Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce is a quintessential Italian dish known around the world, despite taking many twists and turns on its voyage. Last month I had the unique opportunity to be an observer at a cooking demonstration conducted by Maestro Ivan Bombieri, Chef at Risotrante La Taverna, just outside of Udine, in Friuli Venezia Giulia region. Mr. Bombieri is a soft-spoken, charismatic man of no pretension who like his cooking to speak for itself.
Like many North Americans I grew-up eating lasagna. I recalled how my grandmother, who hailed from Genoa, would explain that lasagna was the name of a pasta, not a dish. Her style of preparing lasagna was to boil the pasta, then layer it with a Tucco sauce (dialect) and Parmigiano–Reggiano cheese, with no baking in the oven.
Pancake Day always takes place on Shrove Tuesday in Great Britain, the day before Ash Wednesday, which is the first day of the Christian season of Lent in the run up to Easter. Traditionally, Shrove Tuesday was a day for using up food that could not be eaten during Lent, which was a time for fasting. Therefore people made pancakes …
The tradition of proffering offerings of love on Valentine’s Day goes all the way back to the early 1400s. During the Victorian era, chocolate became the confection of choice for a Valentine’s Day offering with many believing it contained aphrodisiac properties. Others thought that the Valentine chocolate phenomenon was just a clever scheme developed by confectioners to promote products in …
Susanne Servin of Herzerl Tours shares her Apfelstrudel family recipe. Says Susanne: “It may seem overwhelming but believe me, it’s not. In a two hour session I taught a group of my German students how to make it.”
The late stand-up comedian-slash-social critic George Carlin once observed, “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” You know, George was right. The poor lumbering caterpillar did all of the heavy lifting, actually lots of eating, just so he/she could eventually go into total isolation encased in a silky cocoon awaiting his/her rebirth as a …
