I am totally meteoropathic… I can only function if my natural rhythms work, if my reference points are right. A year like this, with a never ending summer and a never coming autumn confuses me. And my stomach.

Normally, I would welcome the first cold days happily snuggled under a blanket on the sofa with a cup of thick hot chocolate in my hands.

Or toasting bread in the fireplace to prepare the first bruschette with our bright green new olive oil. Or maybe roasting a sausage on slow burning embers… That is November comfort food to me: the smell of food must mix smoothly with the smell of burning firewood.

This year, it has been too warm to even cook a soup… and I have… but we have had to eat it with our windows open!

When I sat down to write this post for this month’s Italy Blogging Roundtable, I realized that all food is comfort food to me (and that is not necessarily a good thing… LOL), and that different seasons come with different comfort foods.

Fall Comfort Food

When the autumn comes, there are three things that really need to be on our table at a certain point: polenta with wild boar, castagnaccio and pumpkin risotto.

I grew up in a family of hunters, so game meat has always been available in our home. As soon as the first clouds start gathering upon the Cappelli family’s roof, my mum digs out corn flour and my dad is sent out to shoot some stuff! The fireplace is lit and the first layer of hot polenta appears soon after on the old wooden pastry board, where my grandmother gravely proceeds to cut it with a piece of cooking string. Apparently that is a sacred operation and there is absolutely no other way to test the quality of the polenta… Portions are distributed on everybody’s plates and literally buried under wild boar stew! The occasional guests might ask for the vegetarian option… polenta with olive oil and parmesan cheese. They are usually indulged, but they are likely to get my mum’s and grandmother’s sullen look, which unveils a mix of wonder, astonishment, pity and condescension and translates as “Who could possibly not want to stuff his face with wild boar stew?! There must be something wrong with them… maybe they might prefer a bit of sausage instead?! ” (I know Rebecca and Alexandra will cringe when they read this! LOL)

(Photo by Okapix)

They will be ok with castagnaccio and pumpking risotto, though! Castagnaccio is a thin, dense cake made with chestnut flour, water, olive oil, raisins, pine nuts or walnuts and rosemary. Very simple, but another “must” of my autumn cravings. As soon as the first chestnut flour is available on Monte Amiata, out comes the old castagnaccio baking tin! It’s perfect with the first vino novello!

(Photo from Tuscanfoodie)

I won’t say much about pumpkin risotto as it is not really a traditional Tuscan dish, except that in our variant, the pumpkin is likely to be sautéed in olive oil rather than butter.

(Photos from Memorie di Angelina)

Winter Comfort Food

Winter is a terrible season for my figure (not that the other seasons are any more merciful…). As soon as winter arrives, so does Christmas with the holiday sweets: ricciarelli, cavallucci and panforte. No point in even trying to resist: I have to have ricciarelli at least. For those of you who don’t know what these heavenly sweets are, well, they are traditional Christmas almond cookies typical of the Siena area. You can buy the industrially prepackaged ones, but if you happen to spend some time in a place where there is a bakery that makes them fresh every day, stock up.

(Photo from MyMySays)

Of course, with Christmas also comes the traditional boiled meat meal: you use the meat to prepare broth where you cook some tortellini or home made egg pasta, and then you eat the boiled meat as a second course with some sauces (usually home made mayonnaise and salsa verde, a green sauce made with parsley). This for me means essentially fighting with my cousin over a plate of boiled tongue. I know… it does sound revolting, but it is one of those things that I need to have before the holiday season is over (did I mention that besides being hunters, my family is also a family of butchers?) and it’s delicious!

Then New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day come. And there is no lucky end or beginning without a steaming hot plate of zampone or cotechino with stewed lentils!!! “Every lentil is a golden coin“, my great-grandmother used to say, and who doesn’t need that or the high cholesterol level brought about by a large portion of cotechino?!

Then Carnival comes (I told you winter was tricky…) with all the traditional fried sweets: crogetti (the local name for cenci – thin fried pasta covered in pastry cream, or honey and icing sugar), zeppole (small balls of fried pasta filled with pastry cream and rolled in sugar), and bomboloni (doughnuts or cream puffs).

(Photo from Amiche Cuoche)

Last but not least, Father’s Day comes on March 19 (St. Joseph’s Day) with the traditional rice fritters!

No wonder, the spring starts full of good intentions for future diets…

Spring Comfort Food

Spring means only two things to me: nespole (loquats) and strawberries. As soon as the first nespole become available I have to have them at the end of every meal. Too bad they don’t last for very long!

And of course strawberries with whipped cream, and maybe cherries! Lots of them!

Summer Comfort Food

Summer too is mostly about fruit and vegetables: the sweet tomatoes, the succulent peaches, and the watermelons!

But there are two things that I absolutely have to have: prosciutto and melone and ice-cream.

(Photo from Cool Cook Style)

I think I am a very generous person in many ways, but there is one thing I do not share: ice-cream. When ice-cream crosses the threshold of our apartment, I have no friends: I become territorial with the freezer and very protective! LOL

There is no sharing when it comes to gelato: it can take all my sorrows away, and it has to be all mine! My husband says that I “morph” when it’s around! If I am stressed, the smile comes back on my face after the first bite. If I am happy and he steals a spoonful of my ice-cream I turn into a real harpy! So beware!

Year-round Comfort Food

There is one thing that can always cheer me up and I think it’s pretty much a universal thing in Italy: Nutella. Nutella is a hazelnut chocolate spread, as if there were any need to introduce it…

It’s soul-healing power is such a stereotype in this country that there is a scene in Nanni Moretti’s movie “Bianca” which has become a symbol of this! If I had a euro for every time that I have dreamt of a jar of Nutella like his!!!

A Journey Down Memory Lane

There is one very Tuscan comfort food that I remember from my early childhood years and which my great-grandmother Tilde used to prepare whenever she was looking after me. It was typically my “merenda“, my mid-afternoon snack, and it has always had a special place in my heart and stomach: pane col vino e lo zucchero, that is a slice of stale bread soaked in red wine and covered in sugar.

(Photo from I love spaghetti and you)

I know that many of my non-Italian readers will be horrified by the idea of a granny incorporating wine in a child’s snack (probably as much as reading about my soft spot for boiled tongue! LOL), but, believe me, it hasn’t killed me or any other child over the centuries and I am ready to bet that that was a much healthier snack than most processed stuff that our children eat on a daily basis.

I remember licking the plate!

The winter variant, when it still used to snow regularly in the village, was to use  a glass full of the first snow from our kitchen’s window-sill instead of bread!

Delicious, and unforgettable!

Italy Blogging Roundtable

This is the sixth post in a monthly series called The Italy Blogging Roundtable. Here you can find the posts of the other bloggers who participate in the roundtable. Our topic this month was “comfort food“:

Alexandra (Arttrav) – Minestrone: my winter comfort food

Jessica (Italylogue) – Comfort Food is a Cultural Thing

Melanie (Italofile) – Comfort me with potatoes: A tale of two tuber dishes in Italy

Rebecca (Brigolante) – Eating in the Comfort Zone

My husband was brave enough to venture to the Coop supermarket in the nearest village, while I was left contemplating the sad state of our provisions. And then it is when I realized I had very little, but I had everything I needed to prepare pappa al pomodoro!

Pappa al pomodoro is a bread and tomato “minestra“, that is, a thick soup, and one of the oldest and most typical dishes of the Siena area. It is definitely one of the most representative dishes of the Tuscan cucina povera, the poor people’s culinary tradition.

I hadn’t made pappa al pomodoro in a long time, and it seemed the perfect choice to really get to the bottom of whatever was left of the food we had in the house before my husband came back with two large bags of fresh supplies from the supermarket.

So here is my recipe for a very authentic pappa col pomodoro, handed down to me by my grandmother!

Ingredients for 2 people

• abundant extra-virgin olive oil
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 small onion
• pepper or red pepper
• fresh or canned tomatoes
• 200 gr of stale unsalted bread
• 750 ml of broth or hot water
• salt and sugar
• fresh basil

Slice the garlic and the onion coarsely and sauté in abundant olive oil. Add pepper (or red pepper). Chop the tomatoes and add to the garlic and onions. Cover and cook for at least 10 minutes (fresh tomatoes might need 15 minutes) at medium-low heat, stirring regularly and adding a bit of warm water if the tomatoes start to dry up. Cut the bread into large cubes and add to the tomatoes. Mix and keep stirring for 2 to 3 minutes, or until the bread is well mixed in with the tomato sauce. Add 500 ml of broth or hot water and stir until the bread and tomato mix becomes a “pappa”, a mush. Cover and cook for 15 more minutes, adding an extra 250 ml of water if necessary. After 15 minutes,  take the lid off, taste and add some salt if you used hot water instead of broth and a pinch of sugar if the tomato still tastes too acidic. Keep cooking until most of the liquid has evaporated and the pappa is thick. Pappa col pomodoro is ready when all the broth has evaporated and the only liquid left is some olive oil. Add fresh basil leaves and… buon appetito!

So I decided to make peposo and zucca al tegame! Peposo is a traditional beef stew… but I can’t give more details now because I have promised a guest post to my dear friend Letizia so… The recipe will be coming soon!

[UPDATE NOV. 22, 2011 - The recipe and my guest post on Letizia's amazing food blog is here: Gloria's peposo stew.]

Zucca al tegame is also a very typical summer side dish in Tuscany. Zucca means pumpkin but the dish is actually made with zucchini (or courgettes if you are from this side of the pond), and it essentially consists in slowly cooking coarsely cut zucchini, onions and tomatoes in a large pan (tegame) with a lot of olive oil and basil.

But besides the menu itself, the interesting thing (well… for me at least…) is that I realized that I was actually cooking a real “cena a km0″! For those who have never heard of this new “label”, “a km0“, it indicates locally produced ingredients. It’s a quality seal, usually it means that what you are buying or eating is organic, and produced by smaller farms.

In our case, though, the dinner was actually made with ingredients which were produced less than a km away!

The meat came from a farm 200m away from our countryside home. The wine, olive oil, zucchini, basil, onions and tomatoes all came from my father’s vegetable garden, vineyard and olive groves just outside the garden! And of course, we also had some delicious peaches and plums from our orchard!

Isn’t that cool? Ok… the peppercorns were not from our farm. But still, it seemed still very cool to be able to cook a full meal with what we and our friends actually grow and produce!

I always make fun of my dad who spends all his time in the countryside now that he’s retired. But if he didn’t, we wouldn’t be able to have such a wealth of organic products right in our backyard. And the things you produce yourself taste so much better than anything you buy at the supermarket! Too bad you are tied to the seasonal products, and they don’t last long. When they’re finished, they’re finished… But as long as the vegetable garden is in full swing, let’s enjoy it!

Nothing you couldn’t buy at one of the bakeries in the village but so much better. No matter how “less perfect” they look: home-made traditional sweets and cakes are so delicious!

Maybe because they taste of home: if I close my eyes, I can almost see my grandmother and my mother working in the kitchen for a couple of days preparing trays and trays of sweets to give to friends and relatives! Plus, they are made with my dad’s hens’ eggs, with locally produced “unto” (melted and then filtered pork lard – the traditional alternative to butter in Tuscany), with home made jam. Nothing can beat that.

Ciambellini con l’unto and ciambellini rossi are the traditional sweets of my village, Civitella. They are biscuits which last for a long time. Traditionally they were made around Easter and they lasted for months. They sometimes constituted the whole meal in the fields, sometimes accompanied by whatever fresh fruit was in season.

My husband always makes fun of them, because he says they are just dry biscuits, but they are delicious, believe me! Ciambellini rossi are biscuits covered in sugar and alchermes, hence the red colour.They are perfect for dunking them in red wine or vinsanto!

It was only a few weeks ago that I was talking with Letizia of the beautiful Madonna del Piatto about how alchermes brought back memories of our childhood’s dessert and a couple of days ago I saw that she posted this delicious recipe on her blog: ciaramicola! I loved it!

I’ll have to ask her to make me one next time we meet!

A side-note: spelt is called farro in Italian. It is a very nutritious type of grain which contains high levels of proteins and vitamins. Spelt is the oldest known cereal and was already cultivated in 7000 BC. In Tuscany, the Garfagnana area near Lucca is probably the “homeland”. I discovered spelt only after I moved to Pisa. While it’s now quite popular all over the region, up until not too long ago it wasn’t very common in Italian homes. Luckily, it’s back in fashion and is very easy to find even in smaller stores.

Chicken spelt salad

Ingredients

• 1 chicken breast
• 200g spelt
• olive oil
• garlic
• sage
• salt and pepper
• yogurt

Cut the chicken breast into small pieces.

Cook the spelt in a pot of boiling water for as long as indicated on the package (I use the pre-soaked spelt which cooks in 18 minutes, but most shops sell spelt that you need to soak overnight before cooking).

While the spelt is cooking, fry a clove of garlic and some leaves of sage in olive oil and add the chicken. Cook until the chicken is well cooked. Add salt and pepper and the yogurt. Mix with the cooked spelt. If you like the salad warm, sauté for a couple of minutes, otherwise let it cool down before serving.

Shrimp and pepper spelt salad

Ingredients

• 200 g spelt
• 2 red bell-peppers
• olive oil
• garlic
• 400 g of shrimp (fresh or frozen)
• salt

Cook the spelt in a pot of boiling water for as long as indicated on the package (see above). Slice and dice the red bell-peppers. Fry a clove of garlic in abundant olive oil. Add the peppers and let cook for at least 10 minutes. Add the shrimp. Let cook for 10 more minutes. Add salt and pepper. If there is water in the pan, make sure it evaporates. Add the spelt and let cook for 3 more minutes. I like this salad warm, but if you prefer it cold, it goes really well with mint sauce.

Not long ago, two friends living near Assisi, Letizia of Alla Madonna del Piatto and Rebecca of Brigolante Guests Apartments, got together to film the recipe for farrotto, the equivalent of risotto but made with spelt (farro). To watch this amusing video, check Letizia’s lovely food blog!

So here it is: my second “Tuscan cuisine for slackers like me” post. Who said we all have hours to prepare traditional recipes?!

Here is my recipe for Tuscany’s most popular antipasto: crostino toscano. Crostini, as many of you certainly know, are toasted slices of bread topped with a sauce. Crostini toscani are topped with a meat sauce made with chicken livers (in the Maremma area at least – in other areas it can be with spleen or just plain ground meat). Traditionally the bread was not toasted. People used stale bread softened with chicken broth.

The first immediate consequence of being the modern woman that I am is that I use freshly baked bread. I slice it and toast it. But let’s proceed in a more orderly fashion…

Ingredients for 2-4 people:

• 150gr of chicken livers
• red wine
• 1 onion
• olive oil
• 150gr of ground beef (if you think the flavour of liver might be too strong)
• chicken stock
• capers
• anchovies
• butter

This is the “politically correct” list of ingredients. If you are a lazy slacker or a plain bad housewife/cook feel free to substitute real chicken stock with powdered chicken stock, capers with caper paste and anchovies with anchovy paste.

Clean the chicken livers (they come with the heart as well). I use kitchen scissors to cut the meat in small pieces and to eliminate the fat parts. Put the meat in a bowl and cover in red wine. Leave it for at least 15 minutes.

Cut the onion in small pieces and fry it in a pot with abundant olive oil.

When they are a nice yellow colour, take the liver out of the bowl and add it to the onion. Stir and let fry for 5 minutes. If you want to use ground beef too, add it in now and let fry.

Cover the mixture with the red wine used to marinate the meat. If the meat is not covered, add more. Let simmer for 20 minutes.

When the wine has evaporated, add chicken broth or a cup of hot water with powdered chicken stock. Cover the mix with abundant liquid and let cook until it has evaporated.

Put the meat in a blender. Add a few capers, and a couple of anchovies (or a spoonful of caper and anchovy paste). Add a teaspoon of butter (it makes the mix creamier). Blend until the mix is smooth and suitable for spreading on bread.

Toast a few slices of bread and enjoy! Buon appetito!!!

If you like traditional Tuscan recipes which you can make quickly, check my first “Tuscan cuisine for slackers like me” post dedicated to Minestra e Fagioli (bean soup with pasta).

Panna Cotta

Panna cotta is exactly what the name says… “cooked cream”!

Ingredients:

• 500 ml of fresh cream, the type you use to make whipped cream
• 200 ml of milk (better is fresh and “intero”, whole milk)
• vanilla
• 10 gr gelatin in sheets (6 sheets)
• 50 gr sugar

Soften the gelatin in cold water or as indicated on the package of the gelatin that you are using. In the meanwhile, pour the milk in a small sauce pan, add vanilla and the sugar and heat it up (very low heat), stirring frequently. When the milk is almost boiling (you can see small bubbles), take the gelatin out of the water, and put it into the warm milk to melt it. Stir to avoid lumps.

Add the cream, and keep stirring until the cream mix is simmering.

Pour the mix in a pudding mould or in small containers, let them cool down at room temperature and put them in the fridge for at least 3 hours.

You can serve it with fresh berries, like I did (strawberries with sugar) or with berry puree. In the winter, I love to serve it with an orange and cointreau sauce and orange rinds. Delicious!

Pizza

I make pizza almost once a week. It’s one of the cheapest things to make, and a simple way to make of an ordinary evening a more festive one!

Ingredients:

• 500 gr of flour (I use the “00″ type)
• yest
• salt
• olive oil
• sugar
• water
• canned tomatoes
• mozzarella

Put a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar (which helps the rising of the dough) in the flour and mix. Pour some olive oil (the quantity depends on how rich you like your pizza – I put about 5 table spoons) and mix with a fork.

Keep mixing until the flour looks like Parmesan. At that point melt the yeast in warm water (the best temperature is when you cannot feel the water at all when you touch it with a finger). Pour the liquid yeast in the flower and mix, first with a fork and then with your hands. In order to avoid for the dough to stick to your hands, pour some olive oil on them and then keep kneading the dough for at least 5 minutes.

This will make it elastic. I generally divide the dough in two parts, I make two small balls, and I put them in two containers and cover them with a tea towel. Leave it to raise for at least 1 hour, but more it’s better.

When  the dough is ready, roll it out and put it in a greased oven tin. Prepare the tomato sauce by putting the canned tomatoes in a small sauce pan, add some garlic in very small pieces, olive oil, salt and oregano.

Put the tomato sauce on the “pasta” and add the condiments that you want. I generally use tuna and onions, or vegetables, or sausage and mushrooms, or even different types of cheese.

Preheat the oven at 250 °C and when the oven is ready, put the pizza in for 15 minutes. When the crust is ready (check the base by passing a fork under the crust), take it out, and put some pieces of mozzarella on top and put it back in the oven for a couple of minutes to let the mozzarella melt.

Enjoy!