Feels like winter. Chocolate and chickpeas then.

First off...

thirty steps to chocolate connoisseurship, from the Guardian. Scroll down about a third of the way to hit the thirty steps.

I cooked up a wintry chickpea soup today, to cope with the terrible weather. This one is taken from "Made in Italy", and adapted slightly to my pantry.

To make the base, you'll need, a chopped stalk of celery, a sprig of Rosemary, some sage leaves, 2 bay leaves, and about 250g of chickpeas. If dried, soak them overnight and drain, if canned, wash thoroughly before use. 4 cloves of garlic, crushed.

Put everything in a pot, cover with about twice the amount of water as chickpeas, splash in a little olive oil, and bring to the boil. Cover and simmer for 45 minutes. Fish out the herbs, remove the chickpeas, and reserve the cooking water. There's no need to add salt at present.

Next, you will need about 150g of chopped pancetta (you can use streaky bacon if you are stuck, I used my home cured bacon), another stalk of finely chopped celery, and two finely chopped onions - 1 red. Heat up a skillet, add some extra-virgin olive oil, and gently fry off all of the above until they are soft. Should take 5-10 minutes. Add about two thirds of the chickpeas to this mix, and blitz them in a food processor until they are finely ground. Add the reserved cooking water to get the consistency you need - I added about 200ml to get a fairly thick soup.

To finish - fry off some small cubes of pancetta until golden brown. Chop up some rosemary and sage. Reheat the soup mix, and taste and adjust for seasoning. It should be quite salty already, from the pancetta. and plate it. Sprinkle with the cubed pancetta, the reserved chickpeas, and the herbs. Generously drizzle with olive oil. Grind some pepper. Serve with a plain bread, and olive oil on the side.

An authentic taste of Northern Italy, and a soup hearty enough to ward off the winter chill. Food for the soul, eh?

Sorry about the formatting. I have learned to hate blogger.

And thanks to Laura over at eat drink live. Check out her well formatted and photographed soup for a fantastic borlotti bean recipe.

Kim-chi restaurant

To the left is one of four starters from Dublins Kim Chi Restaurant. Located at the top of Parnell street, and recommended to me as an authentic taste of Korean cuisine, we chose it as a late night venue for a fond farewell to a work colleague.

The starter pictured is the rainbow roll, Korean style sushi comprising eel, prawn, salmon and tuna sushi rolls, with a dab of wasabi, and soy sauce on the side. The tastes cut through our drunken palates, cleanly, and crisply. The unexpected and gently building heat of wasabi combining terrifically with the pleasant purity of the sushi tastes.

We also had (pictured right) a starter of blocks of rice, daubed with wasabi, and a butterflied prawn, topped with roast, shredded sweet potato, with a side of pickled ginger and wasabi. The prawn had quite an amazing texture, fleshy and firm, and an unusually intact taste. The shredded sweet potato was addictively sweet, and the ginger the perfect side to cleanse the palate for another uncomplicated taste of simplicity.

This starter was a similar dish, but without the sweet potato, and topped with eel and salmon, to be dipped in soy sauce, and wasabi, and followed by a slice of pickled ginger to cleanse the palate. A fantastic introduction, accompanied by complimentary soup in small cups. And the aesthetic effect of these finely balanced, well put together, quite minimalist plates was startling.

As we moved on to main courses, I entirely lost track of what we ordered. It was, after all, a farewell party. For my own main, I ordered the Bulgogi, a beef dish marinated in soy sauce, pear puree, sesame oil, and a host of other ingredients, and served with a side of freshly washed lettuce, still wet, some boiled rice, and some fermented soybean paste.

The trick is to spoon the beef mix into the leaf, then some rice, and finally spoon over some paste, and wrap the concoction up in the fresh leaf, then eat. Quite an interesting and divine leaf, each flavour distinct and somewhat separate, but working together fantastically to counterpoint one another. And the freshly washed leaf brought a texture and fresh taste that was absolutely perfect.

We also had a 7 shot bottle of sake, warm, and two other starters, for the princely sum of €115, including tip. An amazing price for a truly memorable meal. The service was exemplary, with staff genuinely happy, it seemed to our beer soaked selves, to explain any queries we had about authenticity, recommendations, and pronunciation. Tables have buzzers to summon service, and food arrived in perfectly staggered stages. An amazing price for what I am told is an authentic taste of Korean cuisine.

Add to this the general ambience, where, on Parnell street, the melting pot of Dublin, the bar and restaurant was populated by pleasantly drunken Koreans, Irish, Poles, Germans, co-existing quite happily in a chilled out, beer fueled slow and comfortable gorge, and you have a truly memorable experience, which restored my optimism in both our culinary scene, and Irelands current experiment with multicultural identity.

On the downside, the restaurant is tiny, and is part of a larger and noisier bar, which also shares the seating space, so the ambience is distinctly informal. That was fine for our crowd, but it is not a fine dining venue. The seating is quite cramped, and again utterly informal, closer to bar seating than restaurant, and the tables are far too small to easily support the massive amounts of food the kitchen will effortlessly usher out and into your life.

These are not really complaints, though, just qualifications. It is an informal place. Pick up some beers, soak in the food, the tastes, the smiles, and the sounds - it also triples as a music venues - and feel rejuvenated. Its good for the soul. I may well become a regular.

Kimchi (also known as the Hop House). At the top of Parnell street. Enter and enjoy. (sorry, no phone number - they appear to be unlisted.)

Made in Italy

"It is true that man does not live on bread alone;
he must eat something with it"

Pellegrino Artusi

I just picked up a copy of Made in Italy by Giorgio Locatelli. The quote is taken from the antipasti section. And it gives an authentic taste of Locatelli's take on food, and on life.

The main bulk of the book is a collection of stories, techniques, anecdotes and culinary thoughts, which are interspersed with recipes.

The formal recipe writing and instruction is clear, well thought out, and detailed. And the techniques he covers, for making bread, pesto, fresh pasta, are clear and detailed. The pasta description is the best I've yet read, on how to use a machine to press perfect pasta.

His perfectionist nature comes across quite well.

He pays the same attention to detail in his instructions that he expects a good chef to pay in their recipes. And the instructions have the feeling of being born of use and experience. Its restaurant quality food made perfectly accessible to the home cook, with the added twist of excellence that can only come from a Michelin starred chef. I have had more revelatory moments, in this book alone, about Italian dishes, both the classics, and the effortlessly perfect re-interpretations Locatelli provides.

The description about how he makes what must be the most perfect pesto outside Liguria is frankly stunning.

It is, for me, so far, the book of Italian cuisine. More informative about basic techique than the Silver Spoon. More broadly ranging than any of Carluccios books.

The bulk of the book, though, is anecdote. Around which recipes, techniques, and the almost inbuilt understanding of food in Italian life, are wrapped. About his grandmothers kitchen, and garden, about the family restaurant, about his families home garden, his travels and experiences in France and London, all tinged with a genuine and inherited love for his topic. The stories are wrapped around food, around recipes, around tastes and experiences. The ingredients punctuate the books stories. The ingredients are the very stuff of the book. They are the rhythm of the story, and the thing to which all Locatellis stories, recipes, tastes and feelings return.

Locatelli writes in such an unassuming fashion. The brash ego of some food writers is largely absent. Instead, he writes with genuine affection and gratitude about the people, the food, the

ingredients, and the experiences that seem to have all fed into the sense of conviviality with which he infuses his food, his writing, his chefs and his restaurant.

For 30 euros, it's a snip. Any lover of Italian food simply must have it.