Author Archives: hungryenglishman

two-and-a-half ways with king trumpets – due ricette e mezzo per i funghi di ferla

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Today’s little beauty is Pleurotus eryngii. It apparently also goes under the aliases of king trumpet mushroom, French horn mushroom, king oyster mushroom, king brown mushroom, boletus of the steppes, and trumpet royale. More names than your average international fraudster. Mycologists, it would seem, are even more unable to agree than taxonomists, who as we have seen, are themselves a pretty litigious bunch. In Italian, it’s cardoncello, but for me it has always and only Continue Reading →

limoncello – lemon liqueur

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I remember my first, probably illegal, foray into liqueur production. Like many great discoveries, it happened by chance. A bottle of orange squash, barley water or something similar had slipped down behind the desk in my room at school and had lodged behind the radiator. When I came across it many weeks later, it smelt distinctly alcoholic, looked radioactive, and was probably poisonous, but it tasted pretty good, along the lines of Grand Marnier (OK, Continue Reading →

zuppa di fave – fava bean soup

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There’s something about autumn, with the nights drawing in, that makes me yearn for rustic food. Really rustic food, the sort of stuff I could imagine people eating in front of an open fire in some draughty cottage a couple of centuries ago. Yes, very Thomas Hardy, I know, very Woodlanders. Although if Thomas Hardy’s characters had eaten a bit more of today’s soup, maybe they wouldn’t have been so unbearably miserable the whole time. Continue Reading →

cardi gratinati – cardoon gratin

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You may be forgiven for thinking this is Unusual Vegetable Week, what with chayote followed by mustard greens, and now cardoons (carduni in Sicilian). It’s simply because autumn is when the market stalls are brimming with the new season’s produce, including quite a few local varieties not found widely outside Sicily. Anyway, back to our cardoons, which look like an untamed, grubby version of celery. Sort of celery with attitude, not least because the edges Continue Reading →

senape – mustard greens

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Look, I’m really sorry about this, and I wish I could promise it won’t happen again. Problem is, I’m sure it will. It’s all rather embarrassing, but we’ve got a mix-up with the names again. I at least take some comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one to get confused, that even the taxonomists are at a loss. They agree that we are talking about plants from the Brassicaceae family, but it’s Continue Reading →

zuppa di zucchina spinosa – chayote and potato soup

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Never heard of chayote before? Well, neither had I until today. That’s not to say I haven’t eaten it, though. You see, this is a vegetable (botanically speaking, a fruit) I discovered here in Sicily. “Chayote for dinner today, kids!” is not something I seem to remember my mother calling out, so for me it’s always only been zucchina spinosa. I’ve never needed to know what it’s called in English before now. If you want Continue Reading →

street food and markets, palermo

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The idea was to pop to Palermo for the morning and do the rounds of its three historic markets: Ballarò, il Capo and la Vucciria, eating my way through them, as I sampled the city’s renowned street food. And so it was, half asleep, that I tumbled out of the train after a three-hour journey, to the vibrant buzz of one of my favourite cities. This is Sicily at its most extreme, with breath-taking churches Continue Reading →