Autumn warmest colours and flavours: Polenta gnocchi with mushrooms and chestnuts sauce / I caldi colori e sapori dell’Autunno: Gnocchi di polenta con funghi e castagne

In my culinary imagination polenta has always been linked to more or less special occasions. You might think this is strange, as polenta is amongst the basic ingredients of my region’s cookery and its presence on our table during the cold season would be taken for granted. Being my mother English the most common dishes cooked during autumn and winter time are Shepherd’s pie, Lancashire hot pot and a range of stews. Polenta has always been eaten at my aunt’s place.

Autumn Brioche Flower with Chestnut and Butternut Squash, a winner recipe / Fiore d’autunno alla castagna e zucca butternut, una ricetta vincente

Put together a contest, some seasonal ingredients, my brioche dough and shake until thoroughly mixed. The result? An extremely soft sweet bread and a first prize win. But let’s start from the beginning. Almost two months ago I stumbled into an article in Azione, a weekly newspaper by Migros which is one of Switzerland’s retail chains leader.

ZZAFF! Castagnaccio

Our ZZAFF! season begins with an autumnal recipe which has chestnut as the main ingredient. Chestnut is an ancient plant whose presence in the Ticino Region extends from Mendrisiotto to Leventina. Chestnut has been one of the staple ingredients in ticinese cooking since the Middle Ages, due to its high nutritional value. It’s nutritional value can be preserved for a long time through drying or grounding into flour. Among the different recipe sin which chestnut is used I chose the castagnaccio, a sweet which is typical of Northern Italy but has always been very popular in Ticino too. The ingredients are simple as well as the recipe is.

Buckwheat diamonds in autumnal broth / Pasta di grano saraceno in brodo autunnale

Autumn. If you have been following my blog for a few years there is no need for me to stress on how much I love this season. If I had to pick a few words to describe this season those words would be: orange, leaves, perfumes, chestnuts, woolly jumpers, fireplace, home. A few words which are already eight…oh the nasty habit of dwelling that I have! To these “few words” I would just add another one: buckwheat.

No other kind of grain embodies in itself all the scents, colours and flavours of the most beautiful season of the year. Aromatic, intense, hot, buckwheat is very well suited for a variety of recipes ranging from sweet to savoy with the advantage of being a highly warming food (something I learned during my macrobiotic phase), therefore ideal for these months that are slowly introducing us to the cold winter. There is nothing better than a good hot soup to reconcile yourself with the world after a hard day’s work. Just imagine being in the cozy warmth of your house, holding a steaming bowl while sitting on the couch watching one of your favourite tv series.

The dough can be prepared it in advance and frozen laying the diamond shaped pasta on a cutting board covered with plastic wrap. When the pasta is thoroughly frozen you can store it in box to prevent it from breaking.

Chestnuts Flour and Walnut Bread / Pane alla farina di castagne e noci

How I love the cold season. Vendors at every turn of a corner, the thick smoke coming from the roasting racks. Paper cones filled with roasted chestnuts keep my hands warm. Autumn and winter are my favourite season for their distinctive perfumes and flavours. Chestnuts come in the first place of my cold season food top ten. Sweet and fragrant, once amongst the staple food of our ancestors here in Ticino it has now become quite an expensive ingredient to buy in stores. Definitely not an every day ingredient if not for those who have the chance of being able to go in the woods and pick some. Every now and then I treat myself with a bag of chestnut flour and bake kolache. Lately I have been experimenting a bit and came up for this recipe for a bread I took to a dinner with friends. It’s flavour is intense and lends itself well to accompany a vegetable soup which is so seasonal. Chestnuts, walnuts and polenta are all products which are typical of my region and blend perfectly. This bread is one with a strong personality, it is rich and dense and keeps fresh for several days…a bit like bread did in the old days.

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.

La ricetta che ha vinto è…

Sarò breve, ma spero intensa. In primo luogo vorrei ringraziare tutti, in primis la fratella Arianna (te possino te l’ho già detto?) che porgendomi lo scettro dell’MTC mi ha fatto passare un due mesetti belli tosti ma ricchi di soddisfazioni ed emozioni. Ad Alessandra, che mi ha rassicurata da subito dandomi tutto il supporto possibile per affrontare questa impresa per me titanica.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Walnuts, Aniseed Caramel and Pear Tarts/ Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Tartellette alle noci, caramello all’anice e pera

Autumn has set in and I realised it has been a while since I last posted a good sweet recipe for Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook. What better occasion than a bag full of walnuts coming straight from my dad’s garden? The process of nut cracking is long and boring, but there is absolutely no comparison with store bought nuts and the whole process can be done on a cold night in front of a good movie, as I actually did. My sister suggested trying out a Tuorta da Nusch (a walnut and caramel tart typical of Engadina region in Switzerland) which is one of my – many I admit – favourite dessert tarts, but I wanted to do something different.

Living On My Own, The Ultimate Comfort Food: Fried Polenta bites and Butternut Squash / Living On My Own, il cibo coccola per eccellenza: Cubetti di polenta fritta e zucca butternut

Autumn is finally here, with its warm colors and scent of damp earth, burnt wood and hot soups. Even though it is my favourite season I can’t deny its characteristic cold weather and leaden skies can have a melanchonic effect on the mood. Today’s recipe is mostly a remedy against autumnal melancholy, the ultimate comfort food for singles. Something you might want to eat on one of those lonely nights when you feel a bit down after a bad day at work, when its cold all around and inside your heart too. As a single woman sometimes I speculate about relationships, especially on those cold and lonely nights, envying a bit my friends who have a partner waiting for them at home.

My bread featured on Essen Magazine: “Fashion Food” Editorial + Recipes / Il mio pane su Essen Magazine: Editoriale per la rubrica “Fashion Food” + Ricette

Life is strange, it’s not much in my style to make certain statements but sometimes it seems to me that wishes can come true without too much effort and this is exactly what happened with this adventure with Essen – A Taste Magazine I’m about to tell you. I well remember that Sunday morning in August. My friend Chiara and I were in my kitchen, hands wrapped around our cups of black tea, fragrant freshly baked ciabatta and assorted jams for breakfast. We talked about possible collaborations, ideas of projects involving food and fashion (she works as a stylist in Milan). Chiara suddenly came up with an idea, why not propose an Autumn/Winter fashion editorial for Essen Magazine’s column Fashion Food, featuring my bread creations too? We started writing down ideas, but then as you well know the notes ended up in the middle of a thousand other paperwork scribbled with ideas, projects and recipes to try out. Until I got a phone call from Chiara, telling me that out of the blue she had been given by her boss a job for a fashion editorial for Essen Magazine!