Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

SimpleItaly at the Snow Ball

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The table is set for six lucky Inner Italians!

SimpleItaly is happy to support Cetronia Ambulance Corp., the recipient of proceeds from this year’s Lehigh Valley (PA) Chamber of Commerce Small Business Council silent auction at the annual Snow Ball.

Sharon and Walter are offering a classic Italian dinner for six in their home. If you’re attending the Snow Ball,  please bid early and bid often. Since 1988, the SBC has raised more than $340,000 for local non-profits. And Cetronia is a worthy recipient–the regional leader in EMS and the only area ambulance service to achieve  national accreditation from the Commission on Accreditation of Ambulance Services.

Can’t make the Snow Ball this year? Please donate directly to Cetronia.

Making Ravioli with Lehigh Valley Style

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(Left to right) Meghan Decker, Caley Bittner, and editor-in-chief Lisa Gotto of Lehigh Valley Style magazine join Sharon in her kitchen.

Cooking with style is a constant goal of mine but, recently, I got to literally cook with Style.

Lehigh Valley Style magazine Editorial Assistant Meghan Decker e-mailed to ask if she and some colleagues could participate in a SimpleItaly Learn-and-Dine class. We conferred and decided to make two types of ravioli.

A video of the resulting afternoon of flour-filled fun—plus recipes for Cheese Ravioli with Sage Butter and Luganega Sausage Ravioli with Porcini Cream Sauce—is on the magazine’s web site.

Grazie mille, LVS.

You really rocked the ravioli!

Polenta all’Arrabiata

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I shake my head when I see Italian polenta on a menu or magazine article presented as some exotic gourmet dish. Where I came from (that would be the wilds of central Pennsylvania) cornmeal boiled in water is cornmeal mush. Has been for a long time. American writer Joel Barlow wrote a mock-epic poem about this humble daily staple. As a New Englander, he knew the porridge as hasty pudding.

Thee the soft nations round the warm Levant
Palanta call, the French of course Polante;
E’en in thy native regions how I blush
To hear the Pennsylvanians call thee Mush!
On Hudson’s banks, while men of Belgic spawn
Insult and eat thee by the name suppawn.
All spurious appellations; void of truth:
I’ve better known thee from my earliest youth,
Thy name is Hasty-Pudding!

The Hasty-Pudding, Joel Barlow, 1793

Italy didn’t have corn, of course, until Columbus brought it back from the Americas. While the habit of eating fresh corn never really caught on among Italians, cooking the ground dried kernels did. Generations of Italian peasants survived on polenta. I once interviewed an American woman whose father had grown up in the Veneto. His family ate polenta three times a day. On good days, a few pieces of salami or cheese might accompany the porridge.

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Landhaven Bed and Breakfast Cooking Class

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Explore Italian cooking beyond pasta and pizza. Polenta, beans, potatoes, and rice dishes are so satisfying--and gluten-free.

Calling all Inner Italians in southeastern PA and central NJ!

I’m looking forward to teaching a Saturday evening class (January 21, 2012) “Savoring Italian Tastes” at the charming Landhaven Bed and Breakfast owned by Donna and Ed Land. Located in the village of Huff’s Church (Barto, PA), it’s an easy destination for anyone from the Lehigh Valley, the Philadelphia area, or west central NJ.

My class is part of a Food Lovers’ Weekend showcasing gluten-free cooking. On Saturday evening, I’ll show how to prepare delectable Italian dishes that just happen to be gluten free: Risotto with Shrimp and Peas; Cheesey Polenta all’Arrabiata; Zucchini Crust Tomato Basil Tart; Chicken and Red Potatoes alla Pizzaiola. You can sign up for my class only or enjoy a weekend package with two nights lodging with Donna’s incredible breakfast, 3 cooking classes, tastings, and field trips.

Call or e-mail Donna to register:

610.845.3257

donna@landhavenbandb.com

Prosciutto di Parma

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The hams are cured in the small prosciuttifici that dot the countryside around Parma.

As the gossamer slice of prosciutto di Parma melted on my tongue, my senses of taste and smell transported me. I was no longer in a crush of gabbing food folks in the uber-hip Santos Party House in lower Manhattan. I was soaring above the fertile gentle landscape of the Italian province of Parma.

Salumeria Rosi Parmacotto—Tuscan-born chef Cesare Casella’s recreation of a genuine salumeria on the upper West Side of Manhattan—was offering the sampling of Parma ham and other cured meats. The occasion was last night’s kick-off for the International Association of Culinary Professionals’ upcoming annual conference scheduled for the end of March in the Big Apple.

Observing the chef carving the prosciutto was a joy. With practiced rhythm, he used the foot-long knife to slice the Parma ham in one fluid motion parallel with the bone. Rotating the knife so that the flat side of the blade turned up, he gently lifted the slice onto a plate letting it fall in folds like a ribbon. Between slices, he ran his free hand over the surface presumably to smooth out any unevenness.

Parma Products Among Italy’s Finest

My encounter between tongue and brain reminded me of the loving labor that goes into producing the magnificent prosciutto di Parma which carries the PDO certification (Protected Designation of Origin) of the European Community.

The production is monitored from inception to inspection. Italian pigs are bred specifically for Parma ham production and fed a special diet that includes the whey left over from making Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. After nine months, they are butchered, the hind quarters are trimmed, salted, cured, and then air-dried. No sugar, nitrites, smoke, water, spices or additives are allowed. The entire process can take as long as two-and-one-half years and the finished ham will have lost one-quarter of its weight.

To learn more about this unique food product visit the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma web site.

Money and Beauty

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The Money-changer and his Wife (Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello)

What were the 1 Percent of quattrocento Florence doing with their gold florins?

Buying exquisite works of art by Botticelli, Beato Angelico, and the Della Robbias.

The current, and timely, exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through January 2012 shows how the modern banking system developed in parallel with the most important artistic flowering in the history of the Western world.

Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities is co-curated by art historian Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, writer, translator and author of Medici Money – Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-century Florence.

I know of Parks through his entertaining books on the expat life Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. I’m intrigued to learn he’s a scholar of Italian art history.

According to the program notes, “the exhibition is conceived as a ‘duet’, in which the two curators present different – and sometimes opposing – views of the exhibition’s content. [They] aim to provide the visitor with an opportunity to look at art from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving economists, politicians and diplomats. It examines the story of how the Florentine Renaissance grew from the supposedly open, but more often actually hidden, relationship between art, power and money.”

The Florentine bankers practiced usury on a scale the world had never before witnessed. But, unlike today’s 1 Percent, they at least left us with The Birth of Venus and countless other treasures.