Italian mashed potato

What is he on about? I mean Italian mashed potato has to be the same as the English variety, hasn’t it? Well, actually no, it’s not the same.

Italian mash goes by the rather exotic name of ‘Purè’. This does not mean that it contains the omnipresent tomato, it just means that Italian mash is much more liquid than the English version. Should be really, they liquidize it. It’s not bad.

We cheated this evening and made up a packet of the Italian equivalent of Smash (Does Smash still exist?) and served it with our veal steaks. Italy loves veal or ‘vitello’ in the local lingo, which also means ‘calf’, incidentally. This country is not a great place for vegetarians, which is no problem for me because I like meat.

The Argentinean steaks we get from the local GS supermarket are absolutely wonderful. If you like meat that is. Funnily enough my little son seems to prefer vegetables to meat. Whereas I hated peas and green beans, he laps them up. I cook them in the same water as the pasta, at the same time.

I don’t add salt to the water, just drop a piece of ‘brodo’ in there (oxo cube to you in the UK) and this gives the vegetables a more interesting flavour. Shame that my mum never thought of this method. Vegetable seem to be cooked in much more imaginative ways here than back in the UK.

Peas, for example are cooked with little cubes of ‘pancetta affumicata’ – smokey bacon. Now, I never really liked peas before I came here, but I love them now.

A quick word about smokey bacon while I’m sort of on the subject. It is difficult to find rashers of the stuff here. You can get large pieces of it, as it is before it gets sliced and put under the plastic wrapping in UK supermarkets, I suppose. It is possible to ask you local cold meat counter at the supermarket to use the same slicing machine as they use for slicing cooked ham, prosciutto cotto and bresaola etc, to prepare you a few slices of this smoked bacon, although getting them to do it at the right thickness can be tough. Puts your Italian through its paces, I can tell you. However, some places, well, to be honest, one place, our local GS, actually refused to even attempt to prepare any rashers for me. It was against shop policy or so they said.

Maybe at some point in the future I will add a list of shops which will prepare rashers of good old smokey bacon for those that desire this to this blog. Still, it’s not often that I get a hankering for smokey bacon, plenty of other stuff here to tingle those tastebuds.