Tag: italian

Eggplant Antipasto

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It’s the very last night of the year and I have nothing to do but stand around nibbling on fancy cheeses and preserves with a glass of my podcast co-host Simon’s homemade mead in hand. We have been entertaining all week long and have simply had enough of people… It’s just me and these little nibbles.

My favourite of the bunch is a type of antipasti made of simmered strips of eggplant that go especially well with grassy wines and robust cheeses. It’s a recipe from Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli, a book I’ve referenced constantly on our podcast this year. It is a genuine gem, equal parts traditional recipe-focused cookbook, seasonal manifesto and memoir. It’s the kind of tome everyone should leave loitering on the corner of their prep area for inspiration.

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Chicpea Flour Pan Bread (Farinata/Socca)

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I recently did a talk at Berwick about the history, biology and nutritional value of legumes and wanted to punctuate the talk with a snack made entirely of Fabaceae. Not willing to subject the residents to a black bean slider or yet another variety of hummus I opted to buy a bag of chicpea flour (Besan) from the local Mega-Lo-Mart and set to researching a dosa or roti recipe to accompany my talk.


What I ended up on wasn’t Indian at all but a recipe from the Ligurian Coast of Italy called Farinata or alternatively Socca depending on which end of the boot you’re on. It’s incredibly simple to make and the chicpea batter adapts it’s neutral, somewhat nutty flavour to many types of seasoning from fresh rosemary to chilies to (my favourite) a bit of Lebanese Za’atar.

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The Negroni Cocktail

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Thanks to the dynamic duo of Cara and Karlee I’m suddenly inundated with a cupboard full of very familiar liquors, so it’s finally time to bust out my favourite cocktail recipe. This is the big one kids; the aperitif to rule them all, the perfect summer sip, the ayatollah of alcoholla. This is my personal favourite cocktail.

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Fresh Pasta

Shawn 1 Comment

I’ve been making fresh pasta on and off for about two years now. It’s been a long, steep learning curve with a lot of lumpy, feathery or overly-elastic balls of dough destined for the trash bin. Many weekends I would despair that the process is too arcane to be learned from a book and that the tactile magic required to make it like some Piedmontese nona would require a bankrupting trip to the motherland, or at the very least a couple of weeks worth of classes.

But I kept at it, spurred on by the near-pornographic descriptions of fresh pasta making and eating found in audiobooks like Bill Buford’s Heat and Pasta, Pane, Vino: Deep Travels Through Italy’s Food Culture by Matt Goulding. Little by little I got better, mostly by scaling back my efforts to just the simplest recipes and easiest shapes and focusing on my technique, checking at every stage to make sure the texture of my dough matched the descriptions I would read in The Pasta Bible or the fantastic Cooking By Hand by Paul Bertolli.

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Il Falcone (Courteany, BC)

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Via: https://www.ilfalcone.ca/

I recently sat down with farmer, philosopher and garlic guru Brent Garstin at his bucolic Comox Valley farm for a secret project that hopefully I’ll be able to share in a bit. Brent dropped all kinds of knowledge on me, including where to get some of his award-winning garlic to eat.

Crystal was then gracious enough to pick me up from the middle of nowhere so I treated us to dinner at the restaurant Brent suggested. Neither of us had ever eaten there, but I had high hopes after Brent said, “they do things there the right way, authentic… People that I trust say it’s the best in town.”

Those people were right.

Located at the end of the main drag in Courtenay and easily spotted thanks to its copious grape vines and nearly-neon orange paint job is Il Falcone. We arrived around six and scored a couple of seats in their small dining room just before the dinner rush hit. On the way by I peeked in the open kitchen and saw a guy laying out sheet after sheet of fresh pasta and knew we’d made the right choice.

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