Cooking with Oranges (Part 2): Citrus Pasta

For the past few days I have been cooking with products from Trepunti, an online shop owned by a Sicillian farmer. I shared my recipe for a dish prepared using Sicilian blood oranges and fennels, which were hardly an innovative combination. Neither does this one actually though I did make a slight change. 

Cooking with Oranges (Part 1): Baked Fish with Orange-Fennel Salad

Recently, a friend of mine referred me to Jennifer of Trepunti Sicily, a Hongkonger who ran a farm on the ground and also an import/export business bringing many of the Sicilian produces and food products to this part of the world. I learned a great deal more about the regional ingredients and cooking just by a quick chat and message exchanges with her, and she even arranged to have a goodie box available for me to pick up with some of the seasonal produce including many of the citrus fruits. 

A Little Bit Of This, A Little Bit Of That

We decided to host an ad hoc pre-Christmas dinner at our place with just a couple of days to prepare in advance, so we thought it’s a better idea to do a combination of takeaway dishes plus a few simple ones done at home so we have enough food on the table to feed six of us with much less hassle. 

Matsutake Kaiseki

When a friend of ours passed us a batch of freshly picked Matsutake mushrooms from Yunnan, I decided to turn that into a feast of mushrooms for six people, Iron-chef style. 

Seafood Recipe Part 2: Hake and Potatoes

I followed up with a rustic-style seafood main course using another pack sent by the purveyor Qwehli (see my previous post for the introduction). Hake is one of the fish species I love working with, for its firm texture and versatility, slightly richer than cod and leaner than black cod. One I received was caught wild off the Atlantic Coast off France and came in vacuumed and frozen pack of around 300g - good for 3-4 person.

Seafood Recipe Part 1 - Red Mullet Ceviche

I have to go back quite a few pages to see the last time I shared a recipe here – August 2018, to be exact. Not that I haven’t been cooking at home, just that I haven’t had much time to trace back the steps to create some of the dishes I have prepared. But when the team from the French seafood purveyor Qwehli offered to send me a few sample products to try recently, I thought I would share my experience with a couple simple recipes.