Only Recipes, by Alessandra Zecchini ©

I love nashi pears, pity that the season is short... mostly I eat them raw, cut into thin slices, but since I had quite a few I wanted to make a quick tart. This is too easy! I just used one sheet of ready rolled vegan puff pastry, then I peeled and cut 2 big nashi pears and placed the slices on top. I finished everything with a dusting of icing sugar and placed the tart in the oven until the edges of the tart were puffy and golden. As a final touch I sprayed the tart with some  grappa spray . Nashi are good for cooking and baking because they keep their shape and don't become brown! This I will make again, it was even better than an apple tart, which is saying a lot (for me!). Photos and Recipes by Alessandra Zecchini  ©

The original recipe (which was for a silver beet, not spinach, paneer) is  here , but I changed a few things, like adding celery, and more spices. Fist sauté with 2 tbsp of vegetable oil or ghee 1/2 tsp ground cumin, 1/2 tsp ground coriander, 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper and 1 tsp turmeric. Then add a couple of roughly chopped shallots, a good pinch of salt and finally 500 g chopped frozen spinach (defrosted at room temperature) and three celery stalks, with leaves. Add a little water too, about a cup, and simmer for 20 minutes. Then add 1 tsp garam masala, 1 tsp freshly grated ginger, and salt to taste. In the meantime cut a block of paneer and sauté until lightly golden on the borders (Vegan use tofu). Blend the spinach with an immersion blender, then add the paneer. This is my very favorite Indian dish!  Ah, and I made chapati too, the edges are not very smooth, but I was in a hurry! I used 1 cup wholemeal flour, mixed with 2 tbsp vegetable oil and then enoug...

Prawn cocktail is something I remember from the 80's when I was living in London, but I don't eat prawns, of course :-). But I eat celery, and when you cut celery stalks they have that 'c' shape a little like prawns. I also remember very well from working in a coffee shop in Oxford St where we made lots of prawn cocktails that the sauce was a simple mixture of mayonnaise and tomato ketchup! So I mixed my celery with that. I remember the cocktails in glasses, on slices of bread, or even in melons (yuk, not for me) but I think avocado works well here: just cut, remove the stone and sprinkle with lemon juice. And then fill with the celery mixture and top with freshly ground black pepper. This is so basic that I wasn't even sure if it was worth publishing, and yet sometimes the most simple things are the ones that some readers appreciate, especially when they are so quick, easy, and don't even require cooking. What do you think? ...

Almost cake-pops because they look like cake-pops, but they are not made from cake! In fact these are Cape Gooseberries (therefore I am calling them Cape-pops :-)), dipped in dark chocolate. I left some plain, while I rolled the others in shredded coconut, ground pistachio nuts, and  plum powder  (my new discovery, I talked about it already in  here ). I let them set first at room temperature and then, because it was a warm day, in the fridge. These are gluten free too! But more to come... I had melted far too much chocolate for the Cape gooseberries, so I made a pie which, I must say, came out better than I had anticipated. But sometimes new discoveries are born out of chance, or leftovers! I had a few sheets of filo pastry left, I placed them into a 23 cm pie dish lined with baking paper, leaving the corners to spill out. I peeled and cut four pears and placed the slices over the pastry, then drizzled the lot with Frangelico liqueur....

Usually I make soft polenta, I always preferred the soft type that you spoon into a plate and cover with a thick wild mushroom sauce or a stew, but memories are coming back of the type of polenta my Grandmother used to make in the North of Veneto: it was dense and stirred with a thick wooden stick in a gigantic pot over a wood fire, and then she pour the hot golden mass on a big wooden tray where it set hard in no time. She kept the polenta in the drawer of the kitchen table so you could get a slice at any time, and attached to the wooden tray there was a piece of string used to slice the polenta, so you didn't even need a knife. Cutting polenta with a string Of course I attached a string to my chopping board: I wanted to do the same as Grandma, and I hope that you will like the idea too. Serve the slices with your favorite casserole, or top with cheese and let it melt, and when the polenta is cold just grill the slices or fry t...