Buongiorno Amici! Today we are taking another look at The Italian Cuisine I Love by Jules J Bond. We last looked at this book all the way back in 2012 where I developed quite a crush on the author…Bond…Jules J Bond. And who wouldn’t crush on this bon vivant and possible spy! I spent quite a while with Jules J last time and his tuna stuffed tomatoes are still a favourite summer lunch for me! Today, however, will be a flying visit, albeit a delizioso one!
The introduction to The Italian Cuisine I Love says
Italy is a country where the joy of eating is one of the many joys of life”
And today, wherever in the world we find ourselves, we will be trying to capture some of la dolce vita with some fried anchovy bread and Spaghetti in Garlic Sauce. Sorry carb phobes, this one is not for you!
Fried Anchovy Bread
Bear with me for uno momento haters of anchovies……just take a moment to look at this…
Yes, I thought that might change your mind. But if you really, really hate anchovies, leave them out. Add some salami or prosciutto or olives just have it with the cheese! If you also don’t like cheese, then I have nothing for you.
Now that’s the Italian Cuisine I Love!
Fried Anchovy Bread – The Recipe
As delicious as the anchovy bread was, it was just the begining!
Spaghetti In Garlic Sauce
As the fried anchovy bread was quite rich, I thought I would keep the second course quite light. I wanted to have pasta because last time I didn’t make any of the pasta dishes. I chose a Spaghetti in Garlic Sauce. This is a version of a Spaghetti Aglio e Olio and was super yummy!
Spaghetti In Garlic Sauce Recipe
It was so nice to step back into the worldof The Italian Cuisine I Love. I now own a few more in the Cuisines I Love series so hopefully it will not be another eleven years before we step back into the world of Jules J Bond!
Hello crime readers and food lovers! Welcome to Dining with the Dame for May and my take on Sad Cypress. I loved this one! And I also loved the Salmon Rillettes so this was a win-win for me! Now it may be a bit risky to base my recipe on the supposed murder weapon (poisoned salmon paste sandwiches) but the rillettes were absolutely delicious!
Sad Cypress -The Plot
First up, the name comes from a quote from Shake’speare’s Twelfth Night:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
The beautiful Mary Gerrard is dead. Prior to her death, Mary had been the gardener’s daughter in an estate owned by the Welman family. Elinor Carlisle, niece to the recently deceased Laura Welman stands accused of her murder.
Her motive? Elinor had recently been jilted by her fiance (and kind of cousin) Roddy for Mary.
Her means? Salmon paste sandwiches laced with morphine.
Her opportunity? Tea time whilst clearing out the Welman estate.
All fingers are pointing to Elinor being the murderer. But did she do it? Luckily the local doctor who has a bit of a crush on Elinor brings in Hercule Poirot to determine who is guilty.
We have:
A poison pen letter
Some missing morphine
An elderly aunt possibly bumped off before her time
A very large fortune left to Elinor.
A mysterious figure lurking in the bushes
A possibly perfidious cousin
A strange mark on a nurse’s wrist
Secrets from the past impacting the present
Poirot hilariously calling himself a “pukkah sahib”
Such a good story!!
Sad Cypress – The Covers
There are some great covers here – many of which contain aspects of things we have mentioned, the roses, the morphine, the poison pen letter. We also have our first Japanese cover, some French covers, a Spanish cover and a German which may actually be my favorite. Here it is in full:
I also want to call out this one because…what?
I understand the rose and the tea set. The weird green guy? Not a clue! It reminded me of Dumb Witness when Emily Arundell, who had been poisoned with phosphorus was said to have a luminous haze around her head.
The Recipe – Salmon Rillettes
I based my recipe for Salmon Rillettes on the recipe for Rainbow Trout Rillettes, Rye, Cucumber and Watercress Sandwiches from Food for Friends by Hardie Grant Publishing. That recipe is by Philippa Sibley and her book New Classics. I swapped out the trout for Salmon and used white bread for my sandwiches.
Elinor went across the hall and brought back from the pantry a big plate of sandwiches. She handed it to Mary saying:
“Have one?”
Mary took one. Elinor stood watching her for a moment as the girl’s white, even teeth bit into the sandwich”
Agatha Christie – Sad Cypress
Links to The Christieverse
Peter Lord, the doctor who is crushing on Elinor tells Poirot that he was recommended by Dr Stillingfleet. He is a character in a short story called The Dream which appears in The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding.
Hello Friends! This week we are stepping back in time to February 2003 via Delicious magazine. It just so happened that the topic that came up in my random generator was Girl’s Night. So it seemed like a perfect opportunity to tie this into Galantine’s Day.
Before we get into that, let’s set the scene for February 2003. The month started with “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera topping the charts. This was replaced by Avril Lavigne with “Im with you” for the remainder of the month. Number one in the box office was “How to Lose A Guy in Ten Days” and the best-selling book this week was The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold.
My menu has somewhat of a pink theme which seems fitting for a Girl’s night but the content is definitely adult, starting with a watermelon vodka cocktail!
Watermelon Vodka Cocktail
This was so simple! I added a little squeeze of lime into the watermelon and vodka mix as I felt it was a bit too sweet / one note without it. It was super refreshing and made the most of our lovely summer produce! Be careful though…too many of these and you’ll be slurring
I am beautiful no matter what they say Words can’t bring me down I am beautiful in every single way Yes, words can’t bring me down, oh no So don’t you bring me down today
into a pretend mic and telling all your gal pals how much you love them before dessert!
Watermelon Vodka Recipe:
Beetroot Confit and Marinated Goat’s FetaTarts
I didn’t make these because I pretty much hate beetroot. To me, except for one Beetroot Tzatziki which I love, it tastes like dirt. The funny thing is though, it is something I really want to like. So I keep trying to make things with it in the hope that I will find the magic recipe that turns that switch in me from off to on. In this instance, I love the look of the pastry dotted with poppy seeds, the shape of the tiny little black dots echoed in the round of the goat’s cheese, and the gorgeous crimson of the beetroot in between.
Confit Beetroot and Goat’s Cheese Tarts Recipe:
Tuna Carpaccio
I loved this!!! It was so good! (one thing, I completely forgot to add the cucumber to this!). Also, I had no mixed baby cress so I subbed in watercress. When I was in Darwin recently, we went to a restaurant called Pee Wee’s at the Point for the Fussiest Eater in the World’s birthday. There, I had a buffalo carpaccio which was one of the best things I have ever eaten in my life! That dish came with a Hot English Mustard Mayo which inspired me to add my own mayo to this carpaccio. I made a Wasabi Mayonnaise (you can see a little dab of it front and centre in the above photo).
Here is a pic of that buffalo carpaccio. Just looking at it makes we want to go all the way back to Darwin so I can eat it again!
Tuna Carpaccio Recipe:
Baby Tiramisu
These look adorable! And despite not being pink, they are the perfect way to end the evening…or to snack on as you are settling on the couch to watch a dvd or two! And because they are tiny, you can eat one and still fit into a dress just like Kate Hudson’s in “How To Lose A Guy in Ten Days”!
Baby Tiramisu Recipe:
My Nigella Moment – Duck with Berries
For first-time readers, this refers to the moment at the end of Nigella Lawson’s cooking shows when she sneaks back to the fridge to have another bite of something delicious. In the context of these Twenty Years Ago posts, it is something contained in the magazine that does not fit with the overall menu theme but I’m sneaking it in either because I made it and it was really good, or I just didn’t have time to make it!
This month, my Nigella dish is Duck with Berries which came from an article on romantic food to cook for Valentine’s day. It was so good! Timing is so important when cooking duck and this recipe nailed it!
Duck with Berries Recipe:
Delicious Magazine certainly delivered on the Girl’s Night Menu!
Please let me know if you make the Beetroot Tarts. I am so intrigued by them! And also, if you are old enough to have had a girl’s night in 2003, would this have been the menu you would have chosen?
If you would like to contribute a theme, please let me know, I’m up for any challenge you can throw at me!
And happy Valentines, Galentines or however you want to spend the coming Tuesday!
Hola amigas y amantes de la comida! Did I ever mention that during that very first lockdown of 2020, I tried learning Spanish on Duolingo? That first sentence pretty much reflects the highest level of proficiency I attained. Despite my very limited ability to speak the language, we are leaving the snowbound land of Canada to head south to the sun and sea of Mexico via Good Housekeeping’s World Cookery. And our first meal is going to be an absolute favourite of mine – Ceviche!
Ceviche contains so many things I love – raw fish, avocado, lemon, tomato, chill and coriander! And it is also so vibrant! I used tuna in my ceviche so there was the gorgeous pink of the tuna, some red tomatoes, the bright green of the coriander, the more more mellow yellow green of the avocado some bright yellow pear tomatoes so it really was very colourful.
I then also made Eggs A La Mexicana from the same chapter and the colour palette was quite similar!
Of course I am not the first person to realise that a lot of Mexican food is yellow, red and green…there are several colour palettes to this effect on Pinterest and elsewhere:
Having said that, the part of my brain that probably spends too much time at work, or thinking about work, thought the colour palette of both dishes was very similar to that of an Excel conditional formatting colour scale! So I may well be the first person to link Mexican food and a spreadsheeting tool!
The Recipes – Ceviche and Eggs a La Mexicana
Both of these were delicious and easy to cook! Which as long-time readers will know was definitely not the case the last time I ventured into the realm of Mexican cooking! Mind you, I’m not saying that these recipes are absolutely authentico but they had me doing a little dance like this all the same!I hope your week has you also doing a little dance and not staring at too many spreadsheets!
Hello Friends!!! I’m going to be very honest here. I have a problem. I love a food magazine as much as I love a cookbook and have been collecting them for many years. Too many years it turns out as I am running out of space to keep them. They are here:
And here
And are now piling up on the floor here:
So, something needed to be done before the fussiest eater in the world calls the Hoarders team on me. And as with many problems, the solution came to me while I was on holiday and not really thinking about them. In order to help me decide which mags to keep and which to cull, I will cook out of them! And blog about it. One month at a time. In order to assess them, I am going to apply a straightforward formula – if I can build a decent three-ish course meal from any magazine, it will stay in my collection. If that is impossible, it will go into the donation box.
So shall we see what September 2002 via Good Taste Magazine had in store for me?
The Menu
It looks like this one might be a keeper! Even the selection on the menu above is only some of the recipes I would cook from this mag. But the proof of the magazine recipe is in the eating so let’s see how I went with cooking some of the items off said menu.
Pink Grapefruit & Mint Caipiroska
As much as I love a margarita, I am choosing the Caipiroska. I love pink grapefruit, I love mint and I also love the etymology of the work Caipiroska – it is basically a Brazilian Portuguese ellison between caipi- (shortened from caipirinha) and -roska meaning Russian as the spirit in a caipiroska is vodka.
These were delicious!!! Just the right amount of sugar syrup to balance out the grapefruit. And the mint made it all very fresh. If you cannot find palm sugar for the sugar syrup you could use brown sugar instead
Now, you may be wondering where is the pea rice in the recipe? Well, I’m not that fond of a pea so I swapped that out for roti and a tomato, red onion and coriander salad. I also dropped in a little raita.
The recipes for the other items on my menu can be found here and here
My Nigella Moment
What is a Nigella moment? You know how at the end of each episode of a Nigella tv show, you see her popping back to the fridge for just one more bite of something? Well, my Nigella moment will be one thing that didn’t make the menu but something I look forward to cooking (and eating) in the near future.
There was a little article on broad beans which contained the following bits of trivia:
Favism is severe condition brought on by eating broad beans in people who have a particular genetic enzyme deficiency. It can bring on fever, fatigue, jaundice, anaemia and abdominal and back pain!
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras banned his followers from eating broad beans. No one actually know why but theories include their flatulence inducing properties to the belief that they contained the souls of the dead. (Or maybe Pythagoras was someone with favism?)
Broad beans aka fava beans gained some pop culture cred with this statement by Hannibal Lecter in Silence of the Lambs:
I hope you’ve enjoyed this trip back in time to September 2002.
I hope your week has you also doing a little dance and not staring at too many spreadsheets!
