Holiday 2018 Post Redeux

This was originally posted on my Wix blog, under the title "Turkeys, Elves and the Definition of Insanity":

Almost every year, I find myself hosting Christmas for my large, extended family. Either by my own hand or by my husband generously electing me to the post of party queen, every December plays out like the last. Part of my problem is that I hate uncomfortable silences and when the question of who will be hosting Christmas starts to get thrown around in the months leading up to December, the silence of the response is usually deafening. I find myself twisting uncomfortably in the silence and when I no longer take the cricket-song that I hear through the hollow void of replies, I blurt out my bid for it. This has resulted in me winning 27 out of 27times, uncontested. Tell them what I won Johnny: Announcer voice: You've won five days of cleaning, seven trips to the grocery store, nine hours of cooking, three days of decorating, two trips to the liquor store, a beer run, a trip to the party store and two insanely swollen feet!

Luckily, the same does not hold true with Thanksgiving. My sister-in-law loves to do Thanksgiving and I would go as far as to say that she has a lock on the holiday. Thanksgiving is the one holiday of the year that I can guarantee that I can be a guest and that my feet won't swell and throb like two Smithfield hams at the end of the day. It's a holiday where I get a job or a few jobs and I am joyful in the execution of these jobs. You want a sweet potato casserole? I'm your girl. What's that you say? A Chocolate Cream pie? Why of course and I'll throw in a Lemon Pound Cake for good measure.

This year, I was so blissful in my guesting duties that I made a pie, a cake, the Serious Eats Hassleback Potato Gratin (you MUST! Really!) and I had energy leftover to throw together a spur of the moment cranberry sauce. It's easy to be a sport when you haven't been washing floors, scrubbing toilets, vacuuming, dusting and pulling the gizzards out of the ass-end of a giant bird for the last 48 hours.

The burden of hosting is something that is not completely understood by my husband, who seems to think that hosting consists of making a beer run and having the freedom to start cocktail hour earlier than would be socially acceptable on any other day of the year. Every year he looks at me on the morning after a Christmas soiree in almost complete confusion, as I sit with my feet up, on the verge of tears, with a combination of bewilderment and exhaustion on my face over having survived the hosting of another family Christmas celebration. Every year, it pushes me to the brink and every year (like the definition of insanity), I do it again, expecting a different result. The need for change is clearly on me.

So this year, I will wait in discomfort for someone to throw their Santa hat into the ring. I am not going to volunteer, no matter how deafening the silence becomes. I will duct tape my own mouth closed, if need be. I will be resolute in my decision to stand down. But...you might want to check my feet on December 26th. If they are spilling out of my shoes and pulsating like a defective neon sign, then my resolution wasn't worth the Christmas wrapping it was written on.

March 17 2019 P.S. - I did not cave. Man, my feet feel good!

Like a Bad Penny

It has been a long time since I posted.  It has actually been close to two years since I made my last entry to this blog. It isn't because I have lost my interest in writing or cooking.   Quite the opposite, actually.   I have been writing like crazy, trying to catalogue all of our family's recipes for a family cookbook. Our family has been through some significant losses over the past few years and the need to chronicle and preserve the family legacy seems more pressing to me these days.

My goal for the cookbook is to have it ready to distribute to family and friends by Christmas of this year.  I don't know if I will look to distribute it beyond the immediate family, but if not, I think that a good deal of the content will end up here.  And for that reason, I think it's time to come back to this forum and catch up.

When I put up my last post "Channeling my Inner Nonna", in December 2016, I was fresh off a trip to Sicily, Italy and London.  We have since gone back to all three, as the pull of Sicily is strong, due to our family heritage and we can't be in the region and not go to Rome. London, a relatively new discovery for us is just great fun.  I have to say, it is the most spectacularly drunk town that I have ever been to and it has THE WORST traffic.  I would say that the traffic problem in London is far worse than New York City, which is pretty rotten in its own right.

Our most recent trip to Sicily centered around Palermo, a city that was surprising to me on many levels.  I think I was expecting it to be gritty and dirty and tough, like Naples, but moreso.  I could not have been more incorrect.  Palermo is beautiful and elegant and full of history.  With side trips to Erice, Trapani and Mondello, the beauty of north eastern Sicily unfolded like a flower, revealing layer after beautiful layer.

So without much fanfare, I return to the place where I began the journey of chronicling my adventures in cooking and travel. I have new things to share and many reflections on the past that are currently bubbling under the surface. I never considered myself a writer, more of a kibitzer. Someone who makes snarky comments from the sidelines, but is never really in the game.  My goal is to change that and to jump in with both feet. Let's see where this goes...

Alcamo Beach Sicily

Teatro Massimo

Theater Horse

Dramatic Theater Horse

Horses that are probably jealous of the Theater Horse

Palermo Marina

Cannoli

The breakfast of champions

Channeling my Inner Nonna

You ever have one of those days where everything aches for no reason and you walk slow, deliberate and a little like you have a poop in your pants?  Think Fred Sanford, but less elegant.  No? Just me?

OK, whatever.

When I have those kind of days, I think of it as coming down with a case of "The Grandmas".  When you get a case of The Grandmas, everything aches, it takes forever to walk from one side of the house to the other and you forget how to use all your electronic devices.

But sometimes, instead of a case of The Grandmas, you get a case of "The Nonnas".  When you get a case of The Nonnas, you become an elderly superwoman.  You put on your housecoat, cook all day and all night, wash and fold 40 loads of laundry and pick vegetables from your beautiful backyard garden (even if you have neither a back yard or a vegetable garden, when you get The Nonna's they magically appear).

Last weekend, I got a wicked case of The Christmas Nonnas.  I was posessed by the impulse to make Struffoli.  For those of you that don't know what Struffoli are, they are little round balls of fried dough, soaked in a honey syrup and covered with non-pareils.  If you grew up with at least one Italian grandmother, you know what they are and you have warm memories of being shooed away from pots of hot oil, being covered in honey from head to toe and not being able to put anything down after you pick it up because everything sticks to your fingers.

My Nonna did not leave me a recipe for these delightful treats and honestly, I have not ever wanted to make them before because I hate frying.  I hate the smell it leaves in the house, I hate the mess and I hate spatter burns.  But, when the spirit of Christmas mixes with the spirit of Nonna, the compulsion for struffoli can outrun my more neurotic, Felix Unger-type tendencies. Being that I did not have a recipe from my own Nonna, I did what any red blooded Italian Grandmother would do...I used the Internet.

What I found is that there are no shortage of recipes for Struffoli.  Everyone who calls themself an Italian cook has a version - Giada DeLarentiis, Lidia Bastianich, Mario Batali.  They all look pretty good and the recipes are similar...flour, eggs, a splash of alcohol, honey, etc.  But since I was overcome with the spirit of Nonna, I went to the source, Cooking with Nonna.

If you have not seen this adorable series, a young Italian American woman, Rossella Rago, cooks traditional Italian and Italian American recipes with grandmothers.  Yours, hers, any Italian nonna that will sit still long enough to teach her a recipe.  It's quite charming and sweet and it spreads the joy of having an Italian grandmother to everyone.  The recipe that I used, along with a "how to" video can be found here.  Enjoy and Buon Natale!

A Chicken Walks into a Butcher Shop...

I'll admit it, I get a little intimidated when I go into the butcher shop.  If there is one thing that I know absolutely nothing about, it's meat butchery.  On the very few times that I tried to joint up chicken wings or separate a thigh from a drumstick, it has been nothing shy of disastrous.  I end up with flesh that is shredded at the edges like Christmas tinsel.  I can take apart and dice a bell pepper with the best of them, but when it comes to knife skills in the meat world, I get a failing grade every time.

Everything about the process of the butcher shop is about mastery,  from the confident way they handle the different cuts to the understanding of which cut to use for what purpose to the blindingly fast use of a knife. So, like the puffer fish of the deep, I puff up my chest and stride in with a Dirty Harry swagger, as to not tip the professionals off to my lack of understanding or skill.  Think Billy Crystal in Analyze This, but with meat.

I confidently approach the counter and tell the butcher that I would like a pound and a half of ground sirloin and a pound of ground chuck.  I am sure the butcher is scratching his head over this odd ratio, but he is kind enough not to ask.  I don't want to have to tell him that I do this out of laziness because if I use all chuck in my chili, it takes too long to skim the extra fat off the top, so I mix in something leaner.

"Anything else?" he asks.  I momentarily seize up as I had not thought past the pot of chili.  "Yes", I blurt out trying to mask the hesitation brought about by my utter lack of preparedness, "I will take a whole organic chicken, cut up". It was the first thing I could think of and I believe that I have managed to convince him that I had planned all along to make chicken.  I laugh on the inside, believing that I have not tipped my hand (clearly a pair of twos) and exposed the fact that I had no clue what else I wanted, that is until he decides to throw math into the conversation.  If I have one Achilles Heel weaker than my knowledge of butchery, it's my knowledge of math.

"Do you want that chicken cut in eight pieces?" he asked.  The look that came over my face was probably something approximating abject fear and constipation as the thought of meat math was binding up my brain.  I started to do an inventory of chicken parts in my head, which is the meat math equivalent of counting on your fingers "Two breasts plus two wings plus two drums plus two thighs equals eight".  Then as if to provide a haughty "Go ahead, make my day" type response, I tell him, "No, make it ten.  I want to split the breasts across the middle so that all the pieces are the same size, and they cook evenly".

He slowly took two steps back from the counter and I could see the mental math that he was now doing in his head.  He turned to the butcher block and started hacking up the chicken.  And everything was right with the world.  I stood there listening to the solid "thwack, thwack,thwack" of his cleaver against the bird on the board.  I moved toward the register, ready to pay and take the spoils of my chicken victory when he held up the backbone of the bird and asked me if I wanted it.  Shit! How did we end up with an eleventh piece?  Defeated by vertebrae!  I looked down at my shoes and mumbled, "You can keep it" then I paid him and quietly slunk out the door, more Cowardly Lion than Dirty Harry.  Maybe next time I'll make a list.

Crack is Back

Hello? Are  you listening? Because I'm about to get all confessional up in this bitch.

Thanks to a trip to the Tuscan Hills last year, I have developed a jones so powerful that nothing, not distance, not practicality, not plain old common sense can keep me from my drug of choice.  The drug that keeps me warm at night is Profumo Del Chianti.

Profumo Del Chianti is the product of Meat kingpin Dario Cecchini.  Cecchini, the famed Tuscan butcher known for his spectacular Bistecca Fiorentina and his evangelical dedication to all things Tuscan, turns out a small number of spectacular products.  These products are available in his Panzano butcher shop and at a small number of online retailers.  Thanks to oliotogo.com, I got my fix in the mail a couple of days ago.

Profumo Del Chianti (aka my crack) is a finely ground blend of tuscan herbs and sea salt and although the label is not specific as to what the herbs are, a little investigation as well as my own taste buds tell me that it's bay, fennel pollen, rosemary, thyme, sage and probably a few other addictive substances, expertly blended into a fine powder.   This has become my go to seasoning for all meats as well as the best friend that olive oil ever had for dipping bread and raw vegetables.

Cecchini himself is as compelling as his products and is written about in fabulous detail in the fascinating book Heat, by Bill Buford .  At some point, when I have a little more time, I will dedicate a post to Cecchini and will post my pictures from my visit to Panzano.  In the mean time, you can get a taste for his intensity and the vibe of his shop here and here.  While you do that, I need to slip into the dark recesses of my kitchen and get my fix.  If I don't emerge by Wednesday, send a search party, because I'm in deep.

You can find this and other this and a host of other deliriously  delicious products at this location:

Via 20 Luglio, 11, Greve In Chianti, Province of Florence

+39 055 852020