Friendship is sharing: a wrap that crosses the Oceans

Few weeks ago Aparna asked me if I was willing to write a guest post for her, my answer was naturally yes! Apart from being this an honour to be featured on her blog My Diverse Kitchen, how could I say no to a friend?
Once fixed the time details, I just had to think about a yummy vegetarian recipe to contribute.
You might remember that last month Velveteers’ challenge pivoted around the Sicilian caponata; Aparna loved it so much that I promised myself to show her more examples of the fine art of Sicilian veggies.
Last year in one of my visit back home, I bought some little booklets that collect various recipes from Sicilian culinary tradition from the different areas and cities of the island. I started reading the vegetables volume to find out that almost one third of its recipes feature eggplants; they are indeed one of the most beloved vegetable in Sicily. I already delved deeper into the gastronomic history of this fruit in my Caponata post but let me just remind here how it was considered at first as a poisonous "apple" and then relegated as food suited only for Jews.
Curious for more? Let's head over to Aparna's.

Red, White and Green

More or less two month ago, Asha of Fork-Spoon-Knife announced her own challenge: the FSK-Café. Similar to the Paper Chef, the FSK-Café challenge requires us to create two or more dishes with the chosen ingredients. For the first round, Asha chose mozzarella, tomato and basil.
They are everyday ingredients but quite deceptive. It is hard to come up with innovative dishes featuring this Italian trio; salads, pasta dishes, bready ones are those that come up to mind. To make things more challenging, I chose then to stay as far as possible from starches in my dishes and this is what I came up with:

• Mozzarella Lasagna with Tomato brunoise, basil and lemon peel served on a rosemary scented orange carpaccio;

• Fluffy sweet mozzarella curds with candied tomatoes and dark chocolate basil boat served with a tomato caramel sauce.

And here you are how to do them by yourself.

And it was that the four Velveteers were born

Who are we? A new secret gastronomical order equivalent to the Illuminati? Can’t really answer that, unless you pass your initiation ordeal. What's our purpose apart from messing up our kitchens? Work together around a theme, a recipe; explore its different sides shone by our different cultures and life stories. Who are we? Aren’t you curious! Oh well, since secrecy doesn’t really exist in the virtual world (let alone the real one) here we go: Aparna, Asha, Pamela and me.
The first challenge was to create a Red Velvet Cake preferably using only natural colorings; that is why Pam came up with the Velveteers nickname.
Recipes for this cake often call for the use of two entire bottles of artificial coloring (that might indeed produce such a red cake that will be worth serving to Santa Claus). There aren`t really many vegetarian ingredients characterized by a bright red, enough intense and stable to heat to act as coloring in baking.
The first to come to mind are indeed red beets. Who hasn't had his/her fingers or tablecloth stained by these roots? Other red things are actually fruits; namely strawberries, raspberries, peppers, tomatoes, pomegranate etc. My job was that of trying the raspberries. Easy job you might think, until you realize how sour they are. Yes we use sugar to cover it up; exactly COVER it up. Sugar doesn't make raspberry puree any less acid (in other words more alkaline); our gustatory papillae simply don't perceive the sourness that much under the great sweetness. My task was then to balance this acidity with the alkaline ingredients already present in the recipe.
Here we go hands at my old chemistry book to look for pH definition and example of use; Google from its side provided me with the relative pH for each of the aforementioned ingredient. So hands at pencil and papers or rather keyboard and Notepad document to try and solving the riddle.


Few ingredients found commonly in baking along with their pH values.

Ingredient	pH
Baking Soda	8.2
Buttermilk	4.41-4.83 (4.62)
Dutch Cocoa	7.0
Milk	6.6
Normal Cocoa	5.8
Raspberry Purée	3.3
Vinegar	2.4

Chocolate Calamari soup: weird is good

Few days ago I wanted to experiment a bit with calamari. I had in mind two dishes to work on for dinner. The first didn't turn out as I wished so you will have to wait to try it for yourself, but the second was delish!
Not really much to write about this dish, the fact that it includes chocolate should be sufficient to stimulate your imagination.
Chocolate and calamari? You would say; yep they go quite well together too!

Try it and let me know...

I have also tried a new style of photography.

Salmon with chocolate-soy sauce featuring Linwoods’ Flaxseeds, Cocoa and Mixed Berries

 Few weeks ago Bethany of Dirty Kitchen Secrets launched a recipe contest on the new Linwoods’ product: Flaxseeds, Cocoa and Mixed Berries sprinkle.
I have come to know Linwoods’ products since last year Food Bloggers Connect conference. In our goodie bags we found few nice pouches of their healthy products featuring flaxseeds, goji berries, hemp, sesame and other yummy and nutritious seeds to sprinkle almost on anything that comes to your mind. For instance, lately I always add them to my healthy sweet fix of the day: sweetened quark cream with nuts, honey and sometimes also herbs or berries depending on what I have in the fridge.

Fresh, zingy richness in a clear glass

The four Velveteers are back! After our Red-Velvet cakes we come back to you with a new adventure into our fridges, grocery stores and creative minds.
This time it took us quite a few emails before we could agree on what to propose you. At the end we settled for a Verrine.
What is that?? You might say; that is simply a layered dish prepared into a transparent glass so to admire the alternation of its colors and textures and entice our tasting experience. To make the challenge more interesting we decided to propose each an ingredient to keep secret till the day when they were disclosed all together to the others. Aparna required us to include a cheese of any kind, Asha went for zucchini or squash, Pam chose salmon and I threw in chocolate (yeah I know, I like to make things difficult).

So, let’s see what we have on hands. Zucchini have two major qualities to them: they have a lovely crunchy bite when raw and they get sweet when cooked long enough. To make the things even, I decided to use them two ways: creamy and crunchy.
As salmon I chose to use the smoked one and it is mainly salty, rich and meaty.
The flavors did work for me from the starting; the tricky part was in choosing a proper cheese that will stand out balancing the saltiness of the salmon and the sweetness of the zucchini. At the end, I chose to use Gorgonzola with its saltiness and slight bitterness.
Chocolate was naturally to be dark for me but… when pondering on the juxtaposition of the different layers, the possibility to use milk chocolate came around.

To link the various components I had my spice rack on hand.
All this thinking and pondering brought to life my:

Smoked salmon verrine with zucchini-duo, a Gorgonzola mornay sauce and peppery chocolate shards.

Rejuvenation is Yellow

The world of food bloggers challenges never stops to produce pleasant surprises. It was just last week that Cathy of ShowFood Chef popped by my blog and left a comment. I then had the pleasure to discover her blog and the PaperChef challenge!
This is quite the kind of challenge I prefer. What is it about? Monthly a series of 4 ingredients are drawn randomly from a list and a theme is picked by the monthly-host. Our duty is then to produce as many recipes as we wish featuring these ingredients and inspired by the chosen theme. But get a look here for a more complete description, have a look here.
The host for this month challenge is Cath of Prospect: the Pantry; the ingredient drawn were Honey, Ricotta, Dill and Eggs and the theme was Rejuvenation.
To me, all of these ingredients speak of life, spring, sunshine, grass; it was quite easy then to put together my two entries.
The first concentrate on the symbolism of the egg as a life bearer and this thought bloomed in me as a:

Deviled egg with ricotta and dill mousse over a Honey-Dark Chocolate sauce.

And the winner is…..

It’s already 1 week since when I got that email.

The story begins though some months ago, in September. After reading my first book written by Herve This “Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor”, I decided to look for more information about his academic activities and the possibilities to follow some of his lectures.
Through his web-page at the INRA I found information about his monthly seminar at the Ecole Supérieure de Cuisine Francaise. At that time, I had enough money to allow me a trip to Paris to follow the course of September.
Along with testing the effect of freezing on the growth of baked layer pastry (btw not many differences between the frozen and the fresh specimen were observed), madame Renaudin announced the 4th edition of the Rencontres Science Art et Cuisine. I decided to participate. My first gastronomical competition!
The theme of this year was: Modernize our Tradition, with a second module on innovation centred on the use of the Methylcellulose.
It took a couple of months to finally sketch the projects that I wanted to develop as submissions. Naturally I wanted to focus on my Italian origins but more precisely I wanted to research a bit of Sicilian cooking traditions.
I decided to submit two savoury dishes:

• Rosemary Tiramisu with Pink Pepper and Caraway-Chocolate Rose Window shards




• Meat and Ricotta Cassata cake with Almonds glaze, Candied Orange peels and Eggplant Cracklings.