All Things Food
The bone left from making porchetta had been sitting in the freezer for quite some time – I’m embarrassed to say how long! And with frigid temps and so much time sitting at home, I wanted to use it in a bean soup. My memories turned to the semester I spent in Rome at the Centro (Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies), and the pasta e fagioli soup they often served for lunch.
Read MoreAs a child, I was a picky eater. When I was an infant and starting on solid food, I didn’t seem to like anything. But I did like applesauce. My mom tells me she would use a bit of applesauce to hide whatever else was on the spoon, whence derives the applesauce habit I had as a child.
I’m not kidding when I say I had an applesauce habit. Every evening at dinner, to the left of my plate, sat a small bowl of applesauce and I would dip every forkful of whatever meat was for dinner into the applesauce before eating it. Of course people have heard of pork with applesauce, but this was, truly every single meat. Even fish. Even my grandmother’s veal Parmesan with tomato sauce and mozzarella. (Yes, I realize that sounds like a strange combination, and I haven’t had it in years, but it’s one of those embedded taste memories I can still call to mind with utmost clarity.)
Read MoreThe summer after 7th grade, my family spent a month’s vacation in Fano, an Italian town on the Adriatic. This was decided because the summer before 7th grade, my father had quite literally made himself ill from overwork and stress, spending every day of his vacation on the phone. My mother insisted that we go far enough away that no one would call him. (Of course these days, you’d have to go somewhere much farther, much more remote than Fano!)
It was truly a magical trip. In the days before Airbnb and Vrbo, there was the Vacation Exchange Club. The premise was that your family and another family would trade houses for an agreed upon time. There was a physical book to review the homes available, some of which were simply for rent, when the owner didn’t want to trade. This is how we found a home up in the hills above Fano that we rented for the entire month of July, along with a rental tomato red Fiat to explore the area.
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