Blackberry and raspberry muffins

I’m through a difficult period as my dad is in hospital in Rome, I am constantly worried about him and I have traveled back and forth to Italy to stay with him and help my mother and sister. At the same time I’m keeping up with my job and the house work.

In this mayhem trying new recipes is my way to relax. Here are two slightly different muffin recipes I have recently tested at home. I brought some of the muffins with me to Rome, my dad loved them.

Blackberry muffins

You need: 100 g of melted butter, 250 g of flour, 4 eggs, 1 tsp of baking powder, 150 g of blackberries, 200 g of golden granulated sugar, 100 g of ground almonds, 100 g of grated white chocolate, some drops of vanilla extract, icing sugar to finish.

Put aside 12 blackberries and simmer the rest in a pan for 15 minutes with one tbsp of water and half of the sugar. Beat the eggs and the rest of the sugar; add the flour, baking powder, melted butter, white chocolate and ground almonds. Finally add the vanilla extract and the cooked blackberries. Prepare a muffin tray lined with 12 muffin paper cases. Scoop the mixture in the cases and place a blackberry on top of each. Bake for 30 minutes, 150 °C.

Raspberry muffins

You need: 200 g of raspberries, 250 g of flour, 2 eggs, 1 tsp of baking powder, 200 g of golden granulated sugar, 4 tbsp of olive oil, some drops of vanilla extract, icing sugar to finish.

Again put aside 12 raspberries and simmer the rest in a pan for 15 minutes with one tbsp of water and half of the sugar. Beat the eggs and the rest of the sugar; add the flour, baking powder, olive oil, the vanilla extract and the cooked raspberries. Prepare a muffin tray lined with 12 muffin paper cases. Scoop the mixture in the cases and place a raspberry on top of each. Bake for 30 minutes,150°C.

The Lightbox in Woking

Recently I had a wonderful day out with my husband in the centre of Woking. We went to the shopping centre “The Peacock” where I found some fabulous clothes on sale for me and my daughters. A maroon coat for me that matches perfectly with a dress I already had, a pair of warm grey trousers for my eldest daughter and some leggings and tracking suit bottoms for Valentina, my autistic daughter, who can never have enough clothes especially when she is in the ripping mood.

My husband didn’t enjoy this first part so much as he couldn’t do anything but wait in a corner while I was madly browsing the clothes rails and queuing for fitting rooms for what seemed to me ten minutes, but must have been at least an hour.

But he enjoyed the second part for sure. We went to visit Lightbox, Woking’s museum, which has also a shop, a café and galleries with temporary exhibitions. I must say that it had a lot of interesting things; besides the permanent collection, displaying objects linked to Woking’s history, there are talks, workshops for children and for adults, yoga sessions and art and craft fairs.

The main gallery hosted the exhibition: John Constable, Observing the weather. It was about the painter’s ability to observe and depict how the weather changes, reproducing skies and clouds in exceptional sketches. He also considered his works as experiments of ‘inquiry into the laws of nature’. He believed that painting was ‘a branch of natural philosophy’, a way to explore the world, to know it better. According to him landscape painting could give us the key to understand what is around us. He thought that not only science can observe, describe and discover the laws that regulate nature, but art can do it as well, using a deeper insightful kind of observation. Therefore artistic intuition and attentive scrutiny can attain important results. Certainly his artistic intuition and skills worked together to produce exceptional landscapes. On the walls there was a stanza from The Cloud by P.B. Shelley and extracts from Constable’s journals. Interestingly I believe that studying the changing of the sky and clouds is something typical of northern countries and undoubtedly very interesting in England. I can’t think of something similar in Italy where the weather is less changeable and the sky is often clear, and there is therefore not much to study.

In the upper gallery there were some pieces from the Ingram Collection. My favourite: Mini Death by stick 2014, sort of ice lolly wooden sticks painted with inks, acrylics and felt tip pens with figures reminding of people lying in coffins, very original and funny in a way.

Other interesting events I took part in recently were a wonderful poetry workshop at Freud museum in London with Pascale Petit and the parents’ dinner at my son’s college in Oxford.

I had never been to Freud’s museum before; it’s a beautiful house in Hampstead where Sigmund Freud lived only a year before dying, after fleeing Vienna occupied by Nazis. There’s a huge collection of antiquities, mainly Egyptian, Greek and Roman pieces, statuettes and fragments he loved to collect. In the upper floor, which was the space used for the poetry workshop, there was an interesting exhibit that looked like a net where visitors were encouraged to weave patterns using threads and write their dreams on postcards. An interesting space to have a poetry workshop and explore the deepest parts of your soul.

At my son’s college we attended a lecture by Alison Wolf after dinner about her book The XX Factor, an interesting study on women’s work market and how it changed from the 70s on. According to this study education is the key to attain a successful career and today’s women don’t have to be extraordinary to be successful and have a good career as in the past. Still the background counts (as it is for men I suppose), girls from well-off families tend to go to the best colleges and tend to marry high status men. At the same time being successful means postponing the birth of the first child and consequently there is a drop in fertility rates. It is almost impossible to work full time in a demanding job and look after children at the same time. Women need to take time off, sometimes for years, from their careers, or postpone or give up childbearing. Besides women need help at home if they have a career, while servants were taken for granted in the past, today house maids can be expensive. Wolf says that to allow the chance of a career for all women, housework jobs have to be cheap. And this necessarily leads to inequality, if some women can’t do their house works because they are busy with their careers, other women have to do it at low rates, because the career women can’t necessarily afford to pay them more. Significantly the title of the lecture was Not quite Utopia?

In my opinion a possible alternative to postponing marriage and childbearing could be postponing the career. Women can have children earlier and start a career a bit later. When the children start school (primary or secondary) they don’t really need a full time mum any more. Grandparents or friends can help and women can work longer and dedicate time and mind to their careers. I don’t think today we need house maids with washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners and all the rest and we don’t need to spend a whole day cooking to arrange a meal. I had never had a help at home (though my parents had one), my husband and I shared the house works and the care of the children, though I was the main carer and had breaks in my career, sometimes very long breaks. My parents and parents in law helped and I could carry on with a part time job. Our house has never been perfect or impeccably tidy, but clean and welcoming.

On the whole today men and women live longer and work longer, and this may trigger a crucial change. Women can catch opportunities later in life (somebody would say: better late than never) if they wish to have children earlier on. This can happen only if good opportunities are offered to middle aged women as well, which is not always the case today, as being over 40 or over 50 sometimes means that society sees your perspectives as limited. The children are grown up and don’t need to be looked after, it’s time to think about you. Can this be a solution?

Colomba di Pasqua or Easter Dove

The “Easter Dove” is a typical Italian cake we always have at Easter. We usually buy it ready-made in colourful boxes, as we do with Panettone and Pandoro at Christmas, but this year I decided to make my Colomba at home. It took several hours as the dough needs time to rise, and I couldn’t find all the ingredients, but the final result was good. Here is the recipe.

You need: 500 g of flour, 100 ml of lukewarm water, 7 g of dried yeast, 100 g of melted butter, 170 g of Demerara sugar, 5 yolks, 100 ml of milk, some drops of vanilla essence, grated zest of one lemon and grated zest of one orange, a pinch of salt, 100 g of candied fruit.

For the glazing you need: 3 egg whites, 50 g of sugar, 100 g of confectionary sugar (I couldn’t find this it so I used some coloured sugar) and 100 g of almonds.

Mix 150 g of flour, yeast and water and knead for 5-10 minutes. Cover with a damp cloth and let it rest in a warm place for one hour.

Mix the rest of the flour with Demerara sugar, the yolks, 50 g of melted butter, salt, milk, vanilla essence, the zest of the lemon and the zest of the orange. Combine the two mixtures and knead. Cover it with a damp cloth and let it rise in a warm place for two hours.

After two hours knead the dough adding the candied fruit and the rest of the melted butter. Let it rise for another three hours in a mould with the shape of a dove (I made mine with some strong paper and lined it with baking paper).

For the final touch you need to prepare the glazing, whipping the whites until stiff with the sugar. Spread it on the dove and decorate it with the almonds and the confectionary sugar (or coloured sugar). Bake for 10 minutes, 200 °C, and then for 30 minutes 180 °C.

Buona Pasqua!

Christmas 2015, part 4

There’s so much to see in Rome that each time I go back I find some new places to visit. This time I went on a guided tour in the Domitian Stadium under Piazza Navona, then went to the museum dedicated to the Roman Republic of 1849 at the Gianicolo Hill and finally re-visited the Capitoline Museums at the Capitoline Hill.

An archaeologist of the Artefacto cultural association (artefactoroma.it) was our guide around the ruins of the Domitian Stadium. There isn’t much left as the beautiful piazza Navona replaced the stadium, and without the archaeologist’s precious explanations I probably would not have understood much.

The Stadium was built for athletic competitions: running, long jump, wrestling and boxing. Women were not admitted as the athletes performed naked, though there were plenty of brothels under the arches of the stadium (which in Latin were called fornices, which the word fornicate originates from). Domitian (81-96 AD) was a very popular emperor; he completed the Colosseum, the Circus Maximus and built the Stadium. Near the Stadium there was also a theatre (Odeon), now completely destroyed, only the shapes of some buildings remind of its plan.

The Stadium could seat about thirty thousand spectators. In the Middle Ages it became a block of flats with shops at the ground floors. The building materials were scavenged, as were most Roman buildings. The main structure was made of brickwork faced with painted plaster and marble (travertine from Tivoli, in the eastern outskirts of Rome). Some of the flat square terracotta bricks were on display around the walls showing the factory mark on one corner. The archaeologist digressed saying how well organized the ancient Romans were, they not only numbered the bricks, they knew exactly how long it would take to reach Lutetia (Paris) from Rome working out the change of horses and the best routes. Everything was so well planned that it is hard to believe that this perfect organization was completely lost throughout the centuries in nowadays Italy.

All the beautiful paintings and marble decorations went lost as well, they were re-used especially in churches or burned to make mortar. Ancient Roman monuments were considered open air quarries everybody could exploit.

In time the stadium arena became a square (piazza Navona, the name comes from Campus Agonis, competition field, then changed in agone, nagone, and finally ‘navona’) and a market place; buildings replaced the terraces of the stadium. An intriguing story that testifies how the evolution of buildings can reflect the history of its people.

At the Gianicolo (Janiculum Hill), from which we enjoyed an astonishing view of Rome, we admired the famous statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi on horseback and strolled along the path that leads to the Gate of San Pancrazio. The museum at San Pancrazio is dedicated to the battle Garibaldi led against the French troops that attacked the Roman Republic in 1849. It’s a small, interesting museum with free entrance. The legacy of the Italian patriots and of Garibaldi is commemorated in a sincere moving way. Most of them died in battle like Righetto, a child aged 12, and Ciceruacchio, a well known patriot who tried to flee but was caught by Austrian soldiers and executed with his children. Both Austrian and French troops came to Italy to help the Pope to restore order.

According to the rulers of the Roman Republic (Aurelio Saffi, Carlo Armellini and Giuseppe Mazzini) there should have been a free church in free state; the constitution they proclaimed on 3^rd July 1849 had incredible idealistic statements echoing the French Revolution, like ‘sovereignty belongs to the people’, or ‘ the democratic regime is under the rule of equality, liberty and fraternity’, or ‘ the exercise of civil and political rights does not depend on religious belief’, ‘the republic sees all people as brothers’, and so on.

They were defeated, most died in battle, a few managed to flee. Rome was finally conquered in 1870 and became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy.

The video clips are the best part, they are projected on big screens and bring the historic events to life, and the actors that play the parts of the patriots take the viewer to the time and setting of that period. A large room features the reconstruction of the main battles projecting videos around the walls. Everything is subtitled in English and all the texts are translated, in case your Italian is not so good. There are also the red shirts of the garibaldini in various shades in glass displays and charcoal drawings made in prison by the patriots. A remarkable museum with a modern, effective exhibition that testifies the courage and high ideals of the Italian patriots.

My final visit was to the Capitoline Museums I had seen them a long time ago before they were restored and rearranged. When I was young the ancient Roman statues were all packed in a few rooms with no space to look at them properly. The original statue of Marcus Aurelius (176 AD) was still in the square, now it’s under a glass dome in a splendid room full of light. In 1979 there was a terrorist attack (not ISIS or any other Islamic group, but Italian born extremist organizations) which damaged the famous equestrian bronze sculpture and  revealed its terrible conditions, due to being exposed to the elements for so long. It was removed in 1981 and restored, and a faithful copy was put outside in its place.

You can walk from room to room and admire the beautiful marble pieces and elegant statues like in an ancient garden. An underpass decorated with ancient inscriptions and Roman remains leads you to a terrace viewing on the Roman Forum and ends in the opposite building where the Capitoline Venus, the Dying Galatian and the Pinacoteca are. Definitely worth a long visit.

Fat-free Swiss Roll

I tested this amazing fat-free Swiss roll with my mum and my daughter during my last stay in Rome. We prepared it several times for dinners we had with friends and family, it was a success. We made two versions, one with cream, ricotta and berries, the other one with custard cream.

Here is the recipe for the sponge.

option 2

You need: 70 g of flour, 30 g of potato flour, 150 g of sugar, 5 eggs, one tsp of baking powder, two tsp of honey, baking paper.

Beat the yolks with 100 g of sugar, add the honey. In a different bowl whip the whites of the eggs stiff with 50 g of sugar. Mix the two mixtures and add the flours and the baking powder. Bake on a rectangular oven tray lined with baking paper for 10 minutes, 180° C.

Dampen a cotton tea towel and place over the cake.  Turn tray over, so that the cake lies on the damp tea towel.  Lift off the tray and peel off the paper carefully.  Roll the cake in the tea towel and wait till it cools.

option 1

 Here are the two options for the filling:

1. 300 g of ricotta, 200 g of whipped cream, 120 g of sugar, 200 g of strawberries.

Mix ricotta, whipped cream and sugar; add half of the strawberries cut in pieces and mix. Unroll the cake and spread thickly with the cream and strawberry mix.  Roll it up again (without the tea towel) and place it on a tray or large plate.  Cover it with the remaining cream and decorate it with the remaining strawberries cut in half. Finally decorate with melted dark chocolate.

2. Custard cream: 500 ml of milk, 2 eggs, some grated zest of a lemon, 40 g of flour, 100 g of sugar, 25 g of cocoa powder.

Mix the milk with flour, sugar, lemon zest and eggs. Bring to a boil and let it thicken. Divide the mixture into two bowls and add the cocoa powder to one of them mixing it well. Unroll the cake and spread the chocolate custard, roll it up again and place it on a tray. Cover it with the normal custard cream and decorate with melted dark chocolate.

Store the cake in the fridge for one night before serving, so the flavour is absorbed into the sponge. It’s delicious even after two or three days...if it lasts! 

Christmas 2015, part 3

My main aims during last Christmas holidays were to spend time with my parents, to have a good rest and to read, read as much as possible, both the books I had brought with me from England and more stuff I’d dug out from my parents’ library. I longed to live again my adolescent habit to alternate reading, snoozing and taking notes of my thoughts in an idyllic out-of-the-world holiday atmosphere of total break. As an additional task I also aimed to do some sightseeing around Rome and visit museums and places only my husband is able to spot, considering his passion and expertise in ancient Roman history and other curiosities about the capital.

I was with my parents most of the time, spending time with them at home, cooking with my mum, chatting with my dad, going to the supermarket together and taking them to occasional hospital appointments. They are in their mid 80s now, tend to get tired easily and above all often forget things. This brings to funny happenings which may be irritating for some but not for me. For example, we had to arrange where and how to meet friends and relatives, what to cook, how to set out tables and seats, etc. I discussed everything with my mum and wrote it down in a tidy list. But from time to time she came back to me repeating the same questions: who is coming for Christmas day? What are we doing on New Year’s Eve? What are we cooking tomorrow? When are my nephews coming? I kept repeating what we had arranged patiently but sometimes couldn’t help feeling I was in the middle of a live comedy show, where I played the supporting role.

The slightly worrying pickle, though, is that they are convinced they can still do everything on their own. It’s good they have the energy to travel and they are independent, but sometimes I feel they dare too much and they think they can still cope with any problem, which frightens me a bit. It is understandable they don’t want to be a burden for me and my sister, nevertheless I can see they are inevitably weaker year after year.

I could spend time with my parents in law as well, who are about ten years younger than my parents and in good health. We also had a kind of family gathering where we met my cousins and their families. We had a big meal altogether with two types of lasagne my daughter prepared, a classical one with ragù and a vegetarian one with olives; then beef joint, roast potatoes, artichokes (my mum’s speciality) and a superb pudding: a new Swiss roll, a sponge roulade my daughter and I experimented, a real success, and the traditional Neapolitan Christmas treat called struffoli.

My autistic daughter Valentina wasn’t with us. She remained in England this time, in a respite care in Surrey. We went to see her and say good-bye before leaving together with the other children who were back home for the Christmas break. She was happy to see us and looked settled in her new home. We brought her some presents, new clothes, as she loves to get changed, and a puzzle we did together. It was strange to have Christmas time without her after thirteen years she has been with us, but it was a relief in a way. We knew she was happy where she was and we could see it was much better for her to be in one place where they know her needs instead of travelling till Italy in unfamiliar environments which would only unsettle and irritate her.

For Christmas I received gorgeous presents. My mother knitted me a beautiful lilac pullover, a real masterpiece and my parents gave me a powerful super blender as well, a robot by Vorwerk that mixes, blends and cooks with a fantastic recipe book specifically for it. From my sister I had a cushion cover and an Indian doll from her recent travel to India, then a jacket, a pair of black leather gloves from my parents in law, a one-of-a-kind felt brooch from a friend and books from my children. My daughter gave me Inside Out DVD as she remembered how much I enjoyed the film last summer. To treat myself I bought books, especially poetry books, and a few clothes,... this is the charm of being in Italy.

Christmas 2015, part 2

When my daughter came back from uni for Christmas holidays, I couldn’t wait to dash with her to the V&A with my new membership card plus guest.

The “Fabric of India” exhibition was the main aim of the day, but we ended up seeing the “Al Thani” collection first. It was all about priceless jewels, diamonds as big as peanuts, rubies as big as walnuts and emeralds like hazelnuts. Just the day before I’d toured the centre of my village and popped into the jewellery shop for the first time, the luscious rings and earrings had tiny precious stones and were already very expensive, but the gems from Al Thani collection were from another planet. The first piece, a turban jewel, had seventeen diamonds of the weight of 152.64 carats.

Most of the gems of the exhibition were from in India or in Sri Lanka. Their names quite revealing, sometimes disturbing: Idol’s eye, Mirror of Paradise, the Star of Golconda. There were also precious jade bowls, enamelling works and some spinel necklaces, their stones so big that made me think of pebbles collected on a shore, which they clearly were not.

Interestingly, with the British rule in the middle of the 19^th century, the production of jewellery moved out of the palaces and entered the commercial world reaching Europe. Consequently they adapted their style to Western tastes. The Indian manner, to cut and polish the stone aimed to adapt and interpret the gem’s natural shape without changing it drastically, moved to the Western aesthetic of cutting gems into geometrically perfect forms. These angular, regular shapes, captured and refracted light, giving that astonishing, mesmerizing effect that makes gems so attractive, and, I daresay, hypnotizing.

Some photos of Indian aristocrats on display drew my attention: a baby in his father’s arms covered in pearl strings, women with heavy bangles, earrings and nose rings all reminded me of portraits of European queens and kings, with their clothes embroidered with pearls and precious stones. The essence of jewels is evidently linked to power.

The last section was dedicated to large stones carved with deities and inscriptions invoking God. It sounded weird as most, if not all religions preach frugality and charity.

Some of the videos were very interesting, showing how Indian craftsmen made an enamel brooch using traditional tools or how they cut an astounding gem from a rough stone that looked similar to an ordinary piece of rock.

The Fabric of India exhibition was pretty different. It made me realize how much fabrics have always been important in Indian production since ancient times. In Ancient Greece the name ‘India’ meant cotton and the word ‘indigo’ derives from the word India. And still today, India is undoubtedly part of the fabric global trade. Each region of the Indian subcontinent specialized in a particular fabric, e.g. golden silk of Assan, fine cotton of Bengal, red dyes of south-east India. The dyes were originally extracted from plants and roots, like pomegranates rinds, madder root, tinbura root, chay plant, and insects like the lac beetle. To fix the dye they used alum, a mordant, which reminded me of the war between Florence and Volterra under Lorenzo de’ Medici rule caused by Florence greedy aims on alum mines, precious for their fabric production.

India exported fabrics all over the known world, Mediterranean countries, Middle-East, Africa and Europe, then also Japan and the Americas. Interesting videos showed how they hand make wooden blocks to print patterns, how they weave using handlooms and the Ari embroidery technique made by men using hooked tools. Beautiful works that required great skills in craftsmanship.

At the end of the exhibition they explained how the British Empire tried to break this ancient tradition taking the monopoly of the fabric production, producing fabrics in Lancashire mills that were then sold in India. Unemployment spread and only very fine or very rough fabric production survived. From this it’s obvious why Gandhi wanted to inspire people to spin by showing them himself and insisted that everybody had to weave their own clothes. Significantly the spinning wheel is in the Indian flag to highlight the great importance of their fabric production. Today’s Indian fashion design takes into account traditional techniques like mirror work, hand weaving, natural dyes and chikan embroidery, elevating them to a new level using new materials and silhouettes.

A revealing day.