Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

This recipe is for those days that all you want to do is curl up in a ball on the couch. This is my favourite type of baking, because it requires so little effort, while the returns are huge – I would make these biscuits just for the way they make my kitchen smell. There are just 4 ingredients; butter, flour, sugar and ground almonds, in the basic recipe, but you can doll them up with orange zest, lemon zest, vanilla extract (not essence!), orange blossom, cinnamon or whatever tickles your fancy.

Here, I sandwiched half of my cookies with a very posh jar of gianduja (chocolate and crushed up hazelnuts from the Piedmontese region) that I brought back from Florence, but Nutella would work also.

Ingredients

-8 oz butter

-8 oz cream plain flour

-8 oz caster sugar

-4 oz ground almonds

1. Preheat the oven to 190 C. Cream the butter and sugar in a mixing bowl.

2. Add the ground almonds and combine, add the flour gradually. Do not over beat the mixture, when you have a nice smooth dough, stop mixing.

3. Prepare a baking sheet with parchment paper. Roll the dough into cherry sized balls, and place them on the baking sheet, leaving enough space between each cookie.

4. Place in the centre of the oven, and bake for 7-10 mins. You want the cookies to look golden brown, but not dark in colour. Leave to cool for at least 15 mins on the baking sheet, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

5. When completely cooled, liberally slather with gianduja and sandwich together.

Roma: Pizza da Baffetto

In an 8 day trip to Italy, not stopping south of Rome, it would be foolish to claim to have scratched the surface of the foodie delights the country has to offer. Countless Italians have told me that nothing north of Naples is worth talking about in terms of Italian cuisine, and though Rome has its own treasures, it can’t touch the regional styles of other areas. All of this aside, we ate incredibly well over the week, and even lay claim to stumbling across some of the finest pizza in the Eternal City.

 

Pizza da Baffetto was strongly recommended to us by some good friends, but we had kind of forgotten to look up its location or anything. It was more by serendipity that we wandered past, and it was hard to miss given that a queue stretched out the door, down the street. Following my rule of thumb from Paris (follow the queues), we joined the back of the snaking line.

The street, Via del Governo Vecchio, is not far from the magical Piazza Navona, and was buzzing at 9.00pm on Thursday night. The queue moved quickly enough, and we were hustled briskly to a table around the corner, almost on top of an Italian couple already enjoying their pizza. We had a cute jug of house red, but the pizza was the reason we were there, and did not disappoint.

In Roman style, the pizza base was wafer thin, and irregularly shaped – no concessions to form were made here. While in the queue we got a good look at the chef churning out pizza, and most excitingly, the beautiful wood burning oven that they shoveled pizza in and out of at an alarming rate. Incidentally, we had been warned prior to our trip that one of the worst tourist faux pas in Italy is to order pizza for lunch. Italians would never do this, for several reasons, but the most pertinent being that the wood burning ovens take a long time to heat up, and depending on when the restaurants light them, are at their prime cooking temp late in the day.

We shared 2 pizzas, one with salame, and one with grilled aubergines and courgettes. In reality, there is probably no beating a simple Margherita – anything else is gilding the lily. The pictures were rushed – we feared provoking the wrath of the waiters. It seemed like the customers were more of a hindrance to their art of pizza making than much else. Don’t expect to linger – this place turns tables at a rapid tempo.

http://www.pizzeriabaffetto.it/default.asp

 

“Everything you see, I owe to spaghetti…”

And if it’s good enough for Sophia Loren, it is good enough for me. Coming home from a whirlwind trip around Italy last week, my love for pasta in all its shapes and forms has been confirmed. Italy, like France, knows how to treat food with respect, don’t mess with lovely ingredients. This is so true when you are talking about shellfish, the raw product is amazing so no need to mess around.

One of the best discoveries I made in my weekly trawl of local supermarkets around the IC in Paris was that each Thursday or Friday, medium-sized Carrefour would mark down their €8 pack of unshelled  king prawns to €3. I’ll be honest, you have to be a little fearless to tackle these crustaceans (or at least greedy enough for it to be worth the effort!).

To shell the prawns, pull off the head and tail, peeling any bits of shell away from the flesh. Using a sharp paring knife, remove the black vein by scoring down the back of the prawn on both sides. This is key – you don’t want to be eating this. After that effort, the recipe is really easy – no longer than it takes to boil a pot of water for pasta.

Use a long pasta here, spaghetti or linguine should be ideal. To mix it up, you can asian-ify the flavours with chilli, coriander and ginger, but I stuck to classic garlic, basil and parsley here. The rocket needs to be added at the very last moment, no one likes wilted limp lettuce floating around in their pasta.

Ingredients

Prawns (6-10 per person).

2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped.

Handful of basil and parsley, finely chopped.

Handful of rocket leaves per person.

Knob of butter.

Parmesan Cheese.

Olive oil.

Sea Salt and Pepper.

 

1. De-shell the prawns as described above. Melt a knob of butter and a dash of olive oil in a frying pan, then add the chopped garlic and allow to soften. Add the chopped herbs and stir.

2. Bring a large pan of salted water to a rolling boil, and add the pasta to serve. If you have the water at a brisk boil, there is no need to add oil to the pasta, just drop it in and stir immediately.

3. Add the prawns to the garlic herby butter, and fry for a few minutes. Season with salt and pepper, add a glug of good olive oil. Strain the pasta, conserving about a tbsp of the starchy water. Add the pasta to the prawns and combine with the herby oil. Add a good grating of parmesan, and a handful of rocket, tossing with the tbsp of starchy water.

4. Serve immediately with more parmesan and some cracked black pepper.