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01/08/2006 Archived Entry: "Selling Myself"

I think it is about time I sell myself. You, of course, know that I am for sale, so to speak.

For instance, I am hosting a cruise in May, with a three-day optional land tour in and around Rome, from where we board the Holland-America Noordam, the fleet’s newest ship. It won’t even be launched until February. Wanna come? My webmaster is about to add that to my Maven’s Appearances section of the website, but we can send you a brochure now. We will be traveling under the wings of Alice Travel and Travel Four Vacations, my long-time travel partners, and you can see more about the trip by going to either www.travelfour.com or www.alicetravel.com I am with you every step of the way, but they are the ones who really look after you on these cruises. They also book the reservations and answer all your questions. Just call 888-414-2323. Maureen will probably answer the phone. She’s a doll.

And I suppose all of you know that I still do my cooking school or culinary vacations, as I prefer to think of them, at Baronessa Cecilia’s water buffalo farm in Paestum, down the road from the famous Fifth and Sixth Century B.C. Greek temples. My next group will be from Sept. 10 to 16. If there is enough interest, I will also have a session in October. Again, if there is enough interest, I am happy, as always, to have a session that starts right after Christmas and incorporates New Year’s Eve.

My Cook at Seliano groups are very small, usually no more than 10 people, and I am with you every minute – if you can stand it. (Click on Cook at Seliano, wherever it is highlighted, for a link to the food maven pages.)

I must say on my own behalf that everyone who has participated in the 11 groups Cecilia and I have hosted over the last three years has said that Cook at Seliano exceeds their expectations. Cecilia’s rooms are wonderful, all with private baths and beautiful vintage furniture. We eat and drink extremely well, probably too well. We have fun cooking on the three half-days we spend in the kitchen. It turns into a cooking party. And Cecilia and I always plan interesting gastronomic and cultural outings, including taking you to private homes, a winery, the mozzarella dairy down the road, the Greek temples (and museum), to nearby Salerno, the Amalfi Coast, and I could go on. We change the itinerary all the time, depending on the season, just as we change what we cook according to the season. I can furnish references on request, although at this moment I am trying to revamp the Cook at Seliano section on my website, and I will include some of these endorsements.

I am also arranging a new kind of southern Italian travel this year. I call the trips “Italian Roots Tours.” The idea is to take Italian-Americans back to the town(s) from which their families emigrated. For instance, in late September I am taking a family to Matera, their ancestral town in the region of Basilicata. We’ll find their “roots” in the town hall, eat the food of their ancestors, get a feel for this wonderfully preserved small city (I know it well), and tour the countryside, including stops in Puglia, the neighboring region. In this case, the family is flying directly to Bari, the closest airport to Matera, and so we will spend a night in that beautiful, but totally underrated city before we drive a couple of hours to Matera.

Needless to say, food will be a focus. Besides wonderful meals, we’ll see some food production – a farm and dairy where they make great pecorino, a baker who works with an oven dating to 1423, a winery. I won’t let anyone leave Italy without some cultural touring, too. There are fabulous Greek and Roman ruins all over the south of Italy, and some Medieval castles in Basilicata, plus the famous sassi, inhabitable caves, of Matera. (By the way, Matera was where Mel Gibson filmed his Passion movie because the caves make it look vaguely like Jerusalem.) I customize these trips, so, actually, if you put a group together, I will try to accommodate almost any request. If you don’t have Italian roots but want to tag along anyway, that’s great, too. Perhaps you want to visit some other area in the south. I am hoping to have an equivalent trip to Calabria – if I can find enough Calabrese-Americans who want to go.

What else?

Remember that my website has hundreds of well-tested recipes. Just put a word in the “search” box at the top of each page and you’ll see. Or, check out the Maven’s Index. It is not totally up to date, but you’ll see that there is much, much more on this site than meets the eye.

Oh yes, one more thing: Tell your friends to sign up for my newsletter by filling in their email address at the top of any page. Okay?