Simple Italy

Celebrating Your Inner Italian

Mediterranean, si

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How to feel healthier and happier? Just say “yes” to the Mediterranean style of eating following the model of southern Italy and neighboring countries. For inspiration, Gale Maleskey R.D., shows us how in the February 2009 issue of Better Homes & Gardens with her aritcle “The Way to Eat Now.” (Sorry, the yummy  chocolate cupcakes on the cover are not part of the program.)

We’re also pleased that Cooking Up an Italian Life is included in the recommended reads at the end of the article. The Mediterranean Diet has long been championed by health researchers and the nonprofit Oldways Preservation Trust which has created a Mediterranean Food Pyramid. If indulging in seasonal fruits and vegetables, extra-virgin olive oil, red wine, herbs, nuts, seafood and grains is the plan, then, yes, we can.

Do you eat Mediterranean? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

A DiBruno’s Picnic

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Cured meats, cheese, rustic bread, and assorted antipasti make a pranzo perfetto.

Cured meats, cheese, rustic bread, and assorted antipasti make a pranzo perfetto.

I’ve made a drool of myself at many an Italian food forum. . .Peck in Milan, Volpetti in Rome, F.lli Burgio in Siracusa and now DiBruno Bros. in Philadelphia. Founded in 1939 by siblings Danny and Joe DiBruno in South Philly’s Italian Market, the emporium now has a location in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, mere minutes from a borrowed apartment where Walter and I enjoyed a weekend get-away.

Our intention of picking up a few hard-to-find pantry staples such as salted anchovies and D.O.P. canned San Marzano tomatoes, quickly morphed into “how many of these exquisite goodies can we buy for an impromptu picnic?”

Here’s what we managed: Seafood salad, artichokes alla romana, mozzarella bocconcini, peppadews stuffed with gorgonzola, red peppers stuffed with ricotta, stuffed grape leaves, olive roll, ciabatta roll, winter salami, runny-pungent taleggio cheese and shaved culatello that melted on our tongues. Walter, the king of the panino, actually extricated the culatello from his sandwich to savor each slice on its own.

Culatello is not a salume you see in every deli case. Restaurateur Tony May in his Italian Cuisine: Basic Cooking Techniques describes it as “one of the most prized and expensive cured meats” and a “very particular type of salume, produced in a small area around Parma. . . the most singular aspect of culatello is that it has the same characteristics of prosciutto but is aged into a casing” . . . with a taste “much sweeter and smoother” than prosciutto.

The DiBruno culatello is produced by Armandino Batali (Mario’s dad) at Salumi Artisan Cured Meats in Seattle. And, yes, it is pricey but at $8 for our picnic portion for two, it was money very, very well spent.

DiBruno's encourages an appetite for learning.

DiBruno Bros. foster an appetite for learning.

Next time you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you may want to indulge in a DiBruno’s picnic.

DiBruno Bros. – Rittenhouse Square
1730 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19013
215.665.9220

For an online taste, visit www.dibruno.com

The Minestrone Cure

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The remedy for holiday indulgence is simmering in the soup pot.

After half a month (heck, who are we kidding? — it’s more like six weeks) of feasting like a Medici pretending that calories don’t count and that rules don’t apply, we all need a cure.

For me, the solace comes in a steaming bowlful of minestrone, a veritable thicket of winter vegetables. Just preparing minestrone makes me feel healthier, cleaner, lighter. To the uninitiated, minestrone may be just Italian vegetable soup but it is so much more than that.

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Hunting for Porcini

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Dried porcini are easy to reconstitute and add intense mushroom flavor to many dishes.

Dried porcini are easy to reconstitute and add intense mushroom flavor to many dishes.

My youthful encounters with wild mushrooms did little to prepare me for Italian porcini. The fungus of my childhood is the puffball (Calvatia gigantea). Every year at summer’s end, dozens of these absurd orbs ballooned in the grass of our front yard in central Pennsylvania. My dad picked piles of puffballs and proudly lugged them into the kitchen, where my mom sliced and seasoned them, dipped them in flour, and hauled out a cast-iron skillet to fry them in homemade lard. Thank goodness for the pork fat. If those puffballs had any flavor, they were keeping it to themselves.

Years later, I tasted fresh porcini (pronounced pohr-CHEE-nee) and my appreciation of wild mushrooms was drastically, permanently upgraded. It was autumn at a country restaurant in Tuscany. The cook cleaned one just-picked fungo porcino, removed its stem, drizzled the saucer-sized taupe cap with fruity extra-virgin olive oil, seasoned it with salt and the wild herb nepitella, and grilled it over a wood fire. He served the mushroom alone on a plate, which made it seem really special.

I bit into the juicy flesh. It tasted like meat from the earth—complex, rich, and woodsy. The body was substantial yet tender. Truly this was a mushroom so exciting, it deserved to be called wild.

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