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

 Posted by at 2:53 pm  9 Responses »
Feb 062012
 
About that Stracotto: Italian for Very, Very Slow-Cooked, Sublime Stew

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…]

Pantelleria, Sicily: A New Vinegar is Born

 Posted by at 8:09 am  1 Response »
Oct 262011
 
Pantelleria, Sicily: A New Vinegar is Born

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…]

The Trail to Trapani

 Posted by at 6:09 pm  2 Responses »
Sep 302011
 
The Trail to Trapani

Day 1: Under the Sicilian Sun Probably there is no better guidebook to the real and the mythical Sicily than Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, the powerful historical novel about Sicilian life at the time of the Risorgimento [Review of the book from THE GUARDIAN]. I took it with me on a flight to Palermo last week and as we drove on the coastal road toward Trapani and our hotel, past dark-skinned children playing along the roadside and men with the bluest of eyes, yellow hair and ruddy complexions, I remembered his image of Sicily as the “America of […more…]