Beat the Winter blues with Italian food
Bill gave me a fantastic book this Christmas: The Italian Cookery Course by Kate Caldesi. It’s beautifully produced, with mouth-watering colour pix of finished dishes, as well as panoramas of the region and snapshots of chefs at work in their kitchens. The book is broadly arranged by course, with lots of sidenotes on specialities of particular regions. I particularly like the chapter on bread (probably because I like bread, full stop!). In fact, I feel the urge to go and make my own starter dough even as I write.
One of my favourite bready indulgences is chickpea fritters. You can buy them freshly made from Vladimiro’, the pizza place in Fivizzano, to be eaten as a starter. They make them in the pizza oven rather than deep-fry them, so I suppose they might be less calorific (dream on!). Totally delicious. And here’s a recipe for peperonata (serves 6) which would be a delicious accompaniment to the fritters (or farinata as they call them in the Vladimiro’ - or to any other type of bread you have to hand…
Ingredients: 4 large peppers (red and yellow), 200 ml water, 4 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil, 2 red onions (finely sliced), 4 bay leaves, 2 garlic cloves (sliced), salt, 100 ml red wine, 200g passata (or 6 fresh ripe plum tomatoes, chopped), salt and pepper.
Cook the peppers in a large pan with the water until it evaporates. Add the oil and cook for 15 minutes. Add the onions, bay leaves and garlic, and fry for 10 minutes. Salt to taste. Pour in the wine, reduce a little, then add the passata. Cover and cook until soft, around 20-30 minutes.
Enjoy!
