Massimo Bottura

After three days of bliss staying at L’Andana, a small hotel owned by the wonderful Alain Ducasse, situated near the little town of Grosseto in Tuscany, where I spent my time relaxing by the pool, reading, visiting an Eco-clever vineyard which uses gravity rather than pumps for carrying the wine through the maturation process, and dining at Trattoria Toscana, Ducasse’s only restaurant in Italy, where head-chef Christophe Martin conjured up some fabulous dishes with local produce, including an intense fish stew called Cacciucco, I didn’t think my holiday could get much better. It did.

A four-hour train journey later, aching after squatting on some tiny fold-down seats, we arrived in Modena, home to balsamic vinegar, Ferrari and Massimo Bottura. His home was like an art gallery with modern furniture and cool art, including a model rubbish bag which we embarrassingly mistook for a real one! Osteria Francescana, his Michelin-starred restaurant reflected Massimo’s love of art and music with both the room and the food.

It was the finest, most original, inventive, artistic, crazy, cool and amazing food I’ve ever tasted. Every dish was something to remember and treasure for the rest of my life. I’d like to try to describe some of my favourite dishes.

Raw prawns, lobster and citarri resting on a floor of ice looks and tastes great as it is, but as I broke through the ice bed and smoke of oyster juice engulfed the fish I really didn't know what to say. This was something completely different to anything I had experienced before.

This might look like an ordinary plate of pasta and fish, but the pasta was actually cooked as a risotto would be and the fish was almost raw, just slightly licked by a flame.

I seem to have a shared obsession with Massimo for ice, because I also really liked this dish. Mussel shells filled with a mussel jelly poked out of lemon ice like rabbit ears. The jelly had a fantastic flavour of the sea and the ice had a great fragrance.

I love clever food, and I thought this was really inventive, ingenious and artistic: the three stages of sweetcorn. From the green stem to a field full of bright yellow to burnt corn. Simple, but effective.

Now here's something unique - one day old parmesanm, deep fried. We had visited the parmesan production earlier in the day, which was really fascinatiing - we saw the new batch being turned over, the parmesan in salt water and the stacks of cheese lining the shelves. (Of course the best part was eating the finest parmesan made from the milk of a breed of white cows.)

Following the cheese trend, one of the dishes the Bottura is renowned for, the 5 textures and tastes of parmesan. Five different ages of parmesan were presented in five different ways. Most bizzarely and ironically, the 36 month was 'air', a kind of foam, which was rich in umami flavour. There was a 40 month wafer and an 18 month cream. Combined, and we begin to taste what Parmeggiano Reggiano is all about!

This was Massimo's take on a caesar salad, with different herbs and various mustard leaves as the base. Then drops of anchovy, cubes of jelly, crisps of parmesan, and, of course some balsamic!

This was the weirdest dish, and I'm still not sure whether I liked it. 'The potato who want to be a truffle'. This was a dessert, and a strange one at that. A sweet potato with vanilla, hazelnuts and black truffle. And I certainly agree with Massimo that it's very much a dish about optimism.

We also were extremely lucky to have the chance to visit the Balsamic vinegar museum. I learnt about the process of transferring the vinegar from barrel to barrel through different woods until it resulted in the deeply intense dark and viscous Balsamic vinegar that we know.

It was the most amazing foodie experience I could hope for, and I'd like to thank my mum, Massimo and his family, chefs and waiters for making it possible. Grazie e arrivederci!

Prince of Wales Pub

I've just spent a fabulous evening at The Prince of Wales Pub in Putney. POW (sounds like it's just come out of a comic!) had a wonderful atmosphere, topped with great food and charming service. Georgio, our Italian waiter, seemed pleased with my choice of Brie de Meaux on crispy bread with homemade half-dried grapes, followed by mozzarella, tomato confit, and basil lasagne. And I was too!

The cheese was delicious, especially as it was half melted, but I found that it slightly over-powered the delicate flavour of it's accompanying grapes.
I thought that the lasagne was also great. It is a very light version of a lasagne, which is an interestiing and clever idea, because the dish can often be too heavy. The combination of soft mozzarella and fresh basil is divine, and as a pasta lover, this was the perfect dish for me. I also couldn't help but try my mum's lobster and triple cooked chips. Beautifully cooked fish and crispy chips - just the way they should be.

I was really looking forward to dessert - a mango paradise. The presentation in all of the dishes was exeptional, especially this very modern looking not-your-average-pub-pudding. It didn't taste quite as amazing as I was hoping, but it was good. I thought that the jelly was especially nice (and the sugary blanket!).

It was, overall, a fantastic meal with a lively atmosphere and happy service. Just a few minutes walk from Putney station, Prince of Wales is a great place to go out for the evening, or if you don't feel like a full meal, then the bar snacks also sound delicious. http://www.princeofwalesputney.co.uk/

Asparagus tart and fresh salad

What with my mum having a fractured radial head and all, I've been forced to do more of the cooking, which has turned out to be rather enjoyable. Yesterday, we had a great lunch - a filo pastry tart with a layer of caramelised onions making a floor for crumbled goats cheese and asparagus spears. We got the idea from a similar tart from Deliverance food company, but of course our home-made version was better! It was also really simple to make - the only horribly time-consuming bit was having to delicately and diligently chop the onion into tiny bits.


And for dinner, we tried out a salad from Peter Gordan's Salad book, which was delicious. A bed of rocket with prawns, avocado and grapefruit and topped off with pickled ginger (which we forget to put on :/) It was light and refreshing, and fairly simple to make, other than segmenting the grapefruit, which I found thoroughly challenging!