Homemade Italian Breadcrumbs with parsley, lemon zest, and oregano I love versatile foods because, like many home cooks, I’m lazy and time deprived.  I look for shortcuts and want my food to taste good with minimal effort and, moreover, I think even the most respected food experts on the planet secretly feel this way.  After all, there’s more to life than […]

(photo: grilled chicken, fennel and feta salad, a few pieces of good bread and a bottle of Brooklyn Pilsner) We eat tons of fennel during the winter months and usually consume it in a salad or immediately after a meal (as a digestivo).  Recently, we put together a fennel salad comprising of a simple vinaigrette and lots of good feta cheese […]

The History of Pasta Shapes – The Italian People and Pasta Just in case you were having sleepless nights concerning the birthplace of pasta, the esteemed food critic, Oretta Zanini de Vita confirms that there were records of pasta in Italy 500 years before Marco Polo returned from China; so pasta was, in fact, invented in Italy.  I’m glad we cleared the […]

What is Antipasto and What Does it Include – Guide to Antipasto: Italian Appetizers that Come Before the Meal Antipasto literally means “before the meal” and varies from province to province in Italy.  Similar to French hors d’oeuvres or Spanish tapas, antipasto is a combination of small bites of tasty food, usually accompanied by wine (see our wine basics guide) or beer […]

If you’ve waited until now to buy your special somebody a gift for the holidays then you’re probably in a little bit of a jam.  Just think, you have no idea what to get him or her, will need to contend with traffic and super cranky shoppers, and are probably a little stressed overall. In order to provide you with […]

Christmas is just around the corner and if you’re celebrating an “Italian Christmas” then you’ve most likely heard of the Feast of the Seven Fishes.  The traditional Christmas Eve dinner is steeped in folk tradition and as Maria Laurino writing for the NY Times has said, the ritual varies from region to region, including the number and type of fish served. […]

Torrone (literally translated as “big tower”) is a sweet nougat or confection and is usually comprised of honey, vanilla (at times orange), sugar, egg white, and toasted almonds or other nuts.  Torrone is made throughout Europe, but the regions of Cremona (in northern Italy) and Bagnara Calabra in Calabria are well known for the product, especially hard torrone. The candies […]

Oliva Schiacciate or Calabrian Cracked Olive Salad One of the great thrills in my life, if you haven’t noticed, is the simple ritual of preparing and eating food.  The preparing part fulfills me on a tactical kind of level; that is, finding the ingredients, thinking through how I’ll manipulate the products, and working with the food.  The eating part, well, […]

Wow, wow, and even more wow!  I was blown away by a dry pasta from the Italian pasta company Pastificio Vicidomini, specifically the Tagliatelle. The Tagliatelle shape has been around for a long period of time and originally comes from the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.  The word Tagliatelle is derived from tagliare, meaning “to cut.”  Tagliatelle is similar to fettucine in shape and often made […]

What is Cucina Povera? A friend recently asked me to explain the concept of cucina povera and here’s the working definition I came up with: A style of cooking best represented, in the past, by the lower class (read: peasants) of a given society.  Peasant cooking aims to utilize whatever is found in the kitchen, household, farm, etc. to prepare meals. […]