It’s a nice change to find a cookery book with a collection of recipes that sets it apart from the others and a new book, La Mia Cucina, from Scottish Italian restaurant group, Tony Macaroni, does just that. With recipes designed by Italy’s most renowned top chef and epicurean, Fabio Campoli, the book includes 100 authentic recipes, along with helpful expert hints and tips. Buying a copy has the added bonus of helping one of Scotland’s top fundraising charities, Radio Clyde’s Cash for Kids. The proceeds from the first 5,000 books sold are being donated to this year’s appeal.
Written with the home cook in mind, there are classic dishes for every occasion. There’s an authenticity about these recipes, a feeling of what might be served up in a traditional restaurant in Italy. You can experience a genuine taste of Italy without going to Italy. Chef Fabio Campoli’s journey through life has been shaped by his love of food and he shares that love through the recipes in this book.
Divided into 6 sections, chose from starters, super sandwiches, starters, pasta, meat, fish & more, desserts, and find a collection of basic recipes at the end of the book. Basic’s include all you need to make the Italian favourites, stocks, sauces, gnocchi, risotto, pasta and a selection of pastries. All of these link back to recipes in the various chapters.
Starters include black olive crackers with ham, sardines in onion batter with sweet and sour pine nuts and raisins.
The pasta recipes include spaghetti with marinated anchovies & fennel with breadcrumbs and olives, gnocchi with sausage, rocket sauce & crispy breadcrumbs and bucatini with pecorino, prawns and asparagus.
A mouthwatering range of meat recipes includes a delicious braised pork with fennel and prosecco. And if desserts are your thing, you wont be disappointed. Temptation includes, Chocolive pot pie, hazelnut cream on crispy waffles and delicious dark chocolate and hazelnut cake.
A few words from Fabio, ‘ Gastronomic desire’ follows two connected but seperate paths, namely that of research and innovation that merge with that of history and tradition. I love to bring ancient dishes back to life, ad I am always looking for ways to excite people through a dish and it’s history. Gastronomic desires aside – but which I want to mention because they unite each one of us – there are those desires related to the nostalgia of a dish, the flavours of which is alive within us because it is linked to people, places, and adventures that have made a deep impression on our lives. It is exactly in this evocation of the hidden desires within my dinner guests that I find the inspiration to revive emotions in the kitchen that in reality never left’.
One copy to giveaway. Win a copy of La Mia Cucina – either follow A Wee Pinch of Sugar blog or RT and follow on Twitter @weepinchofsugar
Thanks to Tony Macaroni and Fabio Campoli for providing a copy of La Mia Cucina.