Girth and gluttony

Sigh, fiends, I feel so thoroughly ungainly these days.  I can no longer get out of a chair without making noises that ought to be reserved for old people.  And my blood pressure has suddenly shot up for the first time in my life, so I can't bend down without the blood rushing scarily through my ears.  That and heavy breathing.  Shortage of breath is one of the less appealing aspects of preggerville...  and one that is exacerbated considerably for shorties like me by lack of availalable torso space (there's really very little room for my lungs now that my uterus is the size of a watermelon).  Hence I'm spending my days in this most elegant of cities lugging my girth around in sensible fit-flop boots and huffing and puffing over bridges...  whilst Italian ladies of killer heelage skip by unfazed.  I have become a member of the slow zone... argh!
 
Yesterday I woke up feeling like a partially deflated hot air balloon being kept barely aloft by the breath of an asthmatic pensioner.  But, dear god, the light and sunshine outside was so utterly beautiful and dazzling that it would have been a crime to feed my tiredness with a duvet day.  Hence we spent the afternoon on a ludicrously long walk covering an entire circuit of Venice.  Albeit in rather slow motion...
  
By the time we got home I was so tired I couldn't even convince my fingers to hold a pen to do the Times Crossword.  But I snapped out of it and proceeded to spend the next 3 hours in our sunny kitchen making revelatory Italian food "like mama used to make".
 
Cooking has been a lot of fun for me this week.  Those who know me well will be aware that I am a fair weather cook at best - and G is chief chef in our relationship.  So for me to be cooking dinner each evening has been a novelty for both of us.  G and I follow rather different styles in cooking.  He is brilliant at anything involving refinement and complexity and especially good at eastern cuisine, whereas I tend to favour a more rustic, one-pot, peasant style of cooking or, at the other end of the scale, artistic, frou-frou sweet things.  As a result I tend to limit myself to mediterranean food whereas G reigns supreme in all things spicy and exotic.  Also, as is the proper way of MAN, he also makes the best roasties and breakfasts in the world and has been treating me to pancakes all week.
  
Anyway my culinary playfulness this week has come about because I found a dog-eared book in the apartment.  It's a delightfully unsophisticated cookery book from 1986, written for the American market by a Venetian matron called Marcella Hazan, and covering Italian food in the traditional style.  I think she may be the Italian version of Delia.  And - who would have thunk it -  but it turns out, fiends, that if you buy fresh Italian ingredients each day and cook them the way that an Italian mama tells you to, you end up with something absolutely gorgeous.  It's been an almost exclusively vegetarian week so far, with liberal use of porcini, fresh tomatoes, fennel, aubergines, spinach and all things parmiggiano.  And, despite the fact that I yelled at G "Life's too short to peel effing chick peas!", I would now like to retract that statement and say no - it really isn't.  The difference in the resulting texture and flavour of the dish is astounding.   No sulphur, no hard little bullets, just soft, melt-in-the-mouth peas that have soaked up all of the flavour of the soup in which they were cooked.
 
Well that's probably enough waffle from me.  I am still feeling like a sack of spuds, but really ought to get out and see what Venezia has to offer today.  If we can get a table tonight, I'd like to try and eat out at Osteria Assassini, a modest-looking eaterie just round the corner from our apartment that comes recommended by Angela Hartnett in The Times.

Hope all is going swimmingly in fiendland. 

See you next week!