Erica De Mane

Swiss chard gets a quick sauté to heighten its flavor.

Recipes:

Cauliflower with Capers and Brown Butter

Swiss Chard with Yellow Raisins, Pine Nuts, and Marsala

Escarole with Anchovies, Cumin Seeds, and Garlic

When I began cutting back on the carbohydrates, I didn’t fill the void with big amounts of protein, as I assumed I would. Instead I started preparing more vegetables to replace all the rice, potatoes, and pasta that had formerly crowded my plate. I attribute this perversion to my Italian-American upbringing. We really loved vegetables in our house. My father had a beloved little garden that he tended with a vengeance, and a lot of ceremony went into preparing and presenting all sorts of vegetables that my non-Italian friends probably viewed as evil—dandelions, broccoli rabe, cauliflower, escarole. I loved all that stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. When I was a kid I ate a lot of crap, Pop-Tarts and the like, but my mother, being a Southern Italian, always insisted on cooking unusual greens and serving a salad with every meal, all stuff loaded with Omega 3 fatty acids, although I’m sure she didn’t know that at the time. I loved her vegetables, her broccoli rabe with garlic and fennel seeds, her string beans with fresh tomatoes and basil, her spinach with raisins, her escarole with hot chilies and garlic.

The trick to working more vegetables into your life is making them outrageously appealing. That’s where Skinny Guinea comes in. There’s nothing less Italian in spirit, culinarily speaking, than a plate of steamed vegetables, and there’s just about nothing more boring. I’ve seen so many dieters get into the steamed-vegetables rut, to punish themselves, I imagine. They steam them, and then they don’t eat them, because they’re so dismal and watery, so they wind up eating a loaf of bread instead. Not good. In the Italian world, vegetables were made to be adorned. A quick sauté in good olive oil does wonders in coaxing out flavor. Roasting and grilling are other good approaches. In fact, any quick cooking method that lightly caramelizes a vegetable’s surface will improve its taste. (more…)

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My idea of a fine runway model.

A bill now working its way through the French Parliament would ban websites that promote eating disorders through “thinspiration” and starvation tips. I’m sure, since it’s a French bill, it was partly inspired by all the somewhat unappealing bony models who walk the Parisian catwalks, particularly that one sad Brazilian model who died from anorexia a few years back.

Skinny Guinea advocates an Italian lifestyle, and that means looking and feeling good without deprivation. Skinny Guinea embraces the classic Italian body type for women: curvy, with a little padding in all the right places. To achieve this look, it is essential that you eat really great Italian food and enjoy it immensely. You just don’t want to be a pig about it.

The photo above of Claudia Cardinale gives a good example of what I’m talking about. Okay, the waist is impossible, probably all girdled in and hence exaggeratedly small, so don’t worry about that too much. But the hips and thighs, especially the thighs, would give Karl Lagerfeld an aneurysm. This girl could not set foot on a Prada runway. So be it. We love her.

If you’re interested in looking more like Claudia Cardinale than Mary-Kate Olsen, you’ve come to the right place. Stay tuned for upcoming Skinny Guinea spring recipes to keep you looking and feeling properly and proportionally Italian.

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Crispy salmon with Sicilian flavors.

Recipe:

Oven-Seared Salmon with Orange and Fennel Whole Wheat Couscous

Salmon, it’s a wonder food, right? Isn’t it the diet Dr. Perricone insists on? If you eat nothing but salmon and broccoli, you’ll be smooth-skinned, sleek, and gorgeous? Salmon is a lovely fish, but it’s a rich one, almost too rich.
After many years cooking it, I’ve come to understand two big truths about it.

The first is that salmon needs acid to break up its richness. Lemon is good, of course, but orange, which I’ve chosen for my recipe here, or tomato, or wine, or lemon mixed with mustard, capers, a touch of vinegar—those are all good options. I’ve never understood the French habit of presenting salmon in a cream sauce. That, to me, is the French palate at its worst. But a dish even more sickening than that, and one probably invented by my own people, the Italian-Americans, is a pasta version of that concept, sort of a salmon fettuccine Alfredo: salmon, either smoked or fresh, heavy cream, some type of grated cheese, garlic, and fettuccine, all tossed together into a bowl of throat-slicking fat. That was popular in midpriced Italian-American restaurants in the 1990s (and also at wedding buffets). The very thought of it gives me a gag reflex. (more…)

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Creative alternatives to the itsy-bitsy.

The truth is, no matter how thin I am, and I’m pretty thin at the moment, I’m not going to look seventeen in a bathing suit anytime again soon. But that’s not a problem for me. I’ve always found those underwire tops that look just like bras a little trashy, and the thong bottom is almost a strip of insanity no matter what shape you’re in.

The great thing about bathing attire is that there are so many ways to go about creating it, depending on your shape and your outlook. Something that feels very me, a look I’ve come up with variations on season after season, is the boy-brief bottom with a tight striped (or solid black) T-shirt top. It’s got a kind of 1920s quality to it, which to me is much sexier than any thong, and stretchy boy briefs make your butt look really cute, especially if it’s a little on the big side, which is the case for many Italian girls and certainly many Italian-Americans. I also like a full-blown sort of scuba look, with long, tight, black, thigh-long leggings and a racer-back top. (more…)

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A bottle of Aperol and my new faux zebra throw pillow.

In my ongoing effort to rid myself of the habit of drinking red wine as an aperitivo, something that for starters is not very Italian, but more important just makes me want to consume large platters of mortadella before dinner, I’m always experimenting to try to come up with delicious alternatives—real aperitivi.

On one of my first trips to Italy I noticed a bottle of bright red, cheerful-looking booze at the bar at the Siena train station. I asked the bartender about it and wound up drinking two little glasses of Aperol, straight up. The taste was sweet and slightly bitter. I was familiar with Campari, but this was different, sweeter and less bitter but still with that elusive herbal kick, sort of a junior Campari, and extremely easygoing in every way. I was so taken by it that I went to buy a bottle on my return home. I was saddened to discover it was not exported. Well, now it is. (more…)

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La bella figura in Amarcord.

Montasio melts onto asparagus straight from the hot oven.

Recipes:

Roasted Asparagus with Montasio and Lemon Zest
Calamari and Watercress Salad with Chives and Pistachios

You’re not fat, so why are you dieting? I hear this all the time, but the truth is I used to gain a few pounds every year just going about my business eating gobs of mozzarella and downing bottles of semi-cheap wine. I started to notice a touch of dumpiness. I was stunned. A few extra pounds on my five-foot-one Sicilian/Neapolitan frame are, I’d say, equivalent to at least ten on a normal person. It’s so unfair. When I began mentioning my weight to people, that’s when I got laughed at or, worse, condescended to. But if I continued at the rate I was going, I figured in ten years I’d be truly huge. How fat do you have to be before you can knock off a few pounds without offending such friends? Dieting as an act of betrayal? Forget it. Everyone has a right to be comfortable in his or her own body, and personally I feel more comfortable without a bulge of blubber hanging out over my belt loops. Call me narcissistic. If that’s narcissistic than getting up in the morning and combing my hair and putting on deodorant is narcissistic too. I also wasn’t in the mood to develop diabetes, as many of my aunts and uncles and grandparents had. They seemed to accept that as an inevitable part of aging. Getting “the sugar” was like sprouting gray hairs—just happens. But I’m now enlightened, and unlike my grandmother, I now know that it’s not inevitable that you get dumpy and diabetic when you pass forty. You just need to change your tack. There’s no getting around it. I had to start paying attention. (more…)

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Dino and the Duke. The pasta is probably not whole wheat.


The recipe below is whole wheat.

Recipe:

Whole Wheat Spaghetti with Cockles, Roasted Tomatoes, and Dandelion

I now eat pasta only about once a week, and I want each pasta dish I cook to be perfect. But I’m also conscious of the amount I eat (what a nuisance), and I add lots of protein and go for whole wheat as often as I can tolerate it.

Whole wheat pasta? Is that really Italian? Yes it is. And it’s currently even having a little vogue in Italy, since the backlash against refined carbohydrates has made its way out of New York and Los Angeles and into the world (or at least into some of the parts of the world, where they have the luxury to be picky about what they eat). I actually really like whole wheat pasta, but I’ve found that it makes me rethink my sauces. Not only is the taste different from that of the standard dried durum wheat types, but the texture is a bit more brittle, not quite as luxe and elastic. Cream sauces are definitely out; their taste hardly registers as a coating for the nutty flavor of whole wheat. Butter and parmigiano alone? Not quite forceful enough. But if you add a few chopped anchovies to a butter sauce, then you’re getting somewhere. That seems to be the traditional approach in Italy to creating beautifully balanced whole wheat pasta dishes. (more…)

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Cannolis minus all the calories.

When you need a little something sweet and somehow don’t see a whole tray of cannolis fitting into your diet plan, Italy still has a lot to offer you. A neurotic little trick of mine is to eat something extremely small but tooth-achingly sweet to curb my craving. It almost always works, since the thing I eat winds up being delicious yet ultimately sickening at the same time. Victory. (more…)

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Italian beauty on a stick.

Recipes:

Gremolata Chickpea Salad
Shrimp and Mushroom Spiedini with Rosemary and Lemon

My feeling about spiedini, Italian-style kebabs, is that since they’re long and lean, eating them will make me long and lean. Well, lean maybe, but long might be more problematic, since I’m only five-foot-one, and I’m likely to stay that way until I get old enough to start shrinking. But leaner would be welcome (I still have a bit of excess thigh blubber I’d like to whittle down before beach weather arrives). (more…)

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Anna Magnani in The Golden Coach, the film by Jean Renoir.

She’s my ideal. Not too fat, not too skinny. Never overly concerned about her ever-enlarging eye bags. A little tense, but she knows how to have fun. Loves to eat and drink. At home at a raucous party or in a bomb shelter. I love Anna Magnani.

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