Thursday, November 30, 2006
Back From Puglia
I am back from beautiful Puglia and I fully intended, as I said I would in my last letter, to write to you about a dinner party I attended a couple of nights before I left. The dinner was at Onera at 222 W. 79th St. (and Broadway), which is a contemporary Greek restaurant, meaning the food isn’t traditional Greek food but what Italians call cucina creativa – creative cuisine. The chef-owner is Greek-American, Michael Psilakis, who also now owns Dona with my friend Donatella Arpaia.
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Sunday, November 19, 2006
My Restaurant List (Cheap Lunch) for Cecilia
My friend and business partner (Cook at Seliano Culinary Vacations and our new Italian-American Roots Tours) is coming to visit New York and several other stateside places. She’s arriving tomorrow night with what I have been calling her “entourage,” a group befitting a baronessa I feel. She’s coming with her son, Massimino, and his wife, Barbara, two highly valued women from the staff of her farm-inn (agriturismo), Eugenia and Veliana, and Eugenia’s 16-year-old son, Simone. This is not to mention my friend and hers, Nicolas Claes, who lives at Tenuta Seliano and already arrived two days ago. They are all staying in my apartment, which is large, but not really large enough for all these people. To accommodate everyone, I have turned the dining room into a dormitory, I have moved the dining table into the library … and I won’t bore you with all the other rearrangements of furniture and allocation of rooms.
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Friday, November 17, 2006
Special Birthday Edition of Cook at Seliano
It’s my birthday and I get to do what I want to, to paraphrase the Leslie Gore song of my youth. It’s my 60th birthday on March 24, 2007, to be exact. (Oy vey is meer!) And what I want to do is have a special edition of “Cook at Seliano” during which we not only eat, drink, cook, and laugh, as usual, but also visit some antique houses, which is the activity I most love to do after eating, drinking, cooking, and laughing.
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Sunday, November 12, 2006
I'm Back -- Plus Thanksgiving Recipes, Mozzarella di Bufala
I’m back. I’m still jet-lagged and I’m still on information overload (book and travel research), but I am home sweet home in Brooklyn. There’s no place like it, but it was a pleasure to be away for so long. I missed my friends and family. I missed my Tempur-Pedic mattress. But that’s it. I did not miss the political news, or the news of sexual scandals, fires, murders, and celebrities. In fact, I realized that one of the pleasures of being in a country where you don’t speak the language all that well is that you don’t know about their equally stupid political news, and news of sexual scandals, fires, murders, and celebrities. You can live in your own world.
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