Postius about Foodius

Right so this is a post about food and food related things. I’m in Italy so what better place to start than with pasta? I’ve eaten A LOT of pasta. When I first arrived Gabri declared that 30 hours of travel was entirely too long but before I was allowed to sleep I had to shower and eat. Giu was translating a list of foods that Gabri was offering me but my brain was halfway between language input overload and tiredness fog so I went with pasta because a) I knew what to expect, b) I like pasta and c) it was first on the list. I had very tasty pasta with sugo (sauce) made by Nonna Scaletti. Gabri has also made tiramisu which she declared to be solely mine. Since that first day I can think of all of about 3 days where I haven’t eaten pasta, and I think of two of those three I ate copious amounts of pizza to compensate for the lack of wheat I would otherwise have consumed that day.

Now I’m sure the majority of family/close friends reading this will be aware of the fact that I don’t generally eat much wheat or diary products. For those of you who don’t know; since around the time we moved from Geraldton to Perth (2003ish) mum has had me and Tibs on diets of varying strictness to determine which things were were allergic/intolerant to. Now that we're older it's generally up to us to decide what we eat but we rarely have proper milk in the house and we only use wheat flour in baking, sticking to gluten free pasta and soy milk to rest of the time. As you can imagine going from eating virtually no gluten to consuming copious amounts of it ogni gorni (every day) is something my system isn’t really a big fan of. After the first few days I had managed to piss my digestive system off enough such that with in 20mins of eating pasta it would retaliate with stabbing pain. Pasta is tasty and I wasn’t going to let my stomach win without a fight so I decided I was just going to put up with it being painful for a while and see if it was going to get over it. It took a week or two but I’m still eating pasta and my stomach doesn’t generally retaliate. I’m hoping that if I inundate it with enough gluten it will miraculously start producing the enzyme/enzymes that help with digestion, either that or I’ll develop coeliac disease, I’m not sure if you can even develop it like that but I’ll get back to you.

Now, in Australia, when you go to a supermarket there isn’t a whole lot of choice of shapes of pasta, (granted we get our pasta from the health food isle where the choice is spaghetti, curls or penne, but) as far as I’m aware in the normal pasta isle you get varying diameters of spaghetti/tagliatelle/fettucini, spirals, penne and bowties of different sizes and colours, maybe some shells or elbows and then if you are lucky a very limited range of soup pastas. Well here there is a MASSIVE range of pasta (as you would expect). I love all the different shapes, they all hold sugo/panna differently, take different lengths of time to cook, cook differently and plus, its just fun trying to work out how on earth a machine produced something that looks like that! My two favourites so far are; ones that start looking like a curl of pasta and then unroll as they cook and these strange ones that look like... I’ve got no way to explain it other than nudibranch sea slugs... they don’t sound very appetising but they are really tasty, I’ve eaten them all so I cant get pictures but I will take some next time we've got them.

And now to go with the large range of pasta shapes you've got to have a range of ways of eating them. I’ve had pasta with Nonna Scaletti's sugo, panna (cream), panna di salve (sage cream), burro (butter), burro di salve (sage butter), olio (oil), ricotta, piselli e procutto (peas and bacon), panna e uova (carbonara) and Simona's sugo di pesce (marinara). I was going to tell you which one was my favourite but I really cant decide... they are all really nice, however I think that both panna di salve and burro di salve are (separately) very nice on fresh tortilini. I suggest you try it sometime, it appears that sage can be kept in the freezer which is interesting, all you do is pull some out, put it in a small saucepan with either cream or butter and bring slowly to a simmer while stirring to stop stickage...

so now that I’ve written a whole page just about pasta I’m going to move on to something else food related (however if you want to know anything else about the pasta I’ve been eating just ask and I’ll put it in my AOD). We went out to a pizzeria for dinner with Gabri's sister in law and her two daughters one weekend. After eating pizza (I had funghi (mushroom) which is really tasty) most of us orders dolce. I chose panna cotta along with a couple of others. When it came out it was the wibbleyest panna cotta I have ever seen, it made me want to sing 'jelly on a plate'. It was extremely delicious very creaming and smooth, I have now decided to make it my mission to, at somepoint, make uber nommy panna cotta, anyone interested in helping?

While we're talking about soft squishy foods that are tasty; one weekend Gabri brought back from the mountains (where she'd been skiing) AMAZING ricotta cheese (in actual fact she brought back a bunch of things but this was the best). It was sooooo tasty. It was the consistency of lightly whipped cream and was soo soft and tasty... mmmm nomnomnomnomnom.... I ate quite a bit just by its self and then I was told that I must have it on my pasta... it was fantastic...

In Australia, in my family, for as long as I can remember (with the exception of the first few years we were in Perth) we've eaten fish (or seafood) for dinner on Friday. I love seafood, and growing up in Geraldton shelling crayfish and eating occy I don't know how I couldn't. Since being in Italy I’ve eaten seafood twice. It was nice, but was missing the whole family element. Simona, Gabri's sister, made sugo di pesce both times. It was nice but the main point of me writing about this is that it had stange little crustacea in it. They looked like uber mini crayfish. I didn’t initially realise that they weren’t small prawns (there were also prawns in it) because the ones that I had were missing their claws. But when I got to shelling their tails I was halfway though before I realised that they had the arched shaped tail with a flat underside like a cray as opposed to a prawn tail. If anyone’s got an idea as to what they are, let me know!

One last interesting thing that I’ve eaten; coniglio (rabbit). I’ve actually had it three times; twice from Nonna Scaletti and once from Zia Pina (I’m sure that's spelt wrong but that's how I’ll be spelling it). It's quite tasty but nothing extremely special, it's been in a stewish thing every time. Gabri always gets annoyed when I eat rabbit; I attempt to eat it with a knife and fork but she always motions for me to just pick it up, rabbit is quite small so it is actually easier to eat with your fingers. Coniglio ribcage is rather fun to eat; you can pull the ribs apart and eat each individual intercostal muscle separately (no don’t be freaked out, its just like eating pork spareribs only tinier). I got taught an Italian word through eating coniglio; scarpetta where you get use a piece of bread to clean your plate and/or the pan the rabbit was cooking it. Now when ever we get to the end of a meal that was cooked in a pan with some form of sauce Gabri will push the pan over to me with a 'Bre, scarpetta' its very cute.

Out of the vast range of things I’ve eaten there has been only two things that I don’t like. Gorganzola cheese; in my opinion it tastes like the smell of vodka. Apart from the obvious fact that is a blue cheese and I’m not a fan of blue cheeses its very strong, I can cope with a little bit of it on grisini or if its in cooking but even the thought of eating a chunk of it like Gabri and Giu do makes me cringe. The other thing was this raw meat looking sausage thing. Nonna Scaletti brought it for Tuesday night dinner probably my second or third week here. Yeah... it wasn't particularly appetising. And while we're on the topic of raw meat I ate something recently that I though would be rather gross but actually wasn’t. 1.5mm slices of raw meat that you put oil, salt, pepper and lemon juice on. I was rather sceptical about the whole raw meat thing but once you put lemon juice on it some crazy enzyme thing happens which is enough to ensure me I’m not going to die (oh yeah and also everyone else was eating it). The texture is a little strange but if you leave it in lemon juice longer it gets less strange as more cool enzymie things happen.

Right so I wrote most of this yesterday with the intent of finishing it an posting it after dinner however when we finished I was really tired and decided to go to bed despite the fact it was 8.45. This morning, however, I discovered why Gabri and Giu didn’t find this time stupid; we'd just started daylight savings. No one told me this so I had no idea that they started this early in the year so this morning I had Giu come into my room at 7.30 declaring that that was the time. School starts at 8 and I normally get up at 6.45 so as to have time to reply to emails, get dressed, eat breakfast, walk Cleo and wait for Giu (each taking 15min). So when I get told that there's 30mins until school starts my flow chart gets messed up, in the end I ate what we normally take to school for a snack for breakfast, getting dressed and walking Cleo in 20mins in time to be back and hovering for my ritual 10mins as Giu finished getting ready.

Anyway the point of me saying that I wrote most of this yesterday was to add the fact that yesterday was my forth pasta free day. However to make up for it I had a toasted sandwich for lunch and bread with dinner which was uber delicious fughi risotto that Gabri made. It was very tasty and wafted the lovely smell of mushrooms around the house for a while, something that my mum would absolutely have hated!

Postius I made Honey Cracklesius

Yesterday was Tuesday which meant my 2 hours at home by myself. Instead of cooking some noisey and/or highly complicated thing that required an extended trip to the shops I Skyped with my Nanna. It was lovely. Dad and Liberty were in Geraldton visiting so we used Tibs's laptop and webcam for the ultimate Skype experience. It was great to both see and be able to chat with Nanna, the only complaint I have is about the quality of image from a webcam which obviously you just have to put up with.

I still wanted to cook something for after dinner with the grandies but I wasn't really in a complicated cooking mood and didn't want to disturb Giu so I decided to make Honey Crackles (one of my ultimate favorite things ever). The only thing that I had to get from the shops was corn flakes and the overall cooking time was minimal. There was however on minor gitch in my planning... I could not find a translation for or and Italian equvalent of patty pans (or cupcake cases or muffin cups depending on what you call them). Tibs had suggested that I just plop the mix onto a baking tray but I was skeptical about whether it would actually clump together or not.

Last Tuesday Nonna Scaletti brought budino for dessert, this translates to puddings and as far as I could tell it was moose and very tasty. Thats not the point however, the point is that she made them in individual disposable metal cups (like small pie cases with high sides) that for some reason we had cleaned to use again. I thought I would experiment with using these to make my own patty pans and lined them with baking paper. Turns out that this actually works better than patty pans! If you've ever made Honey Crackles (or Honey Joys as they are know by persons that are not a 5 year old me) you'd know that you normally have a little bit of the toffee mix that sticked to the bottom of the paper and you've either got to be skilled to get it off, eat some paper, or ditch it. when you use baking paper nothing sticks its amazing you end up just being able to pull out the cornflake clumps and eat it like and apple! amazing revelation that I shall keep in mind. Plus I like the pretentiousness they extrude... truly cafe worthy =P

Pictures in of my creation in all their pretentiousness:

Postius I made Pieius

I made Pie. It was tasty. I cannot actually remember making apple pie and it not tasting bad... varying degrees of tastyness... thats one hellava recipe for ya!
I spent 4 hours straight conjugating verbs today an for some reason this was absolutely exhausting so unfortunatly you get a very tiny updatius on my pieius.
Gabri took Giu to dance and I was just getting ready to make pastry when she came home and asked if I could take Cleo out (if you've looked at the picspam of the house then you will see there is no yard so we have to take Cleo to the park allll the time). Thus followed my attempt to hold an actual conversation in Italian that went beyond 'how are you?' or 'are you ok?". I think it went quite well; I used the adjective dopo(later), the verb fare(to do/make) (which i conjugated) and the (I think its a) noun dolce(sweets) oooh and I think I got the personal pronoun Io (I) in there somewhere too... in a sentence that went something like "dopo io faccio dolce" I thought it was going quite well until Gabri sceptically corrected dolce to doccia and made water pouring on head/washing hair motions (doccia means shower). I ended up managing to get 'dolce con mele' (sweets with apple) in there and she worked out I did in fact (at least somewhat) know what I was talking about!


We then had a little arm waving session in which she declared that I wouldn't have time to make cake (as we decided upon calling it) if I was making the pastry too and that I should wait until tomorrow. I replied using   dolce con famiglia and she seemed to cotton on that I was at least going to try and do it. there was also a few mins of waving about the fact we only had a few apples left, I ignored this, relatively sure that more would appear with the fam.


to my surprise making the pastry only took 20 mins which was waaaay less that I expected because I had to combine it all by hand and not use a food processor like normal. I was rolling out the second piece when the fam arrived with Giulia at 7.20ish, I set to cutting apples and adding the secret ingredients (which are not so secret if you read my last post). It was apparently impressive that I made the pastry myself (as far as I could tell we were calling it pasta?). and at one point I believe Gabri was scolding Giu for not baking sweets (oooops my bad).


now comes the interesting bit;
i dont generally use gas ovens, so when a bit of pastry crust falls off the pie it normally just sits on the bottom of the oven and goes a lovely brown colour. it appears in a gas oven this is not the case... one side goes black and it starts billowing smoke.... fortunatly Gabri noticed this early on (as in like 5 mins after i put it in) so i started fishing bits of pastry of the bottom of the oven...the even more interesting bit is that it set of the smoke alarm... i'm highly amused that they have these considering they smoke inside but it went off. and the smoke alarm is connected to the house alarm which likes to talk alllll the time (when doors etc. get opened it tells you which ones) and it proceeded to (i assume) announce that the smoke alarm was going off (which we obvs knew about because we were in the same room as it). Giu got annoyed at it talking and went outside and Gabri got annoyed at her for I don't know why and then every time i tried to apologise for setting the alarm of they kept telling me it was fine... it was one of those moments that was highly amusing but you couldn't laugh at it...


anyway pie tasted uber nommy which was a surprise because I've never not used green apples before (i halved the sugar to compensate). but we only ate like 1/4 of it (there were 5 of us) because we had all eaten waaaay to much yummy dindins... (Gabri is saying that tomorrow she is going to spend 8 hours on the treadmill to make up for eating so much).
urgh! i'm starting to use too many words like uber, nommy, yummy and dindins =S i think its time for me to go nighnighs (urgh another one!)


Piiiiee Piiiics (this alliteration is somehow highly amusing to my tired brain):

with and with out flash (i'm not really happy with either pic but anyway)... also if you've had my pie before you can see i went with 3 leaves as opposed to the customary 4... that was really because i didn't have any other flat pastry left and i didn't feel like rolling the left overs out so i just went with three

Postius I made Pavlovaius

Last Saturday was Gabri (my host mum)'s birthday and being the uber organised person that I am I totally had a present organised for her (that, by the way, was sarcasm in case you didn’t get it). So instead of my awesome (non-existent) pre-organised present I decided that I was going to cook/bake something of the dolce variety. I rather quickly how ever discovered that in order to do so I would have to venture to the shops by my self (Giulia was at school) to get the ingredients that I was missing. This was also made slightly more difficult by the fact that I had not decided what I was going to make.

I eventually came down to two options; apple pie or meringue... a friend of mine (the Kuostar) had resently successfully made meringues in the microwave so I thought this might be a simple way to create and Aussie (or possibly Kiwi) dessert without having to spent hours beating egg whites (the only beating devises I could find where an eletric mixer (hand held) and a whisk). Unfortunately however this required icing sugar of which I could find none... I didn’t end up going to the shop because I decided the chances of me being able to find icing sugar by myself where pretty slim. Giulia and I were going somewhere for dinner while Gabri went elsewhere meaning if I made meringue we weren’t going to eat it until the next day anyway so I decided to wait until Giulia could come with me. Shops are apparently closed on Sunday (something I’m not used to living on the same road as an IGA in Australia) and we ended up going out to diner (with an aunt and some cousins from Verona) that night anyway.

On Sunday I spied some Kiwifruit in the fruit bowl (it turns out that Nonna and Nonno Scaletti grow them) and decided that I definitely wanted to make Pav (apple pie isn’t really all the Aussie now is it?). Due to the fact that (ooooh look I got some FPS in here =P) I had procrastinated soooo long and the fact I was going to decorate with Kiwis I thought I might as well make proper pav and not microwave it (I’ve also had some rather … interesting experiences with eggs in the microwave... if you haven’t heard it involved an explosion... enough said right?). However this then involves beating eggs for a stupidly long amount of time and Giulia is studying for this massive exam thing on the weekend. On Tuesday's (that would be today) I finish school at 12 and Giulia finishes at 2 so I thought this would be the perfect time to do all the beating and thus decided to end my procrastination...

it turns out that we did In fact have all the ingredients for proper pav in the house so I didn’t need to venture to the shops. It is however worth noting that after throughly searching the entire house TWICE I did not find any devices for measuring other than 200cc plastic cups, a 1L liquid measuring jug and a set of electric scales (yay) that desplay 'err' when you turn them on (not yay, I think it has flat bats). It is probs also worth noting that I have never made pav before... meringues yes (from the same recipe In fact) but i've never had to deal with trying to make pav. Anyway I used the plastic cups to measure my amount of sugar (fortunately the only measurement other than a ½ tspn for which I used.... a teaspoon!) and set off on my 20min hand beater holding experience. Everything went quite smoothly but the beater only had speeds 'slow' and 'less slow' and looking back I really needed a 'not at all slow' and a 'rather fast' because I don’t think I managed to get it quite stiff enough (but that could also have been due to my inaccurate sugar measurements).

After email stressing to Mum while it was in the oven about all the things that was wrong with it, it seemed to turn out ok. And we both concluded that it would probs taste fine anyway (and plus I was the only one who would know if it was wrong). While it looked disappointingly un-pavlova-like I think it looked quite cool with cream and Kiwis on it. I also had a disagreement with the cream that I put on top. The cream we buy is UHT cream for putting on pasta and resembles thickened cream (which as I’m sure you'll know doesn’t whip). Gabri also made Giulia tell me several times that it wasn't cream for sweets, I did however manage to convince her it was all fine because I would add a little bit of icing sugar (there is a tiny little pot for sprinkling over tarts/cakes etc). Stubbornly I still tried to whip the cream just to see what would happen (not very much, other than making me cream flecked). Anyway; pavlova on plate, cream on pavlova, kiwis on cream, camera in hand, place pav in front of Gabri say 'per tuo compleanno' (for your birthday) end of Pavlova Pandemonium. I named it the Pandemonius Pavlova (in my head and on facebook at least) because it was rather stressful in the making (did I mention that the beater heads wouldn’t clip into the body and thus I had to be careful so as to not accidentally release spinning missiles? No I don’t think that I did...).

Final product was the shape of an oversized chocolate melt with a 2.5mm crust and lots of spongy filling; very tasty. Pictures to insue:

ARGH! I almost forgot to say that it DID tasty uber nommy! (in English that translates to very nice) Everyone seemed to thoroughly enjoy it and they were even fighting over who got the last bit (Gabri won; I believe her argument was that it was her birthday cake which is fair enough)