A look at local food discoveries, whether it’s a particular dish or an ingredient, often with one or more recipes.
It’s that time again, a new month has dawned and we have a little round-up of the last one. I’m finding that a lot of my focus in creating dishes for Casa SaltShaker seem to end up in the pasta world. If I wasn’t already basically retired, I think I’d open a small restaurant that… Read More April Flours
On to the roundup of last month’s Casa SaltShaker meals. Despite taking some time off, we still managed three public and one private dinners over the course of the month. A combination of my personal tastes, and the feedback I got from diners, these were the favorite dishes for each meal. Scallop Mousse Raviolo,… Read More March Madness
How and when did Neapolitan cuisine, probably most epitomized by pasta and tomato sauce, become the symbol of Italian cooking? It certainly wasn’t early on, as tomatoes didn’t become a widespread part of local cooking until, really, the mid-1800s. And in Naples, it’s still not really the standard. In popular culture this was perhaps best… Read More Mangiamaccheroni – The Macaroni Eaters
It’s been awhile for this project, no? Our last entry, Egypt, was back in December 2021! Like all my projects, this one hovers in my mind, and it stalled out when I couldn’t find one of the key ingredients for many dishes in El Salvadoran cuisine, the papa del aire, or chayote. It was just an… Read More The Bread & Soup Project #54 – El Salvador
There once was a poet in Italy named Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. In the leading gastronomy magazine, La Cucina Italiana, in the early 1930s, he wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, a screed on Italian food traditions that became infamous for its dissing of pasta, among other things. In it, he declared that pasta was “an absurd… Read More The Anti-Futurist’s Pasta
Here we are, the end of another month. I, of course, will be taking February 29-31 as days to do things like not drink wine, go on a diet, and exercise regularly. Because I’m just that committed. Let’s look in at my favorite dishes from the meals we served at Casa SaltShaker this last month.… Read More Fleeting February
The second half, and second dish, of the Calabria episode of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy. In the previous post, I covered the sweet red onion spaghetti he waxed poetic about. In this one, we get fishy, with Spaghetti con pesce spada, or, spaghetti with swordfish. Not an easy fish to find here in Buenos Aires. As I… Read More Tucci #7b
I haven’t forgotten my Tucci series. Nor any of the series – like The Bread & Soup Project, or the L-Word Project, or getting to every Peruvian restaurant in the city, or, all the pizzerias, or shawarma, or… there are just too many of them, and as you may have noticed, I’m currently very devoted… Read More Tucci #7a