On September 26, just four days shy of the publication of her fourth cookbook, Giada's Kitchen,Giada de Laurentiis launched a social-networking website. When I last checked on Sunday night, she already had 1,026 members. That means more than 100 new people are signing up every day. With numbers like that it's hard to argue with the jacket copy, which states that Giada "has become America's best-loved Italian cook."
While I'm not about to create a profile for myself (I'm not even on Facebook), I must admit that I, too, am a Giada fan. Years ago a friend prepared a fabulous feast centered around her recipe for Spaghetti with Clams, and I frequently serve her Tuscan Mushrooms (stuffed with roasted red peppers, green olives, and Pecorino cheese) at my own dinner parties. Critics argue that Giada is a nothing more than a sex symbol selling food porn, but I think she offers a bit more than that: to twenty-something aspiring gormands she provides chic, approachable recipes that don't involve expensive ingredients or special kitchen equipment. Armed with only the set of pots and pans I bought straight out of college, I could probably cook my way through her entire repertoire.
For these reasons (and because her new television show, Giada at Home, premieres on October 18th), I've chosen Giada's Kitchen as this week's Cook the Book selection. She may not be as classic as Lidia Bastianich, or as high-brow as Andrew Carmellini, but her food is flavorful and easy. And more often than not, that's the way most of us like to cook.
Win 'Giada's Kitchen'
We'll be excerpting a recipe from Giada's new book everyday this week. In addition, you can enter to win one of five (5) copies of Giada's Kitchen for your very own. Simply tell us in the comments section below: from alfredo and clam to marinara and vodka, what is your favorite kind of spaghetti sauce?
The Jewish calendar is a funny thing. A lunisolar creation, it doesn't quite match up with the Gregorian one our calendar is based on. That's why every year you hear people asking: when is Rosh Hashana this year? When is Chanukkah?
This year Rosh Hashana starts on September 29, but even without knowing the date I could tell when the holiday is near. In my neighborhood, which is an eclectic mix of hipsters and Hasidic Jews (think Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with better weather), a good indicator that the High Holidays are coming are the sukkah shacks that pop up on Beverly Boulevard. Celebrating harvest, according to the Essential Book of Jewish Festival Cooking by Phyllis Glazer, was the original purpose of what we, today, call Rosh Hashana. It wasn't until after the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and the Jews scattered across the globe that the holiday, the Day for Sounding the Shofar (Yom Tru'ah), evolved into the beginning of the new year.
Like any good holiday, Rosh Hashana has a slew of traditional foods. In my family and the homes of most Jews of Eastern European descent (Ashkenazic), the dishes are sweet: challah with raisins, sweet noodle kugel, tzimmes, apples and honey, and honey cake, to name a few, and are meant as a symbol of hope for a sweet year to come.
Memorial Day weekend is all about grilling. This Friday, all over America, home cooks will dig barbecue tongs, forks, and spatulas out of their kitchen drawers, and wheel dusty Webers out of their garages. Supermarkets will set up mountainous displays of charcoal, only to sell out in minutes, along with shrink-wrapped hot dogs, sacks of hamburger buns, and economy-sized bags of chips. Not to mention six-packs of beer.
Memorial Day food isn't fussy or fancy. (This isn't the time to break out your new Kugelhopf pan, or test a recipe for salmon mousse canapés.) Instead, when the flames fire up and the iron grate starts to sizzle, people want to heap their paper plates full of food with big, bold flavors. Who better to look to for menu suggestions than bad-boy celebrity chef Mario Batali?
In his new cookbook, Mario Batali Italian Grill, Batali offers up eighty recipes for appetizers, pizzas, fish and shellfish, poutry, meat, and vegetables, plus sixty full-color photographs. Italian grilling isn't about thick barbecue sauces and heavy basting; instead, the flavors are light, but they still pack a punch (think good olive oil, red wine, garlic, chili flakes, citrus, and fresh herbs).
Win Mario's Book or a Chance to Tailgate with Mario
If you'd like a chance to win to tailgate with Mario at the Texas Motor Speedway on November 2, visit this page and submit your grilling recipe and video demonstration of it. Grand prize winner will grill with Mario and grab two VIP tickets to the Dickies 500 race in Fort Worth.
In addition to that, you can enter to win one of five copies of Mario Batali Italian Grill from Serious Eats for your own backyard library. Just tell us here on this post what your favorite grilling condiment is and why.
Chopping, dicing, grating, wine-opening. These sounds combine to musical effect in this commercial for the Saclà brand of Italian sauces. Do you hear strains of "Hey, Mickey!" in this beat, too? Listen closely—and watch—after the jump.
Rosario’s has a serious pig problem. There are little porky tchotchkes on the counter, statues of swine behind the counter, and a few huge piggy bank–looking porkers above the freezer case. Even the neon sign on the front of the building depicts a bunch of happy piglets jumping in to a grinder. Of course, I wouldn’t expect anything less from one of Chicago’s best Italian sausage makers.
Two weeks ago I ate dinner at Mario Batali's Babbo with Tina Wong (aka The Wandering Eater) and two of our friends for a indulgent night resulting in food comas all around. If you've thought about going but have yet to make the month-in-advance reservation, read Tina's food porn-laden review and you'll probably change your mind.
I have yet to write my review, but we're already making plans to go back, if that's any indication. My perfectly valid reason is that since we didn't have enough time to eat dessert, our meal wasn't complete. Also, I really want another bite of one of their pig’s foot “Milanese”, one of the most heavenly slabs of fat I've ever eaten.
The New York Times raises the question of authenticity of Italian cuisine as it examines the growing number of foreign chefs cooking in kitchens of Italian restaurants. Does, say, an Indian chef preparing Italian food make it any less Italian? One restaurant owner claims that "it's not racism, it's culture"; another says that the ethnicity of a chef changes nothing. This isn't anything new in restaurants in the U.S., but it might be a different story if you're eating abroad: Do you go to the Italian restaurant manned by the Chinese family or stick to the one run by Italians?
It would seem that a man who wore a Jason (of Friday the 13th) mask for a living and took more than a few discs of frozen rubber to the head during his career isn’t the best person to take food advice from. But Tony Esposito, the Chicago Blackhawks hall of famer was, in hockey parlance, a serious grinder. And as it takes one to know one, Esposito definitely knows his grinders. His framed signed picture hangs in the back of Bari Foods, an Italian grocery brimming with tinned cans of San Marzano tomotoes and gleaming jars of pickled goods, praising the house giardiniera
With Quartino, Osteria via Stato, and now A Mano all slinging cured meats, Chicago’s downtown lunch arena is sporting more sausage than the Chicago Bears locker room after a big game. A Mano, the newest of the triumvirate, is helmed by Bin 36 veteran chef John Caputo and offers a wide selection of salumi, including the handiwork of Seattle’s sausage king, Armandino Batali. In addition to the charcuterie, A Mano features all manner of Italian-focused goodies from wood-fired pizzas to zingy crudo.
Posted by Mario Batali, February 12, 2008 at 1:15 PM
This year for Valentine's Day, I'm taking my kids and wife, Susi, out for our traditional fondue fest at Artisanal. We all send Susi a dozen wacky flowers (never roses—way too common), and then it's out for the first seating at 5:30 p.m. for some cheese and chocolate, and then home early!
My ideal menu celebrates the most mysterious and romantic town of Italia—Venezia—and is based on Carnevale, which always falls near, and sometimes overlaps, with Valentine's Day. The celebration is simple and based on seafood and birds from the Venetian lagoon—or the closest lagoon to you.
Posted by Paul Clarke, February 6, 2008 at 4:00 PM
As the interest in fine spirits and cocktails has grown in recent years, demand has likewise increased for Italian amaros. The garnet-red Campari has long held a place of prominence, and recently the milder flavored Aperol has earned fans in the cocktail community. Now, the Sicilian herbal tonic called Averna—already the leading amaro in many parts of the world—is hoping to become the next indispensable ingredient in the American bartender’s arsenal.
With a recipe dating to the 1860s, Averna is a much different style of bitter spirit than the more familiar Campari. Where Campari is sharp and bright (essential elements for an aperitivo), Averna is deep and rich, with a gentle, slightly sweet bitterness and a full, firm body that makes it great as an after-dinner drink.
Conventional wisdom in the food world is that desserts in Italian restaurants are an afterthought. All I can say is that the people spouting that conventional wisdom have never had Gina DePalma's desserts at Babbo in New York City. I have had the privilege of eating DePalma's desserts since the restaurant opened. I have over the years sampled every dessert on the menu at least once, and I can tell you there isn't a loser in the bunch. Now that DePalma has written Dolce Italiano: Desserts From the Babbo Kitchen, we can all try to replicate the magic that comes out of Mario Batali's tiny kitchen at Babbo every night. What's really cool about Dolce Italiano is that DePalma herself wrote every word with the exception of Mario's introduction. It turns out the woman can write and cook.
Win One of Five Copies
As you may have guessed, Dolce Italiano is this week's featured Cook the Book entry. Like all Cook the Books, we have five (5) copies to give away. Just tell us what your favorite Italian sweet is.
Five winners will be chosen at random from among the comments. You have until 3 p.m. ET Saturday, November 10, to comment. The standard contest rules apply.
I did a double-take when I first saw Sara's photo of basil liquor—my first impression was "mint" when I saw the green liquid, but the neighboring tomatoes gave me the sense that it was something else.
Sara describes basilcello as "a very sweet basil liquor that will help take away your indigestion just like the best limoncello." Although anything with alcohol in it tends to give me indigestion, not take it away, I'm curious to find out what this tastes like. Read Sara's recipe to make your own basilcello!
With fewexceptions, most food at outdoor concerts is terrible, leaving music lovers to stuff themselves beforehand or pack a portable picnic. Nothing is more portable than a sandwich, and this past weekend, one of my Flickr friends found the perfect sandwich for a pre–Arcade Fire picnic on Randall's Island in New York: the Rosino Panino, picked up from Sorriso Italian Pork Store in Astoria, Queens.
Although Tuscany and other regions of northern Italy have become the fashionable food areas that food writers have explored in recent years, southern Italy has been mostly ignored (with the exception of Arthur Schwartz's seminal Naples at Table).
Until now. Cucina del Sole ("food of the sun") is writer Nancy Harmon Jenkins's effort to rectify that—an exhaustively researched, mouthwateringly detailed journey into the land and the sea and the heart and soul of southern Italian eating and cooking.
For modern American cooks and diners, la cucina del sole is the kind of food we want to eat right now—the bold simplicity of easy, straightforward techniques and natural ingredients smartly combined.
Thanks to the good folks at William Morrow, we are giving away ten copies of Cucina Del Sole. To enter the drawing, tell us what your favorite southern Italian dish is. Ten (10) winners will be chosen at random from the comments here. Comments will be open until 9 p.m. ET Friday, August 3. The usual Serious Eats contest rules apply.
This snap caught my eye in the Serious Eats group on Flickr. It's easy to imagine breaking off a hunk of this coppa di Parma–stuffed bread and devouring it.
I love the looks of the Mario Batali Pizza Set by kitchenware manufacturer Copco, with its orange colorway to match Batali's famous ponytail and clogs, and I'm sure it makes great pizza, but who's the target market for a kit like this when it's priced at $169.95—and used to cost $63.50 more?
Serious cooks will already have most of the equipment in there and the ones they don't, well—Batali's pizza cutter is well-regarded, available without the kit and affordable at $14.95, and how many people do you know who want a garlic slicer?—and it's an expensive investment that might not pay off if you don't already know your way around the kitchen, or if you're buying it for someone else who doesn't. So whom do you give it to? College graduates moving into their first apartments? Newlyweds? People with really big kitchens? [via Uncrate]
Bruni also failed to mention the place mats at Mozza. One is an attempt to teach the unwitting Mozza customer how to speak Italian in seven not-so-easy hand motions, as this video shows.
On Wednesday Serious Eater Lia posted about Grom, an Italian gelateria concern opening its first U.S. store on Saturday the 5th of May. What Lia didn't tell all of you is that Grom is a mere 50 yards from my house.
When I left my house at 10:30 on Saturday morning there was already a short line to get into Grom, which was opening at 11. When I returned five hours later, the line was longer—much longer, a full city block long in fact. I noticed a friend, Mindy, standing with her significant other midway through the line. I asked her how long she had been waiting in line: 45 minutes, she said. "The gelato is free," Mindy said. Ah, yes, combine a little New York Times hype and the promise of free, artisanally made ice cream, and you have the makings of a long line in Gotham.
You've probably already read that Danny DeVito's recently launched his own brand of limoncello to make the most of his drunken appearance last year on The View, which he blamed on a long night out with George Clooney, saying on the show, "I knew it was the last seven limoncellos that was going to get me." But have you visited the official website for Danny DeVito's Limoncello?
Ladies and gentlemen, this is liquour with a THEME SONG—a happy kicky one at that. I'll be singing it all day and I suspect you will be too.
Every once in a while you get an email so passionate that all you can really do is share it, because paraphrasing would never do it justice. Here's something I received today from my pal Finn:
From: Finn To: Lia Subject: Grom
FYI
excuse my friend's, um, exuberant writing style. his gf is in italy right now and he visits fairly frequently, hence his experience with this gelato joint. he's probably serious about the dream too -- he really likes ice cream.
----- Forwarded message -----
From: Jeb To: Finn Subject: yo
tell your foodblogger friends that they should go to grom and write about it for the food-blobs RIGHT AWAY! GROM is SO FRAKING GOOD. I had a dream about it last Sundae (you catch what I did there with
the 'ae'?)
N.B. If you'd like to send tips in, my email is lia@seriouseats.com. Exuberance, abuse of the caps lock button and even multiple exclamation points are almost always welcome.
I have eaten in Mario Batali's restaurants perhaps a hundred times (and had at least very good meals 95 times), but I was extremely skeptical when I heard he was putting his name, complete with photo, on a line of General Mills frozen pasta dinners called Mario Batali's Regional Recipes, which will be sold initially at club stores like Sam's, BJ's, and Costco. So when we received some samples at Serious Eats world headquarters I volunteered to be the first guinea pig.
Deb of Smitten Kitchen had all but given up on ever making good gnocchi at home, until recently coming across an ingenious technique: "Get this: you grate the potatoes. No food mill or ricer purchase required! (Which is great because you don’t have room for one anyway!) After grating the baked and peeled potatoes, you knead in some flour, salt and an egg, and your dough is complete! And people, these are some killer gnocchi, with a lightness that I’ve only had before at top-notch Italian restaurants."
I can guarantee you that the cutest, most joyous food-related item you will see this week, maybe even this entire month, will be this series of commercials for Parmigiano Reggiano, a.k.a. parmesan cheese:
Can you go wrong with dancing, singing vegetables? Excited about cheese? In Italian? I think not. [via Brandon Eats]
"Most visitors to Milan, Italy's center of finance, commerce and design, go looking for gold, literally or figuratively, and so do I. But the gold I search for is culinary." Former New York Times food critic Mimi Sheraton goes on a cook's tour of Milan and samples the city's finest epicurean delights, like the risotto al salto, "a thin pancake formed of leftover risotto, fried to parchment crispness on one side then flipped (or jumped — salto) to the second side in a swirl of hot butter, the preferred cooking fat of Lombardy."
One of the greatest April Fools pranks of all time was pulled in 1957 by the BBC, of all institutions. Aired as an ordinary episode of the renowned series Panorama, it purported to be a documentary about "a family from Ticino in Switzerland carrying out their annual spaghetti harvest. It showed women carefully plucking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them in the sun to dry."
It sounds ridiculous now, sure, but back then many people had either never heard of spaghetti or had only ever had it from cans, and the episode was shot in a completely straightforward fashion and narrated by the respected journalist Richard Dimbleby. Hundreds of people called the BBC to ask where they could purchase spaghetti bushes for themselves!
In yesterday's T Style Magazine, Oliver Schwaner-Albright says "the meat slicer could be the first appliance to earn a place on the kitchen counter since the espresso machine. That’s because American artisans are no longer hiding the salumi — Italian for cured meats. The process by which cuts of meat, usually pork, are salted and aged in a place that’s cool, dark and drafty, like a mountain cave (the traditional method) or a well-ventilated meat locker (the Food and Drug Administration’s preference), is now being mastered on these shores." Prosciutto we all know by now, but he also discusses seven other kinds of salumi—bresaeola, coppa, lardo, mortadella, salame, soppressata, and speck—as well as where you can find them online.
In the NY Times, Melissa Clark realizes no one she knows actually knows what shrimp scampi is and so she figures it out for herself:
Scampi are in fact tiny, lobster-like crustaceans with pale pink shells (also called langoustines). One traditional way of preparing them in Italy, [Lidia] Bastianich writes, is to sauté them with olive oil, garlic, onion and white wine. Italian cooks in the United States swapped shrimp for scampi, but kept both names. Thus the dish was born, along with inevitable variations like adding tomatoes, breadcrumbs, or, as Ms. Bastianich does, tarragon.
As I saw it, this meant I was free to interpret shrimp scampi pretty much any way I wanted. And I wanted my scampi to be something buttery and rich, with pan drippings intense enough to act as a sauce for pasta, or to make a tasty bread sop reminiscent of the other dish I associate with melted butter and garlic: escargots à la bourguignonne. If I could come up with a scampi sauce as addictive as snail butter, I’d be one very happy.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 27, 2007 at 2:00 PM
Marce from Pip in the City, on her lazy ravioli: "I was too tired to make the ravioli dough from scratch, so I grabbed a pack of won ton wrappers I had in the freezer and made some huge ravioli with a shitake-panko-potato flakes-onions-parmessan filling with a mozzarella cube in the center, served with a very simple tomato sauce." Necessity is the mother of invention, and also in this case of tastiness.
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 22, 2007 at 4:44 PM
Jane Snow of the Akron Beacon Journal, on how "Tuscan" is used and abused as an unauthentic adjective today: "White beans are in so many dishes that Tuscans are called “bean eaters” elsewhere in Italy. But that doesn’t mean a recipe for canned beans and chopped tomatoes in salad dressing should be called “Tuscan,” as it is in The Dinner Doctor by Anne Byrne. Or that a Pillsbury Bake-Off recipe for Tuscan Roasted Potato-Chicken Salad made with frozen potatoes, cubed mozzarella cheese, canned white beans and pre-cooked chicken strips deserves the name. But what the heck. Almost any dish with garlic, basil, rosemary, sun-dried tomatoes and even chicken has been tagged “Tuscan” somewhere, sometime in the United States."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 22, 2007 at 1:21 PM
Exciting news: "New Zealand fishermen have caught what is expected to be a world-record-breaking colossal squid. Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton said the squid, weighing an estimated 450kg (990lb),took two hours to land in Antarctic waters. Local news said the Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni was about 10m (33ft) long, and was the first adult colossal squid landed intact. One expert said calamari rings made from it would be like tractor tyres."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 21, 2007 at 8:46 AM
Jan Norris of the Palm Beach Post: "We got sticker shock, seeing 'premium' jars of red sauce, ranging from $5.69 to $10.29, prominently displayed at the supermarket, while the $2.07 Ragú sat on the bottom shelf. So, if they cost nearly five times as much — and contain, on average, 2 ounces less — these pricey pasta potions must be nearly five times better than Ragú, right?" Norris got five Italian grandmothers to blind taste test 16 different sauces—they thought the most expensive sauce was the worst of the lot and gave the highest rating to Barilla's Tomato and Basil, the cheapest of all the sauces at $2.50!
Hey, serious eaters: We ran this as an "Edibles" post a few days ago, but I liked it so much that I'm sticking it here in the featured video spot for a spell. It's our dear leader, Serious Eats founder Ed Levine, working his way through a guide to Italian hand gestures that serves as one of the featured designs on the disposable paper place mats at L.A. pizzeria Mozza (right; click to enlarge). Check it out if you missed it the first time around. —Adam Kuban
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 1, 2007 at 3:56 PM
La Tartine Gourmande, on the unfortunate irresistibleness of her Butternut Squash and Sage Ravioli: "I had initially planned to keep some ravioli for our respective lunches the following day, but my plan failed. We could not stop. One more, and one more again, until it became obvious that lunch for the next day was slowly becoming more of a wish than a reality. In the end, there was only barely enough for a one-person lunch."
I did an insane thing last night. I took the train to Philadelphia to meet some friends at Vetri. Vetri was opened a few years ago by Marc Vetri, a Philly native who had cooked in NY at Bella Blu, an Upper East Side Italian restaurant that serious eaters have never paid much attention to.
Rave reviews greeted Vetri's opening in Philly. Mario Batali raved, saying that Vetri was possibly the best Italian restaurant on the East Coast. My friend Andy Clurfeld of the Asbury Park Press kept telling me that I had to check Vetri out.
So I did, last night, even though my first train was so late I had to buy an Acela ticket in order to be a mere half hour late. And Andy and Mario and everyone else who has been telling me about Vetri are right.
Vetri is a terrific restaurant, serving the kind of simple, gutsy, long deep-flavored Italian food rarely found in this country. People in jeans and jackets and ties seem to be having a terrific time at Vetri eating unpretentious, unbelievably delicious, unapologetically rich food.
What did we eat?
A superb Antipasto plate with little cubes of fried potato, sherry-charred burssels sprouts, grilled fennel, prosciutto, mortadella, grilled scamorza, and a couple of things I can't remember.
Golden sweet onion crepe with white truffle fondue
Chestnut Fettucine with Wild Boar Ragu
Sweetbread Ravioli with Braised Veal Sauce
Spinach Gnocchi with Shaved Ricotta and brown butter
Pappardelle with porcini mushrooms and shaved white truffles
Almond tortellini with white truffle sauce
Smoked pork sausage with mostarda
Roasted baby goat (capretto) with soft polenta
For dessert:
Buttered pear tart with chocolate sorbet
Beignets that we dipped in Italian Hot Chocolate
Ice Cream Sundae with Candied Hazelnuts
Maple Napoleon
I don't know if Vetri is the best Italian restaurant in America, or even the East Coast for that matter. I do know that it was easily worth the trip to Philly, even if your train is an hour late.
Chocolate bars at Pierre Marcolini, a chocolatier from Belgium. I first had his chocolates at his shop in Paris. I always lean toward more bittersweet, not more than 70%, not waxy, i love the variety of beans that he uses.
Eating and drinking at the food bar at Bella Vitae: I love the fried lamb meatballs, puntarelle in season, radicchio wrapped in pancetta.
I love the mussels at Bar Jamon and the octopus. I especially love them when I can get one of the 12 seats in the joint.
Fairly often my wife gets fed up with our eating regimen (lots of grilled cheese sandwiches (made with great cheese or sometimes Kraft Deluxe American slices), salads, hot dogs and burgers) and demands that I make her a home-cooked meal. So yesterday I bought a container of roasted vegetables at Fairway, one of my local gourmet stores, to use as a sidedish with the boneless pork roast I was going to make. After liberally salting the meat with kosher salt I browned the outside of the pork roast in a saute pan on top of the stove in some olive oil and a little butter. Put the butter in after the olive oil has heated up or else the butter will burn. I then put the pork roast into a 350 degree preheated oven. I cooked the small (a pound and a half) pork roast until an internal meat thermometer reads 155 degrees. Then I put the roasted vegetables in the saute pan I had browned the pork in. I then put in the pan three or four tablespoons of Saba, cooked grape juice made from Trebbiano grapes, the same ones they use to make balsamic vinegar. My friend and co-author Dave Pasternack (chef-partner of Esca) calls Saba Italian maple syrup. It has a fruity, sweet, surprisingly complex flavor, and Saba makes just about anything taste better, especially pork and roasted vegetables. Cook the saba down until it's just about the consistency of maple syrup. Slice the pork roast, dip the slices in the saute pan to soak up the pan juices and saba, and then plate the vegetables. You're ready to eat. My wife loved the meal. I did, too, and now I get to order pizza tomorrow. Out of the frying pan into the pizza oven, so to speak. Saba is available at many gourmet grocery stores. It's also available online from the Zingerman's catalogue.
For those of us who derive great pleasure from eating and talking about it, today's New York Times is a veritable smorgasboard, a feast for our stomachs, brains and heart. Let's start with Mimi Sheraton's cover story on eating in Rome in the Travel section . I've met Mimi Sheraton on a few occasions, even broken bread with her, and she has been nasty and unpleasant towards me each time. Why I don't know. That said, she often writes very well and very passionately about the lusty pleasures so many of us derive from life around the table. I still have a yellowed clipping of the piece she wrote for New York Magazine about New Orleans food many, many years ago. And her piece on eating in Rome today was Sheraton at her best. Halfway through it I wanted to jump on a plane to Rome to savor the "tiny fried croquettes of artichokes, meatballs and the like," as well as the "big, rustic chunks of oxtail" at Il Matriciano, the carbonara and fried artichokes at Matricianella, and the breads and sandwiches at Compagnia del Pane.
On September 26, just four days shy of the publication of her fourth cookbook, Giada's Kitchen, Giada de Laurentiis launched a social-networking website. When I last checked on Sunday night, she already had 1,026 members. That means more than 100 new people are signing up every day. With numbers like that it's hard to argue with the jacket copy, which states that Giada "has become America's best-loved Italian cook."
The New York Times raises the question of authenticity of Italian cuisine as it examines 
With Quartino, Osteria via Stato, and now A Mano all slinging cured meats, Chicago’s downtown lunch arena is sporting more sausage than the Chicago Bears locker room after a big game. 
As the interest in fine spirits and cocktails has grown in recent years, demand has likewise increased for Italian amaros. The garnet-red 
Conventional wisdom in the food world is that desserts in Italian restaurants are an afterthought. All I can say is that the people spouting that conventional wisdom have never had Gina DePalma's desserts at 
, we can all try to replicate the magic that comes out of Mario Batali's tiny kitchen at Babbo every night. What's really cool about Dolce Italiano is that DePalma herself wrote every word with the exception of Mario's introduction. It turns out the woman can write and cook.
Until now. 
You've probably already read that Danny DeVito's recently 
Jane Snow of the Akron Beacon Journal, on 
