Last nights dinner

After a full day of shopping, cleaning and cooking an unmistakable flu (headache, stomachache and feeling hot and cold at the same time) hit me. I nearly collapsed in the supermarket and I had to drag myself into the kitchen to prepare a three course meal for my love and his mum.

Fortunately, and this is how it usually works, as soon as my hands touched the pots and pans I could sort of start to forget about the sickness and put my mind to a more fun occupation.

I had a menu in mind which looked like this:

-scacciata di manzo con finferli e rucola

-Risotto with fennel, ricotta and peperoncino

-very rich and heavy chocolate cake

We had a Pinot Grigio with that from Lamberti.

The first two recipes are from my new cookbook 'Il mio giro d'Italia' by Jamie Oliver. My love gave me one for my birthday in Italian, which has two advantages; 1)I learn Italian though reading a cookbook, for me the best and most fun way. 2)All the ingredients are written in Italian which means I don't have to translate anything when I go to the market.

The cake was from Nigella's 'Nigella bites'. I wanted to make a real cakey cake; heavy, big and almost birthday worthy.

I started with rolling out the steak with the pin roller which wasn't as easy as I thought, the cling-film kept moving in the wrong directions, but finally I got some very nice thing slices of meat which I drizzled with a very good olive oil, rosemary and garlic. It smelled amazing already...

Then there was a little problem with the cake as it had these beautiful cracks in the middle which made it fall apart as I was putting it together with the icing, I let is rest in a cool space and after a while I could paste it back together and no one ever knew. I suppose the cake was still al little warm which made the icing melt. I dressed it with almond shavings which I roasted to get some colour on them and it looked...yes almost birthday worthy!

The risotto is something I will be making a lot more of. The sweet of the fennel with the soft ricotta, the tangy lemon zest( my all time favourite thing) and the hot peperoncino is a heavenly combination. Luckily I still have half a pan left for lunch...