Current
Serate al Cinema
In October Roberto Galati and I started Film Night in our medieval hamlet Casperia. I was expecting crowds to show up for free films but Roberto knew better. We had about 4 people and turn out has continued to be small unless we turn the night into a potluck dinner party. Then even friends of friends come. We couldn’t publicize our weekly films except by word of mouth, because showing DVDs to a group, even in our own homes, broke intellectual property codes, unless we wanted to pay a stiff tax.
Brodetto from Marche
Italy's most famous fish stew, Brodetto, comes from the Adriatic Coast near Ancona. Mangiare Bene's New Year's in Recanati with the Cinti family was all about Italy's delicious food and wine traditions. The trip report with recipes is posted on Slow Trav:
http://www.slowtrav.com/tr/
Pizza Bianca in Your Bread Basket
Lately I’ve been experimenting with pizza bianca recipes. This crunchy, tasty pizza crust with a topping of dribbled oil, salt, and fresh rosemary makes a delicious bread accompaniment to any meal. Baked at the last minute and served piping hot, its appetizing allure will disappear fast from the bread basket, so be sure to prepare plenty of dough. Some of your guests will enjoy helping you stretch the dough, and some might ruin it, but the baked results of their botched stretching won’t be inedible.
Mangiare Bene Visits Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard
While visiting our Berkeley home in January, I took a tour of the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School’s edible garden, founded by Alice Waters in the early 1990s. After about fifteen years of development, the garden and kitchen classes run flawlessly with new projects always in the works. The day of my tour, a mound of mulch had just been delivered to the edge of the garden; steam was puffing out of it, as if from volcanic fissures, and the aroma was heady, like a fermented brew.
Chocolate!
This is Mangiare Bene’s ongoing chocolate tasting blog, and your suggestions are welcomed.
I’ve found that for my palate the best-tasting chocolate bars have 70% or higher cacao content. In the 55% cacao bars the sugar taste, or sweetness, overrides the rich, pure chocolate flavor of darker products.
Zagreb, Hrvatska (Croatia)
On a recent business trip to Zagreb, Croatia, I tasted some of the best food of my life. I couldn’t help but think: Mangiare Bene cooking classes should set up a sister-program here. It wasn’t just the delicious food that was instantly noticeable, but the food culture—the Zagrebians were as attuned to their cuisine as the Italians. They liked to talk about food and wine, they liked to cook, and they liked to eat.
Annual Olive Harvest 2008
It’s mid-November and autumn has finally hit the Sabina with temperatures around 43º in the morning and central heat necessary in the evening. Reds and oranges dust the hills, which were solid green only ten days ago. Many Casperians have finished their olive harvest, but the larger landowners are still picking away and will be into December.