Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Rye Beer Burger Buns / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Burger Buns alla birra di segale

Did you know that Maroggia’s Mill sells Beer too?? Oh yes, we are talking about la birra del mugnaio (miller’s beer) and for this recipe for Maroggia Mill’s Cookbook I thought of using this product to invent beer burgers buns! These sandwiches have a delicious flavour of beer that goes well with the finest flavours of meat and all the ingredients that make a good hamburger. Add some proper cheese, fresh tomato and onion and I assure you…you will love them! Burger must be accompanied by a good beer, of course! These sandwiches are so soft I can’t find the words to describe them and in my opinion they are very well suited for breakfast too if you like intense aromatic notes! Have you turned the grill on?

MTC Challenge: Indian Style Fried Chicken / MTC Challenge: Pollo fritto all’indiana

Another month, another MTChallenge. Last challenge, the macaron, literally brought me to my knees and made me regret having a willpower which is close zero. Friendships, relationships…working hard on myself I learned the salutary principle of “Letting go” and understand that everything, EVERYTHING, in this brief life simply comes to an end. Not with the MTChallenge, I simply can’t let go. Like in the most cliché relationships which are ruled by a strong, and constant, imbalance between love and hate it’s impossible for me to desist. Kathy Bates in “Misery” you name her…MTChallenge is far worse than her smashing Paul Sheldon’s legs, I simply can’t get out of it! Last challenge’s winner was Silvia, not a surprise if you go taking a look at the recipe with which she won. It was virtually impossible for her to lose. I immediately said to myself: “She will bash us, she will”. Indeed, a massive bash arrived. Silvia’s fried chicken! So you think that frying is easy don’t you? You couldn’t be more wrong. Being quite experienced with frying (I think my closest friends have heard me billion times instructing them on double frying) I took courage and decided to use an ingredient I’ve never used for frying before. Almonds. Scared about its humidity content and surely quite fearful of burning them I never, EVER, used nuts to coat anything that needed a good old frying session. Of course it took an MTChallenge to throw myself into the boiling cauldron and overcome anxiety. The inspiration for the recipe came from India, as soon as I read Valentina’s original recipe. Blame it on the marinade (spices and spicy!), or the idea of accompanying the chicken with a sauce (firstly my mind went to a yogurt based dip and then moved on to an inevitable chutney, which I decided to mix with yogurt :D), but for certain if chicken is involved, at least where I come from, you have to venture into indian cuisine.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Vegetarian Seitan Empanadas / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Empanadas vegetariane al seitan

Another day at the Mill, a new recipe for the Cookbook…or rather two new recipes! Today I will be teaching you how to make seitan, a product that has gained more and more visibility in the past years. It takes very little time to make it and the result is excellent. Seitan is a high-protein food of oriental origins that is often used in vegetarian and vegan diets. Being very rich in gluten it is not suitable for celiacs. If cooked with seaweed or flavoured with soy sauce seitan is a complete food, containing 8 amino acids essential to our diet. A very versatile product and a good alternative to meat (it can be flavoured in many different ways), it is worth to include this ingredient in our diets. One kilo flour is enough to obtain 500 g of seitan in just a few minutes of kneading and washing the dough. The rest of the job is done by soaking and boiling the mixture of flour and water.

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.

Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook: Rustic Polenta and Mushroom Gnocchi / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Gnocchi rustici alla polenta e funghi porcini

Here we come with a new appointment with Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook and polenta flour. Today I propose you a recipe for gnocchi which can also be used to recycle leftover polenta. Since I had to make polenta from scratch I decided to flavour it with dried mushrooms, and the result was excellent! An autumnal tasty recipe that I have no doubt your guests will fall in love with.

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: Pumpkin, Pears and Walnut Ravioli in Vegetable Broth / Il Ricettario del Mulino di Maroggia: Tortelli di zucca, pere e noci in brodo vegetale

I haven’t posted a fresh pasta recipe for Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook in a while http://www.mulinomaroggia.ch and the opportunity now comes along with the new packaging for pasta and pizza flour which has been available in stores since November. Alessandro gave me some samples and I decided to try out a tortelli recipe, since I’ve never had the chance to make them myself. I highly recommend you to try making them on a Sunday afternoon, preferably with some family members who can help you out and with whom you can spend some good times with. Making the dough is a long process and requires some patience but the result repays with a fresh product which is also easily customizable.

Brown rice curry with chickpeas and oat milk / Riso al curry con ceci e latte di avena

Recently I realized that concentrating efforts on my macrobiotic diet, recipes for Maroggia’s Mill Cookbook  and MTChallenge participations a this blog features almost exclusively bread recipes. Of course it makes total sense, considering the name of the blog itself is quite exhaustive about my main passion in the kitchen, but still I do believe it would be a good thing just to post some recipes not related to bread every now and then. So I thought about going back to one of my old loves, curry. I will never grow tired of saying curry it is not a powder that one can buy in the supermarket, but a blend of spices that you can easily do at home by varying amounts and types of ingredients. Seen the limitations the macrobiotic diet imposes I came up with a recipe which does not employ coconut milk, but uses oat milk instead. The result is great. If you make oat milk yourself (here you can find the recipe you will see how the sauce thickens with no addition of ingredients such as corn starch. Great, right? This creamy curry is very tasty and not spicy at all and gets even better if allowed to stand twenty four hours. Are you ready to bring some Indian flavour in your kitchen?

Living on my own: Brown rice, lentils and red cabbage / Living on my own: Riso integrale, lenticchie e cavolo rosso

From this month onwards, slowly and not in too categorical way, my blog will adapt to a new lifestyle I find myself forced to adopt due to health reasons. Many things will be banned from my kitchen, some of which are not such a big deal (such as red meat, that I already eat very rarely), and others that will be very difficult to accept and implement (cheese and dairy products, and most shockingly baked goods). Despite the general ban on leavened and baked goods I will continue to post recipes for bread and the like, which will be put to the scrutiny of my faithful guinea pigs. Stopping my kneading routine? No sir! I will not deny that right now, as I am typing on the keyboard my mood is anything but positive. While recognizing that a change is necessary acceptance is still very far from my landscape. Funnily enough this recipe, which I had cooked a little before knowing about this major change, aligns itself very well to the diet I will have follow probably for the rest of my life (even thought some occasional transgression will surely occur). Sure a change of diet doesn’t mean I won’t be having good food and this recipe is proof. But let us read more about the beneficial properties of the ingredients employed in this recipe.

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.