On the Menu This Evening

 I cook a lot, most of the days for the lunch and for the evening. So that's two times a day. I always use fresh ingredients, and I can say that I don't eat ready made meals. Unless not on a holiday or somewhere outside. I know a lot of people are too busy or too tired to cook, or they just prefer to use their time in other ways, all my respect for those ones. After all every one has to choose how to spend their time.

Cooking with the fresh seasonal ingredients means that I go food shopping almost every day. In Bari we have lots of little specialized shops for fish, meat, vegetables and fruit, bread and so on. We live in the city centre and I actually have all these little shops literally just around the corner, so this is another reason why it's possible to use so much fresh ingredients in cooking on daily bases.

In Bari we eat lots of white fish which has been delivered from the fisher men to the shops early in the morning. It's useless trying to sell an old fish for a South Italian. Trust me. They recognise the freshness by the smell, the hardness of the fish and finally in the taste. The salmon in the picture comes from further away and is probably not as fresh as the cods and sea breams in the picture. As a Finnish I have graving for salmon every now and then and I just must have it. I cook it in the oven, add just a bit of salt, then I boil some potatoes and feel like at home. Yum yum.

These are just few examples of a large range of fish and sea food we enjoy here.

Then there's the cheese. I actually didn't eat much cheese before moving to Italy. I didn't like mozzarella, or that gum like white ball they sell in supermarkets in Finland. Here the taste is so different. I eat almost daily fresh mozzarella and other fresh cheese which also arrive from the farms not long after being produced. They do not contain any preservatives and that's why they're so much healthier than the ones that are packed and send to supermarkets all around the world.

This evening I'm planing to cook spaghetti with fresh spinach and ricotta cheese and for the second main course fillets of sea breams cooked in fresh tomato and garlic sauce. So lets get on with it ! Enjoy your evenings everyone !