about eating Italian wherever you are
Just about every Wednesday, you’ll find me at my local farmer’s market. I wait patiently in line with my fellow customers, six feet apart, until it’s my turn for an audience with the seafood vendor. Typically he will have sea bass, tuna, cod, bluefish and half a dozen other wonderful choices. Most of these fish…
We’re social distancing, but no reason for vegetables to do that! One of the best ways for them to mingle is the Italian garden medley called giardiniera. Your pickled vegetable choices are many: cauliflower, carrots, baby cucumbers, fennel, celery, bell peppers, beets, radishes. I love pickled vegetables, but don’t want them to be overly…
On a Zoom happy hour recently, I asked what everyone was having for dinner. Four for four, pasta. No surprise there. Everyone loves spaghetti and other dried pastas, and naturally they’re among the staples we’re stockpiling these days. Other ingredients I never like to be without: olive oil, bread, anchovies, garlic and hot red pepper….
In the Piemonte region of northern Italy where Margherita Aloi grew up, this potful of spring greens in broth, thickened by fat rice kernels and potatoes, is known as a “cleansing soup”…especially for women. I’ve never been altogether sure what “cleansing” means, but it likely has something to do with the greens, rich in digestion-enhancing…
It’s spring, Easter and Passover are approaching, and I feel the familiar urge to cook lamb. Not the roast leg of lamb with sides that I might cook for the whole family, but a lamb and vegetable stew just for me and my husband–my bunk mate of almost 48 years and now my bunker mate…
Mention crepes, and my mind leaps to the thin pancakes, filled with ham and cheese, that I tasted long ago in Normandy. But Italians eat savory crepes, too. Called crespelle, they are a lovely change from pasta and risotto. The flavor and texture of crepes are improved by incorporating whole-grain flour into the batter. You…
I realize that pretty much everyone has cooked a quick Italian tomato sauce. But would you have been proud to use it for a classic pasta al pomodoro, garnished only with grated cheese? I’m not talking about a sauce made with fresh tomatoes at their seasonal peak, but with the canned plum tomatoes we…
Toasted bread, rubbed with cut garlic cloves and anointed generously with olive oil, is known most places as bruschetta (pronounced bru SKET ta, please). Except. If you are in Tuscany, the word for this treat is fettunta, or fett’ unta, meaning “oiled slice.” My first memory of fettunta goes back to a simple Sunday supper many…
It’s hunting season in the Tuscan countryside and we occasionally hear gunshots in the distance. Which, through a sequence of random associations, led me to thoughts of “hunter’s style” chicken alla cacciatora. As the story goes, the hunter’s wife made chicken like this to feed her husband, returning from a long day in the woods….