I cannot remember the first time I ate a salad made with raw sliced fennel mixed with beautifully dramatic blood oranges. Surely it was while having lunch at our neighbor’s house just outside of Pozzuoli, close to the baroque city of Naples….
At first glance this combination may seem to be a strange mixture of flavors. Yet crunchy and savory fennel tossed, with sweetly-juicy orange wedges, is the perfect example of light, bright and fresh. In other words, the making of this salad makes the moodiness of winter weather in the midst of spring promises somehow disappear. Continue reading
I know that pickled beans might sound a bit strange and most probably not as addictively appetizing as they are in real life. I am convinced that this is the fault of some minor misconceptions. First of all, the process of marinating in vinegar is called “pickling” in English. This word naturally evokes sour thoughts of all sorts, without doing justice to the wonderful flavor transformation that takes place when vegetables (and beans of course) are bathed in something refreshingly tart like vinegar. Secondly, beans have a bad reputation mostly because when prepared without passion they can be decidedly uninteresting. Combine both of these words in the English language, and one runs the risk of promoting an unappealing pair on the plate.
There’s something about spaghetti for breakfast – or eating the crusts of homemade pizza in the morning for that matter – that remind me of countless carefree summer days living along the coast of Naples. When I was younger, my mother’s best friend and everyday espresso partner taught her how to make use of leftover spaghetti by baking a simple frittata. The following recipe is the perfect example of how southern Italians make something delicious out of a handful of seemingly unimportant surplus ingredients.
I am in a serious rush and running behind at the same time. In the month of September, if I’m not spending my days preserving the season’s overabundance of tomatoes entire crates at a time, I get the distinct sensation that I am missing something important. Every minute counts and I cannot decide if I should be writing about how to preserve summer figs or spend my afternoons making melanzane alla parmigiana with eggplants from the garden. What on earth this has to do with my recipe for spinach polpette has a kind of logic that I can easily explain.
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