Erica De Mane

Does he have too much on his mind?

According to a report on this week’s 60 Minutes, when you don’t get enough sleep your brain starts sending out messages that you should start eating. Lack of sleep makes us hungry. Evidently sleep deprivation causes a drop in our levels of leptin, the hormone that tells our brains we are full. No wonder Americans have weight problems. Everyone is so tense and overworked that by the time we get into bed our minds are racing, our jaws are clenched, and we lie there with every conceivable morbid thought about personal destruction spinning in our brains. So to all you fellow insomniacs out there, I’m passing along my remedy for sleeplessness. It doesn’t always work, but it does sometimes.

I begin by thinking about something my grandfather once said to me when I was a miserable, brooding teenager. He said, “Tell me where it’s written you’re supposed to be happy.” Now, this is a classic Italian immigrant concept, foreign to most Americans’ thinking. But if I ponder it while I’m tossing and turning and thinking of everything I’m jealous of and all the frustration and lack I feel in my little life, I notice an almost immediate release. I get comfort from his words, the pressure lifts, and I do often then relax and fall asleep. And if sleeping will help me stay thin, that advice from my ornery but contented Italian grandfather should serve me very well.

Infuse your food with big flavor, and you’ll eat less.

Recipe:

Shellfish cacciucco with guanciale and farro.

One thing I love about Italian cooking is its melding of bold and gentle flavors-ricotta crostini with a strip of salty anchovy; braised chicken sharpened with strong lemon; pork chops with vinegar peppers. I keep such alluring juxtapositions in mind as I go about creating healthy, low-calorie Italian cooking. Capers, anchovies, pancetta and guanciale, prosciutto, orange zest, hot peppers, vinegar, sharp cheeses are all amazing flavors, and I’ve discovered that they’re crucial in controlling my appetite. It seems that satisfying my body with something intense and perfectly prepared is the best way to feel full fast. And faster than I’d have imagined it’s gotten my mind off of big bowls of fettuccine Alfredo or creamy rich baked ziti, the kind of mild, bloating foods that I always used to put mindlessly down my throat. Continue Reading »

Silvana Mangano, Giada DeLaurentiis’s gorgeous Nonna, at her swimsuit best.

Do we have to start thinking about this already? Well, if you want to look svelte and lovely on the beach or on your roof, it might not be a bad idea. I know you’ve all been doing your Lenten best in the self-sacrifice department, but don’t give up just because Easter and ricotta cheesecake are around the corner. Stay tuned to Skinny Guinea for more glorious, low-carb, no compromise Italian recipes and illuminating diet tips to get you ready. I’ll have you slithering into that Prada swimsuit in no time.

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 »