La dolce vita - cooking Italian.

They say that you can learn alot about yourself from what others perceive of you. But I've found that you can also learn alot about yourself from cooking.

Heading to Griffith next week for a fortnight placement I thought it might be a good idea if I got in touch with my Italian self for some transient de-boganisation time as well as seeing that Griffith used (or still is?) to be one of the drug capital of NSW complete with Italian mafia* and all. This aside, apparently it has some great Italian restaurants which I am quite keen to taste when I get there.

So I guess it doesnt get more Italian than to try and make your very own tomato sauce from scratch (yes think barefeet thumping tomato squelching time...minus the barefeet), meatballs + spaghetti time!






All sorts of tomatoes!

Starting the cooking process, I quickly learn that 1) I suck at finely chopping onions and 2) most likely because I can't see what I'm cutting on account of the waterfall of tears springing out of my eyes. Confession, I cried cutting shallots during Year 8 food technology. On a brighter note, the highlight of the cooking was in fact de-skinning the tomatoes which is analogous to tearing apart those oh-so-easy plastic wrappings (think Ferrero Rocher type) as compared to ones that require teeth and key. Though, on a more medical note it morbidly reminded me of 'de-gloving' injuries. However, I will choose not to divulge on this particular term and instead let you curious people google/wiki that one up.


My favourite part of the cooking - deskinning tomatoes...




Tomatoes, basil, onions and garlic on the stove to simmer for 1.5hours...I get started on the meatballs. Instead of just ordinary pork mince, I decide to opt for veal/pork mince though not sure if my tastebuds are trained enough to even tell the difference (in retrospect, no they aren't) but they sound fancier to a tee so it's all good. And here comes the part where I get to the usual uh-oh skipped that line part. Except that this time, I don't (amazingly!). Instead, accounting for my amazing cooking knowledge, I somehow mix "mixer" up with "blender" as was pointed yet again by Ali, my fountain of wise cooking advice... also known as common sense. However we figure that the recipe shall survive, considering that we actually don't have a blender around anyway.



I forget to mention that at this time there are 4 other Wagganians bustling about the kitchen and it is a bright spark who decides to bring in the pod-stereo and we start humming and a dancing to the velvet smooth tones of Michael Buble's new album. And it is at this stage that I can imagine cooking (maybe less frantically) middle aged (but 40 is the new 20?) with a glass of redwine and good music in the background...imagination says somewhere Spring time in Tuscany! 3) I like to move it move it (in the kitchen) :)

Back to reality and I venture out to inject something new to Delia's recipe. Gasp. Me a stickler for rules and gram-for-gram recipe reading? You betcha. As I'm rolling up the meatballs, I decide to put a teaspoon of parmesan in the middle theorising that when I grill them, they will hopefully have melty centres! I also figure that as I have spent the last 2 hours cooking and progressively gotten hungrier, bigger meatballs = quicker prep time (in my defense one can say it's all for research purposes...with the question being what's the best meatball size?).



The finished product

And here you go, home-made tomato sauce, meatballs and spaghetti. I have to admit that my tomato sauce is the first recipe turn-out to look somewhat dodgy next to Delia's (will require fine tuning in the future) and I deduce its from my sub-optimal simmer temperature that has incompletely evaporated the juices to leave something less than a "jam-like consistency" as it should have been. Nonetheless, at this stage I'm just happy to sit down and enjoy my meal, with or without my red wine and Tuscany backdrop.

PS cheese in meatballs is a win. highly recommend it!


* An interesting hypothesis proposed by MisterChinUps: the gangster walk may have some medical pathology underlying it. Given gangsters tend to bust caps in gangster asses, injury to the gluteus medius muscle may produce a Trendelenburg gait. However such a gait could be interpreted as 'cool' and hence picked up by the rest of the gangster community giving rise to the 'gangsta walk'.