On being introduced to fennel bulbs

This isn’t so much a recipe as such, as it is an introduction to a vegetable I never knew you could eat before I set foot in Italy.  In New Zealand, where I grew up, fennel was known as a herb that you sprinkled over a fish while cooking it if you were feeling particularly risqué that day. Actually, back in those days, even having fish that wasn’t battered and deep-fried within an inch of its life was pretty damn risqué, let alone sprinkling some freaky herb on it. I’m glad to announce that things have changed drastically in Kiwi-land since then in regards to the way food is prepared! Though I have to say that a fresh piece of deep-fried snapper and chips is one of the first things I want to eat when I touch down at Auckland airport (and that’s even when the plane arrives at 5:30 in the morning!), Well, it’s a competition between good fish and chips (“fush ‘n’ chups” in the kiwi lingo) or a mince pie.  I’m salivating now just thinking about it.  OK, at this point, it gives me a great excuse to throw in a photo of where I spent my formative years.  The colours are real! That’s me, my Dad and one of my sons on a joy-ride. 🙂

Back to thoughts on fennel

Got….to….get….my….mind….back…..to…..salad…….OK, with a force of will I didn’t know I had, I’m starting to think about fennel again, rather than greasy, insanely delicious comfort food……I do love the crunch of fennel when it’s raw in a salad.  It’s a vegetable that my kids also love to play with. They snap off one of the “layers”, hold it by the stalk so that it looks like an ice-cream and crunch and munch it just like that.  It’s also great cooked, if you like an aniseed-y flavour.  The aniseed flavour is much milder when it’s raw.  I like it braised with stock in the oven. OK, now I’m starting to salivate over that too, which makes we feel a little better about the Pavlovian drooling going on inside me.  It’s not just for grease then!

If you want to get really risqué, you can add a handful of chopped walnuts to the mix when you make the salad.  They go really well with the crunchy fennel and sweet oranges.

Another way with fennel

I have a great friend, Gina, who lives in the mythical town of San Francisco (yes, it really is as cool as everyone says it is!).  She used to be a REAL cook (unlike me!) at one of the better restaurants there and introduced me to making salad with thinly sliced fennel and Portobello mushrooms. Fabulous!!  Unfortunately, where I live now, I have never seen Portobello mushrooms.  It’s OK with champignons de Paris, but it’s not the same.  Luckily, fennel is holds up extremely well as a salad all on its own with just a little lemon juice, salt and olive oil.  This is the way my mother-in-law first showed me how to make it.  When I told my husband’s parents that in NZ we use the leaves and not the bulb, they couldn’t believe it as they had never used the leaves for anything.  Funny world we live in, isn’t it!

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Fennel bulb and orange salad

Easy salad made with fennel bulb and orange pieces

Course Salad

Cuisine Italian

Prep Time 5 minutes minutes

Total Time 5 minutes minutes

Servings 3 -4 people

Ingredients

• 2 Fennel bulbs medium sized
• 2 oranges
• 2 Tbsp Olive oil
• Lemon juice from 1 lemon
• Salt to taste

Instructions

• Slice the fennel bulb - the thickness depends on how you like your "crunch factor".  I like to slice it thickly so that it is very crunchy.
• Chop the ends of the oranges, then cut all the skin and pith off.  Cut the oranges into chunks and add it to the fennel.
• Put it in a bowl and sprinkle the other ingredients over the top.
• Mix and eat immediately.

This week’s Travel Photo is a random photo!  Years ago I went to Florida and was amazed at how wild and beautiful it was (as soon as you got away from Orlando). This photo is taken from the garden of a house we rented on the west coast of Florida.  It was incredible!  We could sit on the jetty and watch eagles diving and fish jumping everywhere.  The only reason we weren’t sitting on the chairs enjoying the sunset when the photo was taken is because of the not so incredible wildlife: the tiny “no-seeums”.  These are little insects that look like little black dots that descend on you as soon as the sun starts to go down and they bite and bite and bite, and make you itchy like crazy.  We ran screaming for the house and then realised why the porch had a netting screen all over it.

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Prep Time 5 minutes minutes

Total Time 5 minutes minutes

Servings 2 servings

Ingredients

• 2 cupfuls Arugula rocket
• 10 - 12 cherry tomatoes
• about 10 Parmesan cheese
• 1 Tbsp Red wine vinegar or balsamic vinegar
• 2 -3 Tbsp Good Olive Oil
• to taste Salt

Instructions

• Put the salad in a bowl.
• Add the cherry tomatoes, chopped in half.
• Use a vegetable peeler to add shavings of parmesan cheese.
• Sprinkle the olive oil, vinegar and salt over the top.
• Toss and serve immediately.

Travel Photo Of The Week

Now, as a final as it seems to be becoming a theme, here’s the “Travel Photo of the Week” of Portofino in Liguria.  It’s a very pretty, but very exclusive village on the coast.  Forget trying to stay there unless you’re rolling in money!

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Prep Time 5 minutes minutes

Total Time 5 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 1 bunch Celery white or green
• 20 - 30 g 1 -2 oz Parmesan cheese
• 3 Tbsp Good olive oil
• 3 Tbsp Red wine vinegar
• to taste Salt
• to taste optional White pepper

Instructions

• Slice the celery into thick slices after washing it.
• User a potato peeler to peel off thin slices of parmesan cheese.
• Mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and eat!

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!

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Prep Time 5 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 15 minutes minutes

Servings 2 people

Ingredients

• 1 cup Arborio or Carnaroli rice
• 125 ml 1/2 cup White wine
• 1 Vegetable boullion cube
• 150 g 5oz Small precooked shrimps
• 250 g peas in their shells approx 100g/1/3 cup of shelled peas Peas
• one packet of powder or a few strands Saffron
• 2 cups Water or broth
• 1 tsp Salt
• to taste Pepper

Instructions

• Heat 2 -3 tablespoons of olive oil in the pressure cooker. Add the rice and saute, stirring frequently, until it starts to brown a little.
• Pour in the wine and let it boil off.
• Add the water or broth, the bouillon cube if using, and the saffron. Then add the salt.
• Add the shelled peas.
• Stir everything, then close the lid of the pressure cooker.
• When it starts to whistle, put a timer on for 6 minutes.
• In the mean time, if the shrimps are uncooked, sautee them in a little olive oil until they turn pink.
• When the timer goes off, run the cooker under cold water, then open it.  Depending on what rice you have used, it may be already of perfect consistency, or it may be still a little liquid.  If there is too much water, put the pot back on the heat and let some more of the water boil off for a few minutes.
• Put in the shrimps and stir.
• You could serve the risotto with finely chopped parsley sprinkled over the top of it.

This recipe for polpette con piselli (meatballs with peas) is another great classic from my mother-in-law, Bianca.  Friends of my husband who grew up eating these often at his parents’ place in Turin  have been bugging me to put up this recipe for a while, so here it is!  Polpette con piselli a wonderful “make in advance” dish that also freezes well, and so far, I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like it (vegetarians excluded of course….please don’t make it for vegetarian friends).

The recipe I’ve given you makes quite a few polpette, but as it takes a little effort to make them, it’s better to make more than you think you will need and then freeze the leftovers (if there are any!).  They make a wonderful near-instant meal on one of those days that you don’t know what to make/can’t be bothered cooking and are too lazy even to get take-out.  You can just pull the polpette out of the freezer and heat them up!  I like eating them with mashed potato…I think that’s the Kiwi part of me coming through: “potato with everything!” should be some kind of slogan.  Maybe I should change the name of my blog…hmmmm……

In Italy, I’ve always had these as a second course after a first course of pasta……now pay attention to the bit that said “after a first course of pasta“.  Let it go on the record that I didn’t say “with” pasta (like, on the same plate).  They’d take my Italian passport away for that one! So, you do whatever you want with that, but just don’t tell me so that I can’t confess anything and get you into trouble with the Italian Food Police.

And, just a tip before I leave you with the recipe: I just discovered recently that the best way to chop herbs into small bits is to stick the leaves in a cup (as you can see in the photo above), and cut them in the cup with scissors.  It works amazingly well, and I can’t believe that I never thought of doing this.  Instead for years I’ve been laboriously mincing herbs on a chopping board with a knife, which takes me forever since I’m terribly impatient at doing that sort of thing.  Incredibly, I haven’t lost any fingers yet, but I have sometimes added extra protein to the meal that wasn’t supposed to be there.  😉

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Prep Time 10 minutes minutes

Cook Time 30 minutes minutes

Total Time 40 minutes minutes

Servings 6 people

Ingredients

• 500 g 1lb Beef mince (ground beef)
• 1/2 Chopped onion optional
• 50 g 2oz Ham (chopped)
• 20 g 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
• 1 Egg
• 5 - 10 g 1/4 cup: to your taste, really Parsley
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• to taste Pepper
• 1 sprig Rosemary
• 1 whole clove Garlic
• 400 ml 1 3/4 cups Tomato passata
• 1 Beef boullion cube
• 250 ml 1 cup Red wine
• 500 g 2 cups Peas

Instructions

• Mix the mince, finely chopped onion (if using), parmesan, parsley, ham, salt, pepper and egg together in a bowl. If the mixture is too "wet" and doesn't stick together, add some breadcrumbs: 2 Tbsp at a time until it becomes more firm.
• If you have time, place the mixture in the fridge for 30 minutes.  This step is not strictly necessary, but it helps the balls stay together while they are being browned.
• Make balls about the size of a walnut with your hands.
• Heat olive oil in a frying pan (with high sides if possible) with a large sprig of rosemary and a whole clove of garlic.
• Brown the meatballs.  Do not crowd them together.  If the pan is too small, put them in a few at a time. Gently turn them until they are browned on all sides.
• Add the red wine and let it boil off.
• If you do not have a pan with high sides, transfer the meatballs to a larger pot.  Add the tomato passata, the boullion cube and the peas. Top up with a little water if the sauce is too thick.  Add salt to taste.
• Simmer gently for 15 -20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
• If the sauce is too runny, turn the heat up briefly to let the sauce thicken.
• These are great to freeze!  Just make sure the sauce is quite runny and covers the meatballs entirely before putting them in the freezer.

I’m sure that right now you’re saying, either aloud and making all your work-mates turn to look at you, or more sensibly, in your head so that nobody knows that you’re not working, “What the heck is Ciceri e Tria??!!!”.  Well, that’s what I said when I first heard of these words when we were in Puglia a few weeks ago.  Ciceri e tria simply means chickpeas and tagliatelle in the Puglese dialect.  I ate it for the first time at a marvelous  family-run restaurant in Lecce called Alle Due Corti .  Rosalba de Carlo, the matriarch of the family and restaurant founder, oversees all the diners from a table in the corner of the restaurant.  You have the feeling that if you don’t eat everything on your plate, she will come over and tell you off.  🙂 The menu there full of traditional Salento dishes. Salento is the stunning region in the “heel of the boot” full of  white-sand beaches, and beautiful ancient towns that still have their medieval walls.

Lecce is a beautiful, mainly pedestrian, wonderfully ornate Baroque town. It was founded when the Greeks lived there, so that means a loooong time ago.  Around the area there are villages in which they still speak a dialect which is very close to ancient Greek.  Amazing that it hasn’t changed over the last thousand-odd years!  I say that the town is “mainly pedestrian” as you still have to watch out for the ubiquitous Fiat Pandas driving down “roads” scarcely wide enough for three people to walk abreast in, but mainly it’s a peaceful place to wander around in.

For ciceri e tria you use fresh tagliatelle made without eggs.  I’m not sure what would happen if you used tagliatelle with eggs, but it may mess up the important part of the dish in which you fry part of the pasta in olive oil until it’s crispy.  I haven’t done a test yet to see what happens if eggs are involved.  If anyone tries it, please let me know how it goes!  Just an aside here: the fried tagliatelle turn into something a little like chips.  Just add a little salt and you have a delicious snack without making the rest of the dish!!

The tagliatelle are easy to make even without a pasta machine and a standing mixer.  You just need a bit of muscle to knead the dough (or someone to do it for you!), and a good rolling pin. I used dried chickpeas to make this, but you could cut the process time a lot and use canned ones.  Just drop the cooking time you need to make the sauce.  Oh, and one more thing about the sauce: go look at the photo at the top of the page, and then remember, it should have MORE broth.  I didn’t leave enough of the broth.  It still tasted good, but it should be almost “soupy”.  Just add more water if the chickpea mixture is drying out while cooking.

Ciceri e tria takes a bit of work to make, but it’s totally worth it!  You can make the sauce the day before to cut down some of the labour on the actual day, and just heat it up again before you throw the pasta on to boil. Be courageous, take the bull by the horns, take the plunge, grab the golden ring, or just forget all those metaphors and go try to make it.  It’s not as tricky as you think! (Oh, actually I don’t know if the golden ring one is actually a saying, but I like the sound of it!).  It’s almost as good as going to Puglia (well, it’s not really but I wanted to make you feel better!).

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Prep Time 2 hours hours

Cook Time 1 hour hour

Total Time 3 hours hours

Servings 4 or 5 people

Ingredients

• 200 g 7oz All-purpose flour
• 200 g 7oz Durum wheat flour
• 1/2 tsp Salt
• 200 ml 4/5 cup Water
• 300 g 2 cups Dried chickpeas
• 1 Onion
• 1 Carrot
• 1 stalk Celery
• 1 medium - large Tomato
• to taste Salt and pepper

Instructions

The night before:

• Put the chickpeas in a large bowl filled with water and leave them to soak overnight.
• On the day:

The Sauce

• Peel the carrot and onion.  Chop them into small pieces. 
• Slice the celery stalk. Chop the tomato.
• Put all the vegetables in a large pot.  Drain the chickpeas and add them as well.  Cover with fresh water.
• Bring the mixture to the boil and scrape off any foam with a spoon.
• Lower the heat and leave to simmer until the chickpeas are tender, but not mushy.  This can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on their age.  Stir every so often and check the water level isn't dropping too much.
• Add about 1 tsp of salt in the last few minutes of the cooking.

Eggless Pasta:

• Combine the flours and salt in the standing mixer (or on a clean kitchen benchtop).
• As the flours are being mixed add the water in a steady, slow stream until it becomes incorporated into the mixture (or try to knead the dough by hand and add a steady stream of water at the same time. You may need an assistant for this one!).
• Take the dough out of the standing mixer and continue to knead it by hand for 15 minutes until the dough becomes elastic and smooth.
• Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and leave it to rest for 30 minutes.
• Make tagliatelle with your pasta maker, or roll the dough out with a rolling pin until it is quite thin, then cut it into long narrow strips.
• Sprinkle flour all over the pasta so that it doesn't stick together and leave it on a tray covered with a tea-towel until ready to use.
• Boil a large pot of salted water.  While it is coming to the boil, heat a few Tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan.  Fry about a quarter of the pasta in the oil until it is brown and crispy.  Keep a close eye on it, as it can burn quickly.
• When the water is boiling, add the rest of the pasta to the water and cook for 1 -2 minutes.  Drain it and add it to the chickpea mixture.  Add the fried pasta and mix it all together.
• Now, enjoy it!  you've earned it after all that work!!

The first local asparagus has hit the shops! No, not literally….that would be very messy…and maybe dangerous.  Have you ever been poked in the eye with an uncooked asparagus spear?  In a stupid story that I’m not going to go into here, I have and I can tell you that it hurts! I was first introduced to asparagus when I lived in Germany.  I had the good fortune (aside from just the fact of being able to live in the beautiful city of Heidelberg) that I was very close to a town called Schwetzingen  that was so famous for its white asparagus that it had a festival in its honour every year. Unfortunately, that was back in the Dark Ages, when there was only FILM photography, so I have no photos to show you the wonders of Schwetzingen, so you’ll just have to trust me when I say that it’s beautiful (or google it)!

The salt I used on the asparagus came from a place in the South of France that we visited last year called Aigues-Mortes, which means “dead waters”. In the photo below you can see the actual salt piles and salt pans that made my salt, but no I didn’t go and scrape up some surreptitiously in a jar, although I was tempted! Aigues-Mortes stands on the flat-lands of the Carmargue, a beautiful empty area, where white horses run wild, and the cold Mistral wind howls more often than not.  The town was built with its gate openings facing only in a certain direction, so that they could avoid the wind blowing through the streets. So, what has this got to do with this Italian recipe using asparagus, you ask.  Well, nothing actually; but isn’t Aigues-Mortes an interesting town?

I think the best way to truly savour fresh asparagus is to eat it surrounded by as few ingredients as possible.  A sprinkling of good olive oil and salt, and a smattering of grated Parmesan cheese fits the bill perfectly!  Asparagus like this can be eaten as a side to anything (except for maybe another asparagus dish!), or as a main if you add a fried egg or two to the side of the plate and maybe some good quality, thin-cut prosciutto.  It’s wonderful to dip the asparagus spears in the runny egg yolk!

 So go out and grab yourself some green or white asparagus as fast as you can!  The season doesn’t last that long.  And if you want to make the kids eat it, tell them that it’ll make their pee smell funny (maybe this only works if they’re boys?!!).

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Ingredients

• 1 kg 2.2lbs Asparagus
• 2 - 4 Tbsp to taste Olive oil
• about 30g 1/4 cup Parmesan cheese
• to taste Salt

Instructions

• Cut the ends off the asparagus, and peel the stems if you think they need peeling.
• Steam for 7 - 12 minutes, depending on the thickness of the stems. (Or boil them in salted water with a squeeze of lemon juice in it).
• Drain the asparagus,  then pour some good olive oil on them. Sprinkle with the grated cheese and salt.
• This dish is often eaten with sunny-side-up fried eggs.  You can dip the asparagus in the yolk....DELICIOUS!!! 🙂

A slight dusting of snow fell on us last week to about the depth of a thin piece of paper, which caused all traffic to ground to a halt. People abandoned their cars on the sides of the roads and to walked through the forest to work, or back home. As you can probably tell, it doesn’t snow often here in the South of France!! My kids were hoping that school would be closed, but unfortunately for them, the people in charge of sending out the text messages to announce the closure of the schools were stuck in un-moving traffic and couldn’t get to the office in time to send out any information.  I think they may have to rethink their warning system a little bit.  Anyway, all this cold weather and excitement of snow got me to thinking about making polenta: perfect for cold dark evenings to warm you up!  Now, it should really be eaten in the mountains after doing some kind of exertion in the snow, like I’m pretending to do in the photo below by holding a ski pole (just for the record: I don’t ski), but you you’ve got to use what you have, in our case a millimeter of snow that melted by 10am was enough………

I love polenta!  It’s so versatile!  You can eat it in its unadulterated rustic porridgy form (which sounds yucky if you don’t like porridge, but it’s delicious, really!!), you can wait for it to set and then fry it, grill it, or bake it, you can add cheese to it (polenta with gorgonzola’s my favourite!), It can be down home comfort food with any kind of meat stew, or dressed up to be a very elegant side if made into little squares and sautéed (I’ll write the word “sautéed” since it’s meant to be elegant, therefore “fried” sounds a little vulgar, even though they mean pretty much the same thing!) 🙂 My mouth is watering just thinking about it! 

Polenta was eaten way back in the days of Caesar. In those days it was made with other types of cereal grains such as farro.  Corn arrived from the Americas in the 1600’s, and that was when the polenta as we know it today began to be eaten, particularly in the northern part of Italy. It has been known as a food for the poor for centuries as it is made from easily grown cereals and fills your stomach efficiently so you don’t feel hunger pangs. Now, it has become less class conscious and is eaten by everyone!  There are many different kinds of polenta flour: from very fine to coarse.  I prefer to make polenta with the finer ground flour as it makes a creamier dish, but if you like a more rustic polenta, use coarser grained flour.  Thanks to confusing naming, polenta flour is cornmeal and NOT cornflour (cornstarch). Corn meal is made from grinding the whole corn kernel whereas cornflour is made from the inner part (endosperm) of the kernel.  If you try to make polenta with cornflour you will end up with an excellent glue!

The only problem with polenta is that if you make it from scratch, it takes a long time, an eagle eye, and a strong stirring arm to get it cooked.  But, never fear my harried, time-constrained friends!  I have the solution……yes, you guessed it….I’m going to talk about that pressure cooker again!!  Look, just go out and get one, and then I promise that I’ll stop harassing you. I learned how to make polenta in the pressure cooker from my father-in-law.  It’s fabulous as there is no, that’s right folks…..NO stirring involved! Well almost none…..just enough to mix the polenta in with the water at the beginning, then a quick whiz with the wooden spoon at the very end.  That’s it!

Print Pin

Ingredients

• 250 g 7oz Polenta flour
• 1.5 L 6 cups Water
• 1 tsp Salt

Instructions

• On medium-high on the stove top, bring the water to a simmer, NOT boil.  If you have it boiling hard and add the polenta flour, you will get splattered with burning, sticky polenta (trust me on this one.....it hurts!).
• Add salt and stir.
• Turn the heat down to medium. Add the polenta flour in a steady stream while stirring continually. If you don't stir, or you add it all at once, lumps will form.
• Up to now, the method is the same for the regular way of cooking it.  If you don't have a pressure cooker, keep stirring the polenta with a wooden spoon for 40 - 50 minutes until it becomes creamy.  Add water if the mixture gets too thick.

If you HAVE a pressure cooker:

• The polenta mixture should be very runny, like the consistency of soup. Put the lid on, and immediately lower the heat to medium-low, depending on the strength of your hot-plates.  If you are using gas, turn it down to the lowest flame you can.
• Let it cook for 30 minutes.  Keep an eye on the pressure.  If the safety valve drops down, turn the heat up a little to make it pop up again, then lower the heat again.  You don't need to hear the mixture bubbling inside.  In fact it's better if you don't.  If it is boiling strongly, you will have burnt polenta on the bottom of the pot.
• After 30 minutes, run the pressure cooker under cold water to decrease the pressure.
• Take the lid off and stir the polenta.  It's now ready!!
• Note: if the polenta is too thick when it has finished cooking, don't panic.  Just add hot water and stir it until it becomes creamy and runnier.
• This recipe is for 2 - 4 people, depending on how you are going to use the polenta.

NOTE: Soak the pot immediately in water after using.  After a few hours, the polenta stuck on the bottom will peel away easily.

This pasta with a sauce of sausage and spinach is another one of those sneaky recipes I use to get yet more spinach into the stomachs of my spinach-phobic children!  With the tomato puree and the sausage, they hardly even notice the green flecks, especially if I grate a mountain of Pecorino cheese over the top……I find it delicious too, so it’s a win-win situation. 🙂

The sauce with sausage and spinach goes incredibly with with Pecorino cheese. Pecorino is a hard cheese made from sheep milk that is used extensively in Tuscany, Umbria and Southern Italy. To be honest, although I’m bordering on a cheese-a-holic, it’s not my favourite kind of cheese as I find it a little too salty, but my kids and husband adore it.  Whenever we go to the beach in Tuscany for our Summer holidays, while I stand despondently at the cheese counter in the supermarket trying to find something which is NOT Pecorino, while the rest of my family are busy throwing as many different kinds as they can into the shopping trolley: fresco (soft and mild), stagionato (old and crumbly), and semi-stagionato, which is somewhere between the two. It also comes with with peppercorns in it, and with peperoncino in it……the choice seems nearly endless!  Luckily in Tuscany the salume (dried meats) are delicious, so I make up for my cheese neglect in other ways….so if you were worried that I may be wasting away from starvation, please stop this minute!

If you’re an adult and actaully enjoy the taste of spinach….at what age does that happen???  How do you go from being a green-things-hating kid to an adult just like that?  Is it that you wake up one morning and decide from now on you’ll eat spinach???  Is it when you buy your first car?  When you get a real job????…..anyway, if you feel adult enough, put the whole leaves in.  It tastes great like that!

To find out how to cook pasta like an Italian does, check out my handy guide.

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Penne Rigate alle Salsicce e Spinaci

Prep Time 15 minutes minutes

Cook Time 10 minutes minutes

Total Time 25 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 400 g -or you can use pasta like fusilli or cellentani penne rigate
• 1 small onion
• 3 sausages
• 450 ml 2 cups passata di pomodoro ( tomato puree)
• 80 g frozen or one bunch of fresh. spinach
• to taste salt
• to grate over the finished product Pecorino stagionato
• 1 tsp crushed optional peperoncini

Instructions

• Boil the pasta as per the packet instructions.
• While waiting for the water to boil, chop the onion finely and sauté it until it becomes translucent.
• Add the sausages crumbled or sliced (depending on how you prefer them), and brown them. If adding peperoncino, you can add it now. (I don't when cooking for my kids, as they start screaming and pawing at their mouths if they eat even a speck of chilli).
• Add the tomato puree, spinach and salt and simmer on a low heat until the pasta is done, stirring occasionally.
• Drain the pasta, add the sauce and stir.
• Grate Pecorino over it and serve immediately.

How to make risotto two ways

As promised, here’s risotto made the traditional way….be eternally grateful to me now, as I only did it this way for you instead of using my pressure cooker. 🙂 This recipe comes from my wonderful mother-in-law who makes this dish far better than I can!  It’s a derivative of a risotto dish called Panissa vercellese, which means that it comes from the province of Vercelli in the Piemonte region in the North-Western part of Italy where they grow Canaroli and Arborio rice.  The original risotto has a special kind of salami in it called salame della duja and lardo in it, but no Parmesan.  Sounds yummy, but it would be MUCH heavier than this version with sausages. Lardo is not exactly a diet food (but, oh man, it’s good on bruschetta!)

My mother-in-law told me that when she was young, they almost never had pasta, but always rice dishes.  Pasta was made fresh and only for special occasions.  My husband’s grandmother used to stand up to her knees in water day in and day out when she was younger, working in the rice fields.  She’s now 95 years old and recently bought 25kg of tomatoes from the market so that she could make and bottle pasta sauce for all the rest of us lazy members of the family…..maybe spending years bent in half and always wet is the secret to a long, healthy life!  If anyone wants to go and ahead and try it, let me know how it goes…..I’m more the drinking-wine-in-the-sun-on-the-terrace kind of person.

It’s all about the quality of the ingredients

The quality of the sausages is very important for this risotto.  If you get flavourless ones, then your risotto will be exactly that. If you can, try to get some from a butcher rather than the supermarket (where we all know that the sausages are made with any leftovers they pick up off the ground…….is that a good way to start a vicious urban legend or what!). If you’re feeling super-cheffy (yes, the spell-check pulled me up on that word, but you know what I mean!), you can soak the beans the night before and boil them in unsalted water for an hour before actually getting on to making the risotto.  Now, if you’re like me, you’ll never remember to do the soaking step, so just buy a can of beans from the supermarket and don’t even pretend that you’re making everything from scratch (actually, that’s directed at me from me….I think I may be going mad! Writing notes to myself in my own blog? HELP!)

What are Borlotti beans and can they be substituted?

This recipe calls for borlotti beans, which I thought that I couldn’t find outside of Italy until I realized that they have a screed of names, but are actually pretty much all the same thing.  This bean has as many aliases as an undercover CIA spy: cranberry beans, and coco rose beans are just two of them. Before cooking, the beans are a beautiful striped pink or red and white, which fades to an ugly uniform mud-brown colour when they’re cooked….shame about that, but they do taste good.  Just don’t get your hopes up that they’re going to make your dish look colourful! If you cannot find borlotti beans, any kind of dried beans will work at a pinch.

This time around, I actually used cannelini beans, which are similar, as that’s what I had on hand.  They work well too.  They are white beans, that stay whitish during cooking, so there are no surprises there! Just don’t use kidney beans….been there, done that, didn’t even want to touch the t-shirt.  Save them for Tex-Mex cooking!

By Lisa Watson

Print Pin

Risotto with sausage, red wine, and dried beans

Risotto with sausage and borlotti beans is a traditional risotto from the Piedmont region in North-western Italy.

Course entree, first course, Main Course

Cuisine Italian

Prep Time 40 minutes minutes

Cook Time 25 minutes minutes

Total Time 1 hour hour 5 minutes minutes

Servings 4 people

Ingredients

• 1 Onion
• 2-3 Sausages
• 350 g Caneroli or aborio rice 2 cups
• 250 ml Red wine 1 cup
• 1 Beef bouillion cube or beef broth
• 1 tsp Salt or to taste
• 400 g 1 can Borlotti or cannelini beans
• 30 g grated Parmesan cheese 3 Tbsp
• 1 large pot Simmering water or broth

Instructions

• Put the pot of water with the bouillon cube in it to simmer on the stove top.  Chop the onion finely and saute it in olive oil in a second pot. When the onion becomes translucent, crumble the sausage and add it.  Stir the mixture until the sausage is browned.
• Add the rice and saute until it browns slightly.
• Add the wine and let it boil off.
• Pour in enough water/broth from your simmering pot to cover the rice mixture. and put the timer on for 13 minutes.  Now, STAY THERE AND DON'T MOVE!!  As the rice is cooking, watch the level of the water.  As it goes down, add water from the simmering pot, one ladle-full (or cupful) at a time. Stir the rice often.
• At this point, you can drain the beans and add them.
• As the time gets to around 12 minutes, start tasting the rice to see how done it is. The type of rice you have may vary the cooking times, so I'm being conservative here. If it's close to being cooked, don't add any more water and let the water in the rice boil off....and don't forget to stir it.....
• Add the Parmesan cheese and stir it in.