Janice Tripepi

A hearty welcome, to my new blog!  This is an incredibly exciting day for me and I am tickled pink with the way that it looks.  When I met with Joe, the young gun who bowed his head and did absolutely everything perfectly and magically produced exactly what  I asked of him and developed this beautiful blog for me, it took just 45 minutes to synergise my vision.    I knew exactly what I wanted my blog to look like from the mood, the theme and the general feel that I wished to portray to layout and functionality of the site.  Thanks to Joe and Dom for their incredible patience and for making this whole process loads of fun.

My home, my food and my family are a tightly woven Italian tapestry and it would be impossible to separate out any one of these for individual scrutiny.  We speak, love and live our food and culture and enjoy nothing more than a plate of pasta, a glass of vino and good chat around the dinner table at the end of a day.  So, my theme is Italy and every picture has a story to tell.  I shall be posting about each picture and matching it up with an appropriate Italian favorito!

My very first post, on the Food24 Letterdash forum was uploaded on the 16 September 2009 and 327 blog posts later, I have enjoyed every minute of blogging and look forward to sharing more new and exciting recipes on my new blog.  One of my recent adventures has got me thinking about modern Italian food and how the classics are in need of a little re-invention and in my case, Africanisation!

Now this approach is all well and good, but do remember that I have a house full of Italians, that should I stray too far from the time honoured, age old, Nonna approved recipes, and start throwing in bits of ginger and coriander Willy Nilly, they will start throwing hands and arms in the air and muttering many many Italian profanities!  So I shall try to fly under the radar and sneak in new flavours and without losing any limbs in the process.

So in the spirit of new beginnings I have created a budget (yes BUDGET) pasta dish and am using the star ingredient in a totally new way.  In Italy, pigs cheeks are known as ‘guanciale’ which one would pronounce (gwun-charlay), they are generally cured and smoked and used much like bacon/ pancetta would be used as a salty and smoky base flavour in a pasta dish.  I made enquiries with Dargle Valley Pork, the farm in the Natal Midlands that supplies me with hormone free/ free range pork and they happily supplied me with two beautiful pig cheeks at a cost of only R25, 00 for both.  Talk about reasonable!

Last weekend Durban was drenched for two days with torrential rain that just would not stop.  This is the kind of weather that fuels my cooking furnace so while hubby snuggled with Bubblz, Feenix and Tino-the-CLAW-Tripepi I got into the kitchen to play with my pork cheeks.

Triangoli di Guanciale

Triangular Pasta Pockets …. Triangoli Filled with Roasted Pork & Tomato Sauce

Seeing as this is my first blog post linked to my new blog Please click on the pic above, and hop along

over and check out the new base camp of my blog.  I would love to hear your comments and any suggestions you may have as to how I can improve your experience on my new blog mag.  I have all sorts of new pages that i will be introducing.

 I will continue to post here with my Food24 family, who are solely

responsible for getting me blogging back in 2009.

Thank You Caro and Cath for your ongoing support and encouragement may we continue

to go from strength to strength.

As always

Buon Appetito

jan

xx