What to Cook Tonight #45
Simple, joyful flavours of Southern Italy — a melt-in-your-mouth Zucchini Sugo, Roasted Fish Parcels with Chopped Caper Salsa, and a vibrant Sicilian Summer Salad.
Delicious summer flavours from southern Italy are well suited for languid days and the last flush of summer produce. When Rose was 6 and her brother Sean was 8, we spent a few months living near a small village called San Vito Lo Capo in western Sicily. Annabel was writing Savour Italy — a gorgeous book about Italian food, and Rose and Sean got to come along for the ride, while Ted held down the fort at home.
The south of Italy is hot and dry — the food culture is largely centered around resourcefulness, as necessitated by centuries of grinding poverty. Meat and cheese are used sparingly, nothing is wasted, olive oil and legumes are in abundance, and the bounty of vegetables are eaten when in season, and preserved for when they are not.
The lauded Mediterranean diet has numerous health and environmental benefits — high in fibre and olive oil, low in sugar and processed foods, it’s all about eating whole ingredients and making meals from scratch. The best way to make sure you’re eating healthy food is to make it yourself, a strategy that is much more affordable than dining out or getting takeaways.
With this in mind, our first recipe for you this week is for a gorgeous Zucchini Sugo. This is a truly miraculous recipe that costs next to nothing to make. You wouldn’t believe how much flavour you can coax out of the humble zucchini with a little olive oil, garlic, lemon zest, and time. Amazingly, you don’t need any cheese! Patience is key here — you want to cook the zucchinis right down until they are completely melting and tender.
There is something so satisfying about cooking something down to its essence, you get such a pure concentrated flavour, which creates this “aha moment” — aha, so this is what zucchini really tastes like, at its deepest core. This is also a great way to train your palate, and create a rich memory of flavours that you can draw from, like a library.
Then, when you are trying to figure out what you are going to cook with what you have at hand, you can go into this mental library to think about what flavours and textures you want to bring together. For both of us, this is a big part of how we cook and think about food. An endless source of entertainment and pleasure!
This is also why when we write these newsletters we focus on a season or region — by setting these parameters, we use produce and pantry staples that are readily available and can be used interchangeably across the three recipes. The flavours complement one another because they make sense — in southern Italy, there are lots of capers, tinned fish, tomatoes, chillies, and garlic. So this is what the pantry for the week looks like.
We hope that by sharing this knowledge with you, you will learn to be a more intuitive, confident cook, as well as understand how to cook in different food languages and landscapes all over the world. Of course, many delicious things can be made when you bring together unexpected ingredients… but let’s keep things simple for now.
Back to the pasta — you can easily halve the recipe if you’re cooking for one or two. The sugo also freezes well if you want to whip it out in the depths of winter for a burst of summer sunshine.
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