What's better than grazing from a table of appetizers while chatting with friends and watching your favorite baseball team play? I've often said that I'm going to have a party and serve nothing but appetizers. Then, being Italian, I think about my six brothers all asking when the pasta is...
(2) Comments | Posted May 7, 2012 | 11:56 AM
We are very fortunate to know the Italian hillside town of Montalcino in Tuscany through our dear friend, Rachael Ray, the cook, TV host, and writer. She was married there in a castle on a hillside overlooking the town. As many of you who follow her show and magazine know,...
(3) Comments | Posted March 21, 2012 | 1:20 PM
March Madness is a national phenomenon. Sports fans of all ages join in. It has everything: buzzer beaters; Cinderella stories; heartbreaking last second losses and hysterically happy upset wins. There are triple overtime games that end with young players sobbing on the bench into their towels, while the victors are...
(0) Comments | Posted February 14, 2012 | 2:27 PM
Every Valentine's Day, our thoughts turn to love, and flowers, and well, chocolate.
All I really need is love, but a little chocolate now and then doesn't hurt!
What is it about chocolate that makes people feel so much better?...
(1) Comments | Posted October 28, 2011 | 2:01 PM
We were very tired, we were very merry--
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry;
And you ate an apple, and I ate a pear,
From a dozen of each we had bought somewhere;
...
(1) Comments | Posted May 11, 2011 | 12:53 PM
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-luscious
-e.e. cummings.
It's May and spring has finally come. Spring means different things to different people. For me, it's being able to walk outside again and see the return of my favorite shore birds, the egrets and...
(2) Comments | Posted March 28, 2011 | 4:33 PM
Okay, it's supposed to be springtime, and winter is just not over. What's up, Punxsutawney Phil and Staten Island Chuck? You said winter was going to end in six weeks on Groundhog Day. I just looked up Phil's accuracy rate and it's only 39% since 1887, so I should've known....
(7) Comments | Posted February 19, 2011 | 4:10 PM
Every Presidents' Day holiday, I go through the same confusion of trying to figure out how they pick the date. It's not Lincoln's birthday, or Washington's, but it is definitely closer to our first president so I guess that's my answer. That old seniority thing. This year, we had a...
(3) Comments | Posted January 19, 2011 | 2:42 PM
Pasta at Midnight
Put on the Ollies! - Pete Carlesimo
I could say that these cold winter nights are the reason I love to have a warm, delicious bowl of pasta at midnight. But then I'd be lying. I love having pasta at midnight at any time of the year,...
(5) Comments | Posted December 2, 2010 | 12:29 PM
Hanukkah begins very early this year -- the first of December. Growing up in a big Irish-Italian family in Scranton, Pennsylvania, I wasn't...
(2) Comments | Posted October 19, 2010 | 5:22 PM
Autumn LeavesThe falling leaves drift by the windowThe autumn leaves of red and gold. --Nat King ColeOctober means so many things to me. It's the beginning of fall, my favorite season. I like to shake off the languid slow pace bred by the hot summer days and...
(0) Comments | Posted October 19, 2010 | 3:26 PM
Autumn Leaves
The falling leaves drift by the window
The autumn leaves of red and gold. Nat King Cole
October means so many things to me. It's the beginning of fall, my favorite season. I like to shake off the languid slow pace bred by the hot summer...
(0) Comments | Posted September 3, 2010 | 6:59 PM
Without labor nothing prospers. -- Sophocles
As Labor Day approaches, with the last big grilling feasts of the year, I can't help but think about my favorite part of a mixed grill -- the sauce you put on top! Every country seems to have its own take on this...
(1) Comments | Posted July 14, 2010 | 12:20 AM
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La Marseillaise Allons enfants de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé! Contre nous de la tyrannie. Claude-Joseph Rouget,1795.
I've mentioned before that I had the good fortune to spend half of...
(4) Comments | Posted June 24, 2010 | 6:51 PM
"I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set...and be a blessing to us." -- Walt Whitman.
...
(0) Comments | Posted May 8, 2010 | 2:42 PM
ON MOTHER'S DAY OR ANY DAY
Cinnamon Buns in the Morning
Everyone thinks that their mother is the best cook in the world. My mother, Lucy, had to be an excellent cook because she is the mother of ten children. She called herself Lucia Child and the name was...
(9) Comments | Posted April 21, 2010 | 5:34 PM
"If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for all of Paris is a moveable feast." Ernest Hemingway, 1950
I was lucky enough to live in Paris in my twenties....
(0) Comments | Posted November 18, 2009 | 5:33 PM
I think everyone's had a disastrous Thanksgiving Turkey event in their lives. My personal disaster happened in my sophomore year at Fordham, at the very end of the sixties. I was living in my first apartment, with three other roommates, in what turned out to be a tough neighborhood in...
(7) Comments | Posted November 13, 2009 | 3:43 PM
Why is Thanksgiving the King of all the food holidays? Is it the turkey? I don't think so. We all like a good bird just fine, but seriously, it's not what we think and talk about as our favorite part of the meal for the rest of the year. Is...
(0) Comments | Posted May 24, 2012 | 11:39 AM