Erica De Mane

Sophia Loren nibbles on a pine nut (or is it a diet pill?).

Recipe:

Sear-Roasted Chicken with Lemon and Garlic, Served over Watercress Salad and Pignoli Vinaigrette

Pignoli nuts are one of my favorite Italian foods. I love their creamy, rich taste. I love the way they look, so smooth, so mini. Since I’ve been on this low-carb diet roll, I’ve been eating a lot of salads, and as a result, I’m constantly looking for new ways to make them interesting. Enter the pignoli. It’s a big player in Genoese pesto, of course. A simpler pignoli pesto makes a great salad dressing. Here I use a sweet little watercress salad, dressed with pignolis, as a bed for one of my all time favorite Southern Italian classics, chicken with lemon and garlic. (more…)

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Too much cheese is never enough.

Recipes:

Arugula Salad with Valtellina Casera and Rosemary Apples
Ragusano Crostini with String Bean and Mache Salad

Why am I capable of devouring pounds of cheese after a big dinner? My idea of a cheese plate always used to be five or six huge hunks of various irresistible cheeses, big enough so my guests and I were assured it would never run out. Cheese is so damned alluring and I want so much of it. That’s not the way I’ve seen them do it in Italy. There small chunks of a few local cheeses are brought to the table to be slivered off. The cheese course as I formerly interpreted it needed major reworking. Now when I serve cheese after dinner, it’s one or two kinds at most, and not an entire truckload (so sad, really). (more…)

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My grandmother’s string beans, made low-carb.

Recipes:

Grilled New York Strip Steak with Thyme and Anchovy Salmoriglio
String Beans with Tomatoes, Sweet Vermouth, and Pine Nuts

Low-carb works for me, but I don’t go crazy with it, sucking cheese off mini crackers and then hiding the crackers on a bookshelf, as I once saw a friend do at a party. Some people do get carried away with low-carb eating, becoming ridiculously rigid, which makes them infuriating dinner guests. (When I spend hours making a fresh, flaky apricot tart, for instance, I don’t love seeing the inside gouged out by some crazed Atkins extremist). I have fallen into low-carb eating out of necessity but, I hope, not stiffly. I have to have bread and pasta in my life. I don’t eat low-carb every night, but protein and vegetable dinners four or five nights a week keep my butt where I want it, and that’s the only tack that has worked for me. (more…)

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