Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Pop-up Cooking Class: Pasta

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Lehigh Valley Style

photo by Colin Coleman, Lehigh Valley Style magazine

Escape from the snow, cold, and ice with a fun, interactive pop-up pasta cooking class with Sharon Sanders, Certified Culinary Professional, and Walter Sanders of simpleitaly.com.

The small classes (maximum of 10)  in a welcoming home kitchen (Center Valley, PA) are an intimate experience.

You’ll learn to make, roll, and cut fresh egg pasta dough by hand-cranked machine, as well as prepare, and pair, three sauces for both fresh and packaged pasta.

You’ll also receive an inscribed copy of Cooking Up an Italian Life and a SimpleItaly.com chef’s apron.

And, of course, you’ll sample all the pastas you’ve prepared!

Check out what Lehigh Valley Style
says about our Learn-and-Dine cooking classes

Choose from two sessions:

Sunday, March 9, 2 p.m.

Thursday, March 13, 4 p.m.

Fee is $60 (per student). To request a spot, fill out the “Contact Us” form click here

 

Love Is All You Need

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Danish actress Trine Dyrholm is irresistible in this "Inner Italian" flick.

Danish actress Trine Dyrholm is irresistible in this “Inner Italian” flick.

Ever on the lookout for “Inner Italian” movies (see my Top Ten), I stumbled upon Love Is All You Need (Sony Pictures Classics) on Netflix. It’s a relatively recent film that must not have made it to my little corner of the world during its theatrical release.

Susanne Bier, the Danish Academy-award winning director for best-foreign language film (2011) In a Better World, made this film with stars Pierce Brosnan and Trine Dyrholm. She shot it on location near Sorrento.

Love Is All You Need is certainly not a masterpiece (how many are?) but Walter and I found its quirkiness, and the charismatic Dyrholm, appealing. Not a typical rom-com, several dark elements colored the narrative.

We responded to the palpable sense of locale and it seemed as if some of the minor characters were locals.

My only serious irritation was from the music. Opening with Dean Martin’s That’s Amore (a song spot-on for Moonstruck, a movie celebrating an Italian American family in Brooklyn) is tone deaf in this context.

A view of Amalfi from a limonceto.

A view of Amalfi from a limonceto.

While I’m not in the business of revealing plot points, I will declare my crush on Danish actress Dyrholm.

Forget Brosnan, I fell in love with her.

When she says, “I can’t imagine existing in a world without lemons,” I found a soulmate.

Brosnan’s lemon grove is a pivotal locale that reminded me of my enchanting stay in a cottage set in a citrus grove above Amalfi.

Love, and lemons, are all I need.

What “Inner Italian” movie do you like?

The Glorious Vegetables of Italy

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“Wherever there is a plot of land in Italy, there is something growing, whether it’s row upon row of staked tomatoes or a hardy mound of rosemary. Even the most modest city balcony holds pots of geraniums and basil. Italians love to be outside, and who can blame them? The entire peninsula is, essentially, a beautiful garden, filled with a profusion of glorious vegetables, from artichokes to zucchini.”
—Domenica Marchetti
Domenica Marchetti's book is a vegetable primer and recipe collection illustrated with stunning photographs by Sang An.

Domenica Marchetti’s book is a vegetable primer and recipe collection illustrated with stunning photographs by Sang An.

Verdure (green things) are not merely ingredients used in la cucina italiana. They are quite literally the soul of Italian cooking. Food writer Domenica Marchetti proves the point in her fresh new cookbook The Glorious Vegetables of Italy.

Marchetti shares recipes for traditional dishes, such as Ribollita, and innovative interpretations, such as Carrot-Ricotta Ravioli with Herbed Butter. Her taste memory guides her.

Domenica Marchetti cooks Italian vegetables thoughtfully. photograph by Olga Berman

Domenica Marchetti dazzles with Italian vegetables.
Photograph by Olga Berman

Her mother was born in Chieti, Abruzzo, and her father’s parents were also born in Italy. Marchetti, who lives in Viriginia, has spent plenty of time in her forebears’ homeland absorbing the flavors and techniques that make vegetables sing.

This is a book of vegetable, not vegetarian, dishes. Meats, cheeses, and seafood are the condiments here rather than the main event. The recipe chapters are organized by the courses in a meal: “Appetizers,” “Garden Soups and Salads,” “Pasta, Risotto, Gnocchi, and Polenta,” “Pizza, Calzoni, and Panini,” “Main Courses,” and “Side Dishes.”

She has desserts, too. . . Sweet Potato Frittelle, Chocolate Zucchini Cake, and Winter Squash Panna Cotta among them. . . also a chapter of Preserves and Condiments.

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Southern Italian Desserts

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Crostata al Gelo di Mellone (watermelon pudding tart) from Sicily graces the book's cover.

Crostata al Gelo di Mellone (watermelon pudding tart) from Sicily graces the cover.

I don’t know why Rosetta Costantino’s family emigrated from the small southern Italian hill town of Verbicaro to the San Francisco Bay Area when she was 14. But I am grateful they did.

Had Costantino remained in her native Calabria, I doubt I would be salivating over her new book Southern Italian Desserts. Written with Jennie Schacht, it is a meticulously researched cultural accounting. The book includes 76 recipes for traditional sweets from the regions of Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Puglia, and Sicily. Some of the pastries, such as Cannoli, are familiar to English-speaking bakers but many, such as Biscotti di Ceglie (almond cookies filled with cherry preserves), are revelations.

With photography by Sara Remington and Ten Speed Press’s signature high-quality production values, the volume is as visually appealing as its recipes are alluring.(Ten Speed also published Costantino’s first book My Calabria.)

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On the Truffle Trail in Le Marche

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This article first appeared in the November 2011 issue
 of the award-winning subscription travel newsletter Dream of Italy

By Sharon Sanders

Acqualagna truffle hunter Giorgio Remedia assesses his treasure.

Acqualagna truffle hunter Giorgio Remedia assesses his treasure.

Acqualagna, Italy–Two dozen miles southwest of the Adriatic coastal city of Pesaro, the placid plain morphs into picturesque hills near Acqualagna with 5,000-foot-high Monte Nerone and other peaks in the distance. The terrain gets rugged quickly.

Our bus struggled up a winding dirt road to deliver us to truffle hunter Giorgio Remedia’s azienda. Although we’d been advised to have proper footware, the sight of Remedia’s knee-high rubber waders gave some of us pause. He had a no-nonsense demeanor that could perhaps be attributed to his other job as chief-of-police in Acqualagna.

Remedia explained that this area is rich in truffles. He said that they’re a symbiotic fungus that grow on the roots of oak and poplar trees. The Acqualagna area yields different varieties of tartufo bianco (white truffle) and tartufo nero (black truffle) almost year round.

This community is seriously all about truffles. It’s said that one-fourth of the residents are qualified truffle hunters and 70 percent of Italy’s truffle dogs are trained here. The white truffle is celebrated each autumn with the Fiera Nazionale del Tartufo Bianco. This year’s event begins at the end of October.

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Giddy about Garlic

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What Happens Underground Doesn’t Stay Underground
Freshly harvest viola Francese garlic bulbs will dry in a shady spot for a few weeks.

Newly harvested viola Francese garlic bulbs will dry in a shady spot for a few weeks.

Last fall I blogged about my foray into planting garlic. My procrastination in ordering bulbs on the Seeds from Italy website resulted in missing out on the desired rossa di Sulmona variety. I settled for viola Francese.

I separated the bulbs into cloves, planted them, and mulched them as instructed. They pushed their green shoots out this spring (full disclosure–a few started growing last fall). We savored the garlic scapes in salads and sautés. So good.

Then the whirl of summer took over. A morning glory vine from a planter box adjacent to my garlic patch spilled a thick green leaf quilt over the garlic leaves which were wilting and turning brown according to nature’s plan.

Hmmmm. Out of sight. Out of mind. When was I supposed to dig up those garlic bulbs?

I consulted my trusty copy of Step-by-Step Gardening Techniques Illustrated (Storey Communications) which told me, “When most of the leaves have turned brown (in mid-July to early August, depending on your climate), gently pull or dig up the bulbs, being careful not to bruise them. Don’t leave them in the ground too long, or they may begin to separate and will not store well.”

It’s the end of August! Carefully retrieving the bulbs with a trowel, I can see that although most of the bulbs are intact, the center stem connected to the root has died back, leaving the individual cloves more prone to separate from the bulb.

I don’t care. I’m still giddy about my bumper crop. Now that I can see the bounty, I promise myself to watch the calendar more closely next season.