Twice-fried Chinese green beans

 

 

What do you do when you have a great recipe and a pretty mediocre picture of it? Do you wait till the next time you cook it and then make sure it is for lunch and not dinner, thus ensuring good light, and that you have your camera handy?

 

Well, if you have thousands of followers, a cookbook out and a nomination for best photography you might not even have to think about it.

 

If you are me, however, you consider the pros and cons.

Sudanese shorba

The thing I love the most about food blogging is that I get inspired to try things I normally never would. I love reading blogs from all over the world and enthusiastically absorb all I can from foreign cultures.

I know very little of is African cuisine. If you can actually even talk about a generalized African food culture as it ecompasses a great variety of foods. There are lots of African restaurants in Milan, with a preponderance of Eritrean and Ethiopian cuisine due to the unfortunate recent historical link between Italy and these countries. I have tasted their food and liked it and I have travelled to Maghreb and enjoyed their cuisine, but that is where my knowledge ends. I know close to nothing about Sub-Saharan African food.

Recently this one recipe kept on popping up everywhere around me. I first watched it being made on a British food show and was intrigued by the ingredients. It stuck somewhere in the back of my mind, although I had no recollection of the name or country of origin of this dish. Then, following the Foodbuzz Project Food Blog, I came across the same recipe in Joan's Foodalogue. There were those familiar ingredients! I was intrigued all over again. The idea of making a hearty vegetable and lamb soup (I love lamb) and giving it an extra twist by adding peanut butter and lemon juice at the end to thicken it up was suddenly irresistible to me. This had to be our Saturday dinner.

Farro with green beans and garlic

There I was, getting ready to post about this dish that can be a healthy, light main course or an original side dish, when I realized I wasn't quite sure what to call farro in English. I was pretty sure it was spelt and was surprised when I read the correct translation is emmer wheat, although it is often confused with spelt. They are actually cousins, the difference presumably being that emmer wheat needs to be soaked (although some say it is optional), spelt does not. I did not soak my farro, so perhaps it was spelt, but it distinctly said farro on the label. Oy vey! At this point my level of confusion kept growing and I went on researching. It turns out that a variety of hulled wheats (whose kernels retain their hull during the harvest and are dehulled afterwards, before further processing) are called farro in Italian: emmer wheat, spelt (or Dinkel in German) and einkorn. At times the distinction between farro piccolo, medio and grande will be made (small, medium, large), but not always. It seems that the largest cultivations in Italy are of emmer, but spelt is usually the easiest to find in most places.

Elba part 7 - Sicilian salad and a stomach pump please

I need a break. This is a food orgy; all we seem to be doing these days is eating and drinking. Plus my morning runs and afternoon laps have come to a screeching halt since my 13 month-old not only has decided to start waking up early in the morning but also that he cannot live a minute without his father or me in a two-foot radius. And did I mention that he is also trying to abolish his afternoon nap?

As a consequence I am rising like a loaf of bread in a hot oven. I need to go back home and get back into shape. I also need some healthy, light food. So pass me a salad and a stomach pump please if you will.

YM's green beans in cream

Yesterday I came home to a pretty empty fridge. So I did what I rarely do (unless I am making a pasta dish): I cooked an entirely vegetarian meal inspired by some recipes I had seen on the web and that I just happened to have the ingedients for. Yummy Mummy posted an interesting piece yesterday about recipe ownership and she mentioned an old recipe from her childhood, yellow beans and cream. I just happened to have a bunch of green beans in my fridge and decided to try out this unusual combination. I also made this chickpea recipe I had been thinking about for days to eat along with or in this soupy vegetable dish.