Hello, how are you? Hoping that you have a great Holidays’ time! I’ve been “busy” with Christmas’ celebrations, so I had no time to upload the blog. In this day we made some typical recipes, like “anolini” and roast meat (we call it “arrosto”), but i couldn’t take any photo, it’s a bit difficult in this kind of situations…anyway, i would like to share with you the recipes of the Friday night, as usual: it’s my day off at work, so I have time to experiment!
This time I’ve used a typical “salume” (cured meat) that is produced near Parma countryside, and it’s called “Strolghino”. It’s a “salame di culatello” (a pork-thigh salami), with a delicate flavor. I sliced it in cubes, and I used it to garnish the pasta with peas. Before, I cooked the peas in a pot together with minced onions and extra-virgin oil; after i added some cubes of strolghino. (only some cubes, you’ll add the remaining at the end, so you’ll taste the hot and the cold Strolghino in the same dish – photo number 2). During the cooking, I like to squash a bit the peas, to make a velvet sauce that melts in the mouth.
Instead of bread, I prepared some “sfogliatine”, flat puff-pastry bread with potatoes, origano, salt and pepper, cooked in the oven at 200 °C for 15 minutes. So simple and so perfect combined with shrimps.
A friend of mine brought us some fresh shrimps from Sicily .. so the main dish, as you can imagine, were shrimps and pan-fried potatoes, flavoured with parsley, garlic, salt and pepper, and also a bit of grated bread. I have an habit: I put the shrimps (already cleaned) in a food container with cold water, extra-virgin oil and a lemon juice, then I move them in the frypan in the hot olive-oil.
It’s really a simple dinner to make, after all. But I love simple thing, and also genuine food and great “raw materials”. See you next time!Cris
The third symbol is Babbo Natale (Santa Klaus): he’s not properly a Christian symbol nowadays: at the very beginning, he was referrred at Saint Nicholas of Myra: he was a 4th-century Greek Christian bishop of Myra (now Demre) in Lycia, a province of the Byzantine Anatolia, now in Turkey. Nicholas was famous for his generous gifts to the poor, in particular with three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian so that they would not have to become prostitutes. He was very religious from an early age and devoted his life entirely to Christianity. In continental Europe (more precisely the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria and Germany) he is usually portrayed as a bearded bishop in canonical robes. The tradition wants him living at the North Pole or in other places in northern Europe, but the real Sant Claus is located in Italy. In 1087, the Italian city of Bari, mounted an expedition to locate the tomb of the Christian Saint and procure his remains. The reliquary of St. Nicholas was conquered by Italian sailors and the spoils, including his relics, taken to Bari where they are kept to this day. A basilica was constructed the same year to store the loot and the area became a pilgrimage site for the devout. Sailors from Bari collected just half of Nicholas’ skeleton, leaving all the minor fragments in the grave. These were collected by Venetian sailors during the first crusade and brought to Venice, where a church to St. Nicholas, the patron of sailors, was built on the San Nicolò al Lido. This tradition was confirmed in two important scientific investigations of the relics in Bari and Venice, which revealed that the relics in the two Italian cities belong to the same skeleton. Saint Nicholas was later claimed as a patron saint of many diverse groups, from archers, sailors, and children to pawnbrokers.He is also the patron saint of both Amsterdam and Moscow. (I must say that for this part I’ve helped myself refreshing my memory with Wikipedia)
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