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 […]

Pasta e fagioli, or pasta and beans, which goes by the amusing nickname ‘pasta fazool‘ in Italian-American slang, is one of the most internationally famous dishes in the entire Italian repertoire.  It is, however, a victim of its own success, and is too often made badly, very badly, which is why I would never order […]

It seems like the artichoke was designed for stuffing. That huge cavity in the middle surrounded by all those layered leaves make it a perfect receptacle for all sort of savories. No wonder there is an  almost endless variety of stuffed artichoke recipes. Here is the way that Angelina made her stuffed artichokes: as always, […]

Braciole—beef slices rolled up with a savory garlic, parsley and cheese filling—is one of those dishes common to both Italian-American and ‘real’  Italian cooking—of the Neapolitan variety. Italian-Americans will often add them to the pot when making “Sunday sauce”, but they are equally good on their own, simmered in tomato sauce. Unlike the long simmering […]

The weather this Labor Day weekend hasn’t been too congenial for a cookout. It seems Mother Nature has been in a changeable mood, sunny for a while, then cloudy, then stormy, and hot and muggy the whole while. So I took the chicken I was meaning to grill indoors and gave it an old-fashioned treatment […]

For most of us, pizza means just one thing: a round disk of dough topped with tomato, mozzarella and other goodies and baked in a hot oven. But the word ‘pizza’ can also refer to a sweet pie, typically made with ricotta and eggs, flavored with sugar and other things, called pizza dolce di ricotta. Angelina […]

I wasn’t much on sweets even as a kid, but these little sugar-dusted ribbons of fried dough—variously known as chiacchiere, nastrini, stracci, cenci, frappe and a myriad of other names—were my one weakness in the sweets department. They are a traditional treat for Carnival, a time for over-indulgence, culinary and otherwise, getting in your ‘last […]