White Almond Sicily

" To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything "  Wolfgang Von Goethe, 1787 Last month my husband and I celebrated our 25th Silver Wedding Anniversary. As we had to cancel our return home to Sicily this April due to the Covid_19 outbreak we decided to celebrate in the UK and booked a country hotel in Dorset and lunch at one of our favourite celebrity chefs, Rick Steins restaurant, with Daisy.  However as the pandemic worsened hotels and restaurants closed in the UK and we needed to make alternative plans. The next best thing was maybe a picnic somewhere fabulous. Painshill Park is an award winning 18th century landscaped garden in Cobham and is located about half an hours drive from us on the London-Surrey border. The gardens had been closed for social distancing reasons but luckily for us they reopened just in time for our anniversary and Painshill Park seemed like the perfect place for a romantic pi...

Sicily is an island steeped in history. The English have always had a love affair with Sicily and the island boasts a lot of British history but did you know that there was once an English Queen of Sicily? At school in England we were taught medieval history and in particular about the Norman conquests in England and Europe, also the Crusades and Holy wars. So when I first started visiting Sicily I already had a good knowledge of Norman rule and culture. History was my favourite subject and I passed my exam with flying colours. In 1066AD the Normans were busy invading England but what is not so well known is that they were also doing the same thing in sunny Sicily. The Norman conquest of Sicily was accomplished through a long and bloody warfare and the reign of Roger de Hauteville was a long succession of battles. By 1079 he had conquered the whole island and by his death in 1101 he was awarded with the title the Great Count of Sicily. After his death his son succeeded the th...

"Leave the Gun ... Take the Cannoli" Pete Clemenza, The Godfather Part I The Cannolo (singular) or Cannoli (plural) is one of Sicily's most popular Dolci (desserts) and was supposedly invented by the Arabs in the Harems of Caltanisetta. Cannolu in Sicilian dialect means little tube. Cannoli are made from crispy rolls of pastry which are deep fried around special metal tubes. They are then filled with sweetened ricotta and then decorated with candied fruits, pistachio nuts or chocolate and then dusted with icing sugar. Are you dribbling yet? First there is the crunch of the Cannolo shell as you bite into it and then the ricotta cream oozes into your mouth like a little piece of heaven. When I first tried Cannolo Siciliano I was told that I would never want to eat any other dessert. A cannolo really does have the "Wow" factor when you are served it. Cannoli were such a temptation and proved so seductive for the Benedictine monks that they spent a...