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Showing posts with the label FOOD - book review

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Seville

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SEVILLE Sevilla After living up to some wonderful moments at Granada, the birthplace of the renowned Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, we decided to further our coadventure through the heartland of the southern Iberian Peninsula, composed of lowlands, mountains and valleys. You’ve got it right. To arrive at Seville, we traversed the fascinating Spanish heartland. The landscape presented some vistas composed of rustic plains, lowlands, winding roads through the Sierra and then vast stretches of olive orchards. About 200 years back, a couple of decades after Napoleon’s army plundered and destroyed parts of Alhambra, an American diplomat and writer, Washington Irving and his Russian counterpart traversed the path from Seville to Granada. It was highly adventurous then, because of the fact that the transport system at that time was horse-drawn carriages and muleteers. It was such that they could ‘wander among the romantic mountains of Andalusia’ (Tales of Alhamb...

RISOTTO WITH NETTLES - A Review

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Risotto with Nettles by Anna Del Conte (Published by VINTAGE BOOKS , London) RISOTTO Born in Milan in 1925, the author grew up in Italy. When world war II came to Italy her family had to abandon  their  spacious house in Milan and move to the countryside to avoid the ravages of war. Though this book, as the title suggests, is about Italian food, Anna takes the reader on a narrative that begins from her early childhood and schooling in fascist Italy under Mussolini's reign all the way till her family settles in in England at the end of the war. Along the way, there are breathtaking stories of near-death experiences during the war, vivid descriptions of war-ravaged towns and cities, and bombing raids. Through it all, she still manages to pull your focus towards the food - from her childhood memories of delicious home-cooked meals, to her own coming-of-age as a culinary expert. The end of each chapter features a recipe that comes out of the story preceding it....