Life Long Passion for Food Part 4: Pasta Fagiole Recipe

Due to a request on my previous post about Italian food and specifically Pasta Fagioli, this post is about how to make the soup.  I wrote about a funny anecdote about Ron first tasting pasta fagioli at my mom’s place. There is more. We stayed at my mom’s that night and the next morning, my mom asked us what we wanted for breakfast. Ron says “Do you have anymore of that soup left?”. I about fell over. Did my mom ever love that! And of course she had some soup because she cooks for a gazillion! At that point, I knew that if Ron and I split up, my mom would go with him. read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 3: Abruzzo

In my last post, I mentioned my Italian mother. My grandparents came from the Abruzzo region of Italy. It’s a region to the east of Rome and part of the region borders the Adriatic Sea. My grandparents were from the mountains in Abruzzo, a little town called Castel Di Sangro. Italy has many different regions and many have their own dialect and their own food traditions. For us, it was making sauce with different kinds of meat for a very rich, deeply flavored sauce, cavatilles (also known as gnocchi), pasta fagioli, Italian wedding soup, scamorza (a cheese similar to French Raclette), ricotta cheese pie, and Italian Wedding Cake. I can’t forget biscotti either! read...

Life Long Passion for Food Part 2

In my previous post, I talked about getting started cooking. In this one, I’ll continue on with my lessons from mom. My mom was one of the cooks in the family. Her sister, Aunt Louise, was not.  Aunt Louise cooked but she did it out of necessity. Mom enjoyed cooking and loved to feed people who came over. We always had chops, cubed steaks, and ground meat. My aunt had a drapery shop. Between the decorators, workmen and sometimes clients, they would often get some venison too. I grew up eating lamb, pork, and beef. We ate liver and onions which I still love but rarely eat anymore (more on this later). read...