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