Tag: DIY

DIY aperitif, 30 perfect ideas to make at home – Italian Cuisine

Bruschetta, quiches, cocktails, fried food and sandwiches. The aperitif at home has never been so good!

What's better than waiting for sunset to toast the evening that is about to begin? Many times to do so we choose the wrong location for the aperitif and we find ourselves in drinking poorly prepared cocktails and eating soggy chips, leftover and charred wraps, possi pretzels and overcooked and unsalted pasta salads. And when it happens we thunder: "next time we do it at home"!

Password, vary!

But how? What to prepare to make the invited friends happy and not to do worse than the bar downstairs? We have collected 30 ideas including appetizers, cocktails, frittini, baked goodies, bruschetta, pretzels, sandwiches, omelettes and savory pies. The advice is to vary as much as possible by choosing perhaps two types of bruschetta, a sandwich, a savory pie and a fried, perhaps accompanied by a bit of sliced meats and cheeses and accompanied by homemade taralli following this recipe.

Something to drink

Here are the simple and tasty ones cocktail to serve a fresh and tasty aperitif: five thousand lire, bloody mary, santiago sour, romeo, alemanno fizz, monk, americano and fruit and vegetables. To prepare them, just carefully follow the indications on the proportions of the drinks to be mixed, it will be very easy!

Our recipes

As for the tastings for the aperitif, however, let yourself be inspired by these recipes: potato croquettes and cod, sea crouton with tuna and bottarga, Salted Plumcake, squash of courgettes, croutons with nduja, radishes and soncino, rustic corn pitta, wings stuffed with spicy sauce, omelette roll with feta cheese and courgette flowers, melon gazpacho with prawns, bloody mary, baguette with crab, oysters and green beans, ravioli with cheese, crostini with liver foam, churros with port sauce, sea kebabs and fennel cream, kalitsounia, cretan appetizer, Italian sushi, mini farinata with spicy sausage and endive, leek and goat tartlets, carrot blinis with scamorza cheese, ham and rocket, tuna and spring onion mousse with olive croutons, courgette flowers in beer batter and creamy robiola and small carriages of courgette with onion sauce.

30 ideas for making an aperitif at home

DIY games from the past to keep children entertained at home – Italian Cuisine

Our advice on DIY games of the past that you can do at home to entertain or spend time with your children during the Quarantine: from the 70s top to a more complex but exciting treasure hunt

In this period of sanitary emergency and lockdown, one of the most common problems in Italian families concerns the closure of schools and the difficulty of having to manage children at home. With the intensification of routine household activities and the work obligations of parents, that of keeping children busy, alternating learning moments with others of leisure, has become a real challenge. If the toys available, the readings, the audiobooks, the drawing and maybe some healthy activities to be carried out on the balcony in the open air are not enough, you can resort to some DIY games of the past. Here are some ideas from different past eras. These are simple but cheerful ideas which, in addition to entertaining the children, allow them to transmit their values and habits of the past as well as the educational concept that you can have fun even with few means and a little imagination.

The figures with the rope

Let's start with a game popular in the 70s, a period in which a few colored balls, a bit of rope, an elastic band and a few other economic and household means were enough to spend time. Precisely in this era some historical pastimes were born, including hide and seek, tug of war, bell, a two three star, flag-stealer. A game called was very common among indoor games figures with rope, Or a very easy game for two, which today's grandparents certainly remember. To recreate it, you only need fifty centimeters of fine twine, even the kitchen one can be fine. The two challengers can place themselves in front of each other and, in turn, must weave the string between their fingers trying to create figures of any kind, for example a fish, a candy. The same game, done with the ecstatic and then widespread in many parts of the world, it is called Cat's Cradle or cradle of the cat.
For both, today's children can play with their siblings or parents, and if they live at home with their grandparents, let them tell you about it.

The top

Another legacy of the 70s is a game that we all know, or the spinning top. This toy can be easily made at home using recycled materials. In fact, a wooden skewer or pencil, sheets of paper or colored cardstock (also the one for pasta packs), scissors and glue or adhesive tape are enough to create a beautiful and functional top. The children, with the help of a coaster or a compass, can make a circle of paper quite often, color it to taste and then insert the skewer exactly in the center. To fix the top of the top, simply attach a plastic ball or a 1 cent coin to the tip of the stick. A fun idea can be to create comic or cartoon characters, colored patterns or educational on the card Newton's disc.

Origami

Many of the toys of the past had not only the advantage, as we have seen, of being created at home with poor materials, but also that of developing the manual skills and ingenuity of children. They are a perfect example of this paper origami, a fun pastime that requires only a few sheets of paper, perhaps colored, and some time. Among the great classics are theairplane and the small boat, but also more interactive and complex games such asorigami hell and paradise also called fortune teller or magic square. To build it, just take a sheet of A4 paper, fold it along the diagonals, take the corners and fold them internally until you have a square, then turn and repeat the same operation. Once folded, first in one direction and then in another, you're done! At this point you can decorate the sides of the origami with numbers and write something in the corresponding paper wedge. Parents can insert general answers, but also mathematical or general knowledge riddles and, of course, play together with their children. Fun for the whole family is guaranteed!

Camping inside the house

In this period, being forced within the walls of the home can have many repercussions on mood, including that of children. To give them a smile, a little bit of pri: the "camping inside the house". In the past, in fact, a little fabric, recycled materials and a little imagination were enough to build a camping tent, a small house or a fort in the living room or bedroom. An example of a do it yourself solution, in this sense, that is simple to implement is that of Indian hut. To build it, in fact, you can use three-five wooden sticks or broom handles to give life to the base of the tent, a rope to fix them and finally an old sheet or a blanket to cover the whole. To make the structure stable, you can also use clothespins, adhesive tape or nails, while to decorate the interior you can add rugs, cushions and Christmas lights. As an alternative to the Indian hut, and depending on what material you have at home, you can build one real cottage; in this case you can resort to a box, lifting and gluing the upper part so as to create the roof or, more simply, you can cover a table with an old sheet, in which to carve doors and windows. Finally, you can add decorative elements made with pannolenci, fabric or cardboard, and, of course, let children make a creative contribution to the project.

The treasure hunt

For creative parents, however, it may be interesting to brush up on a game from the past that can be a little more laborious at an organizational level, but that can be even more compelling. For those who did not remember the rules, the players were divided into two teams that, thanks to a series of scattered clues to guess containing instructions for discovering the next stage, had to get to find a mysterious object that consisted of the final prize. There home version and "lockdown" of the treasure hunt it can be thought of as a race between siblings or an adventurous challenge for just one child. For clues you may want to consider including some skill or memory test as well as some question or riddle concerning specific knowledge or subjects. The prize may perhaps consist of a sweet treat, a homemade toy or any other object that could represent a moment of joy and a small conquest. Of course, you can also choose to organize one treasure hunt that follows a themefor example that of pirates for boys and that of fairies or princesses for girls.

Whatever the chosen activity, the ideal is always to involve children in all stages of implementation, allowing them to make a significant artisan and creative contribution to the project and to feel useful and important. In the same way, parents and relatives can accompany the moment of the game to that of the sharing stories about one's childhood, so as to intrigue children and grandchildren and pass on what were their DIY pastimes.

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over half of families choose DIY dessert – Italian Cuisine

The particular situation of this Easter 2020 region by region: with Italians who rediscover the pleasure of making traditional desserts at home

The lockdown made us rediscover the taste of kneading bread and pizzas, proposing traditional recipes and baking cakes and biscuits. So, for Easter, more than half of households – 53% – will experiment with the homemade preparation of typical regional sweets, as emerges from the Coldiretti / Ixè survey presented on the occasion of the reopening of the Campagna Amica farmers market in Rome.

Making festive dishes at home has become (or returned to being) a rewarding activity, both for men and women, who in this way manage to release some tension and the stress of social isolation that the coronavirus emergency forced everyone.

This is demonstrated by the products with which, in the last five weeks, the Italians have filled their shopping carts: they are Flour purchases doubled (+ 100%) and brewer's yeast (+ 73%), but also sales of sugar (43%) and eggs (40%) increased, while for packaged ones, chocolate, purchases fell by 30-40 %). It is estimated that this week will be more than 400 million eggs of hens painted by hand to decorate houses and tables set or used in traditional Easter recipes.

The typical Easter cakes, region by region

In Piedmont they taste the Pope's salami, made of chocolate, and the tira, loaves to dip in milk or sweet wine. In Liguria Easter canestrelli are prepared, woven baskets of shortcrust pastry, which in the center or on the edges are decorated with colored eggs. There Lombardy it is the region of the classic Easter dove, made with flour, butter, eggs, sugar and candied orange peel, with an almond glaze. In Trentino Alto Adige there are the Easter wreath, a leavened sweet braid, and the fochaz-osterbrot, a flat bread made from wheat flour, generally in the shape of a bunny. The Friuli is the region of the pincer, a rounded loaf on which a cross is engraved, while in Veneto the traditional Easter cake is called fugassa and is a soft pan prepared with eggs, butter and sugar. In Val d'Aosta flantse or flantson are prepared, flattened rye breads, usually round in shape, to which were added a little sugar, maybe a little butter, raisins, almonds and candied fruit. L'Emilia offers the bensòne, an oval-shaped dessert, with plum jam and black cherry filling. But also the dove of Pavullo, a village in the Emilian Apennines, a cake prepared with four sheets of leavened dough and stuffed with savòr, a compote of cooked grape and fruit must, pine nuts and raisins. In Tuscany there is the Pisan Schiacciata, sweet aniseed bread to accompany with Vin Santo, while in Umbria the ciaramicola, prepared with alchermes, meringue and colored sugars. In Abruzzo you can taste horses and pupae, biscuits made with shortcrust pastry enriched with a boiled egg, while in Lazio triumphs the sweet pizza, in the shape of a very fragrant and very tasty panettone. The Easter pine cone is typical of Ciociaria: it is a dessert with raisins, candied fruit, vanilla, cinnamon, anise, with the aromas and scents of candied fruit with orange and lemon and a hint of liqueur. In Marche Easter donuts are served, biscuits made according to an ancient recipe: the dough is prepared on Good Friday and then cooked on Easter day. In Molise pine cone, a donut made from flour and eggs, is served while in Basilicata there are the pannarelle, in the shape of a braid or heart, with an egg in the center to remember a basket full of sweets for children. There Calabria proposes cuckoos, made with a sweetened bread dough enriched with a few drops of anise and lemon zest. In Campania the pastiera triumphs while in Puglia prepare the scarcelle, shortbread biscuits with sugar, flour, eggs, oil, lemon zest, but also the panzerotti. In Sardinia the typical Easter sweets are pardulas, made with cheese or ricotta and aranzada nugoresa, orange peel threads slowly cooked in honey and enriched with toasted almonds. There Sicily presents the egg cuddura, a dough similar to a shortcrust pastry, which contains whole boiled eggs and is decorated with colored sugars.