A grand day out

A local hero

Thursday I was lucky enough to be invited to an outing organised by the Italian Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food Policies, one of a series of events to promote certified Italian food products abroad. The Theme was Etruscan Land, so we visited 3 wineries in the Cerveteri and Maccarese areas, and had lunch at a local restaurant, during which we were also offered a tasting of wines from a 4th winery.  Altogether, a lot of wines for someone like me, who drinks on occasion a glass of red! Our first stop was the Castello di Torre in Pietra, along the Via Aurelia, the Roman road which goes from Rome to France. One day, I'll just have to take to it in my car and drive all the way up, to practice my French! The Torre in Pietra estate is a family owned and family run business and has been in the same hands for several generations and, incidentally, one of the family members used to live upstairs from us while I was growing up. I remember his cattle catalogues coming in the post!  Mr Filippo Antonelli showed us round, and having found out his uncle used to be my neighbour, to make the world feel a bit smaller I found out he's a relative of the lady I saw on Monday to make arrangements for a catered dinner on the 19th. She told me about her patissière granddaughter from Milan, who also happens to be this gentleman's niece. The winery has a fabulous grotto excavated in a tuff (or tufa) hill, the Mammoth Grotto, named after mammoth bones found in it. Tufa maintains a constant temperature of 15° C and a humidity level of 80%, which is ideal for wines. The farm turned organic three years ago and it will be certified next year, since by EU regulations it takes 3 years to switch from normal farming to organic. We tasted several wines, of which the Macchia Sacra white was my favourite, made with Fiano grapes. What really got to me was their olive oil: FABULOUS; the juice of life itself. I just couldn't get enough of it and had to buy a 5 litre can. For an organic oil, at 10 euro per litre it was very fairly priced, as were all other products. I also bought honey and chick peas, and the Macchia Sacra white, of course. Plus we were given some of their spelt pasta. I can't wait for James to taste them all and tell me what he thinks. The farm is open every day, and on Fridays and Saturday it offers the added bonus of a local cheesemaker (Pitzalis) and vegetable farm (Caramadre) bringing their products for sale. Being already quite satiated and tipsy, we moved on to Casale Cento Corvi winery in Cerveteri. Again, a family run business, producing wines and preserves. We were greeted by the owners who offered us a tasting of 6 different wines, 3 whites and 3 reds. They have the merit of having resuscitated an almost extinct variety of grapes dating back to Etruscan times, which they have named Giacché. Their Giacché Rosso has won several prizes, and is a very distinctive and rather unique wine, borderline passito. A rich, fruity, almost black liquid, impenetrable to the eye, whith notes of visciola (wild cherry) and dried prunes which, according to the owner, could be drunk on its own in front of the fireplace, or even with raw fish. I beg to differ with the latter. Maybe with tuna.  The wine costs 25 euro a bottle, or 38 $ in the USA.  They also make a Passito version of Giacché, reminiscent of Port but with only 15% alcohol and wothout the overly alcoholic quality and sweetness of port, very pleasant. Our following stop was Trattoria Zì Maria, on the hills towards Sasso. There we were offered lunch and a degustation of wines from Tenuta Tre Cancelli. I must admit that by lunchtime I was rather past tasting wines and couldn't quite focus on the whites, rosés and reds..... Lunch was good, with the chestnut and ricotta ravioli at the top of my preferences. We set off for the Onorati winery in a pretty merry state of mind. There we were greeted by the owner and his teenage son, who gave uys a very entertaining lecture on wine bottling and wine making procedures in English. The wine tasting part of the visit was slightly overlooked, and we were sat down at tables and only offered two wines, accompanied by divine roasted chestnuts and a local pecorino which flaked away like slate. Very special but, alas, so artisanal (the next door shepherd makes it) that it can't be bought. Needless to say, the world is getting smaller every day, so I found out that our guide used to be a  friend of my brother's in my teenages and we had spent countless afternoons playing together ina  band and at my house being served English tea by my mother. My visual memory must be glitching big time, because I had NO recollection of him whatsoever.

Ceilings at Castello di Torre in Pietra

The Mammoth's knee

The cellar

Tasting 'Life juice'

Mini ice creams in their shells

Mini deserts at Trattoria Zì Maria

SOMETHING WENT TERRIBLY WRONG WITH THIS POST'S SETTINGS...... I can't get it to be in a decent layout...... SORRY

A slice of heaven

This is a truly dense but light chocolate cake which I tasted 11 years ago in a café in Bowral, near Sydney. The cake was fabulous and I just had to ask for the recipe. The waitress didn't have the recipe, but said she knew the cake was made with Belgian cocoa and.... beetroot!

So this is what I came up with after a few attempts.

3 eggs
230 gr sugar (fine brown is better)
180 mls vegetable oil
230 gr flour
pinch of salt
2 tsp baking powder
1 1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1 cup dutch process unsweetened cocoa
3/4 cup water
250 gr grated cooked beetroot

Oven preheated to 180° C
First of all, buy a packet of cooked beetroot from the supermarket. You will use half and can keep the rest in the freezer for when you get the urge to make this cake.
Grate the beetrot on a medium sized grater. I use the food processor and NOT the finest grating blade. Hole are about 4 mm wide.
Whip up the eggs with the sugar until nice and pale, add the oil and keep emulsifying. Sift flour, cocoa, raising agents and add to the mixer, mixing until just incorporated and adding the water to ease the process.
Mix in grated beetroot by hand.
You will need a 24 cm cake tin, or thereabouts. Pour into the buttered and floured tin, pop into the oven and give it 40 - 45 minutes.

This cake is lovely and moist, so it really doesn't need a filling or icing, but if you really must you can slice in half and add a good slathering of chocolate hazelnut paste (I like Rivoire from Florence, an artisanal nutella made with ONLY hazelnuts and cocoa) or a plain chocolate ganache.

Obviously, a good dollop of whipped cream wouldn't go wasted on this either.

I made this last weekend for James, I didn't have the recipe with me so I sort of improvised from what I remembered. Well, he said it was PERFECT and asked for the recipe for his hotel!  I couldn't have asked for more....

My daily winter bread

I'm about to tuck into my daily lunch of ribollita soup....
In winter I am a cavolo nero aficionado, and seize any occasion to use it. Tuesday I bought two bunches at my lovely local market, where many farmers bring their own produce. One went into my weekly supply of ribollita, the other I will turn into a mixed pulse and kale soup.
On a cold day I like nothing better than a lovely soup. I make it out of anything, often with the addition of ginger, which gives even the most bland and humble ingredients an interesting twist. Always without oil, which I add in the plate, except for pumpkin soup, where the addition of oil (or butter) is necessary to benefit from the lipo-soluble supply of Vitamin A.

The other advantage is having lunch ready every day for a week! And you know what? I never grow tired of eating a good soup, even 7 days in a row.  It's tasty, it's healthy and it's lean. You won't need Dr Oz's advice when you start eating like this!

First, catch a duck....

I trotted to Piazza Vittorio market this week, mostly for my seasonal fill of pitted Gaeta olives.... If you know where else to buy them closer to my neck of the woods (Monteverde), please advise! Anyway, I love the market and all the ethnic stalls, so there's always a good reason to go, even when Pakistani mangoes aren't in season. I also wanted Oolong Tea from the Chinese supermarket, which is said to have amazing slimming powers.... Not the supermarket, the tea =)

So I went for olives, and came home with a duck, as you do.

The duck was originated by a craving for duck breast, which I watched being cooked on Gambero Rosso channel, with honey and chilli.  Anyway, the duck breasts are in the freezer awaiting a quiet evening or weekend meal with James.

The carcass went into making a jus or fond de volaille, for when I'll be cooking the breasts. The legs, liver and heart went into a duck ragout which we had for dinner yesterday with some fusilli pugliesi. It takes a while to bone and de-nerve duck legs, and then chop all the meat to a decent standard by hand. While I was doing this, James fell asleep in front of the TV.  No wonder I wasn't managing to have a conversation with him from the kitchen!

To make the ragout I used a dash of olive oil, 1 shallot, 1 carrot, 1 stick of celery; a blade of mace, 5 cloves, a few black pepercorns, a cinnamon stick, sage, thyme, marjoram, all of which went into my nifty pacman style sylicone ball which prevents all the little aromatics from floating around your stocks and sauces and then having to fish them out with Certosine-style patience. A good dash of red wine, and a can of my trusty Mutti tomato pulp. All of this cooked slowly for about two hours.  Yum!

By the way, the Oolong tea is working, together with a box of Dr Ernst's slimming tisane also bought in the chinese supermarket. It appears I am losing about 2 to 300 grams PER DAY! All without effort!

You know what, I might make oolong tea duck breast.... who knows, it might be good.

Sermoneta

For the first anniversary with my wonderful chef boyfriend James, we decided to lunch in Sermoneta, a beautiful medieval village on the hills near Latina. We were in the erea anyway to pick up a new car, after his was burnt to a crisp by vandals a couple of months earlier =(

After a search on the net, I decided to try out 'Il Simposio al Corso', a small restaurant run by Fabio Stivali, an expert on Medieval cuisine. I was especially intirgued by his use of 'trombolotto', a condiment produced by him, by pressing olives together with a specific type of lemon which grows in the area. The resulting concoction is then enriched with 14 kinds of herbs (in spring) or 10 (in the autumn).  Stivali only uses excellent extravirgin olive oil in his dishes, and I must say that what we tasted on bread, a freshly pressed oil the colour of which resembled a brightly coloured citrine quartz, was absolutely to die for.

We ordered the house selection of medieval antipasti (crostini with olives, with roasted tomato paste, with peppers; fried artichokes; chicory, roasted peppers, grilled zucchini dressed with a must reduction); I had fresh pasta with porcini mushrooms and trombolotto, James had tagliolini with bottarga (dried mullet roe) and trombolotto, which is dressed and tossed at the table. My aversion to fish had prevented me from ordering this house specialty, but I have to admit that I was astonished at the delicacy of flavour of this sea product which I had always imagined to be over-fishy and over-salty. Instead it was delicate and somewhat nutty.

We were pretty full, so we ordered one main to share, the pork fillet with rosemary and pistachio sauce and stewed eggplant, and it was delicious. All was washed down with a local red wine from Villa Gianna, quite pleasant. We had no room for dessert but were curious, so I had the medieval pear with apple sauce, wild sour cherries and roasted chestnuts in syrup, while James had the anglo-italian 'zuppa inglese', an Italian take on (what I think must be) trifle.  The explanation for this dish was that the local Marquess Caetani married an English Lord in the '50ies, thus influencing local culture and infusing it with British nuances. With this we were offered a shot of sour cherry syrup, which was slightly alcoholic and divine.

The dishes are priced 6, 8 or 12 euros. So it's all very reasonable and GOOD!

Who am I?

Hello anyone and everyone!
This is a blog about food by someone who cares about food and cooking.
My name is Francesca Flore. I live in Rome, Italy, where I was born almost 45 years ago from a Neapolitan dad and a London mum.  My background is very much influenced by all things british, starting from the food we ate at home, mostly cooked by my English (almost) grandmother, a formidable lady who lived with us until she passed away at the considerable age of 98.

I became interested in cooking as a child, when with my brother and a friend who lived round the corner we spent many a saturday or sunday afternoon messing around in the kitchen. I later became in charge of the weekly pasta sauce (we were 8 at home, and my mum used to by 5 kilo cans of tinned tomatoes), most of which got gobbled while cooking, when I dunked pieces of crusty bread into it with the excuse of 'tasting it for salt'. I was skinny at the time and unconcerned by weight issues =(
More or less at the same time I was entrusted with the preparation of vinaigrette for our daily, compulsory salad. 'Eat your greens' was very much a part of my childhood and adolescence and, whereas at the time I couldn't stand the boring round leaf lettuce, later I became a salad fiend, especially after rocket, or arugula, or rughetta, was introduced!  I then added fresh fruit tart to my culinary assets, around the age of 16.

Becoming increasingly interested in cooking, I obsessed by buying endless amounts of cooking magazines.
I later moved to London, at the age of 26, and there food shopping became something of a hobby. I felt like Alice in Wonderland in the supermarket, with all things bright and beautiful at the tip of my finger, or at the end of the cash card.  Herbs and ingredients I would not have found in Rome were to be had as a matter of course, and this widened my horizons.
Still, never had the thought of cooking professionally entered my mind yet.  But at the end of 5 stressful, rushed years in London as a PA, in June 1998 I decided I'd had enough of office work and took off to... Sydney, of all places, to study at the 'Académie Culinaire Le Cordon Bleu (Paris)' cooking school, which had recently opened there.
This allowed me to combine two passions, or kill two birds with one stone. I had been to Sydney on holiday at New Year and was absolutely besotted with it. The place, the people, the atmosphere.  My year in Sydney was one of the best, if not THE best (my time with James is OUT OF contest!).

In August 1999 I returned to Rome, having decided to become a caterer. So here I am: La luna nel piatto, The moon in your plate. This combines two sayings: 'vuoi la luna' (you want the moon) when someone wants something impossible to reach; and 'la luna nel pozzo' (the moon in the well): when you see it, you can make a wish.

I like to offer disparate types of cuisines, such as Italian obviously, but also Thai, Indian, Mexican, Indonesian, French, you name it. If I've tasted it (authentic), I'll cook it! And the menus are taylor made to the client's wishes. I once did a wedding with a Sicilian lunch but 'ethnic' appetizer finger food from Asia, for instance
I cook for 8 to 200 people, or more. I also translate books, and have had music in my life as a hobby forever: I started singing in a choir at the age of 3 and still sing, with a small vocal female group.

And now I have also James to make me happy and share cookbooks with and to give me advice =)