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Of all the activities likely to send me into a spiral of heart-searching, guilt and self-loathing, grocery shopping ranks near the top. Take milk, for example. We’re constantly running out of it at work, and at some point during the day, one of the staff will take it upon themselves to run out and buy a pint with their own money. Sure, it’s only about 45p, but as a responsible and (I hope) fair employer, I think that should be a business expense, so I decided to research getting milk delivered to the office. There is one company that seems to service all of the businesses in the area, but after hearing all of the alarming stories about how dairy farmers are being driven into the ground by big companies forcing their prices down to the point where they’re losing almost 19p a litre or something, I decided that I was going to buy from someone who paid dairy farmers a fair price. After about two hours’ research, I had a list of about 10 companies who would deliver milk to our door, but absolutely no idea how to tell who was screwing the farmers and who wasn’t. In the end the dire need for a cup of tea and convenience won, and someone just went to the crappy corner shop and bought some more surely-screwing-the-farmers milk. (I will persevere in my quest for fair milk though.)
It’s the same thing with my veg box delivery. I’d like to say it’s completely, utterly and totally about me supporting local farming and doesn’t factor in AT ALL the fact that our food shopping choices within walking distance are limited to The Corner Shop and The Other Corner Shop. (Give me convenience, or give me death, as Jello Biafra say.) There is also this sort of creeping embarrassment when I mention it to my friends – I feel kind of all like “Yusss, of course my eggs are natural, darling, they’ve still got bits of shit and feathers stuck to them!” – so I wind up in this spiral of bigging up my laziness when really I’m not all that lazy. If I were, then I’d be on a first-name basis with all the pizza delivery places in this area (we’ll just ignore the fact that the proprietors of at least three of the Vietnamese restaurants in my last neighborhood used to wave at me when I walked by). And even though my carrots are twice the price, I’ve probably wound up saving money because instead of thinking “Oh, I must pick up some carrots at Sainsbury’s” and then coming home having bought carrots along with 2 bottles of wine, some random flavors of yogurt, plug-in air fresheners, miracle stain removers and whatever other crap they have on sale, I just skip the store, go home and try to find something interesting to do with the carrots I already had in the first place. That I haven’t shafted any more farmers or raped our environment in the process ups the feel-good factor.
Thus, Cavolo Nero Pesto. This is one of many reasons that the veg box is awesome. They send you stuff that is in season, and since England has weird weather patterns, vegetables that you’d normally expect to see in other parts of the world grow well at random times of the year here. Bok choy, for example, seems to grow like weeds here. We get our veg box from Abel and Cole, and although you can dictate what you want in your box through a system of dislikes and favorites, I like being surprised with random stuff that I’d never think to buy, like salsify and Cavolo Nero. Read the rest of this entry »
Vacation time is pretty much a myth when you’re self-employed. Since last November, I’ve had a total of two days this year where I haven’t been working, or at the very least checking emails. So when I discovered that my tax bill didn’t quite use up all the money I (or rather, my accountant) had set aside for it, I did what any normal person would do – I set up my out-of-office autoresponder and went to Rome.
It’s extremely cheap to go to Rome in August, mainly because all of Rome has gone somewhere else on vacation. (Mediterraneans have got it so right – summer vacation isn’t just for school kids.) We didn’t really mind that so much was closed for the summer, because it gave us an excuse to search out the little bits of Rome that normally get shoved aside in favor of the Colosseum et al.
One lovely surprise was the Museum of Musical Instruments (Museo Nazionale degli Strumenti Musicali). It’s a big house stuffed with 3,000 instruments dating from ancient times through to the 1800s, collected by opera singer, Evan Gorga. Apparently Gorga ran into some financial difficulties, and donated the collection to the state in a deal that cleared his debts and gave him a lifelong pension. (Somehow I doubt my Fender Cyclone and non-reverse Firebird copy could keep me in pretzels for a week, let alone a lifetime.)
Among the items on display are a 17th-century harp, an early piano by Bartolomeo Cristofori (largely regarded as the inventor of the instrument), and a section dedicated to unusual folk instruments from non-European countries, my favorites being the African madolins made out of armadillo shells. Annoyingly they don’t allow photography, but I managed to get a cheeky snap of Neil peering through some 18th-century cellos.
Note the massive pile of whipped cream in the top right.
But, we can’t talk about Italy without mentioning food, and even those of us who don’t have much of a sweet tooth find it hard to pass up some proper Italian gelato. Rough Guide told us that the Gelateria Giovanni Fassi, was a short (and sweaty) walk away. It dates back to 1880, making it the oldest gelateria and ice cream factory in Italy. It was nearly 4pm and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. There was no way we weren’t going.
And there was no way we weren’t going to love this. First of all, this place was a bastion of efficiency. (Anyone who has ever visited Italy, or any other Mediterranean country, particularly in the summer, will have noticed that expediency is not on most Italians’ lists of customer service priorities.) You place your order at a desk (1, 2 or 3 scoops) and take the little slip over to the counter which houses about a billion different flavors of gelato and ices. Even though it was rammed, we were served in minutes.
Not Great British Food - Great Made-in-America Italian Food.
My Italian-American family has these at Christmas every year. They’re probably the thing I miss most at Christmas (aside from my family of course). These are apparently an Italian finger-food but I’m not sure how authentic the recipe is. It’s one of my favourite things ever though. Mom makes tons of these ahead of time, freezes them and reheats on Christmas Eve.
We always used a homemade Italian sausage from one of the numerous family-owned supermarkets in Old Forge, Pa – Rossi’s on Main St at the top of Taroli St was the usual. Italian sausage is a little crumblier than the Taste The Difference types you get in Sainsbury’s, but that’s probably more do do with the hand-mincing than by actual design. If I’m really stuck I just get a good quality plain pork sausage and season the meat with fennel seeds, garlic, oregano, crushed chili flakes and black pepper.
I couldn’t stand asparagus as a kid – possibly due to the fact that, in my mother’s kitchen, it mostly came out of cans (newsflash to all the trendy revivalists – the 80s SUCKED) – and now I’m pretty much obsessed with it. Mushrooms, courgettes (actually, “zucchini” where I’m from), aubergines (eggplant to us Yanks), artichokes – I used to hate them all.
Fennel, or finnichio in my Italian-American family, is another one that I roundly dismissed for about 25-odd years. My mom hates the stuff, so I never had that much exposure to it. I’ve also heard that in Italy, “finnichio” is also used as a derogatory term for homosexuals, but I’m not sure how reliable my source is, and I doubt that would be why my mother never cooks it.
One of my favorite recipes is the Fennel, Tomato and White Bean soup from James Peterson’s Splendid Soups book, a hefty volume with over 300 recipes for every kind of soup imaginable, and a billion different ways to make stock. I first made this for a vegetarian friend, who later told me she’d never liked fennel till she’d tried this soup, so I think this might be the one to convert my mom. It’s one of those recipes that’s very healthy without being preachy about it – there’s hardly any fat at all, aside from my own addition of the cheese.
