.. here to say I am going to the kitchen, we say " I go home" because in this room we spend all the time home, when we weren't outside working or home sleeping. Everybody likes to stay home and food was cooked while we chatted around having found any excuse to stay..

For a well done meal you have to prepare…		My wife recipes
		Appetisers
		Pasta
		Second Entrance dishes
		Chicchi

Appetisers

Courgettes a Buglione
My wife takes an onion, chops it very thin then adds mashed garlic, and then she fries them on extravergin olive oil. Made that, she puts dices of courgettes into it. If the courgettes are too big you should take out the inner part, which would became a mashed pap and put into the frying pan only the outside, the thick skin of the courgettes, which is the tastier one. When it is in the middle of the frying she adds fresh tomatoes in chopped and peeled pieces. When the courgettes are ready you eat them as they are but also when they get cold, especially in the hot season. Buglione means they are mixed and mashed together: if you want you can add potatoes and sage leaves. But I like them without anything else.

Tuscany Mixed Appetiser
We use to eat as appetiser all those good food which once upon a time was eaten as companatico, that means eaten "con pane", with bread. You should arrange a nice tray or some decorated plates of uncooked appetisers called Tuscany Appetisers to distinguish them from those cooked, which are more modern. This more traditional one consists of all those products of our land put in a nice way. You should put on each plate a slice of salame, ham, finocchiona or capocollo sausage. Then it is required some black crostino (round slice of bread, a croµton, with animal inner parts paté) but you can also do without it, then olives and sottoli. If you like to have a copious appetiser you can add some pieces of pecorino cheese, fresh or matured. Bring some bread a good red wine and we can start to eat!

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Pasta

The Bread soup and the ribollita (lit. re- boiled)
Put a mollo, as to say into the water for a night half KGs of dried butter beans. Then you cook them until they are softened so that you can mash them by the passatutto (lit. allmash). My wife puts into the beans' pot all the vegetables already chopped: carrots, celery, cavolella that is cabbage, parcel leaves, if you had black cabbage too and some beet. Quantities are according to tastes and how many vegetables are available. Then in a frying pan make a soffritto, a fried sauce, of extravergin olive oil, onion and garlic. Onion must be chopped accurately and garlic has to be crashed and at the end of the frying it has to be taken off. When the onion gets a golden skin, let rest the fried sauce and after few minutes add it to the beans' pot. Boil all together until it gets thicker: if it is too much thicker the vegetables take longer to boil, if it is less thickly they will take less time. It is necessary to mix often the soup because butter beans are really dangerous: they became easily sticky. When everything is cooked, you add just a bit of salt and zenzero, as to say red chilly, which in my home has always been used. We take the peppers from the plants and make them dry. If you prefer you can add few tomatoes, possibly fresh pieces otherwise the conserva, the home made tomatoes sauce. You can add it while the soup is boiling, but also before or after. After a couple of hours it should be ready. Then slice some old bread, put the slices at the bottom of the bowl and add the soup onto it. If you make a good quantity it should remain some more, so that you can leave the rest on a pan, add a bit of oil and re boiled all. This would be another dish called ribollita. While it is boiling, be careful that it doesn't become sticky.
But, if at the bottom of the pan it makes a light crust, that is very tasty!

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Second Entrance dishes

Damp rabbit
First you make the pasted sauce, called battuto, mixing and mashing together all the smells, the spices: celery, onion and garlic, carrot and parcel, as it is required without exceed, and, if you like, two three leaves of sage: chop all very thin. Before we used a carving knife called by its shape half moon, but nowadays we all use the food processor, though the smells get lost a bit. You fry the battuto into a lot of extravergin olive oil. It would be better to make it the night before or some hours before, then it should be put around the rabbit meat already chopped and cleaned, together with salt and black pepper, so that it gets tastier. Then you can put everything into the frying extravergin olieve oil or at least put the battuto into it. Then add some pieces of meat and let them fry for a while, that means they should became golden outside. My wife then adds some wine, red or white. When the wine is gone, that means is boiled and evaporated, she adds tomatoes and lets it cook. You can add fresh or sauce tomatoes or also fresh chopped tomatoes. If you would like to make damp rabbit to dress the pasta then you should add a lot of tomatoes or the concentrato tomatoes (tomato purée). Tomato purée today is sold in tubes (like the tooth past) but before we were used to make it home: cooked and mashed tomatoes (used to make the tomato sauce called pomarola) strain them by a cloth. If the tomato pulp is still too soft, then you put it onto some long wooden board under the sun to dry. When it was ready you would have add a lot of salt to preserve it and you would have put it into glass boxes, to use it when it was necessary (to dress a pasta or to add to a damp dish). When the rabbit dressed with this sauce is ready, put out the meat with some sauce and add the pasta just drained to be dressed at the bottom of the frying pan.
This is the way to make all the dishes in damp.

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I chicchi

Cavallucci Biscuits
When we were close to Christmas the housewife used to prepare the cavallucci (lit. 'little horses') which are just like small cooked pieces of bread with walnuts and candies into it. To made it you needs 200 grams of water, 600 grams of sugar, 900 grams of flour, 300 grams of walnuts and candies, a bit of anise seeds, spices, four spoons of sweet's ammonia, a spoon of vanilla sugar and a slice of orange skin. This is the old housewife's recipe: if you use it a lot of cavallucci will came out. Usually I use half dose.
Put the water with the sugar into a pot to boil. After a while you can add the candies and the chopped walnuts and make it boil again. Then you should add the ammonia and turn off the fire. You should be careful with your eyes, while you add the ammonia, and that it should completely melt into the water. Then you can add slowly big spoons of the flour, so that half of the full quantity should nicely melt without lumps. Of the other half of the flour you should make a small mountain with a hole in the middle where to put the just made cream. Then you can make a soft dough collecting together all the flour and from it you can make some little rounded balls. Put them into the oven at 150° for almost fifteen, twenty minutes. If some balls are left you should cook them within the same day otherwise the dough will become too hard. If the balls are already very hard when you put them into the oven, never mind, however: the hot temperature should soften them and they should cook nicely. When the cavallucci are still hot they are very soft, but after a while, cold, they become hard and you could keep them for year.

Weight Pasta
You take six eggs and weight them. Here we say eggs are just like heresies, there are bigger ones and smaller ones. According to their weight you add the same quantity of flour and sugar: for instance if they weight three hectograms then you should add three hectograms of flour and sugar. When she has made the cream, my wife adds the presa, the rising flour pocket, and she puts it into the oven for one hour at 180° Celsius. Since I remember the rising flour has always been in pockets, so that the pocket has become the right measure. This is a simple sweet, but for us it was already a privilege to have it and we used to eat it, as it was, in Easter holidays along with a drop of vinsanto. Today we are glutton so we eat it only if filled with chocolate, vanilla cream or any other creams.

Oily Ciambellone (cake)
We made ciambellone also with extravergin olive oil and sugar: 350 or 400grams flour (the one common here is the "0" flour which was the only one available, but nowadays one can put half flour and half potatoes' flour), four eggs, a glass of milk, a glass of oil, a juice of lemon (called the agro, the bitter), and a rising flour pocket dose, called presa (the quantity contained in one hand). When we put it on a wooden oven, it hadn't the temperature clock to see if it was hot enough. Then we put a newspaper's page into the oven for ten minutes. They say the colour of the newspaper's page would have been that of the cake. If the newspaper would become black, this meant that the oven it was too hot and it required to be left to loose heath for a while otherwise the cake would be burnt. The newspaper's page would become of a golden brown colour, then this meant that it was all right and you could put into it the ciambellone. There it should have been kept fifty minutes without opening the oven: once opened the oven would have loose its temperature. Today ovens can cook for an hour at 180° Celsius according to the oven capacity.

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