Cheese Ravioli with Sage Butter

When Natalie, the niece of a yoga buddy of mine, invited me to make ravioli at her Foundations of Education Class at Lehigh Carbon Community College (LCCC), I thought she must be one very confused student. “How would preparing stuffed fresh pasta help to edify future teachers?” I asked myself.

“We want the students to experience learning and teaching through different modalities,” explained Mary Braccili, LCCC Assistant Professor of Teacher Education, when I called her to inquire about the proposed session. “The five senses — seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting — can all be used in the classroom to enhance learning. And because the unit’s sub-theme this semester is Italy, Mary added, Natalie thought of asking you to make an Italian dish with our students.

(Natalie, I retract my initial doubts — you go to the head of the class!)

Professor Mary Braccilli, "agent" Natalie, and Sharon at the LCCC ravioli session.

And so it was, earlier this week, that my number one sous chef Walter and I had big big fun with a hands-on session in preparing Cheese Ravioli with Sage Butter at the LCCC Fowler Center kitchen.

Sharon gives an overview of stuffed fresh Italian pastas -- such as tortellini, cappelletti, and ravioli -- to LCCC education students.

The students rotated in groups of four in rolling the prepared egg-flour dough on a hand-cranked pasta machine into gossamer 4-inch wide strips. Then they dolloped on the filling mixture of ricotta, Parmigiano Reggiano, Gruyere, and parsley. Quickly they folded the dough strip over, tamped out the air between the dollops, and cut and sealed the ravioli with serrated wheels.

(Left to right) LCCC education students Michele and Eddie fill and cut ravioli while Sharon shows another student (also named Eddie) how to prepare the dough for rolling.

As I supervised, the young cooks experienced how the dough should look and feel — as smooth as modeling compound but not sticky. As the end of class neared, we boiled the ravioli just for a few minutes, then drained and tossed them in sizzling butter and fresh sage leaves. The nutty herbal aroma evoked an idyllic autumn day. At last, we tasted the tender morsels. A-plus to the ravioli makers at LCCC!

Cheese Ravioli with Sage Butter recipe

I caught the tail-end of a Ruth Reichl interview on NPR the other day. Ruth, the editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine, is getting a ton of air time in the wake of that iconic publication’s demise and her new cookbook.

She was asked about her favorite, go-to, family, comfort food, a meal she enjoys making and eating at home. She answered quickly, decisively: “Spaghetti carbonara.” Then she rattled off her recipe, threw in some technique details, and convinced me that she was practicing what she was preaching.

I’ve met people whose love for Italian food could be traced to their first encounter with an authentic carbonara. But I haven’t met many whose career was shaped by its defining ingredient and flavor – pancetta – cured pork belly.

Chef Warren Stephens in his "office."

Warren Stephens is chef and a business partner with Butcher and Calcasieu, two enterprises of the wildly successful Link Restaurant Group of New Orleans.  He had his pancetta moment in Tuscany. Stephens, born and raised in North Carolina, always felt drawn to food. But when he visited a friend living in Tuscany, and tasted his first carbonara, he became fascinated by the alluring flavor of pancetta. “I bought hunks of it, and experimented with cutting, cooking, and tasting it. That led to me to exploring more about pork products, and eventually returning to the U.S. to make and sell my own cured meats.”

More about pancetta

Inner Italians who are fans of the award winning AMC TV program Mad Men received a gift-within-a-gift with Sunday night’s “Souvenir,” the eighth episode of the third season. (You can still catch it at various times on October 6 and 7. (Check the AMC schedule for days and times.)

We learn that gorgeous Betty Draper, frustrated early 1960s homemaker and wife of sizzling ad man Don Draper, has an Inner Italian that’s been stifled in the suburbs (just in case we don’t “get” that Betty’s really trapped, the Drapers reside in Ossining, NY, where Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison is located). Betty’s along for the ride on Don’s two-day visit to Rome (hmm, let’s see . . . fly across the Atlantic, have dinner, fly back across the Atlantic?) to check out client Conrad (call me Conny) Hilton’s property, the Rome Cavalieri.

To many Americans in the early 1960s, Rome seemed the height of jet-set glamour -- la dolce vita -- the sweet life.

Betty no sooner says grazie to the bellman than she’s on the phone in fluent Italian (albeit, not with a fabulous accent — not sure here if creator Matthew Weiner wanted her to speak with an accent or if actress January Jones had bad coaching) making an appointment at the parrucchiere (hair stylist). Next we see her in an outdoor cafe straight out of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which was released in the U.S. in 1961, just a couple years before the Drapers fictional jaunt.

Betty is straight-up channeling the sultry ‘60s Italian actress Virna Lisi with a blonde updo, major eyeliner, and a very little black dress. Two Italian men at the next table take notice. Betty chooses to go with the man at the opposite table, who is her own husband Don, acting mysterious, just as he does when he’s away from her in Manhattan. (Check out the insightful blog commentary by Adam Wilson How Betty Draper Learned Italian (and Why I Don’t Care) at thefastertimes.com.

Rome has revitalized the troubled Draper marriage as we see when Don and Betty return to their room after dinner. The view from their window, with St. Peter’s dome in the distance, looks like the photograph on the “Deluxe Room” page at the Cavalieri Hilton Web site. (This show is known for its near fetishism in period detail, but seriously, this view looks like the art department just enlarged the photo.)

Back at home in her knotty pine kitchen, Betty — usually seen in demure shirtwaists — is wearing a vibrant Emilio Pucci (or maybe a knock off) silk jersey print dress, cutting edge fashion at the time. Pucci was a Florentine nobleman whose early ‘60s designs cut the thread with the staid ‘50s.

Although she looks fabulous in the Pucci, Betty’s boring old life is not a good fit. As she tells Don, “I hate this place. I hate our friends. I hate this town.” She’d rather be in Italy, certamente. But all she gets is a souvenir charm of the Colosseum from Don.

What would Italians make of this episode? I’m not sure and they won’t have a chance to find out until probably 2011. The second season of Mad Men premieres December 28, 2009 on Fox TV Italy. Click here for some amusing clips of the hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-loving, and occasionally hard-working Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency gang speaking in Italian.

Sharon and I wanted to explore Lecce, the spectacular capital city of Puglia — often referred to as the “Florence of the South.”

We needed to find a place to stay that would position us near Lecce, yet keep us within easy striking distance of nearby attractions and points south. Plus, we didn’t want the hassles of city parking.

It was my turn to choose a place so I perused booking.com for accommodations near Lecce.

The B&B Cavallino looked perfect: an intimate property (3 suites), outside of Lecce, reasonably priced and boasting some of the highest customer ratings of any lodging establishment in the area. We e-mailed and were able to procure a room.

B&B Cavallino proprietor Paola Danielli (right) and her husband Paolo Mercurio.

Upon arrival, we met the luminous proprietor Paola Danielli. Efficient, lovely, charming (and fluent in English), she showed us to our “room.” What an exciting surprise! We had a spacious apartment with two floors, two terraces, a kitchen, and a huge bedroom overlooking a quiet green campo.

The apartment really felt like our home away from home for the next few days. Every morning before we set out, we brewed our own coffee and feasted on a lavish tray of local pastries that Paola had purchased for us. As Sharon always says, “You have to love a country where they eat cookies for breakfast.”

The only minor glitch during our stay    turned out to be the source of more joking   than frustration. Due to local street repairs,   access to and from the southern route to the Salento peninsula ran through an AGIP gas station. It was so well trafficked, we took to calling it the AGIP autostrada.

We couldn’t have been more fortunate in finding this jewel of a B&B. It’s easiest to reach by car, however, with proper advisal the hosts will provide transfers to and from the Lecce train station.

B&B Cavallino is the perfect starting point to explore the many attractions of the Salento peninsula south of Lecce.

Reading that Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore’s new film Baaria opened this year’s Venice Film Festival — and wishing I were there! — sent me to my DVD shelf. I reached for Tornatore’s Oscar-winning Cinema Paradiso (Nuovo Cinema Paradiso in the Italian release) and popped it into the player.

This is a movie that improves every time I watch it. It’s a bittersweet tale of an irrepressible little boy Salvatore, nick-named Totò, in post-war Sicily who finds both father figure, and his future, at the local movie house Cinema Paradiso.

An important element, and one that’s really fun to watch, are the dozens of clips of movies we see — through Salvatore’s perspective – that are showing through the years at Cinema Paradiso. Some of the movies I recognize. Others are unknown to me.

Curious if I could find a roster of all these films that appear in the movie, I started searching the Web. Finally, on Italian Wikipedia, there they were.

I like the variety in Tornatore’s choices for the Paradiso. He’s not a film snob. In a movie that’s really a love letter to the cinema, Tornatore mixes Capra’s American middlebrow It’s a Wonderful Life with Vadim’s tacky Euro-flick And God Created Woman with Visconti’s art-house La Terra Trema with Ford’s classic Hollywood Stagecoach.

From Charlie Chaplain’s City Lights to Fellini’s I Vitelloni, the clips just keep on coming. If I had to pick only one, however, for sheer entertainment value, it has to be Silvana Mangano’s crazy dance to Il Negro Zumbon in Anna. (A nun with a past!) You can catch it on YouTube.

If you love Cinema Paradiso, check out the director’s cut. It’s a much longer and very different flim. If you’ve seen both, which do you prefer and why?