Il Forno

Mouthwatering vegetarian: Cafe Paradiso Cookbook

Last summer the three of us spent our holidays in Ireland. Me and Daniela both love this island, with exception of the weather maybe :-). We drove a bit around the west and south, enjoying the landscape, views, the great people and also the food. Oh, and also the great radio show "The Full Irish". I was positively impressed by the food and style of the Irish restaurants we visited. These places were almost always friendly and with a cosy atmosphere, food prepared with nice local ingredients in an Irish/international cooking hybrid style, and most important of all unpretentious. For this very reason I think they wouldn't have a chance to win a Michelin star but would certainly make my "eating-out places to visit often" list if they were in the neighbourhood.

Sadly we didn't manage to try one restaurant I had been hearing about a lot: Cafe Paradiso in Cork. I'd heard great things about this vegetarian restaurant. Since my previous vegetarian dining experiences had all been depressing (one in Naples probably the worst) I was ready to try what is by some considered "maybe the best vegetarian restaurant in Europe". But alas I couldn't. Cafe Paradiso was closed on the two days we spent near Cork. To make up for the disappointment I bought Dennis Cotter's (Paradiso's chef) The Cafe Paradiso Cookbook. I've not been cooking from this book for a while but it still is one of my favourite ones. I really enjoy the way it is written, the recipes are explained in an easy way and it breaks all the prejudices one usually has about vegetarian food.

Is my blog burning? An Italian-style tartine sampler

10 PM on Sunday... I actually planned to write this post a wee bit earlier but a few things distracted me. Between others this book (had to force myself to put it down) and helping Daniela make a double batch of baci di dama for the local Frauenzentrum, for tomorrow, Women's day, I got a bit carried away. But the biscuits are ready now, and I've managed to make a reading pause so here we are.

I had a bit more problems than I thought coming up with a tartine idea. Or better: I got many "beginnings" of an idea but had trouble turning them into practice. I wanted to give my tartine an Italian twist. I first thought about something regional (like a tartine with Tuscan ingredients) but it all got mixed up and I ended up with four possible tartines, all with a definite Italian twist. I couldn't really decide which one to make so at the end I made all of them and after tasting me and Daniela chose a "winner". The one which tasted and looked nicer was a Tartine Meridionale or a Southern Italian themed tartine.

Ode to the artichoke

La alcachofa de tierno corazon se vistio' de guerrero, erecta, construyo' una pequena cupula,

So starts Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the artichoke" (for the full poem: in Spanish here, or in English, losing a bit through the translation, here). Not many vegetables have had the honour of a poem from a Nobel laureate. Love it, loathe it or just find it weird. It's hard to remain indifferent to this edible flower bud. I could hardly stand it as a kid. I found its sweetish taste disturbing. But since my mom comes from Rome, where the things are an object of love, artichokes often popped up on our table. Now I love them. Maybe it's an acquired taste or maybe my taste buds have grown up with me: still now I could never get enough. So I was really happy to find some on sale last Sturday and use them, in a classic combo, with lamb.

My Is my blog burning? Soup

It took me a while to decide what soup to make as my personal soup-entry for this blog cooking day. I wanted to do something Italian but didn't manage to get the ingredients I was looking for. So, inspired by ingredients, I decided to make a soup with a German accent, or at least an "impression" of German ingredients: a potato and horseradish cream soup with smoked trout and toasted almonds.

Italian 80's retro-chic: pasta gamberi e rucola

Every decade is marked by a few, often infamous, food-fads. In Italy the late '80s were the rucola or rocket (as the salad) years. Rucola seemed to move from its natural role as salad (where IMO tastes great) and to appear on top of almost any dish: rucola with steaks, pasta, pizza, rucola pesto and so on. I'm not talking here about the top of the range restaurants but of the many middle of the league eateries. Rucola started to appear more often on our table at home too. Nowadays those "golden days" ;-) are gone but a few rucola dishes remain. One, that my dad still prepares every now and then, is pasta con rucola e gamberetti, rocket and shrimp pasta. The combination works very well, the peppery rucola balancing the sweet shrimps. I felt like some last week, but instead of preparing it the original way I decided to modify it to get a less rustic dish.

A fine toothpick job: Torta Caprese

This is the final post about our New Year's eve dinner then back to baking.

To properly finish our Italian inspired New Year's Eve dinner I decided to bake one of my favourite cakes, torta caprese or chocolate almond cake from Capri. Capri is, gastronomically speaking, the home of some wonderful lemons: so what better than a strongly lemon flavoured custard to go with the cake? I tried some decoration on the custard, as you can see from the pic above, which was, as you'll see, easier than thought.

Tuna in pink

Finding fresh sea fish here in Jena is quite difficult, so whenever I find something that looks good I buy it even if a bit pricey: it's a drag when you've lived years in a city with a decent fish market. I found some nice looking tuna at our local grocery store, which, although probably frozen and thawed, looked very good. So the main course of our NYE dinner (continuing the post of the last two days) was pan fried tuna steaks. I wanted to make an effort in the plating of the dish so after some thought I decided to serve the tuna sliced and fanned out with two or three sides. Finding some nice veggies was quite hard so at the end the choice fell on green beans, red skinned potatoes and tomatoes (to give it a "Mediterranean" touch).

Pasta e fagioli re-revisited

This is the continuation of yesterday's post. As a pasta dish for our New Years Eve dinner I wanted to make some ravioli, my pasta rolling machine lay unused for two long already. I considered various stuffings but at the end decided for white beans for two reasons. First of all because of the pasta e fagioli (pasta with beans) re-interpretation: apart the traditional recipes many modified versions of this dish have been "created" by Italian chefs in the past. This one seemed an intriguing change from the standard. Second I first read about the idea in one of Gualtiero Marchesi books (a famous 80's chef) and was always intrigued by it. Marchesi makes the point that often chefs stuff ravioli with expensive and noble ingredients (for example oysters, lobster, truffles) which actually deserve to be highlighted in their organic characters instead of being reduced to stuffing: much better using first class "poor" ingredients and use their simple flavours in interesting combinations.