A Midsummer Lunch's Dream

Written on the flight Orio - Arlanda, August the 15th.

I’m stuck at my place on the plane, because I’m on the emergency row and I can’t take my bag back. It’s funny that I said “stucked”, like in a physical way, while what I meant was that I couldn’t have my phone and my books in the bag, and escape the boredom of the flight, not able to physically go anywhere anyways. But, the point is, I’m here at my place, with a great hunger, and I have nothing to do but writing this post -  with the Word window in a corner of the screen and 8 as font size, so people next to me can’t easily read me – stupid precaution  I can’t read myself and I’m doing so many errors. The light outside, this time of the day – it’s 8 pm – is gorgeous, someone is eating a banana and smells delicious and I think we can proceede.

So, a Summer menu – why not: we had the Christmas menu and an Easter menu, so let’s talk about a nice meeting with friends in the middle of July, in a super hot Italian midday. I was reading La Cucina Italiana of the previous month and I took some recipes and inspirations from it. We started with two great appetizets, some red onions, slowly baked wit sweet tangy balsamic vinegar, and served with a vegan basil mayonnaise, and berenjenas con miel, aubergines with honey, a Spanish tapa that I made following the recipe of Green Kitchen Stories.

To make the onions, we start from eight nice red onions, better if they are round – mine were Tropea onions, which are little bit longer and it was difficult to make them stay still in the oven tray, so learn from my errors; we have to remove the skin, without cutting the end of the onion, so to be able to cut it into slices without really separate them, like petals of a flower. After the cut, we dispose them in a oven pod with some baking sheet, and we season each onion with olive oil, salt and balsamic vinegar, making sure the dressing penetrates between the petals. Cover and let them rest for 10 minutes. We bake them for 200° for 1 hour, covered with some aluminium, and then 10 minutes without it. For the mayonnaise  we start mixing together 50gr of almond milk with 15 basil leaves and a good pinch of salt, with an immersion blender t; then , while we keep mixing, we add 150gr of vegetable oil, veery slowly– in Italian we say a filo, because the oil must have the size of a thread while it’s being poured. Taste the mayonnaise and add more salt if needed, and serve with the onions.

For the berenjenas, we start cutting two aubergines in small pieces, place them in a bowl and cover with some vegetable milk, for one hour. Then, you have to take each piece of aubergine, cover it with a mixture of polenta flour and salt, and place oit on a baking tray covered with baking paper. Done that with all the pieces, drizzle some olive oil and bake for 20/25 min at 220° degrees. Put the cooked, crispy aubergines on a nice plate, sprinkle them with runny honey and lemon zest, and serve – they are a real treat.

The main course was the best thing in my opinion, but you need to start the day before, because we have to make some vegan fresh cheese – it is super easy and tastes really good, so once you have learned how to make it you will never stop. You just need some vegan not flavoured yogurt, like plain soy yogurt, a sieve, some gauze or a thin piece of fabric, and a large bowl: you put the gauze in the sieve, the sieve in the bowl, the yogurt in the gauze, folding back the corners to cover the yogurt; then you place a weight on the filled gauze – like a can of beans or a jar of jam – and you leave everything like this overnight. The day after, you just need to scope the cheese from the fabric, season it as you prefer – for this recipe, I added salt and thyme, and nothing else, but you can use any other herb, nutritional yeast, dried tomatoes, chopped olives, whatever. Time to do our risotto, and the recipe of La Cucina Italiana suggested an unusual method to me, but the result was great, so I will give it to you as well: we start warming up in a pot 5 spoons of vinegar and 1/2 glass of white wine; when it boils we add three finely chopped shallots and, after 3/4 minutes, 200gr of cold vegan butter; then kill the heat and whip with a whisk; second passage, the blueberries: we have to cut 250gr of berries in a half and cook them in a pan with three spoons of hot olive oil, a pinch of sugar and a good pinch of salt, for 2/3 minutes, until the fruit is broken in a sort of jam, and we set them aside too. Now, the real risotto: toast 325gr of Arborio rice in a big pan, with a pinch of salt, without any kind of fat; when it is hot, add the butter with the shallots, after 1 minute add some hot water and, after 2 others minutes, the blueberries; then cook the rice adding a ladle of hot water at the time, always stirring - it will take around 20 minutes. When al dente, turn off the heat, add salt and pepper to taste and a good spoonful – maybe even too – of our fresh cheese, stir well, cover the pan and set aside for a couple of minutes; then serve with some cheese n the middle, and good bread for cleaning the plate. 

And, finally, the dessert, a sort of sorbetto or granita with sweet plums. From La Cucina Italiana I took the idea of the gin and a rosemary syrup – that you make melting 150 grams of muscovado sugar in 274gr of water, with a rosemary sprig, on medium heat, bringing it to boil and them let it cool completely - , but the method is the one we use in our family, and for it you need some frozen fruit – super ripe plums are perfect -  at the stage to be still icy, but soft enough to be blended, and you do so with our rosemay syrup and some gin, to taste- I think I added I little bit to much that day, but never mind, we all like gin. You can reinvent this recipe with idfferent combinations of fruits, herbs and alcool – lemon and tequila, and maybe a mint syrup – or thyme, pears and rum, peach, basil and prosecco…endless combinations.

And that’s it for today! There is an enormous black cloud outside the plane window, my butt hurts and I just want to eat some fries. Good night!