Aroma Cucina

Plate2Page Magic in Toscana

Is it alchemy or magic when a spell is cast and you are transported to another place? When words transport and images bring a place to life?
Food bloggers are stuck in that nether world between art and craft, hobby and vocation, respect and silliness.
Perhaps we belong to the old tradition of serial story telling?
Not unlike Pinocchio and the Pickwick Papers that told their stories in regular releases in the newspaper, we tell stories and share recipes in little daily bites. Our loyal readers are in on the jokes, know the characters, know of my fondness for roasting quail.

It was in that spirit, of wanting to walk in Dickens or Collodi’s shoes,  that I went to the Plate2Page food writer & photography workshop in Tuscany.

OK...I confess Dickens was not exactly what I was thinking about on the long, foggy drive from Montone to Pistoia. But, I was looking for inspiration, and permission, to play with my words and my photos.

Writing is solitary and there is certainly an appeal to being able to share fears and frustrations with other who tell tales through words and pictures. How much of my personal life should I reveal, must everything be 100% truthful and hot off the fire, how often must I blog, and how the hell do I adjust the white balance on my camera? 

Blogging is a new frontier for sharing and those of us who truly care about what we write push ourselves to do it better with every post.


There were 16 of us: 4 organizers/teachers and 12 participants. We came from:Germany via India, France via Florida, South Africa via England, Italy via Sweden, Malta, Brazil,Canada, California, Denver, Belgium, Toronto, Poland, Amsterdam, England. In other places and other situations, this might make for long uncomfortable silences, but when food is your love, the barriers melt, the Belgium chocolates are passed around and the noise level rises.

There was a late night photography class, and multiples of writing and photography assignments throughout the weekend. And while I picked up technical knowledge, what I truly gained was a respect for our craft and the comfort of comraderie with my fellow serial writers.

Many thanks to our creative organizers: Meeta of  What’s for Lunch, Honey; Jean of Cooksister;  Jamie of Life’s a Feast, and Ilva of Lucullian Delights. Each of you brought something unique and wonderful to the experience.

And more thanks to the generous sponsors of this Plate2Page workshop: Bisol Prosecco, Sunchowder’s fabulous jams, Zwilling J.A. Henckel’s knives, tasteofhome's yummy baking book, Smaromi’s gorgeous salts, OXO, South African’s Peppadew peppers, Cavi-Art’s beautiful faux caviar, Gallo rice, Nielsen-Massey Vanilla, Gourmelli’s pink Himalayan salt slab, Matcha Factory’s green tea powder and travel size bottles of Tabasco.

Food Speak: NYC Style

Do you think we could view the world of food as a many faceted, sparkling crystal? Shiny in spots and grubby in others?  Do you think New Yorkers are a tribe unto their own? How does everyone afford to go out night after night? Why didn’t I didn’t know I could go to a different food event every day and night? 

I’ve been a part of some amazing and unique conversations while I’ve been in The City the past few weeks. As is par for the course with me, one question leads to another.

There is no question that food is HOT. The media, the buzz, the attitudes, the events remind me of the crazy days in the fashion world when money flowed and the world revolved around Kate Moss.  Linda Evangelista infamously declared she didn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000.  Now, I believe it s Giada De Laurentiis who is the reigning diva of the moment.

Celebrity chefs have usurped the Super Models. My, how the world has changed.  Or, my, how it really hasn’t changed at all; it is still just as silly as it ever was.
But, there is something else going on; there is an air of urgency, an awareness that we need to know more about what we are eating.


Our complacency with the way we eat is slowly being shrugged off, like a sleeping giant shaking its head and trying to make sense of what happened while he was napping.  Shake, shake: junk food isn’t really cheap if you factor in the cost of making people sick. Shake, shake: food tastes better when you eat it in season. Shake, shake: people forgot how to cook, but they’re waking up to it’s pleasures once again. Shake, shake: we’ve got a lot of people to feed on this planet, how we gonna do it?

On Tueday night, I listened to Kat Flinn, Pam Anderson and Lauren Shockey talk about their new books and their personal journeys that led them back to the home kitchen. The crowd roared when someone said, “Bring back Home-Ec classes!”


As part of the Culinary HIstorians series,I listened to one of our national treasures, Paula Wolfert, talk about the joys of Moroccan cooking, and how happy she is to bring Berber cooking the attention it deserves.  It was a sold out event and the audience was rapt, respectful and informed.

By Friday, I needed to round up food people for our #IACPNYC photo shoot.  The word went out and within 24 hours I had a skate boarding butcher, mustached mixologist, gorgeous coffee roaster, courageous author, vegan activist, home charcuterie maker, two adorable boys who wanted to play air guitar with a bunch of celery, and an urban farmer all lined up to have their photo taken for the cause. My sincere thanks to Holley Atkinson of  Slow Food NYC and Karin Endy of The Culinary Trust for helping me to gather the clan.


There was a kind of magic in the room as everyone shared their stories with us. These passionate people are doing amazing things and changing the way we think about food and drink.  I have the utmost respect and admiration for our photographer, Jason Blake, who conceived of this project and who let his curiosity and enthusiasm bring out the best in everyone.

One last shout out of the week to Jane Lerner of Smorgasburg/The Brooklyn Flea frame. What a great time and great food to be had in Brooklyn!  Thanks for getting me over there and opening my eyes and tastebuds.

There’s a phrase that keeps simmering in my brain as I work on the IACP conference and meet all these committed people: “May you live in interesting times.”  Well, I do believe I’ve hit the jackpot.

Thank You Mom, Or Why I Love Being in the Kitchen

A little break from artichokes to wish all the mother’s a Happy Day!
All week long I’ve been thinking of my Mom and chuckling about how she can never remember the Italian word for artichoke: carciofi.  I suspect she remembers very well, but enjoys hearing everyone laugh.
One of my mother’s greatest gifts to me (and there are many!) is my love of cooking. She’s a good cook, but the fact that growing up, we always had dinner together is where the love part comes in. I had to be home by dinnertime..or else. That was a time to share the day, talk about nonsense, or revel in the fresh corn that was picked moments before it went into the pot. Of course the time I picked the cow corn by mistake and brought it home also meant it was time to teach me the basics of corn identification. It’s how I learned all the capitals of the 50 states...drilling at the dinner table.
No matter what kind of day you were having, dinnertime was a little oasis where everything else stopped and you connected with the family. Whether you wanted to or not. Hell, I was a miserable teen ager like every other teen ager, but you still had to come to the table.

Then there were the parties. Growing up it seemed as if there was always a party going on, either at our house or at somebody’s house. One time I walked into our kitchen, and there were 5 or 6 women, chopping onions,  all with saran wrap tied around their eyes to keep from crying.  They were laughing too hard to notice they were crying anyway.  Over the years, we all learned to hang spoons from our noses. No dinner was complete without a spoon hanging session. Poor Jeff, he married into a family of spoon hangers. Not that his family isn’t just as nutty! 

Even bad times meant people gathering, people bringing food. When my father passed away, after the funeral everyone came back to our house. The house was literally bursting with people and eventually sadness turned to laughter with everyone telling stories and eating casseroles.  I remember thinking how much my Dad would have loved that party.

And that’s why I love to cook. Because putting food on the table is a sure way to gather family and anyone else who is around and have some laughs. If you have dinner together often enough, those dinners build an unbreakable bond.

So, Mom, when you say, “I don’t know where she got it from.” Yes, you do...I got it from you. 

Here's a wonderful musical video, from Louie Lopez who has eaten at our table so many times he is definetely family!

 

 

 

Simple Food v. Modernist Cuisine?

There is much ado over Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine and if I had a spare room and a lot of extra cash...well, I still don’t think I’d buy it.
In case you missed the coming of this encyclopedic behemoth, it’s 5 volumes, at around 500 bucks and it’s on back order. I respect and admire the Boyz with Toyz crowd, but in general, I’m a simpler, comfort seeking cook. Let me be clear, there’s a time and place for modernist cuisine, and a time and place for comfort food. There is room to enjoy both; there is no line in the sand and both schools learn from each other.

Recently I’ve come across fooderati prose that gushes in wonderment at the miracles that can be performed with just three ingredients! As if there was some prize for discovering joy in simplicity. Well...duh. Good quality ingredients, prepared respectfully have been in vogue since women discovered how to cook meat over a fire.

Umbria is probably one of the better examples of making good food from humble ingredients. Note, I did not say Michelin 5 star fine dining, I said good food. Everyday food.

Pancetta is a staple meat in Italy; not the cured, bacon-like pancetta, but raw slices of pork belly. It’s always the first thing to get gobbled up at BBQ’s. A traditional stove top way to make pancetta is to fry it in the pan, throw bits of  fresh sage in at the last moment, and then finish the dish with a good size hit of red wine vinegar. It’s pork belly perfect.

My big experiment today was seeing how potatoes would pair with the super peppery arugula that wintered over in our orto.  It worked beautifully with boiled potatoes moistened with some of our olive oil, a little bit of mustard and a pinch of salt. Take note: no self respecting Umbrian would ever add mustard to anything, it’s just not in their DNA.

The tomato salad was a salad of necessity. The tomatoes are coming up from Sicily and they’re just so-so, but I wanted a salad. The sweet peas are in season and I’ve been throwing them in everything, just because I can.

So, the moral of the story is don’t apologize for simple food, don’t elevate simple food to a state of godliness and save your pennies because this new oven that Shola is testing at Studio Kitchen looks to be just about everything I’ve ever dreamed of. It peels grapes for god’s sake.

Happy Weekend!

PS Next week we’re hosting an Artichoke Festival here at Aroma Cucina. How to clean them and a week’s worth of recipes. Should be some tasty fun.

When To Be or Not to Be a Locavore

I will never be a committed locavore. I won’t give up:
mangoes
coffee
olive oil
tangerines
shrimp
wine

I could go on and on,  but you get the point. Doesn’t it make more sense to be an efficient-vore?  Certain things grow better in certain places. What am I going to do for high altitude coffee beans? Grow them on top of my kitchen cabinets because that’s the highest point around?

Things taste better when they grow in their proper environment. This is called terroir, and wine people will debate endlessly about whether or not you can taste the shale that covers the root of a particular grapevine. French and Italians will come to fisticuffs over whose truffles taste better. I KNOW our orto produces the best tomatoes in the whole world. And that’s because tomatoes taste best in season, sun ripened, plucked and eaten still warm. 

We need to know when to ship and when to stay  local. No one hands out medals for trying to force grow lettuce in a freezing cold upstate NY greenhouse in winter. It’s simply not efficient.

Shipping has become incredibly efficient. The reason civilization spread was an indirect result of wanting what someone else had. People wanted salt, and eventually they built a city near the salt collecting area and called it Rome. Spices traveled and so did culture. We traded...I make this, you grow that, we trade.

Sarah Murray’s book, The Moveable Feast is an absolute eyeopener as she explains the pure efficiency of shipping food. It’s full of stories about things that we now take for granted and weird moments in history. Like the Clipper ship races, where the ships would leave India and race to England, arriving within moments of each other. Or the fact that UPS truck routes are  set up so they have no left turns to save on fuel.

Read the book. Make informed decisions. I’m all for eating local, when it makes sense. But, when those mangoes are flooding Chinatown, and they taste this good, you know I’m going to be eating them!

How do you eat?

If organic celery costs $4.95 and regular celery costs .99 which would you buy?

• organic because I'm worth it
• how bad could it be?
• regular so I can save $4.00 and buy a bottle of organic water

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Create a Poll

I know. I’m trivializing important food issues, but what goes on in the world of food media and marketing is really frustrating and demoralizing. Are we content to be treated as mindless children? walking wallets? elitist foodies devouring endangered species?
Or worse: have we lost our sense of humor?? 

Alice Waters included sharks fin in her wish list for a final meal and was soundly berated for being insensitive. Hell, I want some of those Ortolan little birdies that Mitterrand ate for his last meal. I want them...but I’m not getting them. People, could we please just get a grip?

Slow Food sent around a petition regarding Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD. It’s not about the collapse of the American colonies ...it’s about bees. Here’s the quote:  “The Environmental Protection Agency has the power to investigate and ban the pesticides thought to be responsible but, despite their own scientists' advice and under pressure from pesticides companies, they're dragging their feet.” [emphasis by Slow Food]

This is scare mongering. Slow Food is laying a blanket denunciation on all pesticides. If you go onto their various websites, there is now a more moderate tone suggesting there may be multiple reasons for CCD. But, that won’t get names on a petition, will it?

Whole Foods issued a cheery 5 step rating system for animal slaughter, only it’s more about making the consumer feel good,  than it is about being able to comply.
The reality is that it's a very bad idea to have bulls around that aren’t castrated. They get really feisty and will injure each other if a pretty Bessie happens to stroll by.
There are also the legal problems associated with on farm slaughter. Most states don’t allow it, or allow it only for at home consumption, or there are significant limits on the number of animals to be slaughtered. It is a state by state ruling. So, is Whole Foods only going to source from one state? One farm? Not likely.

And what is up with pigs and bowling balls?? Apparently it’s a wonderful thing to throw bowling balls in with the pigs so they have something to do. This is natural? Italian pig famers would laugh themselves silly. Then again, bowling isn't very popular in Italy. Maybe the farmers could start a trend.

People, we need to face some facts. There are lots of hungry mouths in the world, more on the way and we all need to eat. While slow, local and organic is wonderful, and the way I like to eat, it is a choice. I buy organic when I feel it’s worth it. 
So could we scale down the rhetoric and start coming up with some truly viable solutions?
And to the guys at Whole Foods and Slow Foods....don’t treat us like children. Talk to us about the problems, the challenges, the realities, and we’ll like you a whole lot better in the morning.

 

Winter Weekend Fare

This weekend I'm recharging my batteries with hearty winter fare.

Duck Elaine: fennel scented roasted legs, seared breast served on a bed of sour cherries that had been picked in their prime. Elaine just happened to have a duck in the fridge, and you know the old Chinese saying, "A duck must be eaten." So eat, we did.

Saturday night movie and a trip down Food Memory Lane at a funky old Spanish restaurant on Houston St. It's the only place in the world where I eat iceberg lettuce and French dressing. And it will probably be another 30 years before I do it again. But, last night it worked perfectly.

Sunday morning egg with buttered soldier. And a warm bowl of cappucino. Total indulgence. Happy Sunday!

Holy Vegans! Locavores Divine! Rise of the Food Radical!

We’re back. Our re-entry into the U.S of A., into NYC, into Soho is  exhilarating, and more than a little dis-orienting. You come back into the ‘hood’ with fresh eyes, wanting to see what’s new, what’s still the same. 

Last year when we came back, blueberries were the new “lose weight, anti-oxidant, liberated radical foodstuff that will keep you young forever”.  The year before that is was pomegranates. I suppose the  jump the shark moment for pomegranates came when the POM people claimed drinking their POM juice would cure erectile dysfunction. Maybe they thought licking the sticky juice off of body parts was a natural cure?

This year it appears to be the deification of vegetarians presided over by those high priests The Vegans.  One of the silliest things I’ve read in promoting veganism was about the agony of a chicken laying an egg. Honey, get a grip. Go to a hen house. They cuddle up. They lay an egg. They go get something to eat. They’re chickens, there is reason they are called bird brains.

Another fringe cult that has blossomed into a full blown religion is the Holy Locavore. Has it crossed a sainted locavore’s mind that one of the earliest factors in civilizing our prehistoric selves was the creation of trade routes? Use some common sense, grow things that are native to your area, and trade for the stuff you can’t grow locally.

And what the hell is up with Stonyfield and their scary yogurt packaging?? They use Uncle Sam to scare us into eating organic?   The label ‘organic’ has been so abused, it’s literally meaningless, so I don’t appreciate being bullied by my yogurt carton first thing in the morning.

Let’s face it, nutritional science is a moving target. Once upon a millennium ago, sugar was considered a cure for the plague. More recently, margarine was the cure for high cholesterol, now it’s evil incarnate. Just a few months ago, a NYC bureaucrat decided we need to eliminate salt from our diet. Then he recants and declares he only said it for the publicity.
 
I’m not saying I’m anti-organic, anti-vegetable, anti-locavore; even though I just might be anti-vegan. All I am saying is let’s not get militant.

Is there a way to scale down this rhetoric or am I just being a naive rube? Do we have to vanquish someone who doesn’t hold the same opinion as us, or can we respect our differences?  Can’t we all just get along?  OK. I get it. I’m a naive rube.  Welcome me back.

Time to move on

Things to say good bye to:
Truffles

Olives

Salumi

Fall Light on the last bits from our orto


Aperitivo Hour

The Hills of Umbria




Things to look forward to: Friends, family,  Indian, Vietnamese, Chinese food, the luxury of ordering up, multi-culture cross-over inspiration, fast internet, Jon Stewart, biking around the city, energy in the streets, movies in English, roast turkey, oysters, 50 kinds of blue cheese, watching our new kitty become a New Yorker.
See you on the other side!

Slow Food Salone del Gusto

We're off to Torino to attend the Slow Food Salone del Gusto.  I'm hoping to be able to blog from Torino, but you just never know how the internet connection will be. This is a massive conference with producers from all over the globe  coming in to show off their wares, discuss food trends and politics, host tastings, put on demonstrations etc etc etc etc. 

I have a feeling this will be a huge dose of inspiration!