Perfect Summer Pantry Pasta with red peppers, tuna and olives

Summer can get tricky when there are two working parents in a family.

Many children here leave town for a good part of three months to spend time with grandparents at the sea, in the mountains or in the country, while parents or fathers stay in town to work. Grandparents here are a very popular form of free 24/7 year round babysitting and nobody seems to think much of packing off multiple children to their elderly parents, who take care of them without a complaint for months on end.

Our parents don't do the 24/7 thing, whether for health reasons, distance or simply because hello, they have their own lives + should enjoy their golden years and their grandchildrens' occasional presence + spoil them rotten and leave the dirty task of parenting to the parents already! As much as we would ideally love for the abovementioned to kidnap our kids for weeks on end and free us of the worry of how to organize yet another summer in the city and enjoy multiple dates on week nights, we are realistic and totally believe that it is wrong and should not be.

To be truthful, things have luckily been changing noticeably in the past years, with August no longer being that month where everything is closed in the city (no tumbleweed rolling down the streets anymore!) and more and more women working alongside their spouses. The city and schools offer summer acitivities for children all through August, something quite unheard of until recently. If you ask me, July and August have almost become pleasant, relaxing months to be in Milan, this summer in particular, where the weather has been extraordinarily good and cool. We almost feel priviledged to be here.

There are however a couple of factors to deal with, no matter how well you actually know you are coping. The first one is that atavic, irrational feeling of guilt all parents live with, or at least all working mothers (yeah, sure, it makes us more accomplished women, better moms blablabla but truth be told, most of us don't really have a choice anyway). And then there is the fact that I (as also my husband) was a priviledged child who travelled and spent several months away from home every summer (chaperoned by a balanced mix of grandmothers, nannies and parents).  

As a result, to compensate, we have been away pretty much every weekend this summer, trying to give our kids concentrated shots of the seaside, the mountains and the country. We have been alternating these short trips with some stints away for our oldest with F's family. The little one is still too small and too much work. Luckily he doesn't understand yet and still prefers being with Mommy and Daddy for now.

The result is short weeks, where Thursday has become Packing Evening (I never cease to be surprised at the amount of things you need to take for the under-6 category, even for just 2 days) and Monday has become Unpacking/ Laundry Evening. This means very little time to cook and even less time for foodshopping (thus an empty fridge).

This is where a pasta like this comes in handy. All pantry staples except for some fresh peppers, which you can pick up at any corner supermarket. Not bad, eh? It is very quick and so flavorful it will make your taste buds sing. Go on, make it tonight. Tomorrow is Packing Night again.

Recipe adapted from here, a wonderful source for many tasty recipes.

Gazpacho - a soup or a drink?

The other day I mentioned a questionnaire I was answering to subscribe to a food community. One of the questions was a pet peeve of mine in the kitchen. I had a hard time coming up with one at that moment, but since then they have just been popping up in my mind. Turns out I am quite the kitchen nazi.

Here are a few:

1. When someone grabs food from a platter or picks/eats the garnish before I serve it.

2. When someone hovers while I cook and constantly sticks a spoon or even worse a finger into something I have on the stove top.

3. When someone sticks their fork into my plate while I am eating. (I see a trend emerging here. A touch territorial?)

4. When someone eats pasta and leaves all the sauce in the plate.

5. When someone eats roast chicken and discards the crunchy, salty skin.

6. When someone says they don't like something without ever having tasted it (excluding religious/moral reasons)

7. When someone only takes the runny part of an aged cheese

8. When someone cuts the crust off of cheeses like camembert and brie

9. People (er...Italians) who say English food is terrible. Hello? Gordon? Nigella? Jamie? Heston? (Also, I believe there is no country that does not have a local cuisine, some just have more variety than others)

10. People who think Italy is just pizza, pasta, cappucino and mafia.

11. When people make ..... (brownies, cookies, etc. You choose) and halve the butter, sugar, egg ratio. Don't be surprised if it ain't a ..... or if it isn't as good as the bakery's.

12. Language distorsions.

This opens up a whole new subcategory (and the truth is I probably do the same in languages I don't know so I probably shouldn't cast the first stone). But bear with me and let me rant just this once:

a) biscotti is plural. The singular is biscotto, so you are eating a biscotto, not a biscotti

b) the same goes for panino and panini

c) by the way, biscotti are all kinds of cookies in Italian - even an Oreo, and panini are all kinds of sandwiches, even a club sandwich

d) the same goes for Italians. 'Cookies' are all cookies, not just chocolate chip cookies

e) the right word/spelling is BRUSCHETTA (pronounced broosketta, not brooshetta)

f) why does the package of a regional, traditional Italian cookie (biscotto) have to have 'cookie' written in English under the brand to make it cooler? (And why don't you get a native speaker to correct your English before you print that sentence on 100,000 t-shirts? But I digress...)

g) gelato is all ice cream in Italy, even the Haagen Dazs you buy at the supermarket

h) Fettucine Alfredo are NOT Italian

Since we are discussing all those infuriating/endearing mistakes we make with foreign foods, here is the recipe for gazpacho. I am sure that in Spain every family has a recipe for gazpacho that is the best and only true version. In the recipe I used, which may or may not be authentic, the procedure is a little more complex than my usual throw-together-and-blend-the-vegetables approach. The result is delicious, it really does seem to give the gazpacho an extra kick.

Now to the big dilemma is: is it a soup or is it a drink? 

After doing a little research and because I have close family living in Spain, I feel I can pretty confidently answer it is a soup you can drink. So whether you use a bowl and spoon or a glass is up to you. But because I do not want to become a Spaniard's pet peeve please let us know, if you are out there, if this is true and also what you consider to be the original, one-and-only recipe.

I followed the recipe to  a "t" and made half a batch and then omitted the last step with the other half. You decide which you like best. I drank the first and ate the second with a spoon. What matters is that it bring you pure joy on a hot, hot day like today.

What are your pet peeves in the kitchen?

Adapted from Just Eat it.

Mediterranean stuffed green peppers & amazing women

I have to admit I am a little uninspired these days when it comes to cooking and writing. I am sort of missing the umph, I am distracted. There are things on my mind.

It is hard to write about the superficial, the mundane when my very close friend was readmitted to the hospital on Monday for his second bone marrow transplant. His wife, also a dear friend, is a blogger. She has the gift of expressing the ups and downs of battling leukemia as the mother of two young children with such simplicity, honesty and irony that she leaves me at a loss for words.

My thoughts the past weeks have also constantly been fleeting across the ocean to Monet, a fellow food blogger that I do not know personally. We are not really friends, we have only ever exchanged a few words, but I cannot stop thinking of her, her family and their loss. She writes beautifully and her words have deeply touched my heart and soul.

My words ring empty  when I read what these amazing women have to say. What may be therapeutic to them, their writing, is a lesson to all of us. They teach us strength, compassion and an intense love for life, a true eye opener to those of us caught up in the minutiae of our daily routine. As Moomser puts it, life is simply what is is, so we have to live every moment fully and create memories that will help us through hardship. And while doing this, Monet reminds us to bestow kindness on the strangers we will encounter today, because they could be walking down a dark road. If you see someone falter, don't honk at them, don't be aggressive. Try to be a little more patient, because you don't know what they are experiencing inside.

So today, I will step aside, and let them do the talking.

Below, the simplest of vegetables with an unexpected, complex filling.

This is not a typically Mediterranean recipe, or at least not that I know of. I called it Mediterranean because each and every ingredient used is so typically representative of this area. In every bite you will taste the saltiness from the anchovies, the creaminess of the feta perfectly balancing out the acidity and fruitiness of the sundried tomatoes and capers.

 
I admit I used a short cut when I made these. A while back I had bought this Sicilian paste that I didn't want to use on crostini or with pasta as suggested. It is 100% natural and thus easy to make at home in a food processor or blender. I am not giving amounts as they depend on your personal taste and on how many peppers you will be using.

Spatchcocked Cornish game hens and roasted peppers in olive oil

I bet you think I am trying to be fancy with all this spatchcock and Cornish game hen talk in my title. The truth is it was a Thursday night. (This post was written on Friday). And what a Thursday night!

I had bought two Cornish game hens to roast for dinner, a nice change after all the fish we have been eating. It was a week night and I usually do not have time to roast a chicken, so I thought these little guys would do the trick (thus the choice of poultry). So there I am as usual on a work night, in octpus mode, making my young-un his baby meal, roasting the peppers, filling the bathtub and washing the kids. I realize it is getting later than expected and that I may actually not even have time to roast the hens if I want to fit in an early dinner so that my daughter gets back to a decent bedtime routine after the Spanish Italian hours she got accustomed to during our vacation. So I am thinking spatchcock. Yes, that is what I will do. These days more often than not I feel like the Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, jumping around in a frenzy repeating "Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!".

About love affairs, Asian-style chicken salad and guilt-free potato chips

Dear F,

I don't know how to tell you this, but I have fallen in love. It happened by accident, we met in a little old store on my way home from the office. I saw him and looked the other way, feigned interest for something on display. I promise you, I tried to leave and not turn back. But I couldn't help it, I could not control my urges. I turned and he was still there. Sleek and sharp looking...I couldn't resist...I left the store with him. We hit it off immediately. I did things with him I had never dreamed of doing before, I suddenly became adventurous, I wanted to try more. I couldn't help myself. Forgive me F, I have fallen for Kyocera, my new Japanese love.