Kitabı oku: «Made at Home: The food I cook for the people I love»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The places I call home

Seasonal salads and vegetables

Simple soups

Panini, crostini, pies and other snacks

Pasta, rice and pizza

Favourite fish and seafood

Grilled meats, roasts and stews

Cakes, treats and ice creams

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

The places I call home

Home means many things to me. Home is north London with my wife, Plaxy, and now grown-up ‘kids’, Jack and Margherita, who come and go but still expect to raid the fridge as soon as they walk through the door. When Plaxy and I are at home on our own, the meals we share are about simply cooked fish, vegetables and salads, and many of our favourite recipes are included here. But when Margherita was small, much of our cooking had to begin with something that she could eat, since shortly after she was born we discovered that she had an allergy to around 600 foods, especially fish, tomatoes and eggs. So for years we could never have fish or tomatoes in the kitchen, and ingredients like almonds would be kept in jars in separate labelled cupboards to keep her safe. We never wanted her to feel different, so we would always find a way of making something for her that looked like what everyone else was eating, even if the ingredients varied. But for me, that should always be at the heart of all home cooking: the idea that you adapt and change according to what you buy fresh that is in season, what you have in your cupboard and your fridge, and who you are cooking for.

Home, for me, is also Corgeno in Lombardy, northern Italy, where my whole family was involved with my uncle’s restaurant, La Cinzianella, on the shore of Lake Comabbio, so my grandmother was in charge of the cooking in our house while my grandfather raised rabbits and chickens and grew vegetables in the garden. Many of the meals that my grandmother cooked, I still cook at home for my own family, and when I do, it is as if I am back in Corgeno with her and my grandad again.

According to the day of the week, we might have risotto with saffron, pasta with homemade passata, fish from the lake, and once a week fresh prawns; or stews, such as osso buco or my favourite, spezzatino, made with beef, potatoes and peas, according to whatever pieces of meat Stefanino, the village butcher, had kept for my grandmother.

When my elder brother, Roberto, and I would come home from school there would often be a soup made with my grandmother’s broth and maybe a scallopine to follow: a sliver of pork, veal or chicken, encrusted in breadcrumbs from the big jar in the kitchen and fried. I still think that in a family environment, soup is very important. It is a great comfort food; it doesn’t need so much planning, and you can make a potful and freeze some in a container for next time. If I get home late from the restaurant, or from filming, having tasted so many dishes during the course of the day, all I want is a simple soup to soothe and settle the stomach. Or a simple pasta.

I never tire of a plate of spaghetti with a brilliant tomato sauce, but I often think that while the great advantage of pasta is its familiarity, that is also its worst enemy, because we all have our one or two favourite recipes that we make over and over again, when actually a dish of pasta should reflect the changing seasons. It is a perfect medium for introducing kids to ingredients with different textures and flavours throughout the year.

My grandparents, who had been through the war, never lost the fear that there might come a day when there was no food – something that Jack and Margherita have no reason to understand – but in Europe plentiful food has come at a certain cost to society. There is no doubt that we have to address the problems of eating too much sugar and salt, the way we have made food ‘convenient’ by packing it full of additives, our wastefulness, and the fact that we cannot go on extracting so much from the earth and emitting so many gases. But one huge step is to go back to the essence of home cooking – buying fresh ingredients, preparing them simply, enjoying them with your friends and family, and keeping anything you don’t eat to transform into another meal – and that’s it.

Home, too, is my restaurant, Locanda Locatelli, where I spend most of my waking hours with my other family, the team of chefs and front of house staff, many of whom have been with me for a long, long time. You have to look after the people you work with. Ever since I sat on a rubbish bin outside the kitchen of the Tour d’Argent restaurant in Paris where I worked long, long hours for a pittance, eating sausages at the end of the night, while inside the diners paid a small fortune for the famous classic French dishes we had made for them, I vowed that when I had my own restaurant, I would make sure that everyone ate well. So each day at 4.30p.m. everyone sits down together to eat something simple that we have made in the kitchen, because that is when you have the time to talk to people, share ideas and news, find out what is going on in their lives, if someone needs help with something or has a problem. Exactly like a family sharing a meal around the table at home. The two favourite meals are ‘Italian’ burger night on Tuesday, and pizza night on Saturday, when even those who are due to finish their shifts, or on a day off, seem to find a reason to stay behind or drop by! So those recipes are included in this book, too.

And now Plaxy and I have a second home perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea in Puglia, a region we discovered and fell in love with after spending so many amazing summers across the water in Sicily. In the winter, it feels like you could be on Mars, with the rocky cliff falling away beneath you, but in spring and summer the water is a stunning blue and that is all you can see.

In London, I am spoilt by so many different ingredients and cultural influences, which have pushed the way I think about food way beyond the northern Italian flavour palate that I grew up with. But on holiday everything is stripped back to a few knives and some pots and pans and whatever I find when I go out each morning – maybe with some money in my hand to meet the fishermen coming off the boats, or at the market to buy fresh local vegetables or rich, creamy burrata. So Puglia, too, has inspired some of the recipes in this book. The ingredients may be more limited, but their quality is exceptional, and that is when I feel at my most creative. I look at what I have and decide then and there how to prepare it for family and friends to share. Just as my grandmother did all those years ago in Corgeno.

Seasonal salads and vegetables

I find myself focusing more and more on vegetables, not only for flavour but for the beauty their different textures can bring to a salad or a dish, sometimes just by the way you cut them. I am excited by the idea of vegetable butchery.

Pan-fried cauliflower salad with anchovies and chilli

When I was cooking at the Savoy I thought of myself as the King of the Cauliflower, because one of my jobs was to make the cauliflower soup, and I made a cauliflower cheese that was a work of art, really light and perfectly glazed. But the truth is I never liked cauliflower much. In the cooking of countries like India it is treated to interesting spices, but in European cuisine it often seemed like the boring enemy of gastronomy. In Italy they used to say that cauliflower was for priests, because it kept the sex drive down. But my opinion changed forever a few years ago when I tasted a cauliflower pizza made for me by a husband and wife team, Graham and Kate, when I was a judge at the BBC Radio 4 Food and Farming Awards.

This sweet couple, who now have a restaurant in Bristol, drove around in a bright yellow Defender van with a wood-fired oven called Bertha in the back, and they would come to your party and make maybe 70 or 80 pizzas in a night. Back then it was quite a revolutionary thing to do. I asked them to make me a pizza margherita and another one of their choice. The margherita arrived and it was unbelievably light, Neapolitan style, and I was already thinking, ‘These guys are good,’ when they brought out their anchovy and cauliflower pizza. Graham had sliced raw cauliflower very thinly and used it instead of cheese. I cannot even describe the way in which it was almost melting and yet it kept its structure and flavour, and its tanginess worked so well with the flavour of the anchovy and a little touch of chilli and lemon zest. It was so delicious and like nothing I had tasted on a pizza before.

When someone presents to you, in such a different way, a vegetable that you have put into a certain compartment of your mind for years and years, it is a total shock. I went back to the kitchen at Locanda and I immediately said to the boys, ‘Do we have some cauliflower?’ Of course we didn’t, because I didn’t like it. So I had to go and buy some. We played around with a lot of ideas, and this way of pan-frying the cauliflower and incorporating it into a salad with anchovies, in a little echo of the pizza flavours, was the one we loved the most. It is exactly the kind of quick and simple salad I like to make if Plaxy and I are at home on our own, or as a starter if friends come around.

When a cauliflower is quite big and loose it is easy to break it into small florets of the same size which will cook evenly, as I suggest here, but if it is smaller and very hard and compact, it can be easier to cut a cross in the base and cook it all in one piece, until just tender. As it cools down, the heat will penetrate evenly all the way through to the centre. Then you can cut it into slices. It’s your call, depending on the size and density of the cauliflower.

Or, if you prefer to roast the cauliflower in the oven, you can spread the florets over a baking tray and roast them at 180°C/gas 4 for 20 minutes, sprinkled with a little olive oil. When they have turned golden, remove the tray from the oven and allow them to cool down.

Serves 6

salted anchovies 6

cauliflower 2 heads, separated into florets

olive oil

hard-boiled eggs 3, chopped

black olives 15, stones removed

capers in vinegar 1 tablespoon, drained and rinsed

chopped mild red chilli 1 teaspoon

chopped fresh parsley 1 tablespoon

Giorgio’s dressing 200ml (see here)

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Pan-fried cauliflower salad with anchovies and chilli

1 Rinse the salt from the anchovies and dry them. Run your thumb gently along the backbone of each anchovy – this will allow you to easily pull it out and separate the fish into fillets.

2 Blanch the cauliflower in boiling salted water for 2 minutes. The florets should still be crunchy. Drain them.

3 Heat a little olive oil in a pan, put in the cauliflower and sauté until golden all over. Lift out into a large serving bowl.

4 Add the anchovy fillets, eggs, olives, capers, chilli and parsley. Drizzle in the dressing, mix everything together very gently so that you don’t break up the egg yolks any further, and season to taste.

Plaxy’s salad

When I first came to London my palate wasn’t very spice-oriented. In my region of Lombardy we would occasionally put a little mild chilli into a pasta sauce, but that was it. It was Plaxy who educated me to eat more spicy food, which seemed very daring at the time. But the more you eat, the more you increase your capacity to still taste the flavours of the food and not be distracted by the heat, and so I came to love spice as much as she does.

This has become known as Plaxy’s salad because I first made it for her after we had been in Thailand, and she was hankering after the fresh, clean flavours of the food there. I had some carrots and apples, so I put together this very simple combination which has become a favourite at home, and the boys in the kitchen often make big bowlfuls of it when the staff sit down for their meal before the evening service.

It is the combination of fresh carrot, chilli, mint and sweetness that really drives the flavour, so the rest can be quite loose and you can use different fruits if you prefer: perhaps pears or mango. You can leave out the almonds if you like, maybe put in some tomatoes, parsley or coriander, which adds its own radish-ey aroma. Often we grill some chicken breasts and put them on top of the salad and that is lunch, and it is a great salad to put out as part of a barbecue. Of course you can increase or decrease the quantity of chilli, and if you prefer a more citrus dressing, add a little more lemon juice, or if you like a milder flavour, add more olive oil.

Buy fresh, bunched, organic carrots if you can, as you want to get as close as possible to that intense flavour and aroma that a good carrot has when it is just pulled from the ground and that you never forget. When I was small, my grandad had to stop me pulling up all the carrots in the garden, washing them and eating them straight away, like Bugs Bunny. I loved them so much.

Be gentle when you grate the carrots so that you don’t bruise them, otherwise they will lose some of their moisture.

Serves 6

almonds 250g

carrots 12

green apples 3

fresh mint leaves a good handful

limes juice of 2, or of 1 lime and 1 lemon

Thai chilli paste 2 teaspoons, or to taste

extra virgin olive oil 5 tablespoons

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Plaxy's Salad

1 Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas 4.

2 Lay the almonds on a baking tray and put them into the oven for about 7 minutes, moving the tray around and giving it a shake occasionally so that the nuts become golden all over. Remove the tray from the oven, allow the nuts to cool then chop roughly.

3 Grate the carrots coarsely into a serving bowl, or, if you want a more beautiful presentation, slice them on a mandoline.

4 Cut the apples in half, take out the core, then slice into segments, leaving the skin on. Add to the carrots, together with the toasted almonds and the mint leaves.

5 In a bowl or jug combine the citrus juice, chilli paste and olive oil, taste and season, then toss this dressing gently through the carrot, apple and almonds and serve straight away.

Green bean salad with roasted red onions

People often ask how it is possible to get so much flavour into a dish that is essentially green beans and onions in a shallot dressing, but this is a great example of a very simple salad that is all about the quality of the ingredients and the detail of preparing them.

When a green bean is perfectly cooked, if you squeeze and push along the seam with your thumbs it should split easily. Then, a trick I like to do is to run a knife along the length of almost half the beans so that they hold the dressing, along with little slivers of shallot, almond and Parmesan, in a way that a closed bean can’t do. The contrast of the closed and open beans creates a slightly different feel in the mouth that makes the salad more interesting.

The real key, though, is the contrasting intense sweetness of the red onions, which comes from roasting them very, very slowly in their skins, but also relies on sweet, fresh onions full of juice to begin with. You can tell easily when you buy them: they shouldn’t look dry, and they should feel heavy. The onions we use are the cipolle di Tropea, the special Calabrian onions that have their own Protected Geographical Indication label, and are famous for being so sweet you could almost eat them raw. Tropea is on the coast looking out to the Stromboli volcano, and the best onions are grown south of the town and closest to the sea, where the soil is rich with sandy deposits that have blown into it over the 2,000 years since the onions were introduced to Calabria by the Phoenicians. Of course you can use any other variety – the pink French Roscoff are also especially good – but if you can’t find really fresh red onions, forget about them; it’s better to choose some beautiful sweet, juicy white onions instead.

When onions are slowly roasted like this they can be used for so many other things, too; for example, they are good mixed with roasted vegetables, especially aubergines, or crushed into a paste and served on toasted bread.

The mixing in of the grated Parmesan should be the final touch just before serving, so that it doesn’t get soaked into the dressing: that is very important.

I also made this salad for a friend who is vegan, and instead of the Parmesan I pounded a handful of pine kernels with some extra virgin olive oil and just drizzled this over at the end.

Serves 6

For the onions:

coarse sea salt 100g, plus an extra pinch

red onions 4 large

red wine vinegar 2 tablespoons

extra virgin olive oil 2 tablespoons

For the beans:

almonds 120g, chopped

long green beans 700g

shallot dressing 3 tablespoons (see here)

Giorgio’s dressing 100ml (see here)

Parmesan 200g, grated, plus a little extra for shaving

Green bean salad with roasted red onions

1 Preheat the oven to 180°C/gas 4.

2 Lay the almonds on a baking tray and put them into the oven for about 7 minutes, moving the tray around and giving it a shake occasionally so that the nuts become golden all over. Remove the tray from the oven, allow the nuts to cool then chop roughly.

3 To roast the red onions, scatter the sea salt over a roasting tray and lay the whole onions on top, still in their skins. Cover with foil and put into the preheated oven for 2 hours. They are ready when they feel quite soft to the touch but still give a little resistance. Take out of the oven and when just cool enough to handle, remove the skin and cut each onion in half. Put into a bowl.

4 Mix together the vinegar, oil and a pinch of salt. Pour over the onions, toss through and leave until completely cool.

5 Blanch the beans in boiling salted water for 4 minutes, depending on their thickness, until they are just tender but retain their bite: they should open out easily if you split them along their length. Then drain them under the cold tap to keep their bright green colour.

6 I like to use the outer layers of onion for decoration. If you want to do this, take off the two outer layers of each onion half, keeping them in one piece, and put to one side. Chop the rest of the onion and mix into the beans, add the shallot dressing and Giorgio’s dressing, season and toss all together.

7 Arrange the outer layers of the onions around the outside of a large shallow dish to resemble a crown. Add the grated Parmesan to the bean and onion mixture and turn it all together gently, then spoon it into a mound in the centre of the crown of onions. Sprinkle the almonds on top and finish with some shaved Parmesan.

Dressings

I am always shocked at how many bottles of dressings and sauces there are in the supermarket, when it is so easy and so much better for you to make your own. Why not invest in some little squeezy bottles to put on that rack on the inside of the door of your fridge, and fill them up with some punchy dressings that you can pull out any time you need something with a kick of flavour to add to a salad, over some vegetables, or a piece of fish or meat. Grate some carrots, add some anchovy dressing from the fridge and you have a starter. The good thing about a squeezy bottle, as opposed to a jar, is that the contents don’t come into contact with any utensils, like spoons that have been dipped into other sauces, so the dressings stay pristine. They are all made with oil and vinegar, so they will keep for up to a month, unless you have a son like Jack, in which case it will be a few days.

Giorgio’s dressing

This is my everyday dressing. I like a fresh, fruity, grassy, rounded oil, and so just over ten years ago we decided to experiment with producing our own oil in Sicily in partnership with the owner of the small Tenimenti Montoni estate, Antonio Alfano, to use in the restaurant and to sell. The patch of land is high up in the mountains of Cammarata, close to Enna, where they grow Nocellara and Biancolilla olives, and we planted an additional 3,000 olive trees at the top of the mountain which have now come to full production. The oil that they produce is unfiltered, green-gold in colour and full of flavours of tomato and artichoke and cut grass. We have bottles of every single vintage in the kitchen at Locanda, and every autumn when the first new oil comes in it is exciting, because there is always a subtle difference, depending on the season. One year a tempest came in from the sea and did a lot of damage to the trees, but we still managed to produce a beautiful oil. It is such a pleasure and a privilege to open each bottle and to feel that, yes, it has all the rich characteristics of a typical Sicilian oil, but it is also very personal, reflecting all the particularities of a piece of land that you know so well.

Makes about 375ml

sea salt ½ teaspoon

red wine vinegar 3 tablespoons

white wine vinegar 2 tablespoons

extra virgin olive oil 300ml, preferably a fruity southern Italian one

1 Put the salt into a bowl.

2 Add the vinegars and leave for a minute to allow the salt to dissolve.

3 Whisk in the olive oil, with 2 tablespoons of water, until the liquids emulsify. Now you can pour the vinaigrette into a clean squeezy bottle and keep it in the fridge for up to a month. It will separate out, so just give it a good shake before you use it.

Shallot dressing

We use this dressing often for salads, especially when they include roasted onions, sometimes on its own and sometimes combined with Giorgio’s dressing.

Makes 150ml

long banana shallots 2, or 4 small round ones, finely chopped

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

red wine vinegar 75ml

extra virgin olive oil 150ml

1 Put the shallots into a bowl and season, then add the vinegar.

2 Leave to marinate for 12 hours in the fridge, then pass through a fine sieve and discard the vinegar. Put the onions into a sterilised jar and add the olive oil. You can keep this in the fridge for up to a month.

Anchovy dressing

Use a blender with a small cup (around 500ml). Blend into a dressing, and store in your squeezy bottle for up to a month.

Makes 200ml

anchovy fillets in oil 14

extra virgin olive oil 120ml

white wine vinegar 3 tablespoons

garlic ½ a clove

dried chilli a pinch (optional)

Sun-dried tomato dressing

Use a blender with a small cup (around 500ml). Blend into a dressing, and store in your squeezy bottle for up to a month.

Makes 200ml

sun-dried tomatoes 8 halves

extra virgin olive oil 100ml

white wine vinegar 2 tablespoons

fresh basil leaves 10

dried oregano a pinch

Black olive dressing

Use a blender with a small cup (around 500ml). Blend into a dressing, and store in your squeezy bottle for up to a month.

Makes 200ml

black olive tapenade 2 tablespoons

anchovy fillets in oil 3

garlic ¼ a clove

extra virgin olive oil 80ml

white wine vinegar 1 tablespoon

Onion and chard salad with broad bean purée

This is a salad that we always made at home, because Margherita could eat everything but the chicory and chilli – although it was a shame she couldn’t enjoy them too, because what I love about this is the contrast of the sweetness from the purée, the slight bitterness of the chard, the sweet and sour of the onions, and the chilli. The chilli brings a lift and a liveliness to the salad; it needs to be a detectable flavour, so if you like you can increase the quantity of mild chillies, or use one hotter one instead.

When it first comes into season I like to substitute the Swiss chard with catalogna, one of the members of the big chicory family, which is similar to the Roman puntarelle, except that puntarelle has little spears inside whereas this one is all white-ish-light-green stems and darker green leaves that look a bit like those of a dandelion. In southern Italy catalogna grows wild everywhere, so when you buy your vegetables in the market, the stallholders will often give you a bunch of it as a present, in the way that they might give you a bundle of herbs at other times of the year. People eat it in all sorts of ways, often sautéd with chilli and garlic, or with ricotta. You could also use the blanched version, the Belgian endive, and just cut it into long strips. It will give you the bitterness, but the shapes and texture will be different.

Although you could make the salad with fresh or frozen broad beans (I am always wary of beans in tins, which may have unwanted ‘agents’ in them), I like to use dried beans. Yes, fresh beans have a fantastic flavour and vivid colour, but dried ones, when they have been soaked and cooked, have a natural viscosity that really helps to bring the purée to the hummus-like consistency that you are looking for. Dried beans are a great gift to humanity: you can keep them in the cupboard or freeze them, you can soak some and if you change your mind about using them straight away you still have 24 hours to use them. And even then, if you cook more than you need, you can cool them down and keep them in a container in the fridge to mix into salads.

When we have the wild fennel, Finocchio selvatico, that comes in from Sicily, I like to use it instead of the fennel seeds, or you could use the fronds from a bulb of Florence fennel, chopped very finely and added at the same stage.

I like to serve this with some thick slices of toasted bread so you can mound some of the purée on top then add some of the chard or chicory and onion to get the full experience of sweet, sour, bitter – and a touch of heat.

Serves 6

dried broad beans 500g

white onions 4 medium

olive oil 150ml

fennel seeds 1 teaspoon (or 50g wild fennel or fennel fronds, finely chopped)

white wine vinegar 50ml

capers in vinegar 2 tablespoons, drained and rinsed

sugar 1 teaspoon

Swiss chard or catalogna chicory 2 bunches

garlic 1 clove, chopped

mild red chilli 1, chopped

extra virgin olive oil, to finish

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Onion and chard salad with broad bean purée

1 Soak the beans in cold water overnight.

2 When ready to cook, chop one of the onions and heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan. Add the onion and the fennel seeds, or wild fennel or fennel fonds, if using, and cook gently until the onion is soft and translucent.

3 Drain the beans from their soaking water and add to the pan with just enough fresh water to cover. Bring to the boil, then turn down to a simmer for about 1 hour, until tender. Transfer the beans to a blender along with any remaining cooking water (most of it will have been absorbed) and blend, adding 2 more tablespoons of the olive oil, a little at a time, until you have a quite smooth purée that resembles hummus in texture.

4 Chop the rest of the onions. In a separate pan, heat 2 more tablespoons of olive oil, add the onions and cook gently. When soft and translucent, add the vinegar, capers and sugar. Take off the heat, put the lid on the pan and leave to cool down.

5 Cut the stems from the chard or chicory and blanch in boiling salted water for 3 minutes, adding the leaves for 2 more minutes until the stems are tender, then take off the heat and drain.

6 Heat the rest of the olive oil in a large sauté pan, add the garlic and chilli and cook gently for 1 minute. Add the chard or chicory stems and leaves and sauté gently, so they take on the flavours of the garlic and chilli, but don’t colour. Season, then take off the heat.

7 Spread the broad bean purée over the base of a serving dish, then layer the chard or chicory and onions on top. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and finish with black pepper.

Swiss chard with butter, Parmesan and baked eggs

An egg and anything interesting that you have in the fridge is a really good meal. If I am at home by myself I love a fried egg; there is something very comforting about it, cooked slowly in a little bit of salted butter in a non-stick pan, so you really taste the flavour of the eggs – I am not a fan of eggs that have been fried hard and turn brown and crispy around the edges.