the new and unexpected thing i discovered about my sister the other day, while i was telling her on the phone about how i had panfried ocean trout fillets with crispy salted skin, and made an enormous amount of buttery mash to go with, out of three mole-sized golden delight potatoes, and put together a large bowl of buttered and lightly salted steamed greens (broccoli, zucchini, peas and cabbage) to round it off… is that she does not care for buttered vegetables.

huh.

“but, green vegetables,” i explained, “with butter.”

“yeeeaaah… eh,” she confirmed.

tchk.

but the other thing i know she doesn’t so much care for, because she told me so maybe last year, is leftover pasta. like, not sauced or anything. just that extra tangle of noodles you find in the strainer at the end of dinner, because you can never judge how much dry pasta to put in the pot, because who knows how much a handful of dry pasta will expand in a body of rapidly boiling water.

well. probably jamie oliver knows.

do you like jamie oliver? i am still not sure. his food always looks delicious, but his tv persona is so tiresome. and even then, just that smartarse, jumping-about-the-kitchen, slightly spluttery cooking show persona, mind. the other jamie, the reality tv jamie, to whom bad things happen, is altogether much more likeable. i could not not watch “jamie’s kitchen”, or “school dinners” or, most recently, “jamie’s kichen australia”… which didn’t have so much jamie in it actually, and certainly not quite enough tobie.

i do not own any jamie oliver cookbooks, but when i recently came into possession of a 50% off voucher…

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…i was convinced i would have to finally buy “jamie’s dinners“, which i look at every now and again in a bookshop. apart from being a lively collection of fun typography and intensely colourful pictures, it is also full of the sort of food i make / would make. but standing in front of the wall of cookbooks, it occurred to me that since i already make this sort of food, i didn’t need to get a whole book on the subject. nevermind. perhaps i would get “jamie’s italy” instead. it was right there on the shelf, and i had not been able to not watch the tv show, and i really like italian food.

and then i remembered that i could not get any more cookbooks ever, least of all an italian one, because nellie had only the other week sent me, via amazon.de, “made in italy“, a weighty tome by giorgio locatelli. it is an engrossing read, this one, not just a stack of recipes, but a mix of history and culture and photographs of noble butchers and their meats.

so instead, the kid got that maisy book that folds out to become a 3D paper playhouse with a cut-out maisy doll and a closet full of paper clothes.

i tell you lots of stories! but there is a point, see. in the fridge, i had a box of leftover fettucine, which i had oiled to keep from clumping before i stored it. yesterday, lunchtime, the cold noodles separated agreeably to be tossed with a beaten egg, some finely-grated cheese, pepper and salt. i put oil in a frypan; i fried three rounds of noodle fritters. golden crunchy carbs, with salty cheesy bits and peppery bits, and brown crunchy bits where a stray noodle sat too long in a bit of oil. fried up cold pasta, who’d’ve thought. i saw this, in a jamie oliver cookbook.

and the locatelli? it has a whole chapter on gelato, but chapter risotto came in very handy last night, when i finally decided that i could probably omit the wine in the recipe to not so much detriment. (giorgio locatelli would probably disagree because every one of his risotto recipes called for a glass, but.) plus, i really needed to use up that expired arborio rice in the pantry, two huge tubs out of the many that my uncle swiped from his job at the rice company, more rice than he knew what to do with.

and i had sausages — chicken, rocket and tomato sausages. so sausage and pea risotto, from the book. it was a lot of stirring in a hot kitchen on a hot evening, longer than the recipe hinted at, but for the first risotto, after years of being intimidated, it was awright.