Have you got a great recipe for a ravioli filling recipe, and a complimentary sauce to go with it B?

As soon as I get home from holiday I'll put something for you.. 

Frozzie, i'm cooooooooooooooooooming"............

Bedidassi I'm terribly conservative with a few French recipes too, especially my family recipes    It probably comes from growing up with a certain food culture and expecting food belonging to that culture to retain its original taste.  It's important to keep a few traditions going but I don't mind experimenting.

To get back to the panforte, are chocolate and pistachios a more modern addition?
My boys love pistachios and I always add them to my panforti at Christmas time.  This morning my sons left for school with some pistachio biscotti.  Biscotti disappear pretty quickly in our house!

Ricciarelli:  have heard of it but never tasted one-  sounds delicious!  So many tasty morsels to try!!!

You have spoken with my words Carine. I like to experiment too and I absolutely love ethnic food but I'm pretty conservative about some very traditional recipes, especially when they come from my family tradition and when they are more than 1 thousand years old .Panforte with chocolate or pistachio will be surely a delicious cake  but it will not definitely be a Panforte. Done with that,  I think everybody who is willing to try can make as many version as possible but I prefer to experiment on something else 
When iwill come back from France I will post the Ricciarelli recipe as well. I know Christmas is still far away, but it's better to get ready, right?   

Follow the instructions and the pictures and you will see how easy it is and when the pastina does not cut (it could depend on eggs diminution or flour humidity) then you only have to add a little more of flour and have a look until is not the diminution you want..

Fundj, I'm sorry if the pastina didn't work with you but I make the same recipe for years now and I assure you it works. I think the problem is only that, without pictures, you don't realise how the pasta would come out and, as I told you, I cannot add pictures for the time being, so what I though is this: I put the link of the same recipe on an Italian tmx site with pictures on it. I hope that's nothing wrong about putting links of other sites, otherwise you will let me know, ok?
This is the link: http://www.cookaround.com/yabbse1/showthread.php?t=186905&page=1
As you can see making this pastina, as I told you, it's very easy and you can change the recipes adding some parmesan cheese, or parsley... Be sure of it, Fundj, if you need pastina for the winter, this is the right recipe...

so basically they are a version of macarons?

Nothing to do with macarons even if the ingredients are the same. When I will be back I will post the recipe..

lucky you bedidassi    we have friends down south and usually stay with them but they are more marseille area and the south west...bayonne etc  We have stayed in apartments down south but I am so fussy I didnt like it much (accom)...they looked gorgeous in the photos but when we got there it was clean but nothing like the photos and in one room the bed took up the size of the room literally ie you walked in the door frame and ploof bed and no space around lol and Ive found that happens alot...even 'nice' hotels disappoint...DH thinks I was spoilt and am now ruined as he puts it..the norm in oz is alot higher standard than the norm here..you would have to pay ALOT more money to get that kind of standard but such is life....Im just asking for space, modern and clean which is not all that easy to come by as a whole 

France is much better for wifi over the past year...i find i can connect most places and most public areas and hotels have free wifi now!  Will be interested to see how you go!  Enjoy your trip and France! 

Montecarlo is really nice but, obviously, very posh and expensive but fortunately, not paying to sleep and moving around, won't kill us. Surely the Australian standard is higher than in Europe, and you should see hotels in Florence  About the wifi we have been in Montecarlo even last Christmas and the only wifi spot I could find was 1 mt, for 1 mt. in front of the Casino...

Quote from: Bedidassi on August 07, 2011, 08:56:57 am

Yes. That's it. Did you like Pisa? I've been to Australia in 1993 and I have left my heart there but I had some problem with food, especially because I dont eat meat... Anyway, the recipe is a very good one, is the same one that we pass on in my family from, and I'm not joking, at least a hundred years... 

Our whole family loved Pisa.  What a beautiful city- vibrant and so full of history.  The view from the tower was fantastic after a stormy afternoon (rolling green fields and hills all around with dark blue clouds towering over terra cotta roofs) and we were all quite taken by IL Campo.  Mainly loved strolling trough the streets though! You must be sick of the tourists at times...
Before Pisa we were in Livorno:  fantastic market!  We also stayed in Lucca for 3 nights.  You must have been to the antique market there:  it's sooo good.  And, again, a beautiful town!  You're lucky to live in that part of the world.
Thanks again for your family recipe 

Pisa it is a beautiful city with an incredible history and, yes, we are packed up with tourists but they are not the problem. In the last few years we have been literally invaded by clandestine immigrates who come from the sea and then disappear as soon as they arrive. Now I strongly want to make this clear: I'm NOT racist. I've been living in London for 5 years so I know what it means to immigrate but in London I had documents, social security, I was working, paying taxes, respecting English social rules and laws... Letting people come like this, with no rules at all, create delinquency because people come hoping to find a better life but then cannot do regular jobs because without documents and end up robbing, selling drugs and similar. The Italian government, left or right, cannot find a way to solve this problem and we citizen are fed up of following  rules when these rules are not equal to all of us. For example, in Pisa there is a big hospital, Cisanello, with a very big outside car parking. Unfortunately I had to go many times in the last period in this hospital and I was shocked to find that Senegalese people rule over this parking. When you stop the car they come all around you even in groups of 10 and they want to know for how long you need your parking ticket. Then they go to the ticket machine and they use something like a false coin with a sort of lever attached to it and they get the ticket without paying. Then they come back to you and they want the money for the parking ticket plus some more money and you better give them what they want... Last time I went there I was so fed up that when I saw a Municipal police car, I jumped in the middle of the street and I complained about what was happening right in front of their eyes and you know what they told me?"Please, move away from the street because you are causing disturb." that's the way it is. People, police too, are scared and this is a very dangerous situation, let me tell you.
Now enough of this. I tend to forget that this is a recipe forum, not a political one.
You are right, Livorno's Market is a very nice one (I have lived in Livorno for 5 years) and Lucca is a real jewel inside her walls but still, I would rather prefer to live in a less crowded place...