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 […]

Book Review: Salumi by Micheal Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn’s Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing was a popular and more general look at making cured meats.  In the author’s latest pork crazed book, Salumi, Ruhlman and Polcyn focus on eight basic categories of Italian salami (plural salumi), including: guanciale, coppa, spalla, lardo, lonza, pancetta, […]

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 […]

Growing up in a southern Italian household in the United States, polenta wasn’t standard dinner or lunch fare; in fact, corn hardly made an appearance at our kitchen table.   Fast forward about 20 years and we can’t wait for the Fall season to come around so we can prepare a bit pot of steamy polenta flavored with wild mushrooms […]

Pizza Gain Aka Pizzagaina, Pizza Rustica, or Italian Easter Ham Pie Recipe PizzaGaina goes by many names including Easter Pizza, Pizza Chiena, PizzaGaina, Italian Ham Pie,  Pizza Gaina, Pizza Rustica, Italian Easter Ham Pie, Stuffed Easter Bread, Pastiera, etc. And just as there are many names for Pizza Gain there are various versions of the classic Easter dish.  For example, in provinces such […]

(photo: thanks to thegivenschronicles.com for the photo) We’re big fans of soup and we’ve covered many varieties such as chicken soup with tortellini, Italian cauliflower carrot, pea, escarole and bean, pasta e fagioli, broccoli bean soup, minestra, chickpea, and our perennial favorite lentil soup. We like to begin our meals with a soup and then usually prepare a protein such as fish […]

(photo: Wild Fennel Seed (Semi di Finocchietto Selvatico) from Sicilia; you can use the seed as is or crush it via a mortar and pestle for savory and sweet dishes) Wild fennel, or Finocchietto Selvatico, can be found throughout most parts of southern Italy and is part of the staple diet for many Calabrians, Sicilians, etc.  My father tells romantic stories of foraging for wild […]

(photo: matzoh pizza with sausage and broccoli rabe – courtesy of Dr. K) Our honorary Jewish Italian, Dr. K., recently put together some exquisite matzoh pizza for his family and I was compelled to ask him for yet another guest post entry.  Enjoy and Zeezum Pasach! Dr. K used Bittman’s olive oil matzoh recipe, which is an adapted Sardinian flatbread.  He used freshly milled hard […]

  (photo: grilled Italian sausage in a spicy tomato sauce) Although my favorite way to prepare sausage is grilled on an outdoor barbecue with wood briquettes, simmering already grilled sausage in a spicy tomato sauce is a close second! The recipe is more than easy, it’s almost a non recipe; that is to say, something you can intuit very easily.  Here’s the […]