Found this while searching through links and restaurants...
http://wgbhfoodie.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/61/
Monday, June 21, 2010
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
First pages
As I start my blog journey, I would like to start with my joys and inspirations in cooking. Food at its very bottom is substance to nourish our bodies and to sustain ourselves in our daily lives. Eating is not an option. We eat, we live. We do not eat we die. Rather what we chose is what we eat and how we eat. For me, eating for the sake of eating, seems not to honor what food is. To enjoy and take pleasure in what we eat is a way of paying respect to that which keeps us alive.
Every ingredient I cook with I try to present with it’s fullest potential. Food should be manipulated or abstracted as little as possible so it does not lose it’s quality. Also, the better quality the food has, the less it should be manipulated. I remember one night when I was staying with self-sustaining peasants in the Apennines, Felice brought up from the stream a bucket of watercress (crescione) for dinner. In the mountains, far from any city or town, the water runs clean and fresh. The cleanliness of the stream was tasted in the crescione. When cooking it, all he used were three ingredients: the pot, salt and crescione. Another night it was beans from the gardens, grown without herbicides or pesticides, and again in the mountains away from pollutants. Again, minimal ingredients used, minimal cooking required and the flavours were above anything I have ever tasted before.
At another place, where I lived for about three years, Martino raises sheep with the utmost care and respect, making sure that their lives were tranquil and naturally healthy. The sheep lived, mated with the ram and had babies. The lambs would be killed and sold for meat, the milk would then be made into cheese and ricotta, which then would be eaten or sold at local markets. The taste in the two month old lamb, grilled over a fire rubbed only with salt and pepper, echoes that of it’s life on the fields. It is the same with the ricotta: clean and sweet… as sweet as the grasses and flowers eaten by the sheep.
But why are we interested in food?
Certainly it is a basic need, but there is something more…
“Food is a product of the region but the dishes are an expression of a culture.”
– Jessica Scalamonti
We eat to enjoy and spend time together and what commonality we all have is food. It is a blend of tradition and history reflected in what we eat. Food is an expression of pleasure, of experimentation and of creativity. In meeting another culture it is always interesting to taste their food as a way to get to know that culture. We relate to food. It tells a lot of stories to us and about us.
And that is where I would like to start.
Every ingredient I cook with I try to present with it’s fullest potential. Food should be manipulated or abstracted as little as possible so it does not lose it’s quality. Also, the better quality the food has, the less it should be manipulated. I remember one night when I was staying with self-sustaining peasants in the Apennines, Felice brought up from the stream a bucket of watercress (crescione) for dinner. In the mountains, far from any city or town, the water runs clean and fresh. The cleanliness of the stream was tasted in the crescione. When cooking it, all he used were three ingredients: the pot, salt and crescione. Another night it was beans from the gardens, grown without herbicides or pesticides, and again in the mountains away from pollutants. Again, minimal ingredients used, minimal cooking required and the flavours were above anything I have ever tasted before.
At another place, where I lived for about three years, Martino raises sheep with the utmost care and respect, making sure that their lives were tranquil and naturally healthy. The sheep lived, mated with the ram and had babies. The lambs would be killed and sold for meat, the milk would then be made into cheese and ricotta, which then would be eaten or sold at local markets. The taste in the two month old lamb, grilled over a fire rubbed only with salt and pepper, echoes that of it’s life on the fields. It is the same with the ricotta: clean and sweet… as sweet as the grasses and flowers eaten by the sheep.
But why are we interested in food?
Certainly it is a basic need, but there is something more…
“Food is a product of the region but the dishes are an expression of a culture.”
– Jessica Scalamonti
We eat to enjoy and spend time together and what commonality we all have is food. It is a blend of tradition and history reflected in what we eat. Food is an expression of pleasure, of experimentation and of creativity. In meeting another culture it is always interesting to taste their food as a way to get to know that culture. We relate to food. It tells a lot of stories to us and about us.
And that is where I would like to start.
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