is beef, onion and garlic, with spring onions mixed in once the meat is cooked. The meat mixture is formed into little egg shape balls, smothered in a thick layer of mashed potato, rolled in breadcrumbs and beaten egg, and fried.
• Ensaladang Pinoy: to balance out all of the meat, we had a Filipino Green Salad. It’s pretty much just a garden salad but the dressing sugar, vinegar, fish sauce, salt and pepper. A nice change. And it was very exciting to use a freshly picked cucumber from our garden.

Dessert was meant to be a steamed palm sugar custard but the plan had to be aborted because of our power issues. I could have used the gas stove inside but it was still pretty warm and it’s not so fun cooking by candlelight. We were also planning on making avocado milkshakes but that required a blender…

Instead, we ate melting ice cream from our freezer. It was just like soft serve. Yum.

Next week to Lithuania with Alicia and Spiro.