Memorie di Angelina

Chicory (cicoria in Italian) is one of my very favorite greens. It brings back memories of Angelina for whom cicoria and escarole were almost daily staples. Maybe that’s why she lived well into her 90s… A great weeknight dinner option, the recipe for this soup is very fast, very simple and very healthy. (If you […]

Risotto is one of my ‘go to’ dishes when I don’t feel like cooking anything elaborate. That may sound odd: risotto has a reputation for being a lot of work and easy to get wrong. And yes, when done badly, risotto can be a rather goopy mess. But it is not really very hard to […]

When we think of Neapolitan cooking—and southern Italian cooking in general—we think of pasta and pizza. So it may come as a surprise that one of the most emblematic dishes of Neapolitan cooking is actually a rice timbale, the sartù di riso. The word sartù, the story goes, is an Italianized version of the French phrase […]

Well, Spring is finally here! All those lovely seasonal vegetables that are just beginning to arrive in the markets, the kind that Italians call primizie—asparagus, baby artichokes, fresh peas in their pods—are beginning to make their appearance in the local markets. There are so many ways to enjoy these vegetables, but one of the loveliest […]

Insalata di riso, or rice salad, is another staple of Italian summertime cooking. It’s quick and very easy to make, it can be made ahead—in fact, it only gets better after a day in the fridge—and it’s light on the stomach. And it lends itself to variations limited only to your imagination. Last August, I […]

Risotto is one of the staples of northern Italian cooking, nowhere more so than in Lombardy. Here is the risotto that typifies the cooking of Milan, the capital of Lombardy region and the economic and financial capital of Italy. This risotto follows the classic method for making risotto, which we have gone over before, but […]

Here’s another installment from the colorful world of risotto. Last week we featured green risotto, this week it’s black risotto, made with cuttlefish and its ink. The technique for this risotto recipe is a bit different from the more usual one, in that you don’t begin by toasting the rice but rather braising the cuttlefish […]