There was a personal joke within the family that my grandmother had the best recipes and everything else she might have needed to start her own takeaway business – except, perhaps, for an enterprising spirit, the financial capital and the desire to see her cooking hands made common and expendible. I have always wondered where these recipes stemmed from, and suggested to my mind that perhaps it all started with the mentality of her home-town, where vegetables were plentiful and meat was dear, refridgeration non-existent and food never went to waste.
Whatever the reason, for as long as I can remember her cooking philosophy has revolved around the tenets of sharing, of copious quantity and outstanding quality. There was the familiar hum of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds” playing on the radio by the windowsill, a dusty double-threaded apron held up by a makeshift knot, the steady lick and hiss of olive oil heated above a gas stove and even the good company of family. Like any well-prepared venue, early in the chilly winter morning the starchy tablecloths would be brought out of the cupboards and laid out over the tables beneath the pergola. With a deft toss of the hands, they would burst from their pleats and gracefully glide over the table, settling over like an ironed petticoat.
We worked a production line together with flour and egg and mess, each person kept to a predefined role worked until perfection, to make sure that the food was ready for our demanding customers. That is, the fathers’ and the uncles’, neighbours and their children eager and well-baited by the aroma and mirth.
Once the food was cooked, we displayed our goods proudly on large platters lined with paper towels and filled bags made of greasing paper with the leftovers. Even friends of relatives and distant strangers from the farthest parts of the neighbourhood converged and indulged in what we had to offer – parcels and plates filled with simple fare that mimicked and perhaps even rivalled a take-away shop from the olden days. I even recall bringing the leftovers to school and being the envy of all my friends.
In this series, I will present to you three of the delicious meal and conversation starters that I have learned from my grandmother in the hope that you might bring together your own friends and family in the same spirit. As always, you are welcome to take away as much or as little of these posts as you like — recipes born at home and made for taking away from the kitchen.
I remember when the basil grew beneath the tomato vines. With the slightest passing breeze, the anxious, peppery-green sprouts of basil would tickle the downturned blossoms of the vines, teasing out their pollen in a minute shower over the soil. During the crisp early morning, it was a pleasure to visit the garden where the air was replete with the metallic smell of sunshine and bliss as the sun stirred the morning dew upon those delicate, cherubic tomato buds. As for the lazy summer afternoon, when there was little more to do than count the number of tendrils and minute hairs swaying upon the vines, mother-basil would stir a tempest by tempting the worker bees with her flamboyant bunch of flowering seeds.
As a boy, I never understood why my grandmother went to such painstaking lengths to buy her Roma tomatoes from selected suppliers in embarrasing bulk quantity (somewhere along the lines of 30 kilograms during the winter time), nor did I understand the esoteric methods she frequented for flavour-extraction and preservation. It all seemed a little bit too ”ethnic” to me and I dared not let my friends know that this was our Sunday pastime. At the time, I felt that the procedure of making passata from fresh tomatoes was a silly and archaic practice, where often overripe bulbs were manually processed through a table-mounted mechanical pulper, cooked for hours over low heat and stored in ridiculously hot jars. Nowadays in my mind, I appreciate that there is a particular and very unique taste associated with only the pampered tomato afforded the right care; only with the right dousing of water, the correct spread of fertiliser and the secret elements of love and care.
It makes sense to me only now that the best passata comes by following the traditional methods and the deliberate search for only the best local produce. It is my pleasure to share with you all that I have learned.
Last year, around the same time of our current cusp of autumn and winter, Wild Thyme and Sweet Pea featured pesto gnocchi as the crowning dish and theme of the month, for its wholesomeness, simplicity and deliciousness.
This year, for the months of May and June, I have decided to keep with my tradition and feature another simple rustic speciality: before breaking into the soups, stocks, pickles and desserts characteristic of the season, I have chosen pasta and passata as crowning dishes. I’ll literally be coring and kneading an ode to the winter season!
Meet flour and tomato; the raw ingredient or the Adam and Eve of the empty plate. Unlike the warmer months where the dough dries out and becomes elastic too quickly, the winter months are an ideal time for keeping warm by eating fresh pasta, for the air is sufficiently crisp and cool to make kneading, guiding and processing your dough much easier. Thus it has become a tradition for me, at the first cold snap of May, to respond by breaking the seal on a few jars of well-preserved sauce to accompany my neatly layered lasagna sheets, my delicate coils of fettuccine or silky strands of angelhair.
I discovered from an early age that many herbs, from their most fragile days right up to their adult forms, are wonderfully resilient, fragrant and exceptionally copious in their giving - to the very end of their life. Their roots take care of the erosion of the soil, occupy the earthworms through the untangling of the plant’s under-earth meandering and through the sheer variety available, introduce myriad flavours to our food. The exact time my appreciation process began proper is impossible to say, though I suspect it is due in part to my sighting of the worms and the seeds within my grandmother’s backyard – let’s just say I had curious fingers forever seeking the roots of things! I scouted wherever a crack hairlined the concrete, or the paved brick chipped and grew mossy or a seam mismatched the beams supporting the base of the house, and found that parsley grew there. From the first snap of winter frost through and beyond the dewy smell of the first summer day, parsley darted from some of the most unexpected places and regressed to seed in its dying days. Because of its versatility and abundance, my grandmother maintained a love and a hatred for the common herb — a sentiment I also share.
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If there were to a quote of the month summarising my ruminations, this would be it:It’s not the size that matters, it’s how you use it. Since we are all fairly aquainted with this saying, so I will get straight to the heart of this month’s affair: let’s talk about keeping firmer and less limp, growing larger and lasting longer and most importantly, satisfying that voracious hunger. Best of all, let’s have a lesson how to heat things up and get a great boost of endorphins to boot. If this sounds like the void that’s built walls within your life and started to charge you rent, then you’ve come to the right place.
The Wild Thyme and Sweet Pea project found its roots when it was plucked excitedly from the garden, washed briskly in a basin of water and lovingly left out to dry in a soothing marinade of vision and ambition ... More »
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