Aroma Cucina

Elegantly humble: Celery and Saffron Risotto

 

Like a marriage between a nobleman and a peasant, elegant saffron marries with the humble celery leaf, creating a bit of risotto magic.

Arguably,  Risotto Milanese in one form or another, has been served for centuries.  The grains of risotto rice are bathed in creamy Parmigiano,  a rich golden hue stained with the bitter sweet saffron, and possibly with a sprinkle of edible gold to satisfy the eye as well as the stomach.  
Why arguably? Because the origins of this dish are as mythical as a Cesear salad or spaghetti carbonara, including the tradition of serving risotto Milanese with gold foil. Ask 5 Italian historians their opinion, and you will receive at least 12 theories on the origins of any dish.

Shall we yank back the misty veils of history, and get real?
I’m standing in our orto where most of the celery had wintered over and is now very robust. Which meant, I better chop some of this down and start using it!



The celery in our orto is extremely flavorful; it’s celery on steroids. But it is also tough and fibrous, so it’s best used cooked, instead of raw. Our celery is like some robust, weather beaten country peasant. Store bought celery is like your pallid cousin who lives in the city and is afraid of dirt.

I threw some chopped celery into a sauce on the stove, and now I was left with a pile of leaves. It seemed sinful and careless to throw away these perfectly good leaves, but as they were soooo intensely flavored, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.  As an experiment, I threw the leaves, a few stalks and bit of onion into the stock pot and let it simmer for about 2 hours. Voila`! Pure celery stock, clear, greenish gold and intensely flavored.


Now what do I do with it? I was trying to be thrifty and oh, so Bonne Femme and now I’d spent more time and energy on the damn celery leaves and I still didn’t know what to do with them. I was a Bad Femme, not a Bonne Femme!

Finally inspiration struck: brodo for risotto! Normally, I use a small bit of soffrito in my risotto: that holy trinity of chopped carrot, onion, and celery. This time it was soffrito minus the celery and it was delicious. A nice flavor bump that married well with the cheese and saffron. Give it a try next time you’ve got a big handful of celery leaves, even if they are pallid city cousins to my robust orto celery!

I also had some fresh peas on hand that needed to be eaten.. so they went to the risotto as well. That’s the beauty of risotto, it’s very forgiving, you can make risotto out of just about anything.

 
Risotto di Sedano e Zafferano
2 cups warm celery stock
1 cup risotto rice: Aborio or Carnaroli
1 T equal parts of finely chopped onion & carrot
1/2 cup of white wine
1/2 cup of grated Parmigiano cheese
1 good sized knob of butter
10-15 saffron threads steeped in a tablespoon of warm celery stock
Olive oil, the extra virgin kind!

Proceed as you would with any risotto.
Gently sauté the rice grains with the chopped carrot and celery. Slowly begin adding the warm celery stock, adding more as the rice grains absorb the stock.
When the rice is nearly done, add the wine and let the rice absorb the wine.
When you deem the rice is ready, and the only way to really tell, is to taste a grain or two, remove the risotto from the heat and swirl in the butter and cheese.

And serve immediately...because you know what they say around our house! Risotto waits for no man!  Buon’ apetito!


 

The Belly of the Beast: A Pig Primer

Just to confuse you, what’s the difference between:
Pork Belly * Bacon * Ham
Pancetta * Prosciutto * Porchetta * Guanciale

Here’s your quick-guide Pig Primer:
Prosciutto v. Bacon: Prosciutto is a haunch that is air-cured. Bacon is pork belly that is cured and usually smoked. Prosciutto is usually eaten ‘crudo’ or raw, but it’s not raw in the usual way, it just means it hasn’t been subjected to heat; the ‘cooking’ is in the curing. Eating raw bacon? I don’t think so.

Ham v. Porchetta: Ham is a cooked haunch. Usually made on Easter Sunday, followed by bean soup later in the week. Porchetta is a full, roasted pig that has been stuffed with  fennel and garlic, and is eaten at Italian festivals and gatherings. Both ham and porchetta have cult followings. As well they should.

Pancetta v. Guanciale v. Bacon: Here is where things get interesting. Pancetta can either be cured or raw, it literally only means pork belly.
Cured pancetta is the closest thing to bacon, except it isn’t smoked and can be eaten raw, although it is usually cooked and used to flavor dishes. In Italy it’s usually found in slabs, like bacon. In the States, it’s round. I have no idea why. Confuses me every time.
 
Guanciale is cured pig jowl and is the upscale pancetta. It’s tender, properly fatty and just delicious. It is a precious commodity in the States (i.e. crazy expensive) and it’s dirt cheap in Italy. Well, not dirt cheap, but about 6 euros for a whole jowl is pretty inexpensive when you consider how little of it you need to add flavor to a sauce.

Pork belly is currentl in vogue, usually braised, soft, melting and super rich. In Italy, you can buy strips of pancetta/pork belly and it looks like thick slabs of raw bacon. Instead of a long, slow cook to melt the fat, here it’s seared over high heat, preferably over a wood fire. It’s the first thing that gets snapped up off a plate of mixed grill.
If we serve it at home, we do it contadina style, or farmer style. Sear it in a hot pan, remove the pancetta when it’s cooked, toss in 5 or 6 fresh sage leaves cut into slivers, some boiled potatoes, and then add a good sized glug of strong red wine vinegar. And stand back, because it steams, hisses and splatters! When things calm down in the pan, deglaze and pour over the pancetta. Serve immediately.


And that’s your pig primer for today. There may be a pop quiz later this week, so be ready!  Buon’apetito!

Rites of Spring in Italy

First, I hope all our mothers had a happy day yesterday! And to anyone who ever had a mother... well, Happy Day to you too. Why should mother's hog the spotlight,  because, after all,  what would a childless mother be? 

We had a week of firsts. First rites of the spring season, first flowers, first adventures in Umbria. Italy is literally bursting with flowers right now and it's a marvelous time to be here.

Our back balcony is full of first flowers and we said our first good-byes. If you live in an area where people have vacation houses, you learn to say good-bye a lot. In this case, we all chose to not say good-bye, but to savor the sunset and then have some pasta, and pretend there were no good-byes at all.  The first bike ride of the season, happened to coincide with 'pioppo' or poplar season. Pioppo spew white, fluffy, puff balls in the spring. There is so much pioppo fluff in the air, it's like a blizzard. It makes people sneeze, your eyes run, and as we were cautioned, when the rain comes, it makes the roads seem like they have been oiled. It also makes the forests incrediby spooky and evocative.
In our garden, we had our first irises and the first little grapelets made their appearance.

It was warm and sunny enough for us to have our first lunch on the roof. And this isn't the first poppy of the season because the hills and roadsides have been covered in crimson flowers for the past two weeks. But, this poppy if for all the mother's out there, because we deserve it.

 

 

Recipe for Sunday Lunch: Slow Roasted Suckling Pig Leg With Friends, Fava Beans and a nice Chianti.

Carpe Diem! Sometimes you have to seize the moment, and when the local EuroSpin had a suckling pig leg on sale, it just had to come home with me.  And you can’t eat pig leg all by yourself, because wouldn’t that just make you a little piggy?  Which meant we had to invite some friends over, which suits us just fine on a Sunday afternoon. See how one little impulse buy has so many pleasant consequences!

I’ll admit to being a wee-wee-wee bit nervous about cooking my baby pig leg. The butcher at the ‘Spin told me to cook in a little wine and it would be buona!
The Euro Spin  is a chain of grocery stores in Italy, but they use local purveyors and have real butchers.  They also have the most spectacularly dangerous parking lot entrances; there must be a franchise rule that states the entrance to all parking lots is to have a partially obscured view of oncoming traffic. Maybe they’ve done research, and a pounding heart and racing adrenaline are good for business.

Roast meat is an Umbrian tradition, and although I trust the butcher at the “Spin,  in the hands of the wrong Umbrian you get very dry, over done roast meat. Or perhaps, that’s part of the tradition and I just haven’t gotten used to gnawing through a breast of chicken?  

Regardless, I was sticking to my American roots and wanted soft, suckling pig. Which meant a long, slow roast (200F/93C for 4 hours) so the leg could bathe in it’s own fat, and the collagen would melt instead of constrict. I put lots of salt on the  thick skin side, some young garlic cloves in slits in the meat, laid the leg on a bed of dried fennel stalks and bay leaves, sprinkled some fennel pollen over the leg, added a few good sized glugs of white wine, and sealed the  roasting pan shut with aluminum foil and a promise not to peak until at least 3 hours had gone by.  I confess I got a little nervous when I couldn’t smell anything after 3 hours, but when I lifted the aluminum seal, there was the leg, all plump and juicy.  About 15 minutes before serving the ‘miaiolino’ I cranked up the heat and browned the skin. This was more for eye appeal, because I really didn’t think any of us would be gnawing on baby big skin when the meat was so tender.

But, man does not live by pig alone, so we needed some side dishes.
Artichoke soup: this is a soup you do not want to make. (Note the soup theme: one you can’t have, one you can easily make and this pain in the neck soup that would be fine if you had unpaid slave labor).  Gently simmer about 8 chopped and cleaned small artichokes, toss in a carrot and some celery and let simmer for about an hour. Puree the bejeezus out of the vegetables and you’ll get a thick, fibrous soup-paste. Yum. To turn the soup from fibrous to velvet, you’ll have to push the soup through a tami or drum sieve. Even with energetic music pumping, rubbing artichoke soup through a tami is just not my idea of a good time. Although the results were lovely served with a juicy lemon slice and some good olive oil.


Cavatelli pasta with spring vegetables. The first step is to make some cavatelli pasta, which is quicker and easier than it sounds. Make a basic fresh pasta dough (2 parts flour, 1 part egg). Let the dough sit for half an hour while you tami that damn artichoke soup.
When you are ready, roll the dough into a long cigar shape, cut off little coin size blobs of dough and press and roll the pasta pieces down the nifty little cavatelli board into little ridged, sauce catching cavatelli. Cover and refrigerate until you are ready to cook them.

For the sauce, caramelize a batch of sliced red onions in white wine, taking care not to let them pass the point of caramel into cinder which is what I almost did! Clean some fava, shell some peas, chop some tomatoes, toast a few pine nuts, toss together in a sauce pan with the cooked pasta and you have cavatelli primavera.

For additional side dishes, invite generous friends who can cook and come bearing romano flat beans with pancetta and tomato and spinach studded with cumin seeds.

Pour some of that nice Chianti, relax and enjoy. That’s what Sunday’s are for.  And being reminded that the next Sunday is now 6 days away, just seems so unfair.

Lemony Spring Asparagus Soup

Asparagus are everywhere. Wild, cultivated, in the market and in grocery stores; there is no escaping asparagus at this time of year. They’re even selling asparagus plants at the nursery.  Lovely, little ferny plants,  and in  a couple of years, if all goes well, you can harvest a few stalks of asparagus. Never quite seemed like it was worth the effort, especially at this time of year when asparagus are so cheap and plentiful.

I didn’t like asparagus when I was kid. It was ...weird and mushy and strongly flavored.  I wonder if my mother served us canned or frozen asparagus because we didn’t normally eat mushy vegetables.  I grew up in the 1950’s when  store bought vegetables were just being bred for shipping and convenience and fresh asparagus may not have made its appearance in the hinterlands of New Jersey.  Remember when tomatoes were packed three in a row in a little plastic basket and covered in crinkly cellophane? The pale, pink tomatoes were so firm, in a pinch, they could double as tennis balls.

I had my asparagus revelation in my early twenties in San Francisco. We were invited to dinner by a business associate who I couldn’t stand. I dreaded going to ‘that’ woman’s house. However, she served this lovely steamed asparagus with a bit of lemon and olive oil. I loved the asparagus, but it didn’t change the way I felt about ‘her’.  Just because she served a good side dish, didn’t mean I needed to forgive her Bitch by the Bay attitude.

Let bygones by bygones, and let’s get on with the soup recipe!  This is a soup you can have as long as you have fresh asparagus.

Lemony Spring Asparagus Soup
serves 2
10-12 stalks of asparagus, about 3/4 pound
1 carrot, roughly chopped
1 onion, roughly chopped
1 large celery stock, gently chopped
1 good size knob of butter
4 cups water or chicken stock
1 lemon

To roughly chop the carrot and onion, you need to wear big black motorcycle boots and have a large dull cleaver. Whack away at the vegetables while dangling an ashy cigarette from your lower lip and grunt loudly as you chop.
For the celery, don your best ballet slippers, a tiara, stand on pointe, hum a lullaby, and very gently slice away at the celery. Use a sharp knife so the celery won’t feel a thing.

Toss the carrot, onion and celery into a soup pot with a little olive oil and a two finger pinch of salt. Let the vegetables mingle and brown a bit in the olive oil, over medium heat,  while you clean and chop the asparagus. A bit of brownage on the vegetables is a good thing.

You can choose any costume that suits your mood whilst cleaning the asparagus. I like to play doctor as I figure out where to snap the asparagus. Too high, and you waste, too low, and you’re eating wood pulp.  I was taught to flex the asparagus and it will naturally break at the right point. I’m not really sure that it works, but it is entertaining.

With cultivated, grocery store asparagus that is all the same size and shape, I just whack off the ends at about the point where it looks like the spear becomes tender. There’s no need to peeling the spears if you are making soup.

Cut the asparagus into good size chunks and add to the soup pot. Add 4 cups water or chicken stock to the pot and let simmer for about 45 minutes.   Reserve a few asparagus tips for the garnish.

Puree the vegetables and stock into a thick soup and return to the heat.
Reduce the soup on medium high heat if you feel it is a bit watery.

Slice the reserved asparagus tips lengthwise and sauté them in butter. Add a generous sprinkle of salt and a good squirt of lemon juice. You want this garnish to be perky and lemony.

Right before serving, swirl in a knob of butter and a generous squirt of fresh lemon juice.

Fill the soup bowls, add the zippy little spear tip garnishes to the bowl and grate a bit of lemon peel on top of the soup.

Enjoy with a crispy, cool white wine, and all will be well on a sunny spring day.

And if you are worried about the stinky pee effect of aspargus, you are not alone. Be sure to read through to  the final comment...you’ll never think of asparagus, beetroot, puffed wheat and semen in the same way. You'll also wonder about grammar education in the UK and the USA.

Buon apetito and buon divertimento!

A Bowl of Soup You Can't Have

This bowl of soup is why people get on a plane and travel. It can only be served in one place on earth and it tastes of that unique place and time.

You can’t make this soup at home. You can make a variation, but never this soup. In fact, this soup only exists for one day, one batch at a time.

It's a bowl of spring foraged green soup found in the mountainous area around San Piero in Bagno in Emilia Romagna. Yes, we had it at the famed Locanda al Gambero Rosso.

We would go there far more often if the road wasn't in such disatrous shape! I know it was a hard winter in the mountains, but..really??? We need to rent a Land Cruiser if we want to go back any time soon.

Moreno reminded us why we endured the dreaded E45 highway, as he showed us what was in the hills on Saturday morning. He had us taste a surprisingly lemony sprig of oxalis, a member of the wood sorrel family.   He explained that he finds the flavor of lemons too strong, and prefers the gentle lemon of oxalis. It’s all about how you are raised, isn’t it?

I won’t even mention the tiny wild asparagus that we devoured. It’s the season for wild asparagus in central Italy, and there’s a certain pine forest outside of Ravenna that is famous for wild asparagus. If I mention this, you’ll get jealous and that wouldn’t be nice, would it?
We’re planting our orto, our vegetable garden, and I’m looking forward to tasting what will come out of our garden. You and I may plant the same San Marzano tomato plants, but yours may get more water, our soil may have different nutrients; they won’t taste the same. And that’s what makes both of our tomato plants so precious, so unique.
By the time we eat those tomatoes, we will have shared hot days, cool nights, too much or not enough rain.

“Eat local” is more that a slogan, it means you and your garden have shared a season together. It means you are getting closer to being in tune with your world, and that seems like a fine goal for a springtime Monday morning.

Enjoy the view, Montone in the distance, surrounded by Umbrian spring green.  I got all misty eyed excited looking at all the gorgeous shades of green. Clearly I need to get out more often.

IACPNYC Conference Part 2: Food Karma meets Social Karma

A funny thing happened on the way to launching this Conference, IACP decided to move to being a self managed association.  This means instead of relying on a company that manages any number of various organizations, we would take the reins and run IACP more nimbly, more responsively, and with more attention to fiscal reality.

Take-Away:  we were going to need a culinary event producer to help us make this conference a reality.

What does it take to produce a Conference? Think of a series of interlocking gears, and each piece needs the other piece in order to turn. The producer provides the means to keep the gears turning. 

Here’s an example: you want to throw a party for 1,000 people and it involves a dozen or more guest chefs and sponsored product. You’ll need a venue (a legal place to throw the party), you’ll need permits, a caterer, a sponsorship team that enables our sponsors to feature their products at the party, it means rounding up those chefs and making sure they show up, signage, electrical drops, cleaning crews, sanitation permits and dumpsters.. what have I forgotten??  Right..you need some ooommph to get the party rolling. In our case it wound up being the artists from La Figa Project slicing fresh fruit onto naked women. Worked like a charm.

And remember that’s just one cog in the Conference gear box.

We knew we needed an event producer in place very quickly. And,  as is the way with non-profit organizations, we also had a very tight budget.
There aren’t that many good culinary event producers so the interview list was short, but  nevertheless, interesting. We interviewed one top notch company, with lovely offices; a Rolex on every wrist sort of place. They would have been perfect, but they were too rich for our budget.

We needed someone flexible, who would be willing to work with us as we figured out what it means to be self managed.

This lead us to Jimmy Carbone’s doorstep. One day I’m talking to an event producer in a fancy office, the next day I’m sitting on a barstool at Jimmy’s No. 43 talking about what is Food Karma Project.

Jimmy may be a teensy bit scruffy around the edges, but he has a heart of pure gold.  He’s a beer maven, knows all the local brewers, and truth be told, he’s like a teddy bear, with twinkly eyes and an ever ready mischevous smile. He’s also completely dialed into the farm to table movement, Heritage Radio and he produces events all year long.
This multi-day conference was bigger than anything he’d ever done, but he was willing to give it a shot, and work within our budget.

For a decision like this, the IACP Board of Directors had to interview Jimmy and approve him coming on board as our event producer. Jimmy shows up at the September board meeting with his secret weapon: Erin McMonagle. As you know, a tall woman in heels, with her hair in a tight topknot, always makes an impression. With her no-nonsense, everything will be organized air, it wouldn’t be a stretch to see her in leather, snapping a whip.  We hired Jimmy and the Food Karma Projects team.

I had no idea that Erin and I, along with the dapper and unflappable Sebastian Cervantes, would become literally inseparable over the next few months. Very much like going on a mountain climbing expedition, you start out as strangers, and wind up as family.  

Now that you have the image of conference as interlocking gears, think of it as little streams, coming from different directions and merging into a river. 
One stream was the Jimmy stream, but there was another, urgent, stream that was demanding attention. The SOCIAL MEDIA stream, and the captain of that ship was none other than the Diva herself, Jackie Gordon.


Jackie dove into IACP conference planning like an Olympic diver going for the gold.
She is a sparking flame on Twitter, and like moths, we gather around her energy. I don’t even remember how I first met Jackie. Was it on Twitter? Did she come to a conference planning meeting.  The Twitter-ific "divathatateny" was everywhere at once, pushing us to reach higher, faster, showing us the power of social media.

We had meetings on Skype, we had meetings in bars (thank you Rev and the Idle Hands Bar!), we had meetings in our loft. We talked, we analyzed; what is IACP and how do we communicate that message.
It sounds simple, and IACP is going through a period of re-energizing; so these conversations were invaluable. How do you engage the up and coming generation, without alienating the long time members?
There should be a synergy: the new members look up to the experienced members for guidance, while the older members look to the younguns’ to see what’s going on in the shape shifitng culinary landscape.

It’s a delicately balanced dance and some of the people Jackie brought into the conversations are masters at manipulating social media. The language they spoke was peppered with lingo that didn’t exist...a year ago. Fast, sharp, nimble, they point the way forward.

The wheels begin to turn, the gears mesh and move forward.

Next Installment: Supporting our Sponsors

Breaking News about Fruits & Vegetables: Is being healthy good enough?

 News Flash: Until fruits and vegetables taste good, and are affordable people won’t eat them.

 As soon as we land in Italy, we start eating more vegetables. 

The spring vegetables are in: tender purple artichokes, crisp peas, snappy fave beans, are mounded high in the market. A shopping bag full of freshly foraged greens is 3 euro.

 It’s not an effort, or a chore to eat more vegetables. It’s more about making difficult decisions: fennel or asparagus tonight?  They are as interesting as any piece of meat on the plate.

We sat with some American friends the other night and wondered why shopping at a NYC or Portland green market was so expensive. Why shopping at the green market was something you saved for special dinners.

 Italian markets are reasonably priced. How come? I’ve asked this question many times, in different places, and never gotten an answer that solved the riddle.

We went to a Food Policy talk in New York, and were told that the Greenmarket was no more expensive than any grocery store. In my experience, that’s simply not true.

Granted, the Union Sq Market in NYC, sells precious micro greens by the ounce, and I’m buying foraged greens by the bagful.  Then again, the Italian produce sellers are notorious for having a heavy thumb on the scale, so maybe that’s how they make up the difference.

Have you noticed? Food deserts have been in the news. Food deserts are neighborhoods where you don’t have decent grocery stores. Then the news comes out that food deserts aren’t the problem. Even when there are vegetables for sale, people aren’t buying them.

Preaching about the health benefits of fruits and vegetables works for some people, but desire is a far more powerful motivator.

How do we create the desire in people to eat more vegetables?  How do we make vegetables sexy and in demand? Who does PR for the artichoke? Who speaks for the carrot?  And silly, childish, cartoon vegetables are not the answer. And neither are shrill spokespeople who intone the wisdom of plant eating from a pillar of self-congratulation.

 Do you think if seasonality was reintroduced to our lifestyle, and we learned to long for the first peas of the season, that it would make a difference?  If peas (and men)  were bred for sweetness and tenderness, would they create a yearning; instead of peas that were bred for longevity and shipping, and who are more like a dependable but unexciting husband?  

 I think the moral of the story is: if the asparagus tastes good, we will eat it. I’m not sure what the moral of the story is regarding tender v. dependable husbands, I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

 

 

Dinner Rituals and a Side of Sautéed Mushrooms

In all the chaos of the past few months, I was struck by a lightening bolt moment of clarity. And, gee, no surprise, it was at the dinner table.

Deep into this conference experience, there was a rare night when it was just Jeff and me at home. Alone. Unexpected. And I made us dinner.   And it was good.  Thus spake Zarathustra, that sly Ubermensch,  delivering his sermon about evolved humanity.

With all the intriguing restaurant dinners, hastily grabbed meals, take out and delivery, we were losing our personal social mooring. Gobbling food in front of a computer does not a dinner make. Shared meals matter and it wasn’t until I was making this dinner that I realized how much they matter to us. What’s that silly pop song? “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone?”

That’s not to say, I wasn’t a bit rusty in the kitchen! My timing was off.  Normally I’m pretty good at managing when to start the water, heat the pan, pull the vegetable from the heat. There is a little dance that goes on when you cook (which is an excellent reason to have good music on in the kitchen).  And was my dancing was creaky that night!
It didn’t matter, what mattered was simple, tasty food, with no other obligations. Besides sautéed mushrooms always make things better.


In our house, there is a ritual to making, eating and cleaning up dinner. my gift is making the dinner. We share the eating. Jeff’s gift is cleaning up. It’s not the best way, or the only way...it’s just our gift to each other ritual. 

If you have kids, or presumably you were once a kid, you know the value of a bedtime ritual. It means safety and comfort and imparts an all-is-right-with-the-world security. Why shouldn’t we recognize the value of a dinner ritual?  If marketers were able to convince the world that convenience and speed trumps home cooking, couldn’t a different set of marketers help us ‘discover’ the value of home meals? 

This is something we should be discussing over the dinner table, isn’t it?


And here is my go-to, can’t really mess it up, Sautéed Mushroom recipe.
Sautéed Mushrooms
A mix of mushrooms is best, but white buttons will do
Minced Parsley
Minced Garlic
Butter
Olive Oil
Sweet Wine
Lemon Juice
Salt, Pepper

There is no real need for quantities here. The recipe scales and is forgiving, so use what you have on hand.

Wash, drain and cube the mushrooms. Mince 1 clove of garlic for every cup of cubed mushrooms. I prefer the dish to be about the mushroom flavor and not overly garlicky. You make them the way you like, ok?

On medium heat, warm a saute pan big enough to hold all of the mushrooms. Add about a tablespoon of olive oil and a small pat of butter. Let the butter melt and the oil warm up. Now add the mushrooms and garlic, cover and let the mushrooms simmer and lose their water, approximately 3-5 minutes.

When the mushrooms are bubbling away in their own juices, remove the lid and let the moisture reduce. When the pan is just about dry, this should take about 5 minutes, add a shot of sweet wine and mix well.  Reduce again until the pan is nearly dry.

Add another small pat of butter, a squirt of lemon juice and a generous grind of black pepper.  Mix well and serve in a warm dish. Garnish with the minced parsley.

Catch y’all on the flip side, cuz’ we’re heading back to the old country tonight.
Time to plant the orto, have ringing bells tell us the time (instead of honking horns letting me know it’s rush hour) and slow down the pace of life. Our boyz are having a little pre-flight snuggle....this is Dante’s first big adventure, so wish us a peaceful flight!


Buon appetito e ci vediamo a presto!

NYC IACP Conference Evolution: Down the Rabbit Hole

Like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole, I’ve been living in a parallel world for the past seven months. Jeff tumbled in a few months ago and as we are emerging and returning to our old world, we are much richer for friendships forged in foxholes, much wiser for hard lessons learned, and excited about what the future holds. 

What am I talking about?? I vanish from the blog world, come back blathering about   rabbit holes. Good Lord, I’m a Born Again Blogger!

I’m talking about the International Association of Culinary Professionals annual conference in NYC that was 5 days of food, fashion and love.  People have written eloquently and glowingly about attending this conference, this is about what it was like to plan and execute this whale of a conference.

Don’t call me Ishmael. Call me Nutz.

It all started with Doug Duda. He’s part Merry Prankster, part Auntie Mame willing us to enjoy the ride, part Guru with mystical ideas that continually flow, and part Whisperer, smoothing over the rough patches. He was also the Conference Chair for this whole shindig, and he invited me along for the journey. My job, as the honorable “Host City Chair”,  would be to corral the ideas and keep fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.

The next one to join our little band of Pranksters was Martha Holmberg, author, writer, visionaire. Martha is a bit of Pippi Longstocking, a dash of Judith Jones, with good pinch of Ruth Reichl’s editorial eye and Anna Wintour’s instincts.

And then we were 3. Of course, it wasn’t just us, but we became a nucleus, or maybe we became a virus as we infected others with The Passion.

Here, drink a little KoolAid,  and help us plan this event that eventually grew to be 5 days long,  with over 23 tours launched in a single day, an opening party with 16 chefs, phenomenal cocktails and naked women covered in fruit slices, over 230 speakers, over 170 educational sessions,a glamorous awards ceremony, a culinary expo that was zinging with energy, a book and blog festival that rocked, demos and hands on classes at the Institute of Culinary Education, the International Culinary Center, and a delightful, intelligent cocktail party and more sessions at the James Beard House. 

Conferences need a theme, and Darra Goldstein of Gastronomica  filtered the New York food scene into a simple sounding concept, “The Fashion of Food”.  New York as an axis of media, food policy, food trends, culture and fetish.
But how do you translate that into a visual message? This was fun, batting around ideas, trying to distill the message into something cleaner, simpler.
Enter Jason Blake. Jason is a challenging, provocative  photographer whose photos tell stories, the narrative caught in a shutter flick.

You see what’s happening, right? More bodies tumbling down the rabbit hole, but not tumbling, more like we were thermalling, buoyed by each others ideas.

Jason woke up one morning with THE way to tell this Fashion of Food story. Take the threads of what is in style now: veganism, craft cocktails, culinary students, cookbook authors, charcuterie makers, urban farmers, kids, a butcher, a coffee roaster. Use real people, stylize them like a Gucci ad and ask the question, “Am I in Fashion?”.
Martha came up with the tagline that said it all.  We had the visual anchor. We had a conversation starter.

The actual photo shoot was a bit like the stateroom scene in the Marx Brothers “Night at  the Opera”. Organized chaos that verged on ordinary chaos.

Pushing  furniture aside in our loft, we set up a simple back drop and had our artisans display their talents. Our poor mixologist arrived with a hang over and we had him pouring a soy sauce and water mixture over and over to simulate a cocktail. I’m sure the smell worked well with a raging hangover.  Our butcher skateboarded over from Brooklyn with 3 rabbits he’d slaughtered in his backyard. Actually he slaughtered 50 of them and just brought 3. He always butchers in a shirt and tie. We had to hide the rabbits from the vegan activist when she showed up. The coffee roaster is naturally gorgeous, and I think Jason fell a little in love with her, but that’s to be expected. Then again, throughout the day, I think he fell in love more than once.

How did we find these people? Nicki, the coffee roaster is the daughter of Jeff’s first girlfriend.  The charcuterie maker is our good friend Elaine, she of cherry pie fame.  Adam the butcher? I think Adam and Nora, our urban farmer,  came from a conversation with Holley Atkinson of Slow Food NYC. The adorable kids are Karin Endy’s boys. Karin is the President of The Culinary Trust and Karin roped in Ona our culinary student and Simone our vegan. I met Lauren Shockey, our author, at a book signing event and fell in love with the story behind her smile. The mixologist thought I might be just a little nuts, but he was a good sport in the end.The net widens.

This is a long story, that deserves telling. But it needs to be told in pieces, in installments.

Next chapter: enter Jimmy Carbone. (Kar- bone- ay).  Bring a beer for that chapter.