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antipasto

Of all the vegetables, radicchio just has to be the prettiest of all, don’t you agree? I have always loved gnarly Florentine tomatoes and purple-tinged artichokes too, but they’re beautiful for their rustic, imperfect nature. Radicchio, on the other hand, looks like each leaf was painted by an artist. Have you seen the ones with watercolour-washed, pale pink leaves, the ones with almost-white leaves splattered in magenta, Jackson Pollock style, or the impossible, curly-fingered late radicchio from Treviso?
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A few weeks ago a bomb was dropped. My Tuscan husband, the can’t-live-without-bread, pizza-loving, pasta-making man that he is, was told he has a severe intolerance to wheat and that he’ll need to cut it out, cold turkey. Needless to say, when your partner or someone in your family has to change his or her diet, it pretty much means that the whole family change their diet, unless you want to cook separate meals to cater to everyone’s needs – I don’t, personally, I find it hard enough some days to get time to cook one meal!
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Italy in the spring. It means blossoms and longer, warmer days. Early on, it usually means rain too but also a gorgeous landscape of luminous, bright green pastures of new growth. It means fritelle. It means Easter and plenty of fresh eggs, especially from my sister in law’s busy hens. But, most of all, to me, it means artichokes.
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It’s been a busy new year — moving to a new city, trying to entertain and raise a fast-growing, handful of a toddler and keeping up with my blog and my Regional Italian Food column for Food52. And now I have a new gig as a recipe writer for the weekly Food & Wine supplement of The Canberra Times! For locals, it comes out on a Wednesday with the paper.
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So much of why we love food – eating it, making it, talking about it – is because it is emotionally attached to a memory, perhaps a fond ritual, perhaps a specific occasion. So easily triggered by the smell, feel or look of something, the nostalgia is instantaneous and even stronger when it is something to do with our childhood. This is what happens when you talk about merenda, the typical mid-afternoon snack that most Italians tend to associate with coming home from school as a child.
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It’s early evening, you’ve finished work and are ready to wind down. Perhaps you’re also a tiny bit hungry, or, at least, are at that point where you start imagining what you’ll be eating for dinner. You’re on your way home and perhaps it’s a place on the way, your regular, where you know you’ll bump into a friend or two and a drink is in order, along with some nibbles.
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We moved house a few months ago – our first time living in a house, rather than a shoebox sized apartment, as was always the case in Florence. It’s a lovely old double brick house with stained glass on all the doors, wrought iron fireplaces and hardwood floors. The nice thing with a house, too, is having a back yard where we’ve just planted our first winter vegetable patch with radicchio, leeks and kale and things for the spring like fava beans, strawberries, radish, snow peas.
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This isn’t so much a recipe as it is a memory, brought back to life while going through some old photographs and toying with the tempting thought of a quick visit to Venice again. The memory happens to take place at the Rialto fish market, which I always love perusing even if I’m not buying any fish, just to satisfy my curiosity.
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It’s nearly April, when autumn in Melbourne should well and truly be taking over the season but summer is dragging on and after a long, slow heatwave that felt like a giant hair dryer pointed at the city, a bit of autumn weather would be highly appreciated. I’m beginning to crave a refreshing, crisp morning, for example, when you need a nice hot cup of tea or coffee to warm you up and perhaps a floaty scarf to layer over the summer clothes you’re tired of wearing but have yet to put away.
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By far one of my favourite Venetian cicchetti is sarde in saor – fried fresh sardine fillets marinated in softly cooked white onions, usually with vinegar, raisins and pine nuts, all preferably prepared the day before serving. Found in the bacari nestled along Venice’s narrow laneways, where one stops for an ombra (a tiny rounded glass of local wine) and a bite to eat, this cicchetto is just as suitable as an antipasto at the table.
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If you’ve ever sat down to an antipasto of Tuscan salumi (the Italian word for cured meats in general; not to be confused please with salami!), you’ll know that Tuscans are serious about their cured meats. It’s the topic of this month’s Italian Table Talk, as January is popularly the month for butchering pigs and making salumi in the natural refrigeration that winter provides (if you’re interested in the how-to side of things, see this post on my first experience making salumi with my friend’s family pigs on their farm).
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There is something enormously satisfying about foraging for food, something that makes you feel that even in the city, you can skip the supermarket and go out and search for your own food in the parks around your suburb. More than just being frugal (although that in itself has its own merits), Nigel Slater put it perfectly when he said, “the pleasure is more the idea of exploiting something that is otherwise considered of little use.” For a novice forager (like myself), edible weeds are one of the easiest things to search out, from the cracks in the pavement to the corners of your garden and probably all around your local park.
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Melbourne’s winter is certainly making itself felt with what feels like a constant, grey drizzle. Thankfully the sun has come out today to warm our shoulders a little and put a smile back on people’s faces, but the chill in the air remains. To be honest, the cold, wet days remind me of early winter in Florence and although I’ve been complaining about it, there is something comforting in the nostalgia that the weather brings.
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