The Squash Racket

 Posted by at 8:55 pm  4 Responses »
Aug 162013
 
The Squash Racket

NOTE: FOR SOME REASON, THE FIRST PART OF MY LAST POST EVAPORATED IN CYBERSPACE AS IT WAS ON ITS WAY FROM ME TO YOU, SO PLEASE HIT THIS LINK TO READ IT NOW–-AND THEN, COME BACK HERE! Right, so as I was saying, every August food writers feel compelled to tell their readers what to do about “zucchini fatigue,” as my NPR radio host called our zucchini abundance only yesterday while interviewing a couple of food experts and myself about “the problem.”  The first interviewee speaking on the program, a fine cook and fellow cookbook writer, accused the poor vegetables […more…]

Zucchini Need Live Up to Their Name: “ini” Means Small, Very Small

 Posted by at 1:30 pm  10 Responses »
Aug 152013
 
Zucchini Need Live Up to Their Name: "ini" Means Small, Very Small

  Zucca, in Italian, means squash; zucchini, the diminutive, “small squash” (the Italians snap them off the mother vine at three-and-a-half inches). So why are zucchini so often the size of baseball bats? You’ll have to ask the British about that, who call them “marrows,” and win the world records for growing giant vegetables at the Great Yorkshire Showground every summer. To read about the long and short of it, and learn to look forward  to a bumper baby zucchini crop every summer, go to my new article for Zester Daily. There you’ll find the whole story of America’s gift to Italy, and the recipe […more…]

Julia on NPR Radio and Zester Daily: Global Warming Leads to Pine Nut Plagues

 Posted by at 9:00 am  2 Responses »
Aug 092013
 
Julia on NPR Radio and Zester Daily: Global Warming Leads to Pine Nut Plagues

If making basil pesto is a rite of summer for you, you’ll want to check out my most recent stories on Zester Daily and NPR radio about the disappearing pine nut and substituting pistachios for pesto instead. As our planet warms, we’re losing our pine forests. Everyone I spoke to, from the American pine nut gatherers in the southwest dustbowl, to the pesto makers in Genoa who have relied on the Mediterranean fir forests for centuries, said the same thing: the nut-bearing conifers are an endangered species. It was a tough story to digest, but digest it I did. Because I write about food […more…]

Reader Mail: Why Does Everything Taste Better in Rome?

 Posted by at 2:10 pm  1 Response »
Aug 012013
 
Reader Mail: Why Does Everything Taste Better in Rome?

  Every cookbook writer loves to hear from their readers and find out how they’re getting along with the recipes that are lovingly tested to make them foolproof before they’re published (but, hey! don’t expect the results promised if you go off and “do your own thing”). Here’s a message I got recently (what a treat—they even sent a photo!): Before my wife had given me your Classic Italian Cookbook, I had only nostalgia for the dishes I had tasted during my stay in Rome. Now I am able to re-create those same dishes in my own home, and I […more…]

Secrets of Italian Tomato Sauce

 Posted by at 6:40 pm  1 Response »
Jul 022013
 
Secrets of Italian Tomato Sauce

If you’re like me and love a good tomato sauce, you’ll want to read my new article in Zester Daily, “How to Master the Tomato Sauces of Italy” for tomato sauce wisdom and maybe, just maybe, my favorite “red sauce” recipe.   I wrote it because—I kid you not–even after having written thirteen cookbooks about Italian food—four of them about pasta and the sauces it wears–and one about how to make tomato sauce specifically*, people still ask me what prepared tomato sauce I buy! My answer, “I wouldn’t dream of eating tomato sauce from a bottle!” The response, inevitably: “You make tomato sauce from […more…]

Kudos to Canal House on Winning the James Beard Award

 Posted by at 7:22 pm  No Responses »
May 112013
 
Kudos to Canal House on Winning the James Beard Award

Felicitazioni!… Hooray!… Toot-toot-toot!… Honk-honk!… Bing-bong!… Cling-clang! Bravissime, Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton, my friends and photographers, for winning the culinary world’s 2013 cookbook Oscars for Canal House Cooks Everyday in the category of general cooking. If my readers don’t already know about Christopher (who, by the way, is a “she,” not a “he”) and Melissa, they might start by reading their new book’s foreward, by Julia Child as dictated to Amanda Hesser “from beyond”:   I’ve been an enthusiastic admirer of Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton since they were at Saveur magazine in the 1990s; two forthright women on a […more…]

A Lentil Soup for Christopher Peacock’s Kitchen

 Posted by at 10:25 pm  No Responses »
May 032013
 
A Lentil Soup for Christopher Peacock's Kitchen

My formative years were spent not only cooking alongside my Italian mother and aunts, immersed in beautiful food, but also, studying art. I love design especially–interior, graphic and fashion design, architecture… all of it.  And so I feel excited to be teaming up with celebrated designer, Christopher Peacock, to kick off this year’s Kips Bay Decorator Show House, a quintessentially New York spectacle. Every year, the most acclaimed interior designers transform a grand Manhattan home into an exhibition of state-of-the- art interiors for the show. The idea was hatched in 1973 when several dedicated advocates of the Kips Bay Boys […more…]

Pistachio Pesto: A Sauce Fit for a Prince

 Posted by at 1:44 am  4 Responses »
Apr 082013
 
Pistachio Pesto: A Sauce Fit for a Prince

Last year nearly to the day, I wrote a post about A Day Cooking with the Duchess at the ancestral Lampedusa palace in Palermo, where I spent a weekend that was spectacular indeed. With so many photos to post there was no room for a recipe. Here, you’ll find a version of the Duchess’s pistachio pesto that I adapted for American kitchens. (And by the way, if you live anywhere near Westchester County, New York, the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville will be showing Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of Il Gattopardo, The Leopard, in this year’s Italian Film Festival on May 19, […more…]

A Whiff of Spring, a Waft of Rome

 Posted by at 9:47 am  3 Responses »
Mar 312013
 
A Whiff of Spring, a Waft of Rome

At long last, a streak of warm sunlight beams through my kitchen window. The day brings to mind Easters in Rome and the city’s abbacchio, butter-tender baby lamb, and the first artichokes of spring. No one, but no one, makes lamb and artichokes taste better than the Romans, though my mother would disagree. Being from Sardinia (Sardegna) where some of the best artichokes in the world grow under that island’s blazing sun, the thistles are a religion in her house. In a region where there are nearly twice as many sheep as people (some 3,000,000 of them to about 1,675,000 Sards), you know […more…]

Hey Mark! Whoa Mario! About Those Potato Gnocchi…

 Posted by at 11:21 pm  16 Responses »
Mar 212013
 
Hey Mark! Whoa Mario! About Those Potato Gnocchi...

If you had a look at Mark Bittman’s recent New York Times column about potato gnocchi, this post is for you. Mark and I are old friends from his Cook’s magazine days when we worked on some stories together. Since then, you and I have seen him on a dazzling journey in the world of food. He’s no slouch when it comes to cooking Italian. But about gnocchi specifically, and his recent article with Mario Batali… some input and insights—I’ve been on my own journey with the little dumpling. Continue reading and you’ll find how my own potato gnocchi (gnocchi di […more…]

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