About eating Italian wherever you are
In Italy’s olive-growing regions, the festivals begin in November or even earlier in places like Sicily. Everyone’s eager to taste the olio nuovo at its freshly pressed peak, when flavors are most intense. That party is over. But here in the U.S., new oil from the 2024-2025 harvest is just making its way into…
Bollito misto, a boiled meat and vegetable dinner, is taken seriously in northern regions such as Emilia Romagna and Piemonte. Typically, a server rolls a cart to your table and dishes up boiled meats and side dishes from covered containers according to each diner’s preferences. In Parma I once overheard a large party enter into…
A Florentine gelato maker once told me that crema (also known as fior di latte, flower of milk) has the pure flavor ideal for judging the quality of a gelateria. In Italy vanilla gelato is considered a particular flavor that an establishment may or may not offer. Though vanilla tops every list of favorite American…
Fresh herbs are welcome any time but I have a special fondness for them in spring, early summer and fall, when they are tender and less likely to have turned bitter from heat. Thanks to our daughter Kate, our condo building’s shared patio has three containers overflowing with a mix of flowers and herbs….
Spending a few days in Milan last winter, my husband and I immersed ourselves in art—the immense Duomo built over a period of 600 years, Leonardo’s Last Supper, masterworks at The Brera. It happened to be Fashion Week. So we wandered through the Galleria, stopping for cocktails at Camparino and admiring elegantly dressed inhabitants…
In my dreams, a proper pantry is a closet or a shelf-lined room. In my actual condo kitchen, a cupboard serves this purpose–so I’m picky about the staples stored there. Among the grains, beans, nuts, dried fruit and canned tomatoes, you’ll always find a stack of canned and jarred seafood: tuna, sardines, mussels, mackerel, clams,…
Wrapping meat cutlets around a filling has long been a thrifty cook’s trick, stretching a costly ingredient to feed more mouths. And I also like how the flavors of meat and filling mingle as they cook together, enhanced further by a tasty sauce. These stuffed meat rolls, known as braciole–or braciolini, or involtini–seem to be…
Quinoa salad: not the kind of food most of us travel to Europe for. But I ate it twice on a recent trip, once as an appetizer in a Bilbao hotel restaurant and then as an outdoor lunch in Provence. Both times, I was struck by how appetizing a quinoa salad can be. Maybe because…
If you’ve been cooking as long as I have, you might remember the salade niçoise of the 1980s, which had a bit of a heyday on restaurant and home menus. Artfully arranged heaps of dressed green beans, potatoes and maybe beets, with a piece of seared rare tuna at the center of the plate, amounted…