I have eaten some darn good food since I arrived in Milan. I’ve dined in rustic restaurants so homely that you feel like your eating dinner in someone’s living room, and I’ve eaten in cafes with such good bread that you feel like your eating in, well, a  cafe. But a good cafe. Though despite any culinary excursions I may have made, the best food remains that which I have a casa; the dishes di Rosie.

Rosie is the phillipino housemaid here. Yes, you move countries and some things don’t change… namely rich people keeping phillipinos in their residence. She calls me il maestro (di Giuseppe), which I love. But I spend most of my day chatting with her so our relationship is becoming more informal and thus she calls me Sam more often, which I hate. She is not only who I am currently learning my cooking from, but my Italian also. Phillipinos learning Italian, and Englishs learning Italian off philipinos, it’s a modern world truly.

She is a fantastic cook, and I decided to share the recipe for the photo above as I feel this dish best encapsulates her style of cooking. I know the photo doesn’t look very appealing at all, but my food photography will hopefully improve. Additionally it was a hasty photo; one feels slightly uncomfortable getting out a camera and taking a picture of the pasta at your employer’s dinner table. Nonetheless, I loved this dish and ate the rest of that whole plate. What I love in particular is that the ingredients for this meal are always in my kitchen, yet I never would’ve thought of combining them.

Ginger, spring onions, zucchinis, mozarella, garlic, pasta and that vegetable stock powder. That’s it, and it tasted so delicious. I’d never had ginger or spring onions (scallions) with pasta before, but I really recommend it, and apparently using spring onions instead of onions is quite common in Italy.  The recipe goes something like this:

For 500g pasta: finely chop 1/2 inch cube of ginger, 1 or 2 big spring onions, and 2 cloves of garlic. Put a decent amount of good olive oil in a pan and fry on low heat. Add 2 very finely sliced zucchinis a few minutes later then add a table spoon of vegetable stock powder once the juices start to appear. Cook for 15 minutes or so. Add the cooked pasta and some mozarella, mix well, salt and a good amount of pepper, and eat!

So there’s the first recipe! It’s really exciting for me, to have learned something new and to have shared it. It makes me believe that this trip could just work…