Why did I make an effort to going to Naples just to walk around?

No, I actually went to Naples to eat.

If you know me, and by know I mean after talking to me for 10-15 minutes, you’ll know that I have a slight obsession with food.



Food is, in my opinion, the most important thing in life. You can survive without clothes or medicine, but food? I think it’s the only need we all have in common; the need to eat, even when you don’t want to, you need food to survive. Which is why food is like a medium that connects people around the world together, regardless of one’s religion, culture or nationality.

Most importantly, sharing a meal with other people just add another dimension of the eating experience, happiness grows when shared after all.


My passion for food had brought me to meet some of the most incredible people , especially in Italy, the country where eating is such an important thing. Staying in Maria’s flat through Couchsurfing also happened because we shared our love for food.

After showing her how to cook rice and curry in a Thai way (as close as possible of course), Maria showed me how to make a typical pasta dish from Naples, or pasta con patate e provola.

Yes, it’s pasta with potato and cheese, carb on carb, welcome to Italy.



The further South you go in Italy, the poorer people are (generally), and it’s been like this for a long time. That shapes the cuisine of the South as well. Traditional food from the South are peasant dishes using a lot of grains, beans and vegetable. Even the common shape of pasta here is called pasta mista, or broken pieces of pasta with unidentified shapes. It’s quite common to have pasta with chickpeas, beans, lentils, potatoes or even cauliflower here. These people are just very good at turning cheap ingredients in the kitchen into something delicious.



This pasta con patate is like making pumpkin soup or stir fry rice, everyone makes it differently and there’s no exact recipe for it. Basically just throw what you have in the fridge in there and create something out of it. As long as you have pasta, potato and cheese it’ll turn out just fine.

But the way you cook these peasant pasta dishes is quite unique, you don’t cook the pasta and sauce separately. Rather, you cook the pasta in the sauce that you cook vegetables in, almost like making soup. (but of course it’s not a soup so don’t overcook!) This way, the pasta will be thicker and creamier than usual, as all of the starch from pasta goes straight into the sauce.



Pasta con patate e provola

Ingredients

2 cloves garlic
1/2 onion
1 carrot
2-3 small stalks of celery
2 big old potatoes
a splash of white wine
1 litre vegetable broth
350 g. pasta mista
150 g. smoke provola cheese
grated parmesan, to taste


Sauté minced garlic, onion, carrot and celery in olive oil until browned and aromatic.

Add white wine, cubed potatoes and half of the broth , bring to boil, cover and let the potatoes cook until soft and mushy. Keep an eye on the pan and add more soup if necessary.

Once the potato is cooked, add more broth and pasta, cook until al dente, add cheese and cover for 2-3 minutes before serving.

Buon appetito!

plus, it's very simple to make, and will leave you feel very nourished afterwards


she cooked one big beet in water until tender, grate it and season with salt, lemon juice and honey (normally pickled beet is used) add chopped dill, spring onion and cucumber and mix them together. as Ruta said, this is more like a liquid salad than a soup.


add kefir (which is easy to find in eastern european/russian shop, or use natural yogurt drink instead)  mis them together and everything will magically turn pink! chill the soup in the fridge while preparing potatoes.


serve the cheery cold soup with warm potato and boiled egg. it was a sunny sunday and we enjoyed it in our kitchen. it felt almost like summer then.

we love food.

and i can't think of any other way to begin this post.

we love food so much, which, i guess, is what brought us together (very unexpectedly) on gumtree.

so, our house consisted of Flo and i, who cook all sort of experimental dishes and give them their names ourselves. (like vegan ginger and salted chocolate banoffi with date caramel and walnut crunch...or thai salad with grounded sesame doesn't actually exist in thailand) coming from thailand, i have not once cooked anything authentic except thai black fragrant rice i brought from home at the beginning of the year. yes, putting rice in the rice cooker and press 'mix rice' has been the most authentic thing i cook here in england, which at least reminds me of my mum's food, or the food that i would have back in my country.



and then there is Noosh, my half iranian-half swiss housemate whose cupboards are filled with dried herbs from her mum (like 5 big tubs of herbs and dried vegetables), plus her spices like saffron and cinnamon (which smells ways more intense than what you can get in english supermarkets) she doesn't seem to be in the kitchen as often as flo and i, but when she does cook a meal in there, the whole kitchen smells like another country. her food looks very different and traditional to me, with all the herbs she uses and their farsi names that always make me curious what they actually are.

finally, after 4 months, it's time to try some delicious persian food. it's hard to believe we've waited this long for it to happen.

but at least it did, and it was amazing.

for my first ever persian meal, noosh cooked us some herbed rice with spiced potato and onion patties. the potato patties was made mainly of two grated potatoes, grated onions, two eggs and spices like turmeric, pepper and cinnamon. they looked similar to swiss rösti. i thought it was kookoo sibzamini but maybe not after all, because she didn't boiled the potatoes first.




having rice as the staple grain in my culture, the way she cooked rice here was different. using basmati rice and parboiled it first, she then drained the excess water, mixed in herbs (which we found out later was a mixture of dill and something else, but mainly dill) and salt. the rise was put back into the same pan with added oil, she closed the lid and kept it cooked on low heat until the bottom was a bit burnt and crispy.


and what seemed like forever later, our sunday persian lunch was ready! it was served with yogurt mixed with dried mint leaves, chopped tomatoes and a sprinkle of salt if desired. the rice was light, soft and aromatic. the spiced potato patties were slightly sweet from the onion and minty yogurt plus chopped tomatoes were refreshing. i loved them all together, especially the fragrant rice i couldn't get enough of. i am glad to know that it was dill and will definitely put that on my shopping list.

3-4 florets of cauliflower (~1/2 cup), cooked
4 dates
2-3 tbsp coconut milk
a squeeze of lemon
vanilla
(blend everything together till smooth, leave in the fridge, preferably overnight)

enjoy your veggie-loaded cake for breakfast!

being obsessed with baking for several years, this is actually the first thai baked good i have ever tried to bake myself.

why?

living in thailand where these sweets and desserts can be found everywhere (well, obviously) and most of them already made to its perfection, it was hard to convince myself to try make one home. thai desserts, when made properly like using fresh instead of canned coconut milk, won't keep that long. so i thought, yeah, i'd just buy a portion of whatever i want to eat from the market and life would be a lot easier.

and baking cakes and cookies was much cooler and easier to do at home, and very often take a lot less time (as you will see all the things you have to do for this thai shortbread, it sure is more complicated to make than a normal shortbread or your favourite chocolate chips cookies!)

but i was wrong. about so many of those points mentioned above.


first, i'm not gonna live in thailand forever, at least now when i study abroad, all these thai favourites are not at all easy to find.

second, not all thai desserts and sweets require those 'fresh ingredients', like this shortbread, it's really easy and all the ingredients should already be in your kitchen, except for the 'fragrant candle' for smoking desserts which is actually not an ingredient, so you can buy it (about 1£ in Thailand) and use  it for many times. i'm even planning to bring one to the uk with me!

third, it makes me feel kinda bad not being able to make any thai desserts (let alone thai food...), especially when i'm abroad and talk constantly about food to everybody i meet but not being able to make a single authentic thai food for them.

and most importantly, now i think it's even cooler to be able to make thai desserts than baking cakes! so here a tiny step i took to approach the world of thai food. (how weird it is to say that considering that i'm thai)

kleeb lamduan is a name of thai flower (which looks just like this shortbread). the most special thing about this is the smell of it. after it is baked, the shortbread is smoked with thai fragrant candle for up to overnight (depending on the quality of the candle and the quantity of the shortbread you make, a batch of mine smells good after 1-2 hours) which adds a depth of flavour to this shortbread, makes it somewhat different from any other western baked goods you might be familiar with.

Kleeb Lamduan
makes about 18-20 tiny flowers

110 g. flour
25 g. icing sugar
30 g. grounded sesame seeds 
a pinch of salt (somewhere between 1/8-1/4 tsp)
4 tbsp oil (more or less)
fragrant/scented candle (Tian Ob)


sift together flour, sugar and salt. then add sesame and mix to combine

add oil one tablespoon at a time, it'll look similar to the process of making pie crust. mix the oil and flour lightly, keep adding more oil until the dough is held together but not too wet (oily)

form a 10 grams-ball, cut the ball into quarter, join three of the four pieces together as petals with a help of water so that the pieces won't fall apart. use the last piece to form a tiny ball and put it in the middle of the 'petals'

...and it'll take quite some times to do that to all the balls

bake your tiny flowers in a 175c preheated oven for 15 minutes. let the them cooled before putting them in a pot (or dutch oven, anything with a tight lid that does not made of plastic)

light the candle until there's a considering amount of smoke before blow the candle out and cover with a lit. let sit for at least 2 hours
here's also a video i made (with great effort of a one-and-a-half man team) which shows you all the process from start to finish, making it even easier to follow the this already simple recipe

by the way, head over and check out my friend paula's blog about her exchange year in thailand. she accompanied me during one of many kleeb lamduan session i did for this film. we had a lot of fun baking and already planed a very exciting video project—all i can say now is that it involves a lot of yummy food.

enjoy baking!

there were too much too-riped strawberries in the fridge, and i didn't want to throw them away.
i was struggling so hard, trying to make a decision of whether to make strawberry buttermilk cake (too fat) strawberry chiffon cake (too lazy) strawberry muffins or strawberry sauce.



and i ended up making the last two


i wasn't confident about strawberry muffins, because nobody really made them. strawberry was too juicy and contained too much water (that, i read on internet) but i went for it anyway, gave it a try.



it turned out quite nice, a bit better than i expected. especially when you eat when it was freshly baked and still warm. i ate two of them right away. (not quite a good thing for my belly fat though)


whole wheat strawberry muffins

1/2 cup soya yoghurt
1/4 cup olive oil
1 egg
1/2 tsp honey
few drops of vanilla aroma
1 1/2 cup whole wheat flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup chopped strawberries


preheat oven at 190 celcius. put chopped strawberries in the oven and roasted for around 10 minutes. use the juice from them in strawberry sauce and take only the solid part for muffins.

combine wet ingredients and whisk with your hand until combine. add dry ingredients and continue whisking with your hand just until combine.

add the strawberries and flow gently. bake for 18-20 minutes. i made 10 not-so-big muffins.

it was a nice feeling i could have never felt living in thailand, picking strawberries from one's own garden.

if i had discovered them yesterday, i'd have baked some strawberry cake. if they hadn't been too ripe, i'd have had eaten them fresh.

however, i discovered them yesterday and they were a bit too ripe already. so i decided to make some compote. it was very spontaneous, without a proper recipe. just my instinct and talent i rarely had (seriously, i sucked at cooking)

first, i was gonna make it with strawberry only. i ended up adding apples and it looked and tasted a lot better.

strawberry apple compote

needed:
2 cups whole strawberries; diced
1 apple; diced
1/2 cup juice (i used sugar-free red fruits juice, aka grapes, apple and red berries)
1 tbsp flour
drops of vanilla aroma
a little bit of honey if you want 


on a medium-heated stove, put strawberries, juice, vanilla and flour in a saucepan. let if simmers for approx. 10 minutes. the strawberries will turn very soft but still maintain its shape. put the strawberries in a separate bowl so that it's not overcooked. leave the juice in the pan.

 put diced apples in the juice pan. let it simmers for 5 minutes and reduce the heat to lowest. cook until apples are soft and the juice is a bit saucy. turn off the stove in mix strawberries, apples, and the sauce together.

i eat yoghurt for breakfast (almost) everyday.
the first few weeks in germany, i was addicted to berries and lemon yoghurt. i believe that europe has the best yoghurt in the world. everything i tried was ten times better than yoghurt in thailand (and even new zealand) but rather a bit too sweet. i always add drops of lemonade in my yoghurt (my love for sourness)



then i realised i consumed a lot of sugar through those flavoured yoghurts, so i switch to this natural yoghurt.


until lately, i realised (again) that i eat too much cow milk. i once had sinus infection and my doctor told me to stop eating dairy products. (but i ended up in the surgery room anyway) dairy products stimulate sinus infection (and state of being allergy to something in general) it doesn't mean i can't consume any dairy products at all, but not too much like everyday for breakfast. so now i eat soya yoghurt instead.


and then i started making my own homemade granola!
a lot yummier and healthier. and it's super easy to make.
here's all you need:


rolled oats
roasted nuts (i used walnut, hazelnut and almond)
seeds (pumpkin & sunflower, i'd love to add sesame next time)
dried fruits  (sultanas, raisins and cranberries. last time i added some apple chips as well)

how to roast nuts:
in oven, 170 celsius degrees for around 10 minutes (i needed more for hazelnut) stir evey 5-7 minutes until they smell good. DON'T BURN THEM!
(do the same to rolled oats but it'll take around 20 minutes)

then just chopped the nuts roughly and mix everything. i added cinnamon (yeah,
i'm a cinnamon lover) stored in tight container. or you can just prepare everything but do not mix them yet, mix just before you eat them. some days you might want only nuts or oats or seeds.



and these are my favourite combinations (the apple-cinnamon was heaven on earth :)