Start of Food Wednesday + a good op ed from today...

[lsanderson]

Just How Good Can Italy Get?
By FRANK BRUNI

MY kind of pig heaven looks a lot like Bologna’s fatty heart.

In the shops along and around Via Drapperie, haunches of cured ham dangle far into the distance. Coils of pork sausage spiral high into the sky. Bologna is the capital of Emilia-Romagna, and the region of Emilia-Romagna sees the beauty in swine, as the affiliation of one of its cities with a world-renowned delicacy makes clear. Here lies the plump mother lode of prosciutto di Parma. More

October 24, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Out of Our Gourds
By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
San Marcos, Tex.

THIS time of the year, the windows of America are beginning to be dotted with carefully carved jack-o’-lanterns, but in a week or so, the streets will be splotched with pumpkin guts. Orange gourds will fly from car windows, fall from apartment balconies, career like cannon fire from the arms of pranksters craving the odd satisfaction of that dull thud.

There are, to be sure, more productive ways to deploy a Halloween pumpkin. Post-holiday, composting is a noble option. A pumpkin grower in Wisconsin once turned a 500-pound Atlantic Giant into a boat.

But what we almost certainly won’t do is eat it. First cultivated more than 10,000 years ago in Mexico, cucurbitaceae were mainstays of the Native American diet. If for no other reason than its status as one of America’s oldest cultivated crops, an honest pumpkin deserves our reverence. More

Comments

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

I spent a couple of days in Bologna, and gained several pounds. I ate better than I've eaten anywhere else.

And I was eating the equivalent of diner food, not the really good stuff.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

One of the vendors at the local farmers' market has had the best sugar pumpkins this fall; I've become utterly hooked on them. The first one I brought home I simply cut into wedges and roasted. The second became the most luxurious soup, and the third, a savory pumpkin curry. I want to get more while they last, roast and puree them, and freeze the puree for later. So so good.

[lollardfish.livejournal.com]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmm.