Leave the beautiful region of Calabria and travel north to the much beloved Tuscany or Toscana and you’ll find biroldo or sanguinaccio – a traditional blood-based salumi.  Biroldo is a pork blood sausage and you’ll often find it infused with raisins, pine nuts and cinnamon or flavored with fennel (blood sausage is also referred to sanguinaccio in many part of […]

Grilled Fennel-Crusted Pork Chops Pork in the US used to be an awful affair.  That is to say, the meat was often tough and lacked the well marbled (and fatty) composition of pork found in Italy and France, for example.  Fast forward about 20 years and pork chop aficionados can find high quality chops (and other cuts of pork) with […]

Making fall off the bone ribs, with an Italian flare, is an easy culinary task.  Our oven baked ribs are slow cooked in the oven for 3.5 hours and finished on the grill for an outdoor, smokey, flavor.  We infused our oven baked ribs with an Italian kick by incorporating dried oregano and ground fennel seeds into our dry rub […]

Onions are near and dear to my heart mostly because one of the most famous variety on the planet (Tropea red onions) are grown near my parents home province of Calabria.  Tropea red onions are sweater than other red onions grown in Calabria because of the sandy soil and mild, beach, climate near the shoreline in Eastern Calabria.  One of […]

(photo: simply pork cutlet with cremini mushrooms, white wine, butter, and rosemary) Cutlets, or costolette in Italian, can be found in many food traditions around the planet, including French, Indian, Japanese, and, of course, Italian cuisines.  Cutlets can be made with veal/beef, chicken, pork, and even mutton.  Cutlets are usually prepared with a thin cut of meat and generally fried […]

You have to love any establishment that sells over 200,000 pounds of Italian cheese in a given week, in turn we’ve fallen deeply in love with the Pittsburgh based, Pennsylvania Macaroni Company.  The Italian food store was started in 1902 by Sicilian immigrants from Trabia and they now carry well over 5,000 Italian specialty items, including an online business that will slice […]

The Italian meatball (believed to have originated during the Roman Empire around 55 AD.) has reached legendary status here in the United States and like it’s counterpart in Italy has many variations, as well as differences in how they are consumed.  In Italy, for example, meatballs are served as a stand alone item and not eaten with pasta (although some […]

Easy Italian Sausage and Peppers Recipe As Clifford A. Wright, the author of the wonderful book A Mediterranean Feast, writes: The daily consumption of fresh meat began to decline by 1550 as the population was now fully recovered from the Black Death of two centuries before, and, as a result, more land was devoted to the more labor-intensive agriculture rather […]

(photo: some of Dr. K.’s homemade duck prosciutto sliced thin and eaten with bread and Prosecco)   I’m a big believer in chasing happiness in life and not the 30 minute kind that’s associated with a new car, electronic device, or a bigger house (sorry all you hedge fund managers and Goldman employees).  Happiness, after all (and there’s empirical evidence for this) is derived […]

(photo: locally produced bacon from a nearby butcher) By now, you’ve read my countless references to salame, prosciutto, capicola, cured pork, etc. and you may be thinking: what’s wrong with this guy, does he have a thing for pigs or something?   The short answer is yes and the pork obsession is centered on the cured kind – that salty and spicy […]