Fagioli all’uccelletto / Fagioli all’uccelletto

Today I present you with a Tuscan recipe which I revisited, Fagioli all’uccelletto. A meat dish just for a change, a once in a while diversion from the usual bread baking routine. A nourishing and warming dish. Fagioli all’uccelletto is a traditional Tuscan dish, typical of the Florentine area. According to Pellegrino Artusi the name derives from the herbs and aroma used to cook this dish (especially sage) which where once used to flavour dishes made which had wild birds (uccelletti) as the main ingredient. This dish employs ingredients which are more readily available and serves as a mock version of those recipes. A rustic and rich meal, with plenty of animal and vegetable proteins, which is perfect to warm up the body and lift the spirit during those cold and gloomy winter evenings. I don’t know about you, but the perfume of meaty dishes, the sound of tomato and legumes splattering, mumbling and rumbling in a saucepan always get me in a good mood. It just smells like home…

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: White Chocolate Sachertorte, or Gio’s cake / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Torta Sacher al cioccolato bianco, o anche detta torta della Gio’

It has been quite a while now since I last posted a cake recipe for Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook. As you know by now my diet unfortunately does not allow me to eat sweets, although on rare occasions I happen to cheat (better not mention the Christmas festivities, which have been a disaster as far as diet is concerned). But this cake is simply divine and I could not keep myself from posting the recipes. It’s a reinterpretation of the most famous Sachertorte, the original recipe I have worked on comes from a recipe which I have been baking for nearly 20 years ripped from an old issue of a magazine which I cannot tell anymore whether it was “A Tavola” rather than “Italian Cooking”. However, the recipe of the original Sacher is superb but this white version is not far behind. I used Maroggia’s Mill Nostrana flour and the result is soft and spongy to perfection, very moist and sweet without being sickening (to avoid it being to sweet I decided not to cover it with a white chocolate glaze, which is to my taste a bit too sugary). A bite leads to another bite, melting quickly in the mouth. The first person to test the recipe was my friend Gio’, which I found out loves white chocolate both reasons why I decided to rename this recipe “Gio’s cake”. I also tried to make a bigger cake using a classic 20 cm diameter mould ring and it was met with great enthusiasm, but keep in mind a bigger cake requires different temperatures and times for baking. What are you waiting for, why don’t you try it too?

MTChallenge: Chestnut Honey and Feta Pizza / MTChallenge: Pizza al miele di castagno e feta

Here comes another month, here another MTChallenge. This time Eleonora and Michael, the two minds behind the blog Burro e Miele, threw their gauntlet not with a recipe but with an ingredient instead, and honey it is. Panic. This exact month is filled with work and new ideas, meetings, recipe testing and I won’t deny that such a great freedom within the challenge scares me a bit. In order not to exhaust myself I decided to keep a low profile, a very low one…but always with the desire to test new recipes and enjoy something different. Feta and honey have been a staple of Sunday brunches for a long time now and I’ve been crumbling feta on almost all of my white pizzas in the past years. It seemed to me like a perfect combination. A sweet and salty pizza, bring it on! The idea of putting honey directly into the dough is a winning one. Chestnut honey has a very distinctive taste and the result is pretty good…I already have been thinking of other recipes and I think I will be experimenting next Autumn. For the umpteenth time I want to thank MTC for being such a source of inspiration.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Tortelli who believed themselves to be chiacchiere / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: I tortelli che si credevano chiacchiere

Carnival could be easily renamed “Feast of fried stuff”. The most common recipes in Italy and Ticino are chiacchiere, frappe, tortelli and frittelle. Needless to say frying makes everything better, crisp and irresistible! A quick dusting with icing sugar and tortelli are ready to taste, hot and straight out of their brown paper cone, while parading between bright coloured masks and multicoloured confetti. Each region has its own specialties, and it is not hard to confuse them between one another. And what if tortelli believed themselves to be chiacchiere?