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.
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.
It would be great if only we had such a creation as a split identity – a new dimension to ourselves that interacts with the world and which does the chores you’d rather maintain a distance of a 50-metre pole. But the reality is that you’re strapped for time, strapped for money, stressed out and pulling your hair out. It’s cold outside and your toes are poking through your last pair of socks – yes, those socks; the ones which came wrapped up nicely with a ribbon for your seventeenth birthday. Your stomach grows. Your fridge door is hanging off its hinges full of jars and bottles; mucky milk, mouldy mustard, rancid relish, putrid pesto. Perhaps the only “gourmet” ingredient you’ve seen in weeks is a tin of eerie brown coloured caviar. Perhaps, by the time you reached the end of this list of disgusting fridge contaminants, you’re on the floor laughing, rolling around in stitches.
But I can assure you that being in dire straits has happened to you more times than you’re comfortable to admit. The true art in cooking, in my opinion, is inventiveness with the ingredients on hand – the ability to create an indispensable number of dishes from similar bases. Thankfully, there’s a solution to your winter woes that doesn’t involve taking out a second mortgage on the house or selling that briefcase full of unused Dinky Toy cars. Read on to hear more about one of the best kept secrets of the Mediterranean coast.
Thanks to Jasmin, and based on your wonderfully informative feedback, Wild Thyme and Sweet Pea has received a facelift and a layout reorganisation. Hopefully, it will be easier than ever before to find what you seek and give you some extra eye-candy along with the mouthwatering Autumn/Winter catalogue of recipes to be published. As always, don’t be shy to use the poll system to let us know how we are going. Thanks for your visit!
In recent days, the weather in Sydney has taken a turn for the sour and sobering, with great, soppy and soggy clouds releasing their pent up energy in great bursts of rain and thunder. Traffic has become more congested, shopping centres have become havens for huddling and windowshopping in mass proportions (moreso than usual, of course) and many are choosing to retreat to their homes and preferring the icy mantle of cold floorboards and kitchen tiles to the nippy winds, sodden socks and rugged-up approach to arriving at work. There is also increasingly grim news about the “global financial crisis” that has many holding onto their wallets and piling into their bank accounts, as opposed to our usual methods of indulging in all the culinary world has to offer. But even in uncertain times, we can rest assured that the most solid asset that will always guarantee ‘healthy’ returns is the investment in our health, and in the health of ourselves we must be nourished with the recipes of food that are simple but balanced, prepared with a degree of finesse but consumed with a voracious hunger for proper nourishment.
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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