Cooking with Julia: MAY is for Artichokes

 Posted by at 6:03 pm  3 Responses »
May 072012
 

“Cooking with Julia”  ||  MAY 2012 This new feature on my blog called “Cooking with Julia” offers a recipe every month for ingredients in season. I’d might as well begin with artichokes, now in their prime, because I love them, probably more than any other vegetable I can think of. Perish the thought of pickled artichokes, frozen artichoke hearts, or the canned variety. You’ll ruin your recipe if you substitute them when the ingredient list calls for fresh. While artichokes can be tedious to clean–what’s required is snapping off the hard part of the leaves and whittling away the tough […more…]

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Cooking with Julia: MAY is for Artichokes

Feasting with Leopards: An Unordinary Cooking Lesson

 Posted by at 11:51 am  23 Responses »
Apr 062012
 

On a recent morning in Palermo, I found myself a guest at the historic Lanza Tomasi palazzo, where Nicoletta Polo, the Duchess of Palma, was planning a cooking lesson for American students who would arrive after breakfast. I first met Nicoletta some twenty years ago when she was living in New York City. Originally from Venice and an excellent cook, she versed me on the food of the Veneto for research on a book I was writing then, which includes some of her recipes. Today the Duchess lives in the ancestral palace that her husband, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, has restored. […more…]

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Feasting with Leopards: An Unordinary Cooking Lesson

Luxurious Penance: Italian Fast Day Potato Salad

 Posted by at 11:36 am  4 Responses »
Mar 032012
 

The Italians love good food, fast days or not. All kinds of special dishes have popped up over the centuries to get around papal restrictions designed to curtail excess (sumptuary laws), for Lent and other holy days. Take the fast day salad. There are many resourceful variations on the theme. What all have in common is that they’re meatless. This one is a composed warm salad of creamy boiled potatoes, canned tender Italian blue fin tuna filets, hard-cooked eggs, and asparagus. Italian tuna, called ventresca (stay tuned for a future  post about this as yet under-appreciated delicacy), comes from the belly […more…]

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Luxurious Penance: Italian Fast Day Potato Salad

About that Stracotto: Italian for Very, Very Slow-Cooked, Sublime Stew

 Posted by at 2:53 pm  9 Responses »
Feb 062012
 

And for which I promised a recipe in a recent post (December 15). Just the remedy for February’s chill.  Go to RECIPE> After I finished off producer Piero Catalano’s bottle of Suavis, the aged vinegar from Sicily’s desert island (“The Other Face of Balsamic” [December 15 post]), a small flask of Modena aged balsamic vinegar took its place in my cupboard. Unlike the Suavis, a souvenir from my September in Trapani (I drank it as a cordial, an “amen” to the day, blissful thimbleful by thimbleful and it was gone by January), aged Modena balsamico can be more easily replaced. […more…]

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About that Stracotto: Italian for Very, Very Slow-Cooked, Sublime Stew

FOR THE NEW YEAR: Lentils for Luck and Sausages for Plenty, Infused with Holy Oil

 Posted by at 5:24 pm  10 Responses »
Dec 312011
 

Put them together for the quintessential Italian New Year dish, lenticchie di capodanno (lentils for the new year). Lentils, round and copper-colored, should remind you of money; pork shouts fatness and increase. And the olive oil? Nectar of the gods. “A drop of olive oil on the head, a drop of wine on the lips” remembers writer Bill Marsano, was an infant’s blessing in Italian households. It anoints the breasts of monarchs at their coronations and marks the foreheads of the dying in their final breath of life. In your food, it’s no less a benediction. New Year is an […more…]

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FOR THE NEW YEAR: Lentils for Luck and Sausages for Plenty, Infused with Holy Oil

Piero’s “Better Than Balsamic,” Postscript with Pictures

 Posted by at 2:42 pm  6 Responses »
Dec 152011
 

Frost has snuffed out the last breath of Indian summer in New York, but warm up with these images of Sicily.  From Piero Catalano, the artisan food producer and master vinegar maker I met in Trapani province this past September (see “A New Vinegar is Born,” 26 October post), a postscript in pictures.  Next, go make yourself some stracotto (Italian extra slow-simmered meat stew) with aged vinegar…stay tuned for the recipe…. Piero Catalano’s sun-dried tomatoes and other local products on the shelves in his Trapani shop, KusKus. The most precious item is his vinegar. Since then he has picked all […more…]

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Piero's "Better Than Balsamic," Postscript with Pictures

Pantelleria, Sicily: A New Vinegar is Born

 Posted by at 8:09 am  1 Response »
Oct 262011
 

Day 4   I don’t think there is a place in the world more ideal than Pantelleria to think of the Moon. And Pantelleria is much more beautiful. The endless plains of volcanic rock, the calm sea, the dammusi (traditional volcanic rock houses) where you can see African lighthouses through their windows on windless nights… the bottom of the sea asleep… an ancient amphora with stone garlands and the remains of some wine corroded over the years… bathing in a vaporous bowl in water so thick with minerals you can walk on it… –Gabriel Garcia Marquez, describing the Sicilian island […more…]

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Pantelleria, Sicily: A New Vinegar is Born

Revisiting Fontanasalsa, Trapani

 Posted by at 12:07 am  5 Responses »
Oct 042011
 

If yesterday’s post has left you hungry, here is a description of the excellent lunch I had at the Fontanasalsa agritourism when I visited in the spring. The table was filled with the fruits of the fields and woods nearby–platters piled high with sweet or peppered cheeses and salamis from the countryside, sweet-and-sour eggplant and zucchini compotes, tender glazed veal rolls stuffed with caciocavallo cheese and herbs, and baby cuttlefish coddled in pungent tomato sauce, as tender as they could be. There was hand-made pasta stuffed like a jelly roll with freshly made sheep’s milk ricotta and tender greens, and […more…]

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Revisiting Fontanasalsa, Trapani

The Fine Olive Oil of Trapani

 Posted by at 8:14 pm  2 Responses »
Oct 022011
 

Day 2 A Revelation Sicily’s topography is as diverse as its vivid human landscape. Lush, subtropical flora and desert landscapes alternate with stunning coastlines, volcanic archipelagos, rugged mountains and an active volcano (Mount Aetna). Trapani province’s vista is softened with endless carpets of citrus orchards, olive trees and vineyards, and studded with the vestiges of crumbled empires, ruined Moorish forts and enchanting medieval towns. The fruits of Trapani are many, among them olives, transformed by masters of olive oil into some of the best oil in the world. Three things combine to make this possible: the mineral-rich volcanic soil, single […more…]

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The Fine Olive Oil of Trapani
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