We have it, I just don't know how to pronounce it.

A little over a week ago Mark bought ingredients for pesto and focaccia, intending to recreate the food we had on holiday. Then he didn't actually get around to it while I was obsessing about promised Italian food, so I ended up making them. (Never, ever proimise me cheese, Italian food or trips to New York and fail to deliver - I will obsess about them at the slightest opportunity).

Focaccia needs baking at a very high temperature. This is how I discovered our 23 year old Samsung oven no longer heated up past 140 degrees, and produced very, very bad focaccia.

The oven had been limping along for years; the door wouldn't shut entirely so it's lost heat for at least 6 years, probably more. Last month I discovered only half of the grill worked, but as we have an air fryer, that seemed manageable. 

After some very scientific research and testing (I read Good Housekeeping's recommendations, then I went to John Lewis to open and shut doors and twiddle dials) we decided on our oven. Wanting one that would last pretty much forever, we bought a Miele.

The difficulty in ordering one in person is that no one seems to know how to pronounce it. There was MEE-leh, my-EL-eh,  my-EL, MEE-lay, MEEL, MEE-luh. Each person I spoke to said it differently. In the end I was basically just pointing. "I want that one with the actual buttons, please."

It arrived promptly enough, but there were complications. We'd gone down from a double oven to a single, so Mark needed to build a shelf for it part way up the larger cavity left by the old one. This does mean we have space for an extra drawer, though, which is great.  Also, it needed wiring it. These felt a bit of a faff, so to be perfectly honest Mark procrastinated a few days before doing it just before Bonnie and her friends arrived for the Easter weekend.

There was a hitch - no power. Mark uninstalled it, connected the oven to a plug and turned it on, which showed the oven itself was fine. So it seemed to be the wiring. 

I'll be honest, mid afternoon before a 4 day weekend when you're feeding 7 people is a sub-optimal time to discover you need an electrician.  

I hit all my local WhatsApp chats is an urgent plea for a good electrician but the recommended tradesmen were either busy or on holiday. Mark finally found a bloke at 3:30 on the condition that Mark went to fetch him as his son had taken the car keys. 

 David the Sparky was very lovely. He explained the wiring was just fine but had been over-tightened, leading to a dodgy connection. He fixed that, tested it and put it back in place and was driven home clutching half a dozen fresh eggs as well as his fee, with about an hour to go before the young people arrived.

This morning I thought I should get to know the oven - technology has moved on a lot in 23 years! So first I made a dozen carrot and pecan cupcakes using the Hummingbird Bakery recipe at 2/3 proportions, then a batch of dark chocolate and orange cookies from BBC Good Food. Seeing as it is Good Friday, I've got dough for hot cross buns proving as type. You know me - go big or go home.

HAPPY EASTER - but Zach ate the A cupcake from Happy so I improvised

The new oven is amazing - it gets to temperature extremely quickly,  has a myriad of setting I don't yet understand and probably will never use, has a self cleaning function and can be operated remotely by my phone. What a marvellous modern world we live in, as Captain Jack Aubry says.

 I did the cupcakes on Conventional and the cookies on Fan Plus, and think I'll try Intensive Bake for hot cross buns, and see if I can find a difference in them at all.

 As for the name - I think I'm going with one online suggestion -  Miele rhymes with Sheila. 

 

NB - Mark more than redeemed himself for procrastinating three days with the oven by mowing the lawn today while I baked. First mow of the year! It all looks lovely.

Bringing The Holiday Home With Me

 

 Obviously one of the many reasons to holiday in Italy is the food. What's not to love? Seafood, pasta, pizza, risotto... the whole country is awash in marvellous things to eat. It would be daft not to make the most of it.

Inspired by my very excellent mate Kirsty's habit of going to a cooking lesson when she's on holiday, I booked Mark and I a morning of making the traditional Ligurian pesto and focaccia in a restaurant in the stunning town of Sestri Levante, a short ride on the local train from our hotel in Rapallo. 

Lovely restaurant in Sestri Levante

Yes, I've made pesto before, but it was just more fun doing it with the local ingredients - a scant tablespoon of pine nuts, mounds of fresh basil from Pra', Ligurian olive oil from cold pressed Taggiasca olives, and their preferred a mix of parmesan and Sardinian pecorino. Of all the things we ate in Italy, the warm focaccia lavishly coated in freshly made pesto was pretty much the best thing, and believe me there was some fierce competition! 

All the essential supplies

The charming  Davide insisted that a glass of wine was a very necessary part of making pesto. I remember my Dad saying something similar in Canada in the 1970s - if he didn't have a cold beer in one hand, the barbeque just wasn't going to cook properly. I wasn't entirely convinced that was true for pesto being made at 10:30 in the morning, to be honest. Breakfast Wine is not something I want. However, Davide said wine was what powered the pestle and mortar - without a sip of wine to keep you going as you pound away, you won't have the oomph to make a smooth and delicious pesto.

Like I say, he was a very charming fella. 

See? Charming!

 I was very surprised how little salt and pine nuts went into the recipe. It was maybe half a teaspoon of coarse salt with half a plump garlic clove and the pine nuts that we pounded into a cream to start with. Then it was picking the leaves off mounds and mounds of basil, thumping the bejeesus out of it in a big heavy mortar with a marble pestle, and then thumping some more. The grated cheese was added a tablespoon a time with yet more pummelling in between. If I did this often I'd have muscles Rosie the Riveter would be proud of. Three or four tablespoons of cheese later and we were finished.

Davide said the oil must never be added to the mortar because the marble (or stone) is porous and will absorb it. We scooped all the paste onto our pestles like a glowing green basil gelato cone and put it in jars to be topped by olive oil. Apparently, the pesto is mixed with the appropriate amount of oil when it's going to be served. Otherwise, as long as it was covered with a layer of oil to prevent oxygenation, it was fine as a fairly stiff paste.

Having a brilliant time 

 
When we got home I was keen to try out making pesto - nearly as keen as Zach was to eat it! I have a very small Mason and Cash pestle and mortar I use for crushing spices,so I had a go with that.

Nightmare.

The bowl was far too small and the pestle far too light to crush the leaves thoroughly. It took muscle power to break it down, and muscles aren't what I'm known for. I'm more of a limp noodle than a powerhouse and it was absolutely exhausting.  I am never doing that again.

Luckily there was a very big stone pestle and mortar in the sale due to one of Amazon's spurious reasons for an event (I can't even remember what that one was called, but it wasn't Black Friday) so I bought myself that enormous thing* and had another go.

Seriously enormous, weighs a ton

 

However, all that weight means the heavy pestle does a superb job of bashing the poor basil into submission.  It took less than a third of the time of the small one and was a great deal more fun. It was also rather intimidatingly loud, for which I probably owe my neighbours apologies. And poor Luke who was nearby and nearly jumped out of his skin.

Having tried pesto with the traditionally shaped Trofie pasta (very narrow twists) and with breadsticks and focaccia, I fancied a go at trying to replicate a delicious lunch I'd had in Santa Marguerita. It was big billowing sheets of fresh pasta with loads of pesto on top. It looked messy and awful, but it was so light and delicious. 

Least appetising, most delicious

 

I've not made pasta with 00 flour before, but as I was trying to do it all with the proper Italian ingredients I bought flour to have a go. Bloody hell, that stuff is so much harder to work with than plain flour! It was so very stiff I wondered if I'd got the proportions wrong. I was using Angela Hartnet's 400g to 4 large eggs and a tablespoon of olive oil. I rolled half of it out to thing, long lasagne sheets ribbons and cooked them for around 3 minutes.

I'd been a bit overly free passing homemade pesto around my friends and neighbours to have the quantity  the restaurant served on the pasta, but it was still absolutely delicious. The pasta was light and silky, the pesto was strongly herby with just a gentle kick of garlic and it all felt like a bowl of happiness. Z and I agreed we'd definitely have it again, although with regular flour next time unless I take up an interest in weight lifting in the meantime.

There was the other half batch of pasta dough left over, so a couple of days later Zach and I had homemade tagliatelle with a puttanesca sauce, one of our favourites.  It normally takes less time to make the sauce than the pasta takes to cook, but that isn't true when cooking fresh pasta -  fresh pasta is done in two to three minutes. It's still a ridiculously quick sauce and punches far above its weight in the effort vs flavour ratio. We enjoyed it very much. (Mark, the Philistine, chose fried chicken tenders and chips instead. There's no accounting for taste)

I love puttanesca

*If I am ever found dead in my kitchen, there's a fair chance it will be because I dropped this damned thing on myself when trying to put it away. It weighs a ton and could probably fell an elephant.