Sicilian Girl

Tweet For generations, the American South has cooked up some mighty fine eating, but it’s more than fried foods and decadent desserts. Greens became a staple food when slaves utilized the tops of beets and turnips, discarded after harvest. Simmered in a pot of water with a piece of pork (ham hock or salt pork) [...]

Tweet The quintessential New Orleans sandwich, the muffuletta, is rarely found anywhere outside of the Crescent City. Pronounced “moo-foo-LET-ta,” this deli meat and cheese hero piled with a tangy olive salad is a New Orleans specialty but is pure Sicilian. Since the Super Bowl is being played in New Orleans this Sunday and I need [...]

Tweet Italians eat fennel (finocchio) in much the same way as Americans eat celery, raw with perhaps a bit of salt. Tossed in a salad, fennel adds a wonderful aromatic   crunchy bite. I prefer this vegetable cooked, braised, sauteed, roasted or baked. Fennel is actually a bulb-like herb with little yellow flowers and is used [...]

Tweet Romas, beefstakes, heirlooms and cherries, so many tomatoes, so little time. Recently, I purchased several pounds of tomatoes which I intended on using in a variety of recipes. “Intended” being the optimum word, life got busy and other than slicing and tossing into salad greens, making Panzanella Portabello’s and Fettunta Toscana, I still had [...]

Tweet Little onions, (cipollini) look like ping-pong balls that have been slightly flattened. These little bulbing onions originated in Italy and are harvested 100 days after planting. They have a pale yellow and gold-colored thin papery skin and a translucent white flesh. They have more residual sugar than your average onion and no harsh onion [...]

Tweet There are four major groups of cauliflower and hundreds of varieties used around the world. Of these groups: Italian, Northwest European biennial, Northern European annual and Asian, the Italian is the ancestral form from which the others are derived. This recipe calls for the white variety you find most often in the market. Actually, [...]

Tweet As Pellegrino Artusi, the best-selling nineteenth century Italian cookbook author said, “everyone knows how to cook artichokes on a grill”. Well, if you haven’t attempted it yet, here’s your opportunity with this easy recipe. Artichokes are a marine climate vegetable and thrive in the cooler coastal climates. The main European producers are Italy, Spain [...]

Tweet This is another one of those recipes that travels well. Whether you’re off to the beach or an extended road trip, salads prepared without mayonnaise have a longer “cooler” life. Although it takes only minutes to make, it does need to marinate for several hours (for all the ingredients to get to know each [...]

Tweet The only fricasee dish I can recall was with chicken in a wonderful lemon-y butter sauce. I only have mushrooms tonight so I thought I’d try and recreate that fricasse senza (without) the chicken. Mushrooms are fat-free, cholesterol-free and low in calories, yet they are nutrient rich in B-Vitamins (Riboflavin, Niacin, Pantothenic Acid). They [...]

Tweet   Capers are a small but distinctive ingredient in Sicilian cooking. The caper bush grows wild on the Italian Islands of Salina (Aeolian Islands, north of Sicily) and Pantelleria (Strait of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea and summer home of Giorgio Armani). It is native to the Mediterranean and some parts of Asia. The [...]