In love with pumpkin

A recipe for pea and pumpkin risotto and a fresh little zucchini, tomatoes & capers salad. Extra: what to do with leftover risotto.

Pumpkin... Where to start explaining my love for pumpkin? This beautiful vegetable that comes in so many styles, sizes and colours. This lovely sweet flavour that makes pumpkin so versatile and gives inspiration for both sweet and savoury dishes. When summer almost comes to an end I truly start craving for pumpkin and Iooking forward to those autumn days that ask for nice warm dishes with pumpkin. Pumpkin soup, oven baked pumpkin with potatoes garlic and rosemary, pumpkin mash, pumpkin and chickpea stew, pumpkin risotto, ravioli stuffed with pumpkin and amaretti... What can I say? I just love pumpkin.

Latte Crudo - part 1

"Muhuu" was the sound that we heard when the milk was being poured in the glass bottle, "muhuu". But this milk was not warm like it would be when you milk a cow. No, this milk was ice and ice cold. It does make you feel a little bit closer to the cow and the source of that fresh milk, when you get you latte crudo (raw milk) from a vending machine in the middle of a little town and it even says "muhuu' to you.

Raw milk from a vending machine, you will think? Yes, in Italy this is possible. They might not like it up there in Brussels, but in Italy you can find 1445 raw milk vending machines in 92 different provinces. Seventy of these machines only have organic raw milk for sale. All of them contain milk that is coming from local farms, so the milk does not have to be transported over long distances and therefore is better for the environment. Buying your milk from a vending machine has more environmental advantages though, since the milk is not being bottled and you can just buy one glass (or plastic) bottle once, and keep on using it. And of course, you support your local farmer by buying milk this way, while there are no middlemen involved; the milk goes directly from the farmer to the consumer and the farmer gets the full price.

In season: peperoncino

A view thoughts on eating products from the right season and some recipes to preserve peperoncino...

Lately when I visit markets in the area, or when I enter a supermarket, I find big bunches of various types of peperoncino everywhere. Finally! During the last months we always had to use dried chillies when cooking, while the fresh ones were not in season yet and therefore not available. Actually I guess this is a good thing about Italy. Even in the bigger supermarkets there still seem to be seasons, something we completely lost in the average Dutch supermarket. Whenever you feel like eating strawberries, lettuce or green beans, you can find them, while this is actually summer produce. When it is not possible to get the products from the Dutch soil, you will just find products imported from all different places in the world, causing an enormous ecological footprint. Or products come out of one of the many greenhouses we have at home, which has quite an ecological impact as well. In Italy this seems to be a bit different, although I would not be surprised if this is also changing slowly.

Of course it is a very difficult debate to decide what choices are best to make when it comes to buying food. We are maybe a bit spoiled these days, that it is possible to make seasons 'disappear' by importing products in the 'wrong' season from different countries. You could argue that this might also be a good thing when you look at the social factors, because by importing green beans from African countries in the Dutch winter you support the local economy in those countries. But if you would purely look at environmental factors, what would be the best choice to make? Eating locally, eating organic, either local or from far, eating food from greenhouses or from the direct soil? I find it all quite difficult and although I have a great interest in this topics for a few years already, it remains a complex field of study.

Getting ready for autumn with a tasting of grappa

It was 1885 when a man called Francesco Trussoni came up with the idea to make the first single grape grappa in history, in a town called Gallo d’Alba. Being in the heart of Barolo country this was of course a Grappa di Barolo. In 1922 the distillery was taken over by Mario Montanaro and his wife Angela Trussoni who, together with their son Giuseppe Montanaro, perfected the grappa production process in the years that followed. Since this distillery is only a few kilometres away from our hilltop, I decided that it was time to go and have a look and learn more about this local specialty. Together with the Drover and his Dad, who both like a good glass of whiskey and know a fair bit about the whiskey distilling process, I went on a grappa adventure in the area.

Visiting a grappa distillery was a first for me. So far I have never really enjoyed the taste of grappa so much. Maybe because I had not developed the right taste for it yet, or because I had never tried a really good one? Whatever it was, I was very curious and interested to see the production process and taste the result of Montanaro’s yearlong experience. The young lady that welcomed us in the shop took us to the back to show the distillery. Here she explained that Mario Montanaro makes various single grape grappa’s and a grappa of a mix of different grape varieties. Between September and December the wineries in the area bring the ‘leftovers’ of their grapes to the distillery, after having crushed and pressed them for winemaking. From the end of September until March Montanaro is in full swing to distil he vinacce, the grape ‘leftovers’.

Italian breakfast and the dynamism of a man

Did you know that it is possible to become a dynamic man, by eating biscuits for breakfast?

Italy would not be Italy without Mulino Bianco, a brand known for it’s biscuits that Italian mamma’s love to give their children for breakfast with a cup of warm milk or orzo (barley coffee) to dip them in. But according to Mulino Bianco, biscuits are just as good a breakfast for adults that supposedly become very ‘dynamic’ by having five or six Batticuori (beating hearts), Spicchi di Sole (patches of sunlight) or Abbracci (hugs) in the morning, combined with una tazza di caffè, a small tub of yoghurt and some fresh fruit. All the different packets of the biscuits have a suggestion for a real colazione all’italiana (Italian breakfast) that comes with one of the ten principles of the morning meal like ‘taste the flavours’, ‘start the day with warmth’ and ‘find your own rhythm’.

Curious as I am I wanted to know more about the story of these ten principles and thus had a look on the website. It turns out that Mulino Bianco has developed a model of the real Italian breakfast with the help of scientists from various disciplines. The model shows a food pyramid that has biscuits and breads (sweet breads are also part of their range of products…) at the bottom of the pyramid, therefore being the most important part of the meal. The biscuits are being followed by milk and yoghurt, fruit, hot drinks, sugar, honey and jam and at the small top butter. Not only can you find more information about the different categories of the breakfast pyramid, you can also learn more about the importance of love, trust, warmth, energy, care and the pleasure of starting the day with the family around the breakfast table. The project supposedly has ‘a great scientific and cultural value’ and gives guidelines to start the day full of warmth, pleasure and balance. Obviously this is exactly the way the Italians like it, seen the amount of choice in and the quantity of Mulino Bianco biscuits in the supermarket aisles!

Food and culture. Food and identity. Food and sustainability. Food and love.

In the spring of 2011 I moved from my hometown Gouda in the Netherlands to a beautiful hilltop town in the Langhe area of Piemonte, Northern Italy. Surrounded by vineyards and hazelnut orchards I was going to study Food Culture and Communications and I would become an expert in eco-gastronomy. Unfortunately things did not turn out to be what I had expected, and for various reasons I decided to stop my study programme. Making this decision was not easy, but luckily I was not alone in my hilltop town. The Drover, my boyfriend, private chef, baker and limoncello maker, came all the way from Australia to experience the Italian food adventure with me. He showed me that studying and learning is not something that you can only do in schools and universities: self-education could be the most interesting path to follow.

“How do you know all this?” is a question I have asked the Drover very often, when he was telling me another story or when he was sharing another bit of his knowledge with me.