Archive for December, 2010
Low Temperature, The Restoration Enemy
We’re approaching the end of the year, and decorators are stopping their job too.
But the biggest problem is the low temperature; they explained that under a critical temperature (if I remember well it’s 4 °C – about 39 F) lime gets ruined.
Then they prepare some defensive makeshifts: handmade frames, pieces of material around the scaffold and warming.
The thermometer says those solutions work!
Christmas and Early Vegetables
Since a long time ( I don’t remember well, but it’s more than 20 year old), the Christmas evening (I mean the 25th) we meet our friends to have the so called “dinner of leftovers”.
We consider it a tradition and has 2 goals: to limit our food wastes while eating something we didn’t plan to cook. You know, when you eat something at lunch it tastes fantastic, the same food again at dinner looks “boring”, overall when you have to feed some kids. We all love to cook, so it’s guaranteed we’ll find something wonderful in our dishes.
With our “Christmas cat” taking us company, we ate up our broad beans (it’s an early variety which sprouts in this period) and salame (apparently salame and broad beans is commonly eaten only here in Liguria), chards au gratin, salmon puffs, cima (a typical ligurian recipe, in this case the Imperia-like version: basically it’s a veal meat pocket filled with whole eggs, chards, pine nuts, carrots, prosciutto cotto and parmigiano), crepes filled with fish in a porcini béchamel sauce, coniglio alla ligure, lamb, home made panettone, 2 chocolate mousses (we were doubtful about what recipe to cook, so we prepared 2 variants and did a survey: it won, hands down, the “italian meringue” variant).
Yes, you guessed, we’re a “bit” overweight.
