Marta’s cake with summer fruits and crumble

 

We all spent last weekend in our family home and to celebrate this visit Monika, our cousin, Ola, and I baked a fantastic cake – really delicious and very easy to prepare. The only secret is to use the best quality product. Take some very fresh eggs, butter and fruits from local market and get cooking!

Tomato, chilli and garlic linguine

This is my favourite dish from Café Caldesi menu so I have created my own version of it. Nice friends say it’s as good as Caldesi’s.

You will need:
Ripe tomatoes (the best are San Marzano but it’s not easy to get them if you don’t happen to be in Italy right now. In London I usually buy them at La Fromagerie – today I just used British vine tomatoes)
Tin tomatoes (if you don’t have enough fresh ones)
Chillies
Garlic
Fresh basil
Sour cream
Olive Oil
Parmesan
Salt, pepper

 And of course pasta. I use filini from La Pasta di Aldo – according to Heston Blumenthal ‘perhaps the finest pasta in Italy’. In the UK it’s available at Waitrose. You are supposed to boil it for around 7 minutes in filtered water with a tea spoon of sea salt. To be honest it’s good enough to be served on its own, with a bit of good olive oil, some basil and freshly grated parmesan – my choice after busy days at work.

Any good linguine will be perfect though the only important thing is that it is cooked al dente.

I start with roasting my tomatoes with a bit of olive oil, black pepper and few cloves of garlic. In my opinion this brings more flavour to the sauce and helps cook quicker.

When tomatoes are ready peel them off (it should be easy to do so, if it’s not they are not ready yet), mash together with garlic, remove liquid from the mixture and put aside for a moment.
If I have really good tomatoes then I would bother to remove the seeds as well – but I don’t think this is necessary for every day eating.

In a pan heat some olive oil with pieces of chillies (add as much as you like – I have to confess use usually too much. Like I always boil too much pasta – by the way my Italian friend Mariolina told me to use it next day with eggs and fry like an omelette). You can add some extra garlic if you want (for us Polish people there is never too much garlic) but you will have to be very careful with it as it gets burnt very quickly. Add tomatoes (fresh and tin ones if you are using both), stir and leave to boil slowly for around 50 minutes with a lid on.
Check it from time to time, stir occasionally and taste if you have added enough chillies and pepper.

When it’s almost ready – so when the mixture is smooth – add a bit of sour cream and then almost at the end few leaves of fresh basil.

Serve hot with your pasta and grated parmesan.

It takes few times to learn about its proportion and how you actually like it. Mine wasn’t too spicy today and surprisingly, I didn’t cook too much pasta either.

Buon apetito!

All my Italian friends feel free to comment.

Sunday brunch

Don’t worry – we are not moving into a cooking blog. I still prefer to write about other people’s cooking actually.

 As last week I couldn’t take photos of my lovely brunch, here it is for you now. No Swiss bread this time, I used rye bread from Le Pain Quotidien instead. In my opinion the best bread in London, which is surprising as it comes from a big chain present probably everywhere in Europe. Plus I saw it in Qatar when I was there last year too. Well, Le Pain Quotidien prove that you don’t have to compromise on quality going big and international.

So scrambled eggs with pancetta and chives on toast is my favourite choice (apart from bacon sandwiches) for Sunday lunch. It reminds me of my father who would prepare it in random parts of the day adding Polish sausage instead of pancetta and lots of fried (or burnt according to my mother) onion.

So mix eggs in a bowl, add chives and spices (don’t add too much salt as there is plenty in pancetta already). You may add some grated parmesan as well. Fry pancetta cubes on a hot pan with some butter (and oil if you want), add egg mixture, stir and if you don’t like your eggs to be too dry switch off the heat half way and just let them rest for few minutes.

Serve on slightly toasted bread (the secret, in my opinion, is to use the best bread possible, not something you can get in a supermarket).

Bon appetite!