Benvenuti! Welcome! Thank you for your generosity in supporting my work in so many ways: by sharing your cooking experiences here and my stories with others, by becoming paid subscribers, with your heart-warming praise. I love your company ♡!
A bite of summer: how to make canned roasted cherry tomatoes, recipe at the end of this post
The no name salad
I have just spent an idyllic week at a beach hotel South of Rome. The place is gorgeous, set in a green bay lapped by gentle waves. The garden is graced by Bougainvilleas in bloom. There’s a light breeze that feels like a miracle after Rome’s brutal summer. I can’t stop gazing at that blue.
This is our first vacation since winter 2020, and it’s been perfect, except for one thing.
The salad.
For the entire week we have been subjected to the insalatona. In Italian, the name simply means “large salad”. However, an insalatona is most often made of limp iceberg lettuce, pale tomatoes, olives that have seen better times, rubbery bits of mozzarella, insipid tuna and, a scant drizzle of dubious olive oil.
You can find insalatona on the counter of every salad bar, most fast food joints and even the Ikea’s canteen. Amusingly, Ikea names it “Italian salad” in its menu.
The cunning of the hotel’s chef is such that the insalatona finds its way in most lunch dishes: stuffed in a baguette sandwich, as a topping of focaccia, rolled up in a sheet of mozzarella like a savory Swiss roll. No matter, the ingredients are so mediocre that my taste buds want to go on holidays somewhere else. Every version tastes of nothing.
Chef Cunning also has adapted the combination to create a pasta sauce. Clearly, he needs to use the leftovers for dinner. We are relieved to discover that breakfast is tuna free.
Muddled up
Why, in a country which is famous for the unparalleled quality of its fruit and vegetable, restaurants insists in serving so many uninteresting vegetable dishes? On top of lack of ideas, such dishes are muddled up without skills, quality ingredients, respect of seasonality and, flavor balance. No wonder people resist vegetables.
Tasty vegetables to cook this month
In your travels here, I truly hope you have not encountered the insalatona. Italy possesses a millenary tradition of exquisite plant-based foods, and I sincerely hope that you have had the opportunity to explore them.
The panzanella salad above, for example, is a world away from the Italian salad of Ikea. You will find it right now all over Central Italy, and it’s easy to reproduce it at home.
How to make it tasty? Please, don’t compromise on ingredients. Don’t shortcut the preparation. Use good crusty bread, ripe tomatoes, really fresh cucumbers and/or fresh crispy Romaine lettuce. Marinade the tomatoes for at least 30 min with salt, your best olive oil and finely chopped spring onion or scallions.
A great salad is all in the details, every element must be assembled with care and served before the mixture becomes soggy.
As I tell to almost all participants to my cooking classes, don’t transform every salad into a garbage salad. No-waste is honorable, muddling up is sinful.
Rolls of heaven
No need to heat up the kitchen, sweet pepper roast beautifully in a covered cast iron pan on the stove-top, without oil
Sweet peppers are at their peak right now in Italy, crispy, juicy and full of flavor. I buy them at the market in bulk, roast them on the stove-top using a cast iron pan, peel, and freeze them flat in batches as in the image below.
Freeze peppers whole, open on one side so they lay flat. Cut them after defrosting into the desired size and shape
Our absolutely favorite vegetarian dinner of summer is the pepper involtini for which I stuff the roasted peppers with garlicky bread crumbs, mozzarella, basil, and tomato sauce. I top the rolls with additional tomato sauce and a sprinkle of Parmigiano and bake early in the day when it’s not too hot. They are great at room temperature or barely re-warmed in the microwave.
Using the same recipe, I make the rolls with grilled eggplant slices for another delightful vegetarian main.
Eggplant rolls ready for baking
For a fabulous side dish you can’t go wrong with my classic balsamic peppers which are great for any summer party as they can be easily made a day in advance and served cool, just out of the fridge. They are so delicious that my friend Carol makes them since she joined one of our classes in 2003, a fact that never cease to delight!
Too many tomatoes
A few days before going on holidays, my favorite vendor decided to fill my cart with a huge amount of stunning cherry tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and anything that could fit. He then charged me only a handful of Euro as sign of gratitude for helping him to go home early.
Back home I fell into a sort of panic as my fridge is small, the freezer even smaller. What I was going to do with almost 4 kg (9 lbs) of cherry tomato?
Luckily, my lovely friend Giulia and world-level canning master at Locanda della Valle nuova had a brilliant suggestion: preserved roasted tomatoes!
The recipe is super simple and requires hardly any attendance: ….
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to MADONNA DEL PIATTO to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
