Recipe; simple fresh napoli

Here's a little pasta dish I whipped up with mum's tomatoes, this sort of sauce to me is the height of italian cooking; really simple, fresh and you can taste all the individual flavours. I like to emulsify some oil in at the end, it adds a really creamy taste and helps the sauce cling to the pasta; the oil emulsifies because of the flour leeching out of the pasta in the cooking liquor. So here we go, hope you enjoy;

1 Clove of garlic, minced

4 fresh tomatoes, de-seeded and diced

1 small onion, fine diced

1 handfull of italian parsley, chiffonade

dash of olive oil

salt and pepper

good quality pasta

parmisan cheese

1. bring large pot of salted water to boil (water should have the taste of the ocean)

2. saute onions in a little oil, season, after one minute add garlic; cook until soft then add diced tomatoes

3. add pasta to boiling water in a spiral, holding pasta flat and twisting hand as you drop (do not use olive oil, it is just an old wives tale and a waste)

4. cook tomatoes until soft and mushy but still holding shape, take off heat

5. strain the pasta when al dente reserving 4 tbs of the cooking liquor

6. put tomato back on heat and add pasta liquor, bring to boil

7. take off heat and emulsify with 3 tbs olive oil (slowly drop olive oil in while shaking the pan), add parsley

8.toss pasta with sauce, place in bowls and shave parmesan on top

Rode down to the park for a picnic with Gemma today, champagne and pecorino in the rain, took the opportunity to pick some mushrooms. With all the rain in the last few days the ground was teeming with beautiful fungi, got three kilos of pines but the slippery jacks are a little too small; have to wait a few days for those fellas.

When I got home for a big cook up, recipes soon, mum came over with a big bag of heirloom tomatoes. Reckon I'll have the dryer running overtime this week.

Here I am popping out of my technological bubble and writing my first blog, and this is difficult, I haven't written a word in years. So where to start? Maybe I should tell you that this is the sort of thing I was supposed to start six months ago when I fist came to Ballarat. One of the things that got me excited about leaving the city was learning where the food that we all take for granted came from. But then I slowly forgot about that, until, riding through the park at the start of this week, i came across a very small patch of saffron milk caps.

So what was it that got me so excited about that first patch of mushrooms? It was that this beautiful produce came straight from the ground I live on. Like the wild blackberries, found in a local back-street, above.