(photo: pan simmered baby goat or capretto with onion, tomato, garlic, and red wine) Feasting on baby goat is a staple of our Italian American Easter and Christmas dinners.  My father’s mother, Nonna Rosa Scordo, made a wonderful pan simmered capretto recipe and it includes braising a whole baby goat (which is processed at home or by the local butcher). […]

  (photo: various Scordo family members during the late summer wheat harvest in Pellegrina, Calabria)  You can say, unequivocally, that Americans love their beef. Compared to their Mediterranean counterparts, American’s are ranked third in the world (only behind Argentina and Uruguay) when it comes to choosing beef for their dinner table (Italy is ranked 9th, per 1999 statistics).  An educated guess as to why beef […]

There are some terrific fish on our little planet and while we are, indeed, overfishing our seas , I constantly marvel at how delicious certain varieties of aquatic vertebrates are, including mackerel, sardines, cod, swordfish, trout, branzino, striped bass, salmon, etc.  Much of the overfishing talk centers on Tuna, which is a large industry in Southern Italy, especially near Sicily (where the world’s best tuna is […]

Wild Food I remember walking through the Calabrian countryside with my grandfather as a boy when he suddenly feel to his knees and plucked a few pieces of what I thought was simple green grass from the ground. I, of course, thought he was just being his usual pazzo (crazy) nonno,but what he found were dandelion greens, prized for their earthy, minerally, and […]

Cheap Dinner: Wild Mackerel with Tomato Salad and Orzo with Zucchini and Parsley:  With the arrival of August, our household starts the summer tradition of consuming copious amounts of fresh tomatoes (at times for both lunch and dinner) – see my entries on tomato salad, canning tomatoes, and tomato sauce.  Ripe, garden grown, tomatoes represent the ideal food type for […]