Tagged cooking (Blog)

Not long ago, I joined an Italian cooking group on Facebook. I thought it would be a good opportunity to pick up some tips and recipes. I left the group a couple of months later, after some members became...oh, let's call it "agitated"...over whether Sunday ragu was a "sauce" or a "gravy".

It sounds like a joke, doesn't it? Personal attacks stemming from disagreements over culinary terminology seem like such a cartoonish Italian stereotype that you almost think it just can't be true. Or maybe you just don't want it to be.

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When it comes to food and drink, I tend to lean towards the simple. Or, more accurately, I tend to lean towards the simple and well-made.

One of my favourite memories of the Dominican Republic, for example, was the coco loco - literally just a coconut with the top sliced off and rum mixed into the milk, served with a straw and maybe a squeeze of lime. When the coconut is fresh, the drink is amazing.

Another example would be Marcella Hazan's (in)famous tomato sauce. It literally has only four ingredients (canned tomatoes, butter, onion and salt) and notably no garlic or herbs, so the sauce doesn't really have anywhere to hide; it tastes like buttery, slow cooked tomatoes which is, well, you know, delicious.

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Evelyn and I found a polish bakery in Point St Charles. One of the things we saw (aside from the actual pastries) were packages of Jaffa cakes for sale. I'd never had one before, but they looked good, so I bought one. Indeed, they're pretty awesome. They consist of a sponge-like base, with orange jelly and chocolate on top.

A friend of mine referred me to a web site that showed how to make them. It claimed that the process was dead easy but that's a lie. Specifically, I had a difficult time making what British people call "jelly".

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