Month: February 2022

When I was a child, probably no more than seven or eight years old, my mother and I went to an unassuming Mexican restaurant on a stretch of local highway near our house in rural Rhode Island. There was nothing remarkable about this restaurant, and I don’t recall why we were there, but I have a searing memory of the complimentary bowl of salsa that was placed before us alongside a plastic, wax paper–lined basket of corn tortilla chips.  The first bite was bracing—cold, salty, tart, crunchy—and then came a tingling, burning sensation I had never felt before. Slowly, it crept over my tongue and danced onto my lips; with every subsequent bite, the sting of the salsa became more and more intense, until I was panting like an overheated dog in summ...

In the spring of 2020, I found myself, like so many others in the hospitality industry, unceremoniously unemployed when the restaurant I was running was forced to close because of the pandemic. Suddenly, without structure and the constant demands of running a kitchen, I was thrust into a life of leisure (amid a deadly pandemic), which came with a healthy dose of emotional ups and downs. Fear, sadness, and anger mingled in the dark corners of my mind with profound—and guilt-stricken—waves of relief. For the first time in my adult life, I had no demands put on my time and no pressures to produce a quantifiable body of work (I was fortunate to receive unemployment and PUA payments during this time, while many others were not). The trade-off, howev...

A Classic Roman Dish - Bucatini all'Amatriciana Like many of you, Meg and I watched the Stanley Tucci special on CNN called Searching for Italy. In the Rome episode, he has lunch at Armando Al Pantheon to enjoy their famous rigatoni all'amatriciana, one of Rome's famous pastas. I made it a little different and call it bucatini all'Amatriciana. Of course I had to run out and buy the ingredients so we could make it at home. Not a lot of ingredients and very simple to prepare and absolutely delicious. Let's look at some of the ingredients. Bucatini Bucatini is a pasta that looks a lot like spaghetti but it is thicker and has a whole running down through the strand. My kids like to say it looks like a straw made out of pasta.  If you lived in Naples, Italy, you would call...

A Classic Roman Dish - Bucatini all'Amatriciana Like many of you, Meg and I watched the Stanley Tucci special on CNN called Searching for Italy. In the Rome episode, he has lunch at Armando Al Pantheon to enjoy their famous rigatoni all'amatriciana, one of Rome's famous pastas. I made it a little different and call it bucatini all'Amatriciana. Of course I had to run out and buy the ingredients so we could make it at home. Not a lot of ingredients and very simple to prepare and absolutely delicious. Let's look at some of the ingredients. Bucatini Bucatini is a pasta that looks a lot like spaghetti but it is thicker and has a whole running down through the strand. My kids like to say it looks like a straw made out of pasta.  If you lived in Naples, Italy, you would call...

A Classic Roman Dish - Bucatini all'Amatriciana Like many of you, Meg and I watched the Stanley Tucci special on CNN called Searching for Italy. In the Rome episode, he has lunch at Armando Al Pantheon to enjoy their famous rigatoni all'amatriciana, one of Rome's famous pastas. I made it a little different and call it bucatini all'Amatriciana. Of course I had to run out and buy the ingredients so we could make it at home. Not a lot of ingredients and very simple to prepare and absolutely delicious. Let's look at some of the ingredients. Bucatini Bucatini is a pasta that looks a lot like spaghetti but it is thicker and has a whole running down through the strand. My kids like to say it looks like a straw made out of pasta.  If you lived in Naples, Italy, you would call...