La Scarpetta on a Sunday

Cathy at A Blithe Palate surprised me with an e-mail asking me to participate in a food blogging event about a new cookbook that she and Ivonne from Cream Puffs were organizing. Last week, Adventures of An Italian Food Lover by Faith Hillinger, arrived by snail mail. Adventures of An Italian Food Lover is a recipe in itself: 1/3 cookbook, 1/3 coffee table book and 1/3 a local tour guide's Italy. It's not only about the recipes, it's about relationships and experiences. Her sister, Suzanne, painted exquisite watercolor drawings and each recipe has a foreword about a person or place she is intimate with in Italy. If you have no intentions of being in Italy anytime soon, you can still enjoy it while drinking a few glasses of wine and pretending.

My plan was to choose a recipe and cook it with Geneve, the woman who is responsible for enlightening me with blogging back in April '06. We have been meaning to cook together (and watch Barefoot Contessa marathons) for months since she has arrived here from LA for the summer. Her summer has been very productive; she is a recent grad of the French Culinary Institute's Techniques class and just completed a stage at New York's #1 restaurant. Adventures of an Italian Food Lover is very us. We met seven years ago while both of us were on semester abroad. We bumped into eachother while walking along Tamarama Beach in Sydney and discovered we were both McGill students. A 24 hour flight to Sydney to find a friend at school in Montreal?

Last Sunday, we went to Whole Foods in Union Square and picked up the ingredients for Scquacquacio di Mare, a dish that Hillinger explains is from a wine bar in Venice called Mascareta. She vividly decribes the eclectic sommelier, Mauro Lorenzo, who owns the Inoteca.

Geneve taught me that when you make mussels, all of the mussels should be closed before being cooked. When they are cooked, they should all be open, any closed mussels should be discarded.

We enjoyed the simple and light Watery Seafood Mess and some vino blanco. There was something very European about dunking our baguettes into the zesty sauce of tomato, white wine vinegar and chili peppers. The Italians call it "La Scarpetta", I call it heaven.

Turkish Delight Ice Cream

I've never liked roses. Not the flower (I'm more a peony kinda girl) and certainly not the taste. Maybe it was an over-flavoured Indian dessert that I ate as a child—restraint never having been a virtue in my greedy life, I bit off a huge chunk rather than nibbled to taste, and the heady flavour of the flower exploded in my mouth. To this day, when faced with a rose-flavoured anything, I balk, images of a colourful Indian street flooding my mind, a firm warning that should I so much as lick the food in question, my mouth would fill with that potent sweet essence and linger there until the sacred cows on my imaginary Indian street amble their way home.

So imagine my surprise when I decided to throw caution to the wind and make a Turkish Delight ice cream with a whole 50ml of rose water, and ended up loving the delicate flavour of it.

Incidentally, I can't admit to being a fan of Turkish Delight either (must be the rosewater component, you think?), but this ice cream, part of a composed dessert by the always affable chef Geoff Lindsey at his Melbourne restaurant Pearl, was just too pretty not to attempt.

The dessert encompasses the ice cream strewn with vanilla Persian fairy floss and served with bits of glace ginger, fushia pomegranate seeds and rose petals. I was going to serve it with just the Persian fairy floss, which my cousin bought from Sydney's Jones the Grocer along with a box of their lovely Turkish Delight (the best I've ever tasted), but he forgot to bring the fairy floss to dinner that day, so it was just the ice cream. But no matter. What a wonderful ice cream it was. The bits of Turkish Delight, though turned hard in the freezer, yields quickly to the warm temperature of your tongue. The delicate flavour of the rosewater was just lovely, nothing like the cacophony of sharp, sweet gusto that I had imagined.

Other items on the menu that night included Osso Bucco with Risotto Milanese. A friend gave us a bottle of Spanish saffron stamens to try and they flavoured and stained the risotto a lovely shade of golden yellow.



My brother recently returned from a trip to Italy, so we also had a load of shaved parma ham, which we walloped with baguettes and a wonderfully fresh-flavoured salad of buffalo mozarella, juicy vine cherry tomatoes and fat basil leaves.

Berries in Bronxville

Chris, Karina, Lisa and I
Berry Crumble

Todd, Jorge, Adam, Steve, Josh and Lee

About two years ago, Lisa, a friend from my old job, and her husband, Steve, hosted a bunch of friends from work to a beautiful dinner party. She set a high standard for entertaining; great food and a beautiful table. Two years have past and many dinner parties later, the inevitable has happened. Chris and Josh sold out and moved to Pelham. Three months ago, Karina and Jorge off to Bronxville. Now, Lisa and Steve are moving to a suburb of Boston. The last 4 stand strong. Todd and Adam are safe for a little while longer.


Our diverse crew is headed to the burbs and even worse, they are trying to PUSH the burbs on anyone who will listen. Our friends, Karina and Jorge, have become real estate agents. "Why do you live in the city? If you lived in the burbs, Lee could be closer to golf, you could have a big kitchen and Lee could still lie on the couch all day!"A great pitch, but not so fast....Although, the stench from grilling in my apartment is getting old.


Last night, Karina and Jorge had a lovely party to say goodbye to Lisa & Steve. Karina made a beef tenderloin with olive oil and rosemary that was cooked to perfection. Along side, she served a fabulous spring mix salad with pine nuts and pears and Persian rice with cherries (mmm... for those Venezuelan Persian friends!).

Earlier yesterday, my 9-year old niece, Stacie, and I baked a berry crumble for dessert. I first made this over two years ago for a bridal shower to rave reviews and haven't made it in a long time. It's easy to make and is a perfect summer dessert with vanilla ice cream and/or some whipped cream! It looks so good in this picture thanks to Todd, who taught me that you don't take pictures of your food with a flash. Ooops.

Mixed Berry Creme Fraiche Crumble
FoodNetwork.com, Serves 8

4 cups mixed berries (I used 3 packages of blackberries, blueberries and raspberries)
1/2 cup flour
1/4 cup sugar
1 cup creme fraiche*
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
3/4 cup melted butter

*If you can't find creme fraiche, you can substitute 1 cup of creme fraiche with 1/2 cup each of sour cream and whipping cream; or 1 cup whipping cream and 3 tablespoons buttermilk; cover and let stand 12 hours.

Preheat oven to 375. Mix together the berries, flour and sugar and pour into a 8 x 8 baking dish. Spread the creme fraiche over the top of the berries evenly. Mix together the brown sugar, flour and salt. Mix in the melted butter. Top the creme fraiche with this mixture. Bake for 35 minutes or until topping is golden brown (the recipe calls for 25 minutes, but it doesn't bake enough in 25 minutes...).

Bon Appetit!

Cupcake Madness

It was like a scene straight out of Ugly Betty. An order of 100 cupcakes, which I felt needed to be delivered as fresh as possible. So I baked them the afternoon before they were to be sent and frosted them after dinner. A task that took me through to 2am, when I finally crawled into bed only to wake early the next morning to deliver the bounty.

I call these Adult Cupcakes. In two flavours—banana and chocolate—both with dark chocolate whipped cream frosting.Kids don't like them. I know because my friend's four-year-old daughter took one bite of it and screwed up her face really bad. "It ain't sweet, Mommy!" she cried. Her embarrassed mother attributed it to her daughter's Americanised palate.

Another friend ordered these for her nephew's birthday party. She later reported that few of the kids even touched the mini-cupcakes, but the adults polished them off with ease.




Personally, I like them for the moist cocoa flavoured sponge—in which I use corn oil rather than butter so they stay soft even when kept in the fridge. The frosting, made of fresh cream and melted 64% Valrhona Manjari chocolate, provides a lush, ever so slightly bitter edge that offsets the sweetness of the cake perfectly.



The banana cupcake is a lot richer, but no less delicious. Made with plenty of butter, they are better served at room temperature. Again, the deep chocolate whipped cream frosting cuts through the sweetness of the cake, but this time, the mouth feel is buttery, decadent and deliciously sinful.