Why Dracula can’t cook

Garlic, like anchovies and raw onions, gets a bad rap. Just because it’s smelly or fishy or salty and stays on your breath doesn’t mean it’s not scrumptious.
Peanut butter eaters shouldn’t throw stones.
Even here in Italy, a land famous for garlic and anchovy eating, these wonderful foods have their detractors. I think the detractors are clueless.
Forget about the proven health benefits of garlic for the heart and the immune system. They are part of why garlic is good, but only a small part. It’s because they are heaven.
My first garlic epiphany is still a fond memory today. My mother had just ordered a plate of baked garlic cloves with our hamburgers and steak sandwiches in a basement bar in what little was left of the Italian-Irish neighborhood in Madison, Wisconsin.
I loved it.
And the bad breath? It’s only bad if you don’t like it (poor unknowing fools) and have not also eaten garlic in the same meal. The important thing is that you eat garlic together, then none of those involved will care.
I still remember a meal I cooked for my friends Erin and Bill when I first came back to Madison from Bologna in 1990. Oven-toasted rosemary potatoes, grilled sirloin with oregano and black pepper, and truffled champignon mushrooms.
Truffled mushrooms are as simple as it magical. Clean, dry and slice the mushrooms and get them ready. It’s going to be fast. Peel and crush a few cloves of garlic and get them ready. Get some good Italian olive oil up to frying temperature. Throw the garlic and turn the heat down low just before the garlic fragments turn crunchy and golden. Then slide the mushrooms and cook until they are soft, grey and have absorbed the garlic and the oil.
I like them straight up as a side dish, but they are great as an appetizer on toasted bread (with or without melted provolone cheese).
What made the dinner with Erin and Bill so memorable? The moment I tossed in the garlic in the yellow tuscan oil (yes, even back then you could find it in Madison) a mushroom cloud of garlic steam burst up and filled the studio apartment. I looked back and saw them both, noses up in the air and huge silly grins like dancing Peanuts characters in It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas.
They say blood is thicker than water, but garlic bonds.
To all my garlic brothers and sisters.
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Cinnamon Fall

Today the words “terra e vento” were printed across the chalkboard in my favorite Saturday afternoon bar, just above the names of the CDs that were playing.
“Terra e vento?” I asked the barista as I studied over the pastries.
Espresso with cinnamon. She replied. A bunch of Germans came through last week and they all ordered it. Terra e vento, (earth and wind) was their translation.
There was just a light sprinkle of cinnamon, barely enough to affect the taste of espresso in my little glass cup, but then taste wasn’t the point. It was aroma. The weather was brisk and windy, so a touch of cinnamon became the aroma that ran ahead of the coffee, awakening both senses before the coffee touched my tongue.
A newspaper later I remembered I still hadn’t had my second Saturday morning breakfast. A pane e cioccolato roll and a cappuccino, with a sprinkle of cinnamon on top.
Again the aroma raced ahead….
Neve e vento? Wind and snow?

Cinnamon summer

Cinnamon is one of those spices that bring back memories. Especially, freshly ground cinnamon. This evening I made a quick stop at the Caffè Polar, the tiny bookshop café, with a free hotspot (still not very common in provincial Italy) here in L’Aquila, the city in the Apennine mountains where I live. My goal was a short cappuccino and a newspaper break, but that change, as I stepped up to the bar to order and caught a whiff of that, oh so familiar spice. The young woman behind the bar was busy grating cinnamon over a small glass cup of espresso.  As she tops it up with panna (dense cream), I ask how she would do espresso and cinnamon cold. It is a warm day, after all. “I would make a

Caffè Shakerato,” is her response. 

Caffè shakerato is the hedonistic Italian version of iced espresso. It consists of two shots of espresso straight from the machine, ice and sugar.  The ingredients are mixed in a cocktail shaker then poured into a flute or cocktail glass. In Milan, and a few other parts of northern Italy, Rebarbaro, (a semisweet bitter), or Biancosarti, (a vanilla-based liquor) are added before shaking.   It is great with a touch of freshly ground cinnamon. 

What I like about the  best spices is how they can turn on your memories that play on all of your senses.   I’ll tell you how cinnamon transformed evening strolls on the Sicilian island of Panarea last summer, in the next installment