Christchurch in Autumn, and foraging fungi

La mia stagione preferita a Christchurch è l'autunno, i colori sono bellissimi e non fa ancora troppo freddo. E poi qui si trovano anche i funghi! Andate in fondo alla pagina per vederli 'in padella'!

Il parco di Hagley è coloratissimo!

Sono tornata a trovare le mie ortensie (cioè, quelle che vado sempre a visitare quando vado a Chch), e sono belle anche d'autunno!

Foto di nozze sul fiume Avon

Questo coniglietto dev'essere sfuggito alla tradizionale caccia al tesoro pasquale (Easter Egg Hunt). Eh sì, in Nuova Zelanda Pasqua è in autunno!

Wow, i ciclamini! Siamo nel parco dell'università di Canterbury e i giardini di Ilam.

Ah i porcini! Piccoli ma cicciottelli! La prima volta che trovai un fungo qui era oltre 20 anni fa. Lo portai a casa dei miei suoceri, c'era tutta la famiglia riunita e tutti sospettosi mi hanno criticato per averlo raccolto, mi hanno osservato con disapprovazione mentre me lo friggevo e mangiavo, e nessuno ha voluto assaggiarlo... si aspettavano tutti che morissi avvelenata. Da allora non ho più avuto il coraggio di raccogliere e portare funghi a casa a Christchurch. Ma questa volta era diverso! 

Ho visto una coppia che camminava al parco e ho capito subito che andavano a funghi. E che lui era italiano. Gli ho promesso di non rivelare dove si trovavano i funghi, e che tanto abitavo ad Auckland, e mi ha dato un po' di quelli che aveva raccolto. Partivo quello stesso giorno quindi avrei potuto metterli in valigia, mentre sarebbe stato inopportuno cucinarli a casa di mia suocera. 

Però una cosa che ho potuto fare a casa di mia suocera è stato un bel 'photoshoot' dei funghi e delle foglie raccolte per strada.

A casa ho pulito bene i funghi con un coltello e una pezza bagnata, poi li ho tagliati a fette, infarinati,

e fritti in olio e aglio, un po' alla volta. scolato su carta assorbente e aggiunto sale. Erano solo 5, in pratica 3 padellate come questa a basta, ma li abbiamo mangiati con gusto!

Amo i funghi! 

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Gramigna con panna, funghi e noci

Gramigna is a type of pasta usually found in Emilia Romagna. Shaped like curls, it comes in different sizes and sometimes is green (or mixed, like here). It requires a 'heavy' or creamy sauce, so it is common to see it with bolognese sauce or sausage and cream or similar. It is not my favourite pasta, but every now and them I would have it, and my vegetarian suggestion is to serve it with a creamy mushroom sauce. 

Soak some dried porcini mushrooms, clean and slice some fresh mushrooms. 

Pan fry the fresh mushrooms with a little butter, then add the porcini mushrooms and their soaking water, plus  half an organic vegetable stock cube, if you are cooking for 2, or a whole one, if you are cooking for 4. When all the water has been absorbed add 100-200 ml of cream and a handful of walnut kernels, and cook for five more minutes. Finely chop a peeled garlic clove with a handful of Italian parsley (adding a pinch of salt too to aid the chopping). Add to the sauce. Finish with black pepper and then dress the pasta. If too dry add more cream. In Italy the cream for pasta is thick and mixes well, in NZ we only have one type of cream, rich but very liquid, the important thing is to make sure that the result is not too watery. Serve with grated Parmigiano Reggiano and accompany with Lambrusco or Pignoletto wine.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Tagliatelle ai funghi, in memory of Antonio Carluccio

When I learned that Antonio Carluccio had died I was really sad, I didn't know hime well, but I did meet him twice, and wrote to him once (and got a reply!), he was an inspiration. When I was young and poor and constantly hungry and cold in London I used watch his programmes, and dream of Italy, sun and endless food. I met him in the street there but I was so shy that the only thing I could say was Buongiorno and run away! After writing my first book I emailed him (his publisher) to send him a copy, and got an email reply (signed by him, but I will never know if he wrote it) and a thank you and well done!. Then I met him two years ago at Gusto at the Grand in Auckland, and that was fantastic, I was sitting at his table so I managed to chat a bit with him. What a great memory!

So to honour his legacy I took out my pasta board and went out in the garden, (it was a lovely day), and made some tagliatelle. I even added some flowers to some, just for fun. To make pasta I just use an egg for every 100g of flour, this is good for two people, so double for 4 and so on. Since I have two teenagers I used 300g of flour and 3 eggs :-). 

Then I made a sauce, I had a big pack of dried porcini mushrooms which a soaked, and some other mushrooms, which I cut, and since I didn't have many I added some eggplant, cut and salted (to sweat). If you add eggplant to mushrooms it will absorb the flavour and the texture is a little similar so you can dream that you have lots of mushrooms. I sautéed the fresh mushrooms and eggplant with a little olive oil, chopped parsley and garlic cloves and then added the dried mushrooms and their water, a big bottle of tomato passata,  extra tomato puree and salt to taste. At the end I had a huge pot of sauce, even after I cooked the lot for one hour (to thickens the sauce), I used some for pasta the first day and for a pie the day after.

We had the tagliatelle and mushrooms with Parmigiano, and a glass of red whine, and toasted to Antonio. Goodbye Carluccio, sit tibi terra levis.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Mashroom Magic with Tofu Puffs

Mushrooms are my favourite vegetables, except that they are not vegetables... they are fungi, and I like all fungi (as long as they are edible). For this dish I used a mixture of dried and fresh mushrooms. The dried mushrooms are an Asian mix of different mushrooms, which I soaked in water for an hour or so. The fresh one are oyster mushrooms and common button mushrooms. I cleaned them and then sliced the button ones, while I left the oyster mushrooms whole (a pity to cut them!).

In a large skillet I heated a little vegetable oil with a few drops of sesame oil, then added all the mushrooms (I drained the dried mushrooms, but kept the water) and cooked them turning often until they stopped trowing out water. At this point I added the tofu puffs (fried tofu pieces, available in most tofu shops and Asian stores) the mushrooms water and Japanese soy sauce (not too much). After all the liquid was gone I added a little lemon juice, tasted to see if more soy sauce was needed (for salt) and finished with chopped coriander. Golly they were delicious, and so simple too! Serve with rice.

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Oyster mushrooms with lemon soy butter

When asked what is my favourite vegetable sometimes I reply that it is a fresh porcino mushroom (boletus edulis), and I say this knowing very well that mushrooms do not classify as vegetables... they are fungi, neither fruit nor vegetable. But no one in New Zealand ever asks me what is my favourite fungi (they do in my village in Italy, for sure), only what is my favourite vegetable, and mushrooms are usually defined as a side vegetable (even eaten at breakfast! This thing still puzzles me).  

The fact is that to me mushrooms rarely take the place of a side vegetable, but they tend to be the main player: pasta with mushrooms, risotto with mushrooms, polenta with mushrooms, mushroom fritters, mushroom burgers, mushroom dumplings, stuffed mushrooms...

 For a vegetarian they substitute meat, and in the old days in my mountains in Italy they used to be called carne di bosco 'meat of the woods'.

We never bought mushrooms when I was a child, they grew all around us and we just foraged. We also dried them for winter, or preserved them in olive oil (more rarely, mushrooms may have been abundant, but olive oil was expensive). 

Here in NZ only very occasionally I find field mushrooms, more rarely porcini (it happened in Christchurch once long time ago and I was the only one who ate them, everybody else watching me to see if I was going to die a painful death from poisoning). 

As far as commercial varieties go, I use plenty of dried mushrooms (both porcini and different Asian mushrooms) and the usual button and portabello mushrooms that you find at the supermarket. Fortunately in recent years the interest in more 'exotic' types of mushrooms has increased and now you can find some types of fresh Asian mushrooms too, especially in Asian stores. So I was delighted when Meadows Mushrooms presented the members of the Guild of Food Writers a pack of lovely oyster mushrooms. I love oyster mushrooms and hope to find them in my local supermarket soon!

The only thing I did with these beauties was to put them in the skillet with butter and sauté them on both sides. To make mushrooms easy to digest you need to cook them in a way that they 'loose' water, this is important with foraged mushrooms, if there is a toxic one in you mix making it 'loose water' made it edible (or lowered the risks of tommy ache). Button mushrooms and other varieties can be eaten raw, but personally I prefer them cooked. Of course if a mushrooms is deadly this cooking tip is useless, no matter how much you cook it, but this is not a problem we are facing with commercial varieties!

So, but back to cooking edible mushrooms: let them loose water, yes, but remember that generally mushrooms should not be cooked for too long or they will lose flavour too. So as soon as these oyster mushrooms looked ready to me (a few minutes) I added a drizzle of Japanese soy sauce and some lemon juice. Add more butter too if you like, for a bit more fat, juice and taste. Serve piping hot on a bowl of plain short grain rice, drizzling the juices on top. 

And now the update from the garden: roses, rhododendron and passion fruit in flower!

Happy weekend!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Vegan sushi without nori

There are a lot of traditional vegan sushi rolls already, like kappamaki, kampyo, takuan, inari-san, and the famous avocado rolls, but sometime is fun to make more varieties, especially since Arantxa received a kit to shape sushi rice shapes from Japan, ready to be topped! And for topping we used some carrots slices cooked with soy sauce and mirin and topped with seaweed (vegan) caviar, and some mushrooms slices sautéed with a little vegetable oil, soy sauce and lemon juice. Well, it was truly delicious!

But for even more amazing vegan sushi recipes, and how to cooke the rice, click here and here

and here and here 

And now from my garden: I don't know what has happened to my potted mandarine tree, but I got the smallest mandarin ever… lol!

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Raw Vegan Mushroom and nut 'macarons'

White button mushrooms are delicious raw, and they are vitamin rich, apparently they even have vitamin B12. These little savoury mushrooms 'macarons' make a tasty appetizer, and they look really fancy! All you need is mushrooms and some raw vegan nut cheese (recipe here). Remove the stalks from the mushrooms and peel off the top 'skin', the clean them well with a damp paper towel (do not wash). Fill with a little vegan nut cheese and close together like a macaron.  

Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini ©

Hiking in Coromandel, New Zealand

 A four day hiking trip in Coromandel with friends

Arriving at Crosbies Hut

Days spent in the bush among bird songs and pretty fungi

Convivial evening with fancy hut cooking and entertaining...

… and everything vegetarian and vegan!

Returning home

Photos by Alessandra Zecchini ©