Katie Caldesi's Diary of Italian Living, Food & Culture.

Truffles seem to take over whatever they come into contact with. However my mind has now turned to pumpkins and how to use them in different ways. Unlike the truffle, apart from being sweet they seem to marry well with whatever you put with them. Last night I took a couple of dark orange small pumpkins that we picked up at Marylebone Farmer’s market. From some of the segments that had been roasted with whole garlic cloves in their skins, extra-virgin olive oil, salt and pepper I made a warm salad. I cut up the flesh and mixed it with Tallegio - a lovely strong blue cheese from Italy - some freshly cracked walnuts and some salad leaves. Then I gently tossed the whole lot with French walnut oil, salt and pepper. I put some shavings of Parmesan on the top for a little extra saltiness and enjoyed it with a glass of Villa Antinori’s Toscana 2005.

With the rest of the pumpkin I made a sformato. This is something that really doesn’t translate but is somewhere between a mousse, souffle and a baked puree. The recipe for Carrot Sformato is in our book and you can adapt the recipe to make courgette, spinach, almost any kind of vegetable sformato.

I mixed the pumpkin flesh, mashed, with bechamel - a well flavoured one with lots of nutmeg, salt and pepper and the the milk was infused with onion and a bay leaf - and a handful of grated Parmesan, followed by two lightly whipped egg whites.? The mixture is then poured into a small lasagna dish and topped with small flecks of butter and some more grated Parmesan.? It is then baked at around 180oC for about 20-25 minutes. The result is a creamy light sformato that I would say goes really well with meat stews, chicken or even some baked fish. It is quite sweet however so next time I might mix half carrot and half pumpkin. Giancarlo suggested I do half a courgette sformato in one layer and then top it with the pumpkin so the result would be stunning.

Today I am making roast pumpkin soup and into it I will crumble some truffle cheese, it’ll melt and release the flavour of truffle into the sweet warm pumpkin, umm, I’m hungry already and it not even 7am!

If you have children like mine who wont keep out of the kitchen when you are trying to cook, involve them. Mine scraped the seeds out of the pumpkins, cracked and whipped the egg whites, drizzle over the oil and are always happy to break up the garlic cloves. They’ll do most things now and fascinated in what I am cooking and what everything is. Giorgio came back from school yesterday saying he made a jam sandwich, not sure what that was all about but I wish it had been a bit more interesting than a jam sandwich. I could have given them hundreds of ideas for cooking with kids. He did say they are growing some broad beans so that’s a start. Now he thinks we are going to have broad bean sandwiches in a week’s time!