Sicilian cuccina essentials

If you were to chose a cuisine to teach someone to cook I reckon it would be Italian. It's elemental and instructive, yet non nerve wracking approach will also reinforce to the beginner that they can cook after all. Which is what you want, right? That is, for someone to cook without instruction, for the love of it, time and time again.
The place we are staying in Palermo has a great kitchen set up. All ready to go and it has a dominant piece of cooking equipment; one great, big large non stick frying pan. Almost too big for the stove top. This looked odd to me until I realised what it was used for.
Sicilians love simple pasta. Lots of fresh, seasonal ingredients. I have yet to see a bolognese sauce on any menu at any of the dozen places we have eaten. And creamy sauces are rare, too. What you get is a lot of tomato based sauces with the addition of sardines, anchovies, swordfish or tuna (they love their fish, these Sicilians and all these varieties are caught locally). It sounds odd, but currants and pine nuts feature, too. As too does eggplant or melanzanne, which is also base ingredient in caponata.
But I digress. My point is, and I do have one, that the big frying pan is used here to combine the pasta with the simple, simple sauce. The spaghetti, and it is mostly spaghetti, is cooked, drained and thrown into the large frying pan which has waiting in it some tasty bits and pieces cooked off in lots of olive oil. Too easy? So easy I had my in house beginner cook lunch in a few simple steps.

1. Gently heat lots of olive oil in the large frying pan.

2. Add seasonings to flavour the oil; garlic, chilli even anchovies.

3. Add your vegetables, meat  or fish. You don't need much. Here we used some prosciutto.

4. Cook enough spaghetti for four people. Drain well and add to the big frying pan. Top with parsley and parmesan. 

You don't have to leave home to find love

Firstly, allow me to introduce someone to you. Kersti Hanson has flow in from the big apple to join Roscoe and Timmy for a few days.
Now I was going to do a food posting but it will have to wait. Instead, I would like to say a few words about another subject that has been on our minds. Love.
This posting is for all the single ladies and all the single men out there. But if you are in a relationship, please read on. You, too, might learn something.
Roscoe, Timmy and Kersti. All tall, all thin, all a bit bloody gorgeous and all single, until we travel. But, as they say. what goes on tour. We got talking about this and came to a few conclusions.
How many of us feel that when we travel we are more likely to meet someone, hook up, fall in love etc etc? Frustrating, isn't it? And you think you can only fall in love in Rome, Paris or Tumbuktu? Wrong. You don't have to leave home to fall in love. This is what you have to do.
You wake up in your single bed. Just like any other day. But today you pick a city, any city. Imagine you are there. Pack a bag, just a little one and head out into your suburb, village or home town. You are smiling because everything looks new. You step out into the world with a joie de vive, with a seize the day spring in your step. You say hello to people like you have never met them before. And don't say hello in English. Pick a language or even better yet, make one up. The people you know will think you are fucking crazy but who cares? It's love you are after. Who needs more friends? Pretty soon you will catch someone's eye. In their mind they will be saying - wow I have to get to know that person, wow I love their style, wow I think I love them. You will have people throwing themselves at you. It will be like shooting fish in a barrel. Before the day's end you will be in love.
You may not be tall, thin or gorgeous. But who cares? Atleast you will be in love and you didn't have to leave home to find it...

Arrivederci and buon amore!

Law and Order the Palermo way

Before you read this, and to create the mood, open up another window and cut and paste this  link.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VS9oNBJEtNU

Roscoe and Timmy. Undercover. Disguised. Staking out. Telescopic cameras and all that. Actually, it was none of any of that.
It was more like this. Rosoce and Timmy. Fancy drinks and fine food at a restaurant on the Piazzo San Franscesco, coincidentally the very same Piazzo where the Antica Focacceria is located.
To get you up to speed, this restaurant in Palermo was the first business to publicly say a big, fat no to the maffia's extortion.  This means the owner's are now under threat, not by words but bullets.
Lucky for us, as we were dining at the place across the road and upstairs we had a great view as the undercover cops pulled up.
Check it out. The big silver sedan on the right has blacked out windows. There is a silver golf on the left with a plain cloths dude leaning on the back of the car. And see the guy, back to camera, next to the motorbikes? He is putting on his bullet proof vest...

Doing Doing!

A quiet moment with my panelle.

Back at the beach. It seems that the only place where you can get these panelle (sandwiches with deep fried fillings) is here. Restaurants in Palermo will offer all the good things inside the roll (the eggplant, the croquettes, the fried chick pea thingy which I do not know the name of) but it's the whole package I am after, cant you understand that? It's not too much to ask, is it? I am hooked on these things.
Timmy and I hit Mondello again. Timmy has eaten his double rolled, smoked organic fat free fruiche oat breakfast with high fibre fruit. I am more easily pleased. All I want for breakfast is a deep fried sandwich. I haven't eaten and I am hungry.
So I wait for my chance. Timmy hits the water. I know he will be out there for hours pursuing one of his three loves of life. Timmy's holy trinity; to be rich, to be thin and to be brown.

Now's my chance! But wait, holiday season has ended. All the little deep frying vans have packed up and gone, not to be seen for another Vangaboy summer. Damn! And then I remember (being a Mondello local) that there was one guy in an alley behind the main strip of shops. I can smell the oil as I approach. He is there! I fork over the 1 euro (about $1.50) and I watch as the croquettes and chick pea things (can I please find out what that is called?) sizzle in the hot oil, cooking to a golden crispness. He puts the golden goodies onto a buttered roll. He hands it to me. But that is all I can share with you. You will have to excuse me now, I need a private moment with my panelle. Ciao x

four ingredients

Timmy doesn't cook, or does he? A couple of days ago he chopped a few tomatoes, gently softened them in a pan with some good olive oil and garlic and tossed the whole lot with spaghetti and basil.
Before he realised it, he was cooking and in no time some great food was on the table. So I got thinking.
I have probably written over three thousand recipes in my time. Whatever, this isn't about me. But I have picked up a few things on the way and learning more as we speak.
When it comes to cooking food at home, how rarely do we keep it simple? I have to remind myself of this. Do we get anxious when we feel like we won't have enough food and that more is better? Do we think we are not being clever enough? Has something gone wrong if we have time to actually relax?
Three thousand recipes later, and I am starting to get it. We have heard it before. The key is simplicity, on every level of the process, from buying, to preparing to cooking the food. Many cuisines and cooking styles have simple components. Stir frying is often lauded as the thing any bachelor can cook. Wrong. You need fairly decent knife skills, a large wok (those silly little ones just don't cut it), a really hot gas
flame and a pantry of ingredients. Japanese? Life is too short to make your own sushi. Thai and Indian? Requires

lots of ingredients and time. Roasts and barbies?  Good enough but they are seasonal and barbies are not great for apartment living.  Fancy French? Get over yourself. Provincial French? Now we're getting somewhere.
Being here in Italy with a non-cook cook and I have decided this is it. This is the place and this is the food for beginners.
It's seasonal and elemental. It's fresh and approachable.
We found some white peaches at the market. Really, not like any other peach I had seen. Flat, disc shaped, more like a persimmon. So fragrant and so tasty. Next, the buffalo mozzarella. It is made from buffalo milk and if cheese were white velvet, this would be it.
We chopped the peaches. Nothing fancy like. We arranged the peaches on a plate. We simply tear the mozarella with our hands and randomly strew it over the peaches. We scatter over the basil leaves and finish it all off with a generous amount of fine, fruity extra virgin.
Four ingredients later and here was something any beginner can make.

I see dead people part 2 or The plot thickens

But wait, there's more. We hooked up with a local today (seriously, a very well connected local on a Da Vinci Code scale) and he told us more about the Capuchin catacombs.

So, class, if you have been following the blog you will know the influence of the Greeks, Romans and Arabs on this place. It's theorised that the embalming techniques of the Egyptians were used in preserving the bodies in the catacombs. 

But did you know that surviving family members had access to the catacombs to visit dead relatives? Fact. The body was handed over (not to be taken from the catacomb) and you could do whatever you liked to your dead loved one. Lipstick could be applied to dead lips, fingers run through dead hair, rouge put on dead cheeks, shoes polished, belts buckled and flies zipped. 

It just got weird. 

I see dead people

I have been making up for lost time. I am forty four years old, never seen a dead body but today I saw eight thousand.
Seems appropriate that underneath a city obsessed with death lies, well, more death. More and more and more death.

Several hundred years ago the Capuchin monks 'dicovered' that their catacombs were not only a good place to bury the dead, but an excellent place to preserve them.
This place is out of the way, if not slightly dodgy to get to taking you though some of the least desirable parts of Palermo.
Nothing really prepares you for what lies beneath. It's all business as usual and then there you are, in one of the many halls, bodies lining the walls pinned up like butterflies.
There are five hundred years of bodies here so it could get confusing. But to make life easy those monks put great deal of thought into death. They categorised the bodies, making it easier to find, say, a professor, a baby girl, a baby boy, a lady, a not-so lady, a family or, my own personal favourite, a virgin.

The bodies are in varying forms of decay. Some have skin intact, others hair (head, nose and ear) and one three hundred year old dude was sporting a mo. Nice.