Slow Mondays, Cooking with Massimo & Friends
Bread is Gold: Extraordinary Meals with Ordinary Ingredients
When a Cookbook calls you to contemplate more than just the food..........
Lets see what happens, 400 pages and approximately 170 recipes to discover
Recent Cherry Harvest, love cherry jam is a favourite way to spend a quite summers afternoon with a chilled Rose….
Monday is a good day for me, the house is mostly empty, just me and the pets and I can gather my resources to contemplate this little venture of mine. Pen and paper in hand I scan ‘Bread is Gold’ the Cookbook for meals that are not only in season but with the possibility that I have the ingredients on hand. I have decided there have to be a few rules to make this work:
* Use what I can from the pantry/larder
* Pick out a bunch of recipes each week and add them to the family meals
* Cook seasonally as much as possible
*Keep detailed shopping lists...etc for future recipes that entice
*Pay attention to the herb garden and the moment in time and what is available locally
*Change ingredients if necessary when need to buy....for example if I don't have pistachios to sprinkle on dessert recipe use hazelnuts that I have in pantry etc... (be mindful of waste and moderate accordingly)
*Have fun and embrace beginners mind....I have never baked sour dough bread so this will be interesting.....
Is it perhaps “Ordinary Ingredients” are things we overlook as too simple, like when there is bread left over…I am discovering there are a myriad of ways to use this staple that most of us buy each week in some form….
Add to cakes, bake with olive oil for croutons, grind and fry with garlic instead of parmesan. Poor mans food for a wise mans feast…..
www.foodforsoul.it
I have had to reconcile how to make cooking every recipe out of ‘Bread is Gold’, in other words....... how to limit waste (the whole philosophy behind this), how to add to our home environment utilising resources, etc. I know over the next few months it will be easy for me to negotiate the weekday meals around this book and the recipes, yet I also have to think about a vegetarian daughter who has decided she is mindful of her footprint and a husband who is trying to incorporate an anti-inflammatory diet most of the week. I am open to all of these things, and opt for a win/win, in truth these days we eat three or four dinners a week that are vegetarian anyway.
Fortunately I am in the ‘will try anything basket’ and that ‘all is good in moderation’ approach yet, I don't want too much food that no one will want to eat either. On my mind right now is a bowl of peaches, too many zucchinis and the tomatoes sunning themselves, therefore the recipes using summer vegetables like Roast Vegetable Gazpacho and Baked Pasta Alla Parmigiana are pasted with post it notes for the Monday cookout.
One thing to be mindful of on this journey...... ‘Bread is Gold’ is not traditional Italian Cooking per se. These are recipes that came about from the Chefs who were given random ingredients on the day to cook in a soup kitchen known as Refettorio Ambrosiano in Milan (see the post previous).
Not all of the Chefs in the book are from Italy, but a worldly bunch with culinary training and heritage of their own they take into the kitchen.
Their mission was to make do with whatever was in the crate or box or fridge when they arrived on that particular day. Some staples at any given time were available, the common thread is making do with whats on hand is the foundation of the cooking and the feeding of the people......
This is definetly something that a clever person who wants to minimise food waste will do regardless.
“One-third of the food we produce annually is wasted over a year” - Massimo Bottura, Bread is Gold
I say Slow Mondays because slowing down to read and absorb a cookbook is a pleasant way to begin a new week. Fortunately most Mondays I am at home, but anyone can pick a day or an afternoon that works if they wanted to go down this path. I do love Mondays because I can recalibrate after the general weekend and I can see my way forward earlier in the week.
It’s funny but I have to come to realise over the past few weeks as I manage and figure out how I am going to cook every recipe in this book I realise that reading a cook book and mediating upon the recipes is much like a spiritual practice. You turn up, you read, begin, make, follow, sample, season, taste, prepare and ultimately create something beautiful to sustain your day. You commit, you take your intentions, your creativity and your intuition to the table.
You also cultivate the feeling of ‘flow‘ in the kitchen. An intuition and the feeling of being right in the moment at any given time is with you. I like that and perhaps that is why I am happy there. And so it is time to go make the ‘starter” for the Sourdough Bread recipe. Next post I break down some of the meals made so far.....
Podcasts to listen to while in the kitchen:
REV PODCAST: Sustainable Eating with Skye Gyngell of Spring and Heckfield Place
SECOND LIFE PODCAST: Nancy Silverton: Celebrity Chef, Restaurateur, and Author
Watch: Netflix - Theater of Life & Netflix - Chef’s Table with Nancy Silverton
Season 3, Episode 3..........I hope something transferred here with the possibilities of sourdough bread making.....I really loved this story on her life in the kitchen.............
READ: The Pleasures of Slow Food: Celebrating Authentic Traditions, Flavours, and Recipes by Corby Kummer
