Squash Vine Soup For Breakfast and Cooking at Anna Tasca Lanza in Sicily
Plus! Relationship literature, Sicilian fashion from vintage linens, and the Italian Chicken Dance
COOK
I fall hard for any recipe that makes use of a plant at a less popular stage of its life cycle -- sprouts, seeds, flowers, anything before or after the fruit. The Sicilian dish minestra di tenerumi e cucuzze is built around The Little Shop of Horrors squash vines that every summer gardener knows too well. It’s clean, deeply flavorful, resourceful, and it’s something I never would have thought of making on my own, no matter how many summers I have spent watching the squash vines take over my garden.
Walking the Palermo markets (yes, we are still in Sicily as I write), I saw extravagant bunches of squiggly squash vines displayed alongside pale green, baseball bat-shaped, cucuzza squash. The Sicilian squash vine soup, finished with grated cheese and chile flake (with my addition of an egg on top), has been officially anointed the breakfast of the summer in my home.
Cucuzza squash are hard to find domestically, but any delicate, pale summer squash work great. For my take on this classic recipe, upgrade to paid and scroll down below.
LISTEN
In keeping with our Italian adventures, I am sharing the soundtrack to our daily car(sick) rides to the beach. We have been blasting a campy tune by Italian comedian and famously “ugly-sexy” performer, Pippo Franco, "Chì Chì Chì Cò Cò Cò"/"Caaasa." This 1983 precursor to The Chicken Dance is somehow palatable enough for both parents and kids alike.
READ
I never thought I would pull from the “self help” bookshelf, but the genre is increasingly in my ears and on my bedside table as I fumble through early parenthood. It turns out that the Mom I hope to become is the same as the partner, the collaborator, the daughter and friend I want to be too. How convenient.
For extra credit reading, our couples’ therapist turned us on to Terrance Real, a family therapist, speaker, and author who has written four books on family and romantic relationships. I started with, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship, and I have a feeling I will be re-reading it for the rest of my sentient life. It all sounds shockingly simple, yet somehow it’s really hard to embrace vulnerability as an adult!
“There is no place for objective reality in personal relationships. Objective reality is great for getting trains to run on time or for developing an important vaccine, but for ferreting out which point of view is “valid” in an interpersonal transaction, it is a loser.”
-- Terrance Real, Us: Getting Past You and Me to Build a More Loving Relationship
WEAR
Walking through Noto, a few glasses of wine deep, I stumbled upon this tiny boutique called A Mare Noto. The owner was an gregarious Italian woman, whose effortless elegance had me handing over my credit card before I had tried anything on. The line that jumped out to me was called Relax Re-Lux, each one-of-a-kind piece made from up-cycled Southern Italian, hand-embroidered, vintage linens. It reminded my of my wedding dress from the Fall 2012 Dolce & Gabbana collection where all the pieces looked like they had been pulled from a Nonna’s living room upholstery, but casual.
A Vegetal Carnivale: Salad for President x Anna Tasca Lanza
When I received an email last winter from the team at Anna Tasca Lanza cooking school in central Sicily asking if I would be interested in teaching a course this summer, I replied enthusiastically before the message could fully download. From a culinary perspective, Sicily produces so many of my all time favorite ingredients -- pistachios, almonds, capers, currants, pine nuts, anchovies and sardines -- the list goes on. And while I have taught cooking classes before, the idea of a lengthy retreat with time to build upon a concept appealed. I loved the idea of bringing together a group of strangers from all corners of the world to cook, eat, drink, and learn in their time off.
We put together a week long Arty Party with a focus on vegetables. It would be a lesson in food-styling, entertaining, and resourcefulness, working only from what we could forage and source from the Tasca Lanza farm. I wanted to show the students how lush, and generous a veggie-centric family style meal could be, how to adapt Sicilian recipes and ingredients to make them our own, and how to pull together a party in an artist’s studio, preparing food in our kitchen and assembling à la minute.
Kyle Pierce, the culinary director, taught us a handful of simple Sicilian recipes, from panella, a thinly spread chickpea batter that looks like tortilla chips once fried, to caponata and the watermelon pudding.
I love any cuisine that proudly refers to itself as “peasant” food, and that can trace the provenance of its staple ingredients through hundreds of years of immigrant populations and diaspora. I am going to share a handful of recipes from my travels in the weeks to come, since I am coming down off from the retreat by cooking for my family in a vacation home near the Southern town of Siracusa.
Beyond the food, the eleven attendees who flew across the world in a leap of faith far exceeded my expectations. We had two lawyers from Poland and an Italian American Long Islander former Waldorf Astoria chef with a penchant for reggae music. There was the 32 year old from Istanbul taking a sabbatical from her job and traveling solo, and a United Airlines pilot and mother of two on a getaway with her girlfriend, a TV producer she met 20 years prior in their former lives as flight attendants.
We were a motley crew bound by curiosity and a ‘roll up your sleeves’ mentality. I think this is how I would like to travel from now on, so if you know of other similar programs, please, send them my way in the comments.
Thank you to the staff at Anna Tasca Lanza — Francesca, Kyle, and Luiza — for making this week so seamless, and for your infinite patience with my naked children, their insatiable appetites, and their little fingers in the anchovy jars.
Zucchini and Squash Vine Soup
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