White Wine – Italian Kiwi

Peas With Bacon And Pinenuts

Lisa — Fri, 04 Aug 2017 23:40:31 +0000

Fresh peas are one of my favourite vegetables. The best way to eat them, as far as I’m concerned, is straight off the vine while you’re standing by the plant. If you get them small enough, raw peas taste sweet and nutty and don’t even need to be cooked. As they get a little bigger, cooking takes away the bitter taste that they can sometimes have. I bought these peas recently as my vines have already given me everything they’ve got. The screaming hot weather was too much for them, and they collapsed in a heap at the beginning of Summer. The market ones were still excellent, but I decided that they needed to be cooked. I modified a wonderful recipe that I found in one of my La Repubblica cookbooks that mixes the peas in with pancetta (bacon) and toasted pine-nuts.

When I was a kid, my favourite way to eat peas was to drown them in ketchup and then pile mashed potato on top of them and eat it all in one big messy mouthful. I had ketchup with just about everything then. So much of it, that it probably counted as one of my food groups. It’s a vegetable……right? Once I grew up and stopped spraying ketchup around like water, I had kids who didn’t really want to eat vegetables that much. My sister helped me to get my two boys to eat peas when they were toddlers by suggesting I give them frozen peas straight out of the freezer. Somehow, they taste even better that way; almost like tiny green ice-creams. Both my kids loved eating them like that, and still eat them frozen sometimes, even though they’re both wandering through their pre-teen times now. They skipped the ketchup phase, so I discovered that it’s not genetic.

Adding the toasted pin-nuts to the peas makes them so much more interesting than just boiling the peas and throwing them on a plate as a last-minute side because you should eat something green. It really makes a difference to toast the pine-nuts, so take the 2 minutes extra to do it. Be very careful though, as they burn very easily. Stir them constantly when they’re cooking and don’t leave them in the pan once they’re browned, even with the heat off.

Travel Photo Of The Week

This stunning beach in the photo below is called Arthur Bay. Last year we stopped by in Queensland, Australia to do a little sightseeing and get some sunshine after spending a few wintery weeks in New Zealand. My absolute favourite part of our visit was going to Magnetic Island, where this beach is. As you can see, the place was almost deserted as it was winter there at the time. The temperatures were around 26 degrees C (80 F) and the water was warm enough to swim in. I love winters like that! The best part about winter in Queensland is that there are no jellyfish. In the summer, if you want to go in the sea, you need a special suit that covers you from head to toe and looks remarkably like a large condom, or you have to swim inside designated areas on the beaches that are protected by “stinger nets”. In the colder months, the jellyfish drift off to harass people in warmer parts of the ocean. At Arthur Bay, there was a coral reef close into shore, so we spent happy hours snorkling and gazing at all the colourful fish and corals, and of course, not picking up any shells. Rule number 1, so we were told in the Townsville Aquarium, is NEVER pick up shells. There are tiny molluscs called Cone-shells who live in the shallow waters along the coast which will kill you with their sting in a few seconds. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Prep Time 10

Cook Time 10

Total Time 20

Servings 2 people

Ingredients

300 g shelled or frozen Peas
40 g Bacon
2 Spring Onions
30 g Pine-nuts
2 Tbsp Olive Oil
2 tsp Butter
1 tsp Salt
to taste Pepper
2 Tbsp White Wine
1 Tbsp Parsley

Instructions

Shell the peas. Mince the white and green parts of the spring onions. Cut the bacon into small pieces.
Heat the olive oil and 1 tsp of butter in a frying pan on a medium heat. Add the green onions and bacon and saute them, stirring until the bacon starts to brown slightly.
Add the peas and cook, stirring often, for 8-10 minutes.
While the peas are cooking, add the second teaspoon of butter to a small pan. Saute the pine-nuts for 2 - 3 minutes until they are browned. Stir them constantly, as they burn easily. Drain them on a paper kitchen-towel.
Add wine, salt and pepper to the peas and stir.
Take the peas off the heat and stir in the pine-nuts.
Chop the parsley finely and sprinkle over the peas.
This dish can be eaten hot or at room temperature.

Risotto With Shrimps, Peas and Saffron

Lisa — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 16:41:53 +0000

I found some fresh peas in the supermarket the other day and decided that I needed to eat them immediately, if not sooner……but how to have them? My mind worked furiously….hmmm…I suddenly remembered the kids were at the canteen at school this lunchtime, so they wouldn’t be home to complain about eating shrimps (don’t ask me why they do, but they always do!)……peas and shrimps together go perfectly, and also SAFFRON! (Another “weird yellow thing” that my kids don’t like to eat much), so it was decided: I made risotto with shrimps, fresh peas and saffron, and it was so amazingly good that I wanted to tell you all about it!

I actually love eating raw peas straight out of the pod. They’re so crunchy and sweet! So, there were a few less peas in the risotto with shrimps than there were meant to be. You can always add more that the quantity I’ve written down if you manage not to eat them before you throw them in with the risotto!

I remember eating risotto with saffron for the first time in Milan. At the time I was ….as they say in the UK….”fresh off the boat”. I’d just arrived in England a couple of months before, and was traveling haphazardly around Europe with almost no money, cutting my hair with a Swiss Army Knife and eating mainly bread and marmite. We were puddling around in Greece, when a friend wrote to us using the Poste Restante system. For those who grew up in the age of cell phones and internet, this is a service where you can send letters to a post office , say in Athens, and they will hold those letters for a few months until the person they’re addressed to passes by and picks them up. Yes, I know….it’s archaic! Anyway, this friend wrote that he was actually traveling for BUSINESS, and so had a business account for eating. He was going to be in Milan the next week! We needed a good meal so we immediately high-tailed it on the next ferry out to Italy. He took us to one of the poshest restaurants in Milan, which tried to seat us in the most discreet place possible thanks to our torn jeans, hiking boots and backpacks. We ate risotto al zafferano and drank way too much wine. The waiter kept coming to ask us if we wanted the check, but much to his snobby horror, we kept saying , “No, not yet!” and ordering more wine and making lots of noise. The poor waiter must have been SO relieved when we showed that we could actually afford to pay for the meal, and when we finally weaved our way out of the restaurant. Since then, saffron has always held a special memory for me. Unfortunately, I also remember the Youth Hostel we stayed in was a nightmare of screaming Italian children on a school trip who ran up and down the halls until 3am. Great memories! I’m afraid I have no photos of Milan to put up as that time was “pre-digital”, so instead I’ll leave you with a photo of the “Langhe”, which is a beautiful, not terribly well known wine region just south of Turin and South-West of Milan. Ok, this has nothing to do with saffron, or risotto, but isn’t it nice?

You can use the pressure cooker method to make the risotto ai gamberetti if you have one, which is what I’ve written into the instructions below. If you don’t own one of these kitchen wonders, follow this link to make risotto the regular way. Follow the basic instructions for adding the broth, and use wine instead of beer, peas instead of spinach, shrimp instead of sausage, and saffron instead of, well….nothing…..it is very good without too!