PAINTING HOLIDAYS ITALY – RECIPE OF THE WEEK.

It is carnival time here, or near as damn it. Children are busy suggesting implausible costume ideas – I will go with anything furry or involving an overcoat – it is February afterall. Generally carnivale involves cans of silly string, buckets of confetti, costumes and pranks.  Think ragweek for short people who it would be churlish to get cross with.  This year the new principle at the school has banned Carnivale antics at school (oh, booo, hissss).

Traditionally carnivale also  involves frappe, is it a biscuit?, is it a cake? – no it’s a sort of pastry, I think. Who cares, it tastes great.

Like several pastries of note (I’m thinking mincepies and shortbread)  frappe seems to be considerably improved by the involvement of little fingers.  Or maybe it’s just because its a job for all the family.

Here is a recipie  wrestled, with some difficulty and scant regard for personal safety, from Andrea’s mother.

• 500gm plain flour
• 3 eggs
• 50gm sugar
• 30gm Lard (original, butter will do)
• 1 pch salt
• 1 glass of wine (+spare, to keep the whole process flowing) spot of grappa gives an extra kick too
• lemon zest.
• light oil for frying

On a mixing board, or table, make a volcano of flour with a hole in the middle, break eggs into middle and begin to mix – add other ingredients (lard melted) except alcohol and mix all together to form a ball of dough, slowly add wine and grapa and knead well for about 15 minutes.  Some people suggest leaving the dough to rest for an hour, as suggested in cookery books.  Some people get shouted down.

Once you’ve formed a nice dough cut it into handsized parcels and form them into a flat sausage, ready for the pasta machine.  Now you need to make them as fine as possible,

A rolling pan could work, (roll it out thin, pick it up, fold it roll it again.  Do that a good few times until it is as thin and elastic as possible).

But a  pasta machine really does the trick.

Put the dough through progressively finer settings, starting at 8 and putting it through twice on each setting until you do it once on 2.  Finally, cut those ribbons into strips, you can use a knife but a pizza cutter adds to the whole Italian vibe. Make a couple of little cuts in the squares to allow for expansion

Shallow fry the squares and when they are all bubbled up and just about to go brown fish them out and dust with icing sugar – then – enjoy.