An Amateur Cook in Italy

I am actually a great cook - much to my surprise after years not doing much more than heating up the Breville. (By the way - I never realised that all the fat from the cheese that you over-stuff in those things (just me then?) runs out and collects underneath. That was NOT a pleasant surprise, who could guess that rancid fat could smell so bad?)

Since the boys were weaned, however, I really started getting into it and from my first Anabel Karmel experiences (lunatic woman, who on earth is going to spend three hours over a meal for a toddler, pur-lease?) started branching out. As I have acknowledged many, many times, Enrico is the chef in this family and that is the difference between us. He is a chef and I am a cook. I look stuff up on the internet, almost always, www.bbcgoodfood.com, all recipes infallible as well as delicious, with the comments that come afterwards the cherry on the cake, as it were. Or my old faithfuls, Nigella Lawson's How to Eat and the grandmammy of them all, Delia's Complete Cookery Course. I find something I like that matches the ingredients I have available and Jamie's yer uncle, dinner's ready. Enrico generally doesn't look at recipes. He is a savant in the kitchen and can throw things together - simple, basic, nothing flashy - and they come out delicious and perfect. He has a knack and a gift and I never stop being grateful for a husband who cooks. I have friends whose husbands barely toast their own bread, so the bonus of being able to say, 'do you fancy cooking tonight?' and having someone who actually enjoys the process is marvellous. He uses cooking as a way of relaxing and switching off. I use it to feed people and usually end up stressed myself in the process.

So arriving in Italy just when my wings were fledging in the kitchen, so to speak, was a bit of a shock. Italian supermarkets are full of great Italian stuff but very little in the way of anything more exotic or indeed that is not Italian. I missed bread - and still do, from the fantastic plastic bread that is the only thing to put around some crisp, meaty bacon and ketchup - oh and the bacon that goes with it - to wonderful poppy-seed, wholemeal, cheese, farmhouse breads, all of which are the only solution in certain sandwich situations. I decided to make my own when the boys first started at nursery and I had time on my hands. And blimey, do you need time. I needed around a loaf every couple of days, minimum, and making those loaves took up a fair chunk of my, theoretically free, time in the mornings.

They were generally tasty but I don't know what industrial breadmakers put into their loaves - whatever it is, I don't got it and they were usually a little on the dense side. Not the light, fluffy loaf I craved. Still not solved as the usual Italian loaf is made for bruschetta, but we have discovered a good bakery near E's office who do nice wholemeal and 'farro' bread - according to Wikipedia, it's an old-fashioned wheat variety - either way, it makes a tasty and moist loaf. From never really taking to them in the UK, I have also become rather fond of the wrap, for which I use a piadina, an Italian flatbread from the Romagna region, which is actually available all over Italy. When Enrico made his own one time, we realised why they are so delicious - one of the fat ingredients is lard, which takes them to a whole other level that tortilla wraps just don't seem to attain.

When Enrico and I were first together, one of our many points of difference was the fact that I can quite easily eat a sandwich and a bag of crisps or yoghurt for lunch and not think twice about it. For him, a sandwich for lunch is an aberration and only partaken in the most extreme emergencies. He is not a little chap - 6'1-ish I think, and not exactly of whippet proportions either and he does have a point when he says that it wouldn't keep him going till dinner. However - spread the bread flat, smear on some passata, a few leaves of rocket with some buffalo mozzarella on top and call it pizza: This can quite easily keep him going all afternoon. Every society has their own carbohydrate load and in Italy it's pizza. For us anglo saxons, it's a sandwich. We were watching a very good Roman comedian the other night in a TV special - his girlfriend is American and he was recounting coming home for lunch to see she'd made a toasted sandwich. He had us laughing in recognition at his horror and the thought of what his father would have said, coming home to the same lunch. It would have been assumed that the mother was having an affair that she had so carelessly and with so little time prepared such a lunch!

However, in this as in many things, I am going native. I now actually feel a little cheated if I just throw myself a sandwich together on those days that E's not home for lunch. I have caught the cooking bug and have grown to enjoy trying new things - and frankly, in the absence of ethnic or 'exotic' produce here, if I want something not Italian, I am going to bloomin' well have to prepare it myself anyway. Although I am now growing my own coriander, I don't have a chance in hell of getting hold of red or green curry paste, lime leaves, pak choi, and lemongrass but my English cravings are met by Marmite flown over from the UK (thank you, Joe, thank you Catherine) and I was utterly delighted with a pressie of a big tub of Horlicks (thank you, Loob!!). I am told there is a mythical place called Piazza Victorio in Rome where all of the 'exotic' ingredients can be bought but even the Indian man who has taken over Massimo the Grocer's shop hasn't been able to get hold of a bunch of fresh coriander for me. Little by little, though, I am sourcing things that initially I thought would be unobtainable - ground almonds (for the Bakewell Tart craving), creme fraiche, Gruyère cheese, I even found a place to get fish sauce for curries the other day, yay! So I live in hope that one day I'll be able to get a big bunch of coriander without the two month wait that proceeds it as it grows from a tiny seed. Cross fingers...