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. Continue Reading »

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). Continue Reading »

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. Continue Reading »

This picture is not how you should eat
when you’re on a diet.

Menu:

Warm Black Olives with Bay Leaves
Little Artichokes in Orange Sauce
Braised Calamari with Cinnamon, Tomatoes, and White Wine, served with Garlic Bruschetta
Escarole Salad with Pecorino Toscana and Shallots
Buttermilk Orange-Flower Sorbetto with Limoncello

An Italian-American meal has a very different flow or pace from a meal you’d be served in Italy. I was confused by this when I first visited Italy. Is this all I get, this little lump of veal on this big, empty plate? That’s not hospitality. When my generous Italian-American parents laid out a spread, it covered the table, everything at once, god forbid a guest think we were chintzy. At one meal we might conceivably have sausages, a bowl of jarred artichoke hearts, baked ziti, a plate of mozzarella and tomatoes, roasted peppers, sliced salami, a platter of grilled chicken just for the hell of it, salad, dressed, waiting, and wilting in the middle of the table, bottles of red wine, Diet Coke, milk, 7-Up, whatever, lots of bread, breadsticks, taralli, bowls of olives. Put all your cards on the table, show them what we’re made of. Bowls on the table, pots on the table, everything from the kitchen is on the table, just in case you need more or want more. Even if you don’t want more, you at least have the security of knowing it’s there.
Continue Reading »

A real skinny guinea: Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975).

Recipe:

Caponata with Pears and Almonds

You know the classic Italian mamma, huge, aproned, her big arms swinging with fat, hoisting a steaming pasta pot? She’s an Italian-American invention. That woman hardly exists in real Italian life. Look at the classic Italian movies. They always show something much more complicated. Like the exquisite and exquisitely svelte Silvana Mangano, in Pasolini’s Teorema, who spends her afternoons driving around the slums of Milan in her Lamborghini, picking up young men. And of course Pasolini himself was skinny as can be, maybe partly because he spent more time in the same pursuit as his character in Teorema than he did overeating (or making some of the most amazing films the world has ever seen). I think there’s a lesson here. Keep yourself busy and you won’t think so much about food. Continue Reading »

Veal, prosciutto, and sage, ready to roll.

Recipe:

Saltimbocca with Chicory and Capers

My initial attempt to diet was very lame. Being a complete novice at it, I figured it would be easy. Why, I have no idea, since I’d watched my sister and friends struggle with diets of all sorts for years. I suppose I reasoned that I didn’t have much weight to lose, so it would be no problem (in fact it seems to be just as hard to lose 12 pounds as 25). So in my naive way I decided to just eat less of everything, not cutting out any foods in particular. It didn’t work, mainly because having such small portions of things I loved made me antsy. So I added exercise. That may have been working, but it made me eat more, so it boomeranged. Continue Reading »

A negroni warms up a winter afternoon.

A big lifestyle change I made when I decided I needed to lose some weight was not drinking wine before dinner. It was a bad habit to begin with, and not very Italian in concept. Wine is made to go with food, and a glass of wine before dinner, especially red, just made me want to start my dinner early. I’d start the inevitable snacking on cheese and bread and hunks of salami. Bad. Wine as an aperitif is, I believe, something of an American invention. I’ve had very light whites served before dinner in Italy, but the endless glasses of thick, oaky chardonnay that get passed around at American cocktail parties make me want to send out for a bucket of Kentucky Fried chicken to go with them, not those measly mini crab cakes that always seem to circulate. Continue Reading »

The secret ingredient: cappacola.

Recipe:

Farro Strozzapreti with Broccoli Rabe, Hot Cappacola, and Fennel Seeds

Pasta with broccoli rabe and sausage is one of my all-time favorite dishes going back to childhood, a Southern Italian classic that I still indulge in from time to time. But I’ve found a much less bloating alternative to the fatty pork sausage and tons of olive oil I generally like to throw into it. I’ve replaced the sausage with capacolla, a lean but extremely flavorful air-dried pork shoulder that originated in Calabria (in Northern Italy it’s called coppa). With capacolla I can get a rich pork taste without all the grease. And the great thing about this pasta is that it’s in no way a compromise. Capacolla isn’t a substitute for sausage but an elegant product on its own that makes for a pasta loaded with authentic Southern Italian flavor. And I include a little reminder of the original dish by including fennel seeds in the mix, a palate-teasing trick, but a good one. Continue Reading »