The bread balls from the snowy Alps (canederli or Knödel)

Sometimes it is hard to deal with your bread two o three days after the date of purchase: it is not exactly fresh and tasty as the first day and it certainly doesn't appeal your organoleptic sympathy. How to re-use stale bread then? The bread shouldn't of course be moldy, but some people will throw it away in disgust: if I am not mistaken the percentage of throw-away bread in the UK is simply preposterous! People ignore there are at least three methods with which you may turn a disadvantage into a pleasing opportunity:

1. grilled: so to obtain a bruschetta (pronounce brusketta) and it should be dressed with freshly chopped tomatoes;
2. moistened: dress the bread with a bit of extra-virgin olive oil, put on top a creamy cheese such as Brie or Camembert, sprinkle with a touch of oregano and toast in the oven until the cheese melts;
3. make canederli (also called Knödel in the German-speaking world).

Canederli are balls of stale bread stuffed with many ingredients: the recipes vary a lot but the bread (either white or whole-wheat) is the only ingredient that never changes. If you leave the croutons to marinate into the milk for some hours it will turn out easier to manipulate the new relived pastry:

Ingredients:

• 2 liters of broth (either meaty or vegetarian);
• Butter 30 gr (to melt and add to the bread);
• Chives & parsley: according to taste;
• 1 table spoon of flour;
• 150 ml of milk;
• a sprinkle of nutmeg;
• 200 gr of still bread;
• 100 gr of speck;
• 2 organic eggs.

Cutting the speck (an Alps ham) in small squares: 

buy around 150 gr of speck,

100 for the recipe, 50 gr for the irresistible temptation

to taste it .

The bread wetted with whole milk, the  eggs, 

some home grown chives and speck before kneading

The pastry: how the universe was before

the big-bang

How they should look like before cooking:

if all the ingredients were fresh, 

they re suitable for being frozen

After having cooked 15 minutes in broth, 

they can be dressed with some butter

or served in a bowl with some broth.

And the happy parenthesis on dishes based on broth may be concluded, for the moment!

Crêpes in broth with a Marsala aftertaste

Many people associate crêpes to the French food culture and it is a righteous attribution I won't contest: I shared this misperception for years. Nonetheless, there the geographical proximity between Italy and France, the several military and gastronomic exchanges Italy and France had during the centuries lead to various contaminations. This recipe is a delicate example in which the pastry of the crêpe becomes an exquisite main course, resembling tagliatelle but keeping a spongy texture.

The crêpes shares a similar nature of the pancakes, but they are thinner and more fragile. Handle with care then, on a nonstick pan, wet with some butter, pure the mixture (250 gr white flour, 3 eggs, 1/2 milk, a pinch of salt, mixed herbs as chives, parsley, basil, thyme, marjoram, and 10 ml of Marsala wine) and flip with a paddle.

A nest of Medusa's hair:

they will petrify you, but in a good sense

Delightful strings with (or without) these cute beef meatballs

To drew a correspondence between the taste of the crêpes and the broth add 10 ml of Marsala directly to the broth itself. When the broth is boiling add the crêpes and switch off immediately the hob. It is very dainty to serve them into a soup tureen: in this case pour the boiling broth into the soup tureen and then add the crêpes. 

Broth against stock (and change)

Since I was a child, I enormously appreciated the calming and warming up effect of the broth. Nowadays society pushed us believe that rushing is a natural upshot of a modern and dynamic approach to life. I still look with suspicion to such a life-style, because it is unnatural. Depriving a person of her/his time means stealing that unique good she/he won't be able to reproduce once it has elapsed: money, in fact, is always a metre for prizes not for values. I regard artificial stock cubes as a synthesis of this philosophy and curiously enough it shares the name with the exchange market: industrial stock is something not just disgusting, but frankly deceptive and unhealthy. The idea is that of saving time, but the quality of it becomes worse and unwillingly salty.

For a vegetarian (preferably organic) broth put down a carrot, a medium potato and an onion into cold water, and when it shall start boiling add a rib of celery, a tomato (and if you wish 1/4 of a courgette). Here are four serving ideas: tortellini, little surprises, passatelli and crespelle (very similar to crêpes, but I'm going to tackle this last recipe in the following post).

Tortellini: Venus' belly button

Litte suprises: a format of egg pasta

flavoured with nutmeg

Steaming in the light

Passatelli: they look creepy they act properly

Broth takes only one hour: prepare it the night before, so cooling down all the veggies will release their flavour in a better way. Add salt and pepper according to your personal preference.

The flower inside

Food basically relates on four aspects: taste, scent, colour, and your momentary mood. When one's hungry, she or he would be able to eat unpleasant combinations of aliments in the quickest way possible. The education to good, high quality food, slow-food if you wish [http://www.slowfood.com/], is that of making of (almost) every meal a sort of personal feast, an emotion that has to warm up you belly, your psychical state and your day. I couldn't help myself noticing that the presentation and the atmosphere around your dishes, even if they are as simple as a fired egg on a Sunday morning might dramatically change.

Double coloured turbans 

guarding a chickpeas soup with rice 

Delicatessen lying at the anchor on a violet sea

Awakening of daffodils 

A garden brunch on the table

Home baked goodness

There are alien-shaped forms that may grow inside our kitchens, unbeknown to us: they possibly are doughs of bread, we aren't used anymore to see as part of our domestic world. Making bread is one of the most dear legacies my grandmother has left me (amongst many others): bread is caressing the blond head of hair of the earth throughout the crops. Bread is kneading your hands into a living substance, due to the brewer's yeasts, that  makes you feel relaxed, because your energies flow inside the pastry: you do not buy the ingredients, you MAKE from raw materials a refined entertainment for your eyes and appetite. Bread is above all the way in which I deal with all the ancient memories my grandmothers constantly delivers me without uttering a word.

Durum wheat flouer (1kg), 

tepid water (500ml), 

a generous pinch of salt, 

extra-virgin olive oil (2 tbs),

 1 cube of brewer's yeasts,

work with ELBOW GREASE onto a wooden board,

produce cuts on the dough you

wish to turn into bread,

while leave the others untouched,

let it rise for approximately 1 hour under a woolen cloth.

Spinach battle spaceship: remove the bowl and cover

with a second rolled out disk of pastry. 

Dress the spinach leaves with extra-virtgin olive oil (20 ml or more),

a pinch of salt and hot chili.

Spinach pie (the so-called "scaccia", a Sicilian focaccia),

but you can stuff it with finely chopped broccoli as well

or potatoes, onion & cheese.

Amber brown and tremendously tasty:

looks like a bird feeding a starving chick

Pies in their golden majesty

Orange chicken in armour

Chivalry isn't dead, not in the kitchen at least, but it's sliding into piracy. Forge the aluminium foil, lay there the organic chicken thighs, pour over a marinate of white wine, orange juice and extra-virgin (knights prefer virgins!) olive oil, and add spices (salt, thyme, bay leaf, marjoram, black pepper).

Before the night rest, with its orange cloves squires.

The alluminium flower where the magic happens, 

due also to the fellow oven 

The knight has become a shinbone pirate with bay feathers

An orange sun shines on a mash-cloud, 

while a beetroot lightening branches out

on two chicken-pirates, sleeping on olive barrels.

There still are some preparations that stand bravely against the tyranny of fast and junk food, although they are simple, quick and easy as well.

The wheel of taste

After some pondering, I desire to streamline my approach toward this blog: fewer images and less words. Without the pompous cortege of too pedantic explanations (this will be the last sample), I wish to share the bright coulours of serving ideas and presentations. I shall keep the pleasure of describing what's on the different dishes with a brief caption in English. Today a vegetarian lunch:

Detail: Amphitheater of aubergines (called parmigiana, a Sicilian recipe) 

from an hill of sauté lemon and chili spinaches, and a radish colossus:
curious to know my recipe? Feel free to ask how to make
 aubergine Parmigiana!

From a distance: a caprese waterfall, an eclipse of hard-boiled egg, 

a mono-portion of parmigiana, an Aberdeen buttery desert, lushy spinaches, 

and a monolithic radish.