Erica De Mane

Recipe: Blood Orange Salad with Prosecco Anise Syrup I believe my father’s relationship to the family kitchen was typical for an Italian man. There seem to be three ways Italian men, and I include Italian-Americans, involve themselves in the creation of family meals: They take over the entire dinner preparation in a intense, chef-like manner, [...]

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Recipes: Orange Flower Aperitivo Orange Olivata Crostini For me the aroma of orange has always been linked to Christmas. My father’s golf pro buddies would show up at my childhood home for holiday whisky sours, one of them inevitably bearing a little crate of highly waxed tangerines that, as the evening wore on, got opened [...]

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Red and green through the eyes of Caravaggio. Recipe: String Bean Salad with Tomatoes, Savory, and Toasted Walnuts During Christmas season I inevitably find myself making a lot of red and green foods. As farty as that sounds, I can’t help it. I like to color-coordinate dishes. I’ve made all-yellow meals in summer, and all-green [...]

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Recipe: Trout with Prosciutto, Sage, and Lemon I have to admit to myself that the road to weight control and good health is pretty obvious. For starters, cut down on refined carbs and saturated fats. That leaves vegetables and fish. I love seafood of all kinds, but if I fail to put a little creativity [...]

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Recipe: Lamb and Ricotta Salata Meatballs on Tomato Arugula Soup A few days after Thanksgiving I came down with a head-swelling cold. I expected it to keep me in bed for at least a day, but no, this cold made me fidgety and sick but still up and wandering the cold streets. It put me [...]

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Recipe: Endive Baked with Marsala and Parmigiano Reggiano Thanksgiving is not my favorite food holiday. Words that for me describe its tastes are mushy, sweet, and dry. I think the perfect Thanksgiving dinner would be a big piece of crisp turkey skin and a salad drizzled with gravy. Good cheese would improve things. In fact, [...]

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A dreamlike egg wash. Recipe: Pizza di Scarola with Black Olives and Raschera Many of my dreams involve food preparation. I suppose that’s only natural for someone who cooks as much as I do. The dreams are sometimes truly horrible. A recurring theme is putting a duck or a rabbit in the oven and then [...]

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Happy customers at DiPalo’ in Little Italy, New York. I don’t know if it happens to you, but often when I purchase Gorgonzola, even in fancy Manhattan shops, it’s overripe, mushy and ammonia-stinking. That’s because these days you almost always have to buy cheese with your eyes, not your nose. You’re presented with precut, plastic-wrapped [...]

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My home-preserved tuna in olive oil. Recipes: My Preserved Tuna Preserved Tuna with Cannellini Beans, Celery, and Sage Cold weather makes me and many cooks I know want to preserve food for storage, despite having no actual need to do so. Every year around early November I click into Southern Italian farmhouse mode and drag [...]

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Silvana Mangano and friends in their fetching rice picker outfits in the film Riso Amaro. Recipe: Black Rice with Shrimp, Guanciale, and Rosemary About a week ago I had a very frustrating dream. I was trying to scoop up buckets of something that looked like black pebbles, but I couldn’t get it into my bucket. [...]

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