A look at local food discoveries, whether it’s a particular dish or an ingredient, often with one or more recipes.
I don’t remember who it was among my circle who asked about a recipe for Pizzoccheri alla Valtellinese, but as the last gasps of winter die out in Buenos Aires, it seemed time to slip this one in under the wire. There is some debate over the origin of the name pizzoccheri (pronounced “peetz-OHK-ehry”), some claiming it’s… Read More A Bit, or a Mouthful
We’re back with Stan! Yes, it’s been awhile. The dish I’m about to demonstrate uses lamb stock and I kept putting off making some sort of lamb dish in order to have lamb bones leftover to make stock from. But we were on a bit of a stew fetish for a couple of weeks there… Read More Tucci #8
Time for a look back at some of our (and our customers’) favorite dishes of the last few meals at Casa SaltShaker. These include a couple of further iterations on dishes that I’ve presented in the past, and a new pasta dish that’s been in the works for awhile. Tiradito de Corvina – I’m… Read More Midwinter Munchies
It’s been a colder, wetter few days and a big pot of locro seemed in order. It was time to get back to my list of the various regional South American locros, this time, we head to northwest Argentina and the province of Catamarca (Quechua word meaning… hillside fortress). Catamarca is the province that’s sort of salmon-colored… Read More The L Word – From the Hillside Fortress
For most of my life I’ve thought about something that has a corkscrew shape as a “spiral”. But it turns out that’s wrong – something maybe that was buried in the back of my mind from school years, but never connected. A spiral is a two dimensional figure, like a drawing on paper. When you… Read More Double Helix
I’m just going to throw out a (not so) wild guess that 99.9% of you have never encountered Pasta alla zozzona before. We’re still hanging out in Rome – I mentioned months ago that in response to someone’s assertion that there were really only four true Roman pastas that I could come up with dozens or… Read More Dirty Satisfying Little Pasta Secret
We’re back in Lazio, in Rome, with another pasta. It came up as I was watching a video from someone purporting to know all about Italian pastas, as he asserted that the only pastas worth knowing from the area were the famed four “spaghettis” (gricia, cacio e pepe, amatriciana, carbonara), which he then detailed, getting… Read More Tail of a Pasta Sauce
This sounds like the title of a novel that might have been written by one or another fantasy writer in the realms of dragons, elves, monsters, and heroes. But, it is a reference to a very obscure pasta from Sardinia. Specifically, from the 800-person town of Morgongiori, on the slopes of Mt. Arci, in the… Read More The Twisted Rings of Morgongiori