Food, Family, and Memory

sorrentohotel.jpgI was barely six years old and on an early summer vacation with my sister, Tanya and my Mother, a woman way a head of her time. The three of us were off on another adventure this time to the small town of Sorrento, Italy. Our father loved to travel but never outside the United States after he immigrated from Albania during the first World War to escape the atrocities in his village.

He indulged our mother's wanderlust and desire to show us the world with enthusiasm. That summer, our adventuresome mother picked the spectacular hotel Bellevue Syrene perched on a sheer cliff hundreds of feet above the ocean. The converted palace was surrounded by formal gardens in full bloom and the ocean side terrace dripped with blue Wisteria. It was dinner that evening that awoke my love of food and changed the course of my life.

The dining room was a formal affair like things used to be fifty years ago. As we three approached the entrance guarded by the Maitre D', he pulled back the heavy velvet drapes exposing the jewel box like dining room. As he led us to our table the azure blue color of the Gulf of Naples view from the floor to ceiling windows was so clear we could see Capri.

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anchovies-goldfish-and-shannon-in-the-background-300x270Last year, we had friends and family over to celebrate La Vigilia, which is a traditional Christmas Eve feast that had its beginnings in the south of Italy. It celebrates the wait for the birth of baby Jesus. Vigilia – the wait. Traditionally the meal is comprised of seven fish dishes – including shellfish, of course – and it can be one of the great feasts of the year. It can be a blowout, actually, un cenone, which means a very large and very long dinner.

We decided to go another way. Yes, we would do the seven fishes but we would take it easy on ourselves – just three courses instead of seven – plus dessert at the end, of course — and we split up the work load between four cooks: myself, the eminent Don Michele di Sicilia, our daughter, Alison and her beau, Shannon. So it was a kind of BYOF – bring your own fishes.

We had twelve people for dinner. We started with one of my favorite appetizers – anchovies on sweet-buttered bread. That’s it – as simple as you can get, but the combination of the briny fish and the sweet butter is one of the great single bites of all time.

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blue cotton candyMy idea of a good time is dragging my sorry ass up the stairs after a long day, plopping down on the bed, snuggling with my husband and watching re-runs of Law and Order or, if God REALLY loves me, a NEW episode of Real Time With Bill Maher. This 4 star vacation is earned after a day of schlepping kids, policing homework and of course the dance of death known as feeding everyone.

I’ve lost the will to live at that point, so preparing food for myself is out of the question.  I hastily eat something over the sink or bring things up to the bed that can be dipped or combined such as pesto with bread and diet coke, or Cheezits and Cranberry Juice. Oy.

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zucchinibread.jpgThis fall I took a night train ride from Buffalo, New York to Chicago, Illinois. Normally, I find the train relaxing, a chance to rest, read and reflect. On this trip, however, I just wanted to sleep. But the guy sitting behind me snored so loudly that even the usually soothing train sounds couldn’t drown out his volcanic eruptions.

By the time we arrived at Union Station, I stumbled out of the train bleary-eyed, and headed for the nearest coffee shop. There, I unpacked a treasure from inside my backpack – my sister-in-law’s zucchini bread. I sat by the window, watching Chicagoans hurry through a light rain to their offices. Sipping a steaming latte, I savored every bite of the cake-like bread slices. I can’t think of a breakfast I’ve enjoyed more.

I realized I had never baked zucchini bread. Back home in Los Angeles, I decided it was time to rectify that situation.

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I read “Look Homeward, Angel” by Thomas Wolfe the summer I worked as a busboy in a Catskill Hotel. His hero Eugene Gant was a lover of the morning meal but I had to help serve it.

blintzes2.jpgGetting up at six in the morning for the breakfast shift was hell made worse by sharing a room with medical student waiters who were all too willing to roll you out of your bunk and drag you into a cold shower. If you were lucky enough to escape you took a ‘waiter’s bath’: generous helpings of Old Spice; like French nobility at Versailles we stunk under a layer of perfume.

Breakfast in the Catskills was bountiful. If the hotel was kosher it combined the menu of a Second Avenue dairy restaurant with the display case of a King’s Highway Brooklyn bakery. Juices, fruits, sour cream, cottage pot and farmer cheese, blintzes, all manner of eggs, cereals hot and cold, lox, herring in cream or wine sauce, smoked whitefish, cod and kippers. Fresh baked onion rolls, poppy seed rolls, caraway crescents, fruit Danishes, coffee cakes, and last night’s left over strudel.  If the hotel wasn’t Kosher – and the one I worked in wasn’t – then there was the gift of the forbidden animal; bacon and ham.

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