Tortino di Piselli

Prologue
This is our entry for the Is My Blog Burning? event, which every month calls food bloggers from around the world to write a recipe on the same day based on a common theme. The gracious host this time round is My Latest Supper, and the theme is "Is my blog taboo? aka you are what you don't eat" - basically food that you hate to eat. Well, Katia grabbed this chance to express yet once more her never-ending hatred of cooked peas... Ronald wishes to make it clear that he likes cooked peas and has nothing against them... he can only apologise to cooked peas and cooked pea-lovers the world round for this comprehensive deconstruction of their loveliness...

Why I hate cooked peas... by Katia

Please note I hate cooked peas, not wonderfully and perfectly round fresh peas - and this is precisely what makes this a long story of love and hate. As long as I can remember I have always liked fresh uncooked peas straight from the pod, but give them to me even slightly cooked and they turn into the most unattractive food ever. I do not like the way that lively green changes, I do not like the smashed look, the smell is terrible and, above all, I cannot stand the taste. So a comprehensive huge taboo food for me - just right for this event then!

I have always wondered why should we go to such efforts to ruin something so good ? Do we really need to cook everything mother nature gave us? Luckily, as a child I was never forced to eat them by my parents. But these things just crop up everywhere. Try to explain to a waiter in a chinese restaurant in the UK that you want your special fried rice without the peas. Why, why do they add peas to our fantastic Sicilian arancini? Worse of all of course is that having lived for a few years in Venice where one of the most famous regional dish is Risi e Bisi, rice with peas, I was often trapped as a guest in a house with this terrible dish in front of me. Out of respect to the host, I have always eaten them in these circumstances. Each time I could only confirm how much I hate them. So for an IMBB on food you hate, this was the obvious choice.

Needless to say that I buy only fresh peas in the pod. I have never bought the frozen ones or ever cooked them. So in this case I admit to have cheated a little since the idea and most of the execution was done by my mother, Carla, who had fun cooking peas for me for the first time. "Never say never!" she commented amused.

For the recipe for two people you need:

500 gr. Fresh or frozen peas
2 large spring onions
1 egg
Fresh ricotta
Freshly grated Caciocavallo Ragusano (as much as you would like)
Salt and Pepper

We cooked the peas in little hot olive oil with sliced spring anions, with a pinch of salt and pepper. We mixed a beaten egg with approximately 5 spoons of ricotta and grated caciocavallo Ragusano, then we folded in about 250 gr. of peas and arranged the final mixture into cake tins.

These were then put in the oven at 180 degrees for 20-25 minutes.

Just to make things as bad as they can possibly be we then smashed the remaining peas with some olive oil. Finally, we put the tortino on a dish with smashed peas.

Needless to say the rest of the family loved it. I. naturally, hated it...