For all you foodies out there, here's a simple pasta recipe that's a perfect treat for summertime. For those of you not into cooking you'll probably just think I'm weird and if you're someone who thinks a tomato is just a round red fruit that always looks and tastes more or less the same, you might not want to read any further as soon I'll be harping on like a rabid tv chef about the virtues of one round red fruit over another round red fruit. See what I mean?

This recipe is so basic that you need to insist on the very highest quality of produce, the main ingredient in this case being tomatoes. If it's hot where you live right now, a farmer near you is growing them the old fashioned way without chemicals and pesticides and that's who you want to be getting them from. Here in France as in other Mediterrenean countries local markets are surviving under the evil glare of supermarket neons and only there (in the process supporting sustainable farming) are you guaranteed to find great tasting locally grown fruit and veg.

I only ever do this dish in the Summer months when I can go and pick vegetables from my own garden. (One step even better than the local farmers market.) It seems a little absurd to say it but in our age of convenience where anything can be obtained at any time of year, Summer is the only real time we should be eating fresh tomatoes. At any other time of year in comparison they just don't have any taste.
Here in southern France where the sun is beating down from the high point of its arc, it is the perfect moment to savour them in abundance,
a time when they both look and taste as they should do.

Now I won't pass up the chance of showing off about the fact that i'll be doing this recipe with my very  own organic tomatoes lovingly grown from seed on my vegetable patch here at home. I think every gardener who grows his own lives under the impression that his own produce tastes best but really if it were possible to taste from a photo, you'd believe me. You can't buy tomatoes like this anywhere!
One of the advantages, as any one who grows their own will testify, is that the vegetables and fruit are picked at the optimum point of ripeness when they are bursting with flavour. Even if I were selling these tomatoes at a market nearby, I'd have to pick them at least a couple of days sooner to make sure they didn't get damaged. Imagine then at what point mass produced vegetables and fruit are picked at before they are flown all over the world and stocked in supermarkets not to mention all the chemicals that are used to grow them and keep them disease free.

Ok enough preaching! Let's get on with the recipe.
All you need then are some home grown or locally grown, preferably organic, tomatoes, a large bunch of basil, a couple of cloves of garlic, extra virgin olive oil and some short pasta like farfalle, rigatoni or penne rigate, I recommend the brand De Cecco or ideally if you can find it the best pasta asciutta around called Garofalo made in Naples. Basically the recipe is so simple that anywhere your ingredients are not up to scratch you lose out, for example in this case, the olive oil is crucial. I'm lucky in this respect as my brother makes his own oil in Puglia in the south of Italy and so I get my forty litres of  oil from him at the end of every year.

In the original version of this recipe you can chop bite sized chunks of mozzarella into the bowl once the pasta is cooked but being a self confessed Mozzarella snob, outside of Italy even the regular cow's milk mozzarella (fior di latte) is hard to find with any real flavour or quality let alone the Mozzarella di Bufala which I wouldn't recommend eating unless you're lucky enough to find it very very fresh. So given we don't live in Italy I make a vegan version without cheese and it's fantastic too.



Serves 4 people:

500g of pasta (penne or farfalle etc)
1-1.5 kg of fresh tomatoes
2 good sized cloves of garlic
A generous bunch of fresh basil
5 tablespoons of extra virgin oilive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
(for those who like a little chilli, you can chop  a little either fresh or dried very finely into the mix)


This dish can be prepared in the time it takes to cook the pasta so while the water is boiling, chop the tomatoes roughly and put them into a large bowl  with the olive oil then chop the garlic very finely and add to the tomatoes, finally chop the basil in and stir.



Make sure the pasta is nicely undercooked or al dente, overcooked pasta will ruin this dish. When done drain the pasta completely of water, and add to the bowl stiring until each piece of pasta is coated with the chopped tomatoes, basil and garlicky oil. I recommend eating the dish warm rather than hot so you can wait a few minutes before eating. when serving, stir again to make sure each helping has enough sauce. Buon Apetito!

We recently played a show in Nancy in France and as we were soundchecking my road mnager Pierrot asked me if it was ok if a photographer by the name of David Verlet could do an interview after we'd finished. So once the customary grind of checking levels and frequencies and hushing humming monitors was done with, we sat down for a brief chat during which I did my best to pull something interesting to say outside of the usual hatful of platitudes and cliches that make up the majority of interviews. A task made easier in this case by some good questions. He said he'd be at the show to take some pictures and judging from the quality of our conversation, I got the feeling he'd have something to look at once the gig was done.

Sure enough, I was blown away by his work, the difference between his work and the usual snaps one sees of concerts is that this man has ideas, he doesn't just take action pictures! He thinks before pulling the trigger!
I'll let you judge for yourselves.
P

                 

Parallel Body is Dom Gabrielli's second book of poetry published by Ziggurat Books. Within this new collection of  poems, you will find a few discreet drawings of mine. These drawings as well as the front and back cover illustrations are taken from sketchbooks that I produced in my early twenties. Although initially I wanted to produce something new to go with the poems, we found that these drawings produced on lined notebooks using carbon paper to draw through provided a perfect foil for the poems.

Dom Gabrielli's voice is the voice of a true poet, one that has been carved over the years out of emptiness. It is the song of one who has stared silence in the face in order to discover what it is to have a voice.

It is this voice that calls, moans and sings throughout the book, holding invisible mirrors up to life in order to catch what reflections should fall.

Dom Gabrielli will be doing a reading from his new book on the 29th March 7pm at Shakespeare & Company, 37 rue de la Bucherie, Paris 75005. I will be accompanying him on guitar during some of the poems. Hope to see you there, come early if you want to get a good seat!

Piers
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Parallel+body+by+dom+gabrielli&x=19&y=23

http://www.myspace.com/domgabrielli
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poem 3

words can sing now
words from so far
motionless
in a moment of you

moments wish to leave
beg to depart
to live their own lives as bridges
between our crystal skins

smile another smile

every poem
is a moment
trying to escape time

kiss my poem
and your skin will
come alive







poem 15

you lost her
in your arms
her final heartbeat
was yours
you turned to the desert
not the sea
your poem
began that day
your parched throat was hers
in a sea without water
your thirst for her
for her hand
for her lips
for her bosom
waves in your verse singing
for her who was still you
in the desert alone
you would always be together
you called her back
line after line
you begged
the wounded earth in labour
to bring her back
your voice
calling to the elements
calling each tear with a new name
all names were hers
your voice
hers to call
to unite thirst with thirst
and live on in song

The harsh winter cold will soon be coming to an end. The days are getting longer, the buds on the plants and trees are beginning to swell and the sap is slowly releasing itself from the throes of seasonal sleep. On an afternoon under the warm southern sun where the onset of spring seems tantalisingly within reach, I decide it's time to turn the earth on the plot of land we reserve for our vegetables. The earth that I have at my disposal is not very rich, the region has traditionally very little agriculture and only olive trees and perennial oaks seem to flourish on the dry rocky soil. As all amateur gardeners know, nothing is better to kick start a poor batch of earth than a good load of rich manure turned into the soil.
I wanted to track down a sheep or goat cheese maker in the region who could provide me with a trailer load of manure. Although there are many organic cheese makers in the Cevennes, the manure the animals produce tends to be kept back for friends and contacts of the shepherds and is often surprisingly difficult to get hold of. It's funny that in a world where there's so much of it, a good load of crap is hard to find.

I ran into some luck one morning when dropping off my oldest boy at the village school, the mother of one of his classmates and I struck up a conversation during which she told me she'd come across my music and liked it. As the conversation and small talk ensued, she informed me that she made organic goat's cheese. Sensing this was too good to be true, I suggested that we do some old fashioned bartering and we quickly shook hands on a deal.
The deal being: One of my albums for a trailer load of goat's manure!

It's possible she may have thought that she came away with the better deal but I'm not so sure, after all in some unforeseen chain of events, the writing and recording of some songs has ended up with me potentially being able to grow some prize tomatoes and aubergines this year, making it perhaps the most productive thing to come out of my years of writing songs!




Apart from the pleasing bypassing of cash and money in our deal. I felt it was appropriate in some way that it was the music that I made that had created this prized opportunity to get my hands on some good manure, or in other words on some good shit. (The next time I hear someone say my music is crap, I'll take it as a compliment)

In a way you could say we are here because of shit. Or at the very least you could say we can carry on being here because waste is broken down and recycled by nature. The champion recyclers are the ants and worms and countless insects and organisms that eat up and release the elements back to a reusable form.
Decomposing leaves and branches, dead plants, insects and animals all eventually make up the soil and earth that we grow upon. Life decomposes, gets broken down and is remade all over again in a never ending cycle.
Nothing is wasted, every element is returned back to the earth and rebuilt from the bottom up in an eternal circle of decomposition and composition, death and life, destruction and creation.



Similarly, as anyone who writes will testify, it is in the decomposition or de-structuring of life in the form of relived emotions, memories and feelings that we are able to grow, metaphorically speaking, songs and poems. There's no getting round it, beauty comes from waste.Thankfully we know that we don't have to hold our noses when listening to a good song as the stench of decomposition has transformed itself into a unique perfume.

So who would have thought that when I serve up a tomato and basil salad or a freshly made summer ratatouille that songs that I'd recorded in a studio somewhere would have added unwittingly to their sweetness.

I guess the moral of this particular tale is we all need a good dose of shit to grow from time to time.

P

"Dai diamanti non nasce niente, dal letame nascono i fiori"  Fabrizio De Andre'