Q&A with Francesca Giovannini. Other people's pantries
Q&A with Francesca Giovannini. Other people's pantries
Francesca Giovannini and her essential van pantry | Cooking ciambotta, a Summer vegetable stew, in her van kitchen
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Other people’s pantries is a series of Q&A with a focus on pantries as a privileged way to get into people’s lives, cooking styles, and favourite recipes. It is also an opportunity to chat with professionals I admire, and with friends with whom I have shared an important part of my personal and professional growth. You can read all the previous interviews here.
About a month ago Francesca arrived in the late afternoon with her van. We’ve been Social media friends for years, but this was the first time we had the chance to meet in real life. She was traveling through Italy with her van to promote her latest cookbook, Cucina on the Road. It’s a collection of easy recipes packed with flavour that could be easily reproduced while traveling with a van.
She had a brilliant idea: what if you move a food writer or recipe developer from her comfort zone and her well equipped kitchen and ask her to cook one of her recipes in a minimal van kitchen? When she sent me the first email I immediately took on the challenge. You can watch the whole YouTube series on her channel.
I learnt so much from this experience: when you have an itty bitty living space as a kitchen, every movement counts, just as the sequence of your actions, the way you’ll be washing vegetables (don’t throw the water, you can use it to soak pans later), and the way you’ll cut your ingredients.
We had also the chance to talk about the way to stock up a pantry in a van compared to the way we usually do at home, and from that conversation came the idea for today’s newsletter.
Read till the end, where you’ll find the video (in Italian but with English subtitles) of out get together, and you’ll also see me cooking a recipe from Cucina Povera in her van!
Follow Francesca on Instagram: @thebluebirdkitchen
on her YouTube channel: The Bluebird Kitchen
and on her websites, where she shares her recipes (in Italian): www.thebluebirdkitchen.com
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Ciao Francesca, can you briefly introduce yourself?
Hello everyone, my name is Francesca and I live in Varese, a small town bordering Switzerland and surrounded by lakes. I live with my husband, a cat, a dog, two chickens and a mute duck. It is now 9 years since I started my blog "The Bluebird Kitchen," it was born as a pastime to fight boredom and to be able to cultivate my passion for cooking in a whole new way but now, for the past three years, it has turned into my full-time job.
Where are you from? Are there different regional food traditions in your family?
I was born in Como but grew up in Varese. My whole family has Tuscan origins (from the Lucca area) however my mom grew up in Colombia while my dad always traveled a lot because of his career in the Navy first and his job later. Let's say that I come from a family that has never been strongly tied to Italian regional traditions; my grandmother goes with great ease from making panzanella with unsalted pane to Colombian coconut rice.
What is your relationship with the pantry? and what has been the role of the pantry in your family?
Let's say that as my approach to food and cooking has evolved, so has the pantry. Years ago I would have told you that it always had to be crammed with whatever because "you never know”. Today, instead, I have reduced the pantry to the essentials: I have a few things, but I know them very well, I can use them to their maximum extent, and therefore they allow me to create the most varied dishes, even when at first sight there would seem to be almost nothing. Over time I have managed to create for myself a kind of "capsule pantry" few things but well selected and that can allow me to create "the magic". In my family, on the other hand, the pantry has never played such an important role, not being very fond of cooking in general, even though there you could always find the essentials. One thing, however, that was always full and very rich was the fruit bowl on the table. Fruit was never lacking and it was one of the features that always struck everyone when they entered the kitchen of the house where I grew up.
What is the one ingredient that just cannot be missing from your ideal pantry?
Chickpea flour, for me is really a wild card ingredient. I am a vegetarian whose diet leans more on the vegan side, so for me chickpea flour is a key ingredient. A little bit of vegetables, a few spices, some chickpea flour, and in no time you have fritters, a chickpea cake baked in pan, a batter for frying vegetables, or even some sweet pancakes.
If you had to describe your pantry in one word, what would it be?
Essential (although sometimes it would be more apt to say "messy." :-) ).
You often travel with a van. How is your pantry different at home and on your van?
It's not that different, let's just say it becomes even more essential for space reasons. Traveling in the van was very helpful for me to really understand what I considered a must-have ingredient. If at home I can occasionally afford to add more novelties at once, in the van it's more difficult and most importantly, before one ingredient is completely finished, you don't buy another one.
Where do you like to shop for your basic ingredients at home? and when you’re traveling with your van?
It depends a lot on the season and the type of product. I am also a very practical person, so a lot of things I buy from large retailers. Then if I'm looking for something a little more particular, then I go to maybe smaller, more specialized stores or bulk. Then in the summer I'm lucky enough to be able to source vegetables directly from my garden, and that for me is the best market. When I travel, however, I like to go to places where the locals do their shopping as well, and for each country it's a different way of buying food. That's one of the aspects I love the most, trying to get to know a place also from the belly of its inhabitants, especially in terms of their daily life, which is quite different from eating out. Just as in Italian families you don't always eat what you get in restaurants, so it happens elsewhere. Being able to see where they buy their food, in what format (large packages, small packages, loose, packed in what material) , what products are most present (single ingredients, ready-made meals, semi-finished products), what weight they give to vegetables rather than pantry products, how many animal products are found compared to vegetable products, are all clues that give you a little more insight into the eating habits of a place, and this is something that fascinates me a lot.
Is there a recipe that makes you feel instantly at home, whenever in the world you’re cooking?
Focaccia, it's that flavour that immediately brings me home.
Which is your favourite recipe to make with pantry ingredients?
Tomato risotto, is one of the most underrated recipes in the world but if, done right, with good peeled tomatoes, good rice and whipped with almond butter, it will amaze you with its flavour. Here, when I make it in the summer I also add another ingredient that I love, which is not pantry friendly but makes it really amazing: eggplant pulp cooked for a long time, whole and then blended, a small leaf of fresh basil, some raw extra virgin olive oil and I am happy.
[You can find Francesca’s recipe for risotto al pomodoro here, and my recipe for roasted tomato risotto here in the blog archive]
And now, let's talk about your latest cookbook, Cucina on the road. Ricette con pochi ingredienti, in poco spazio, zero sprechi. How did you get tot he idea of the book? Cooking in the van changed your approach to food?
The idea came to me because it has been 15 years now that I, together with my husband, have been traveling in vans, we even started living together 11 years ago in a van, and in that time I have accumulated some experience in cooking in not too easy conditions (we have always had very small vans where you had to cook either outside with a small camping stove or inside, but sitting down) and since this way of traveling is becoming more and more popular now, I thought it would be nice to collect my experience and some of my favourite recipes in a book. To me, cooking in that context taught me a lot, especially in terms of managing resources, which in a van are limited, in simplifying many processes by streamlining them while still maintaining the same end result by simply being ingenious and really understanding what utensils and ingredients are essential within a kitchen.
Read more about Francesca’s book here (in Italian).
The recipe we made together: CIAMBOTTA, Summer vegetable stew from Cucina Povera
Think of ciambotta as the Southern Italian cousin of France’s ratatouille. It’s a vegetable stew of peasant origins that puts summer bounty to good use. Zucchini, bell peppers, tomatoes, onions, eggplants, and potatoes: one by one, you add the cut-up vegetables to the pot according to their cooking time and simmer until they’re all tender but still hold their shape.
To make this dish on a van, with a limited use of gas and space, I reduced the quantities and cut vegetables into smaller dices, thus speeding up the cooking process. I ended up poaching two eggs in the stew, and serving it with a few slices of my sourdough bread. It was a lovely lunch!
If you have the book Cucina Povera, you’ll find the original recipe on page 54.
After coming back from our road trip...in our westfalia van..., I was delighted to read this post. The tiny space and cooking area are definitely a challenge so I am looking forward to trying the recipe and hopefully with vegetables from a local farmer’s market.
I just made a variation of ciambotta tonight. My mom made it with zucchini, potatoes, onions, tomato and peppers. We love this dish.