Amaretti di Palma

I love looking through Nonna's recipe scrap book (and it's definitely a scrap book).  Lots of little bits of paper with cryptic recipes, written in that distinctive handwriting, some English words mixed in with dialect and 'proper' Italian.

It brings back memories of Italian school, learning about those special action words you only find in recipes. "Sbattere!"

The best part is seeing all the different names of aunties, cousins, and mysterious strangers pop up on the recipes they've shared with Nonna.

We made Zia Palma's amaretti, and I sincerely believe that crushing the almonds through the sauce/salami maker is what makes them taste so wonderfully good.

Paste Secche (Almond Bread/Biscotti)

It's the name that confuses me!

Half of the phone conversation was spent trying to describe the next thing I wanted to make with Nonna. "You know, those biscuits with the almonds in them?  They were really crunchy?  And thin?"
It turns out that there are a lot of different types of crunchy Italian biscuits containing almonds.
"You sometimes have them in your cupboard!"  That wasn't a useful statement either!

Finally a light bulb went on somewhere.
"Paste Secche! You want to make past secche.  Almond bread."

This is what happens when you grow up in a bilingual family which uses a Southern Italian dialect and then decides you only get to learn proper Italian.  Which is different, by the way, from the language my grandparents speak.

Or maybe I just never caught the name of the thin, crunchy almond biscuits I used to eat at an alarming rate.  They are so thin you see, you can eat about 17 at once.

And now the best part is that I know they are almost as easy to make as they are to eat - four ingredients, two trips into the oven, and a very sharp knife.

Fennel Biscuits

One of my earliest memories of Nonna's baking involves a crunchy biscuit, shaped like a fish, full of sharp-tasting fennel seeds.

We called them fennel biscuits or 'biscotti con finocchio'.

I get the feeling that fennel biscuits come from a very ancient recipe which has been adapted all throughout Italy for generations (maybe I'm speculating).

Today, some of the family still living in Italy run their own biscuit factory which sells fennel biscuits of course. Nonna remembers the time when all fennel biscuits were handmade and served at weddings with a glass of homemade wine.

When I was diagnosed with a wheat intolerance at the age of eight, fennel biscuits were off the diet (boohoo!).

But I re-discovered them again this year.

My stomach lets me eat wheat again now, so I asked Nonna if we could make another batch of fennel biscuits for the cookbook.

When I bit into my first fennel biscuit of the last 13 years, the crunch brought me right back to where I'd left off - but I have to be careful... these things are addictive!