Last weekend Director of Good Food Laryl Garcia invited me to sail with her club up to Malibu from Marina del Rey. I’d been watching her occasional posts of being on the ocean and was curious if it would be something I would enjoy. I did not. I guess we never know how we’ll react to bobbing around on the water and despite taking Bonine and tucking a scopolamine patch behind my ear I was miserable. It was strange to be in a place as beautiful as the Pacific Ocean, recognize the beauty and still want to be hunched up in a ball. I guess I’ll confine my boating to the more placid Mediterranean. Nevertheless I will remember watching surfers from behind the waves, and the joy of seeing flocks of baby seagulls bobbing on the water. Have you ever seen one? Here’s a video of us heading out of the Marina into the open ocean before I wanted to die.

Despite my discomfort I managed to dip in and out of conversations with the sailors on the boat. I mentioned that I would be spending the next day canning tomatoes and was besieged with questions: Do people still do that? Why on earth would you do that? Isn’t is dangerous? How much do you can? etc. So I thought I’d tell you why.

Key to our process is this incredibly stalwart tomato mill that my dear friend Delilah Snell of Alta Baja in Santa Ana gifted me one year for my birthday.

Some of you have probably seen instagram posts of my yearly tomato canning extravaganza with two of my friends, Kazi Pitelka and Royce Burke. We usually can between 300-400 pounds which yields enough for the three of us for a year. This year we decided not to punish ourselves due to the heat so we only bought about 200 pounds of tomatoes. 150 lbs of Benevento tomatoes from Weiser Family Farms and 50 lbs of San Marzanos from Beylik Family Farms. We might do another session before all the tomatoes are gone from the markets.

The gift of the tomato mill jump started this yearly tomato tradition. It came from a company that specializes in electric tomato mills. Supposedly this one has a capacity of 800 pounds an hour but we’ve thankfully never done that much. They no longer make this model which has a convenient stand built in.

You’ll notice that we are milling raw tomatoes. In most of the Italian nonna videos the tomatoes are boiled. That’s because they are primarily making passata or simple pureed tomatoes which they will use for all manner of cooking including sauces. We cook the tomatoes up into sauce, then can that sauce. We make two types: a simple pomodoro sauce with just evo, tomato puree, garlic and salt, and puttanesca with evo, tomato puree, Kalamata olives, capers, anchovies or fish sauce, chile flakes, garlic and salt. Sometimes we do an additional batch of passata where we boil the tomatoes before milling. If you don’t cook the tomatoes either before or after milling the water will separate from the pulp in the finished product. Cooking denatures two pectin enzymes that prevents that and helps yield a thicker sauce.

The site of this Tomatopalooza has always been on two burner camp stoves in the breezeway of Kazi’s house in Altadena, seemingly always on the hottest day of the year. While my friends, thankfully, did not lose their house in the fires, four houses across the street are gone. They were just recently able to move back in after a double detoxification of the house and gardens.

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In the above video Kazi is carefully placing the jarred sauce in the water bath canner. This is what allows the jars of sauce to be shelf stable.

We missed two seasons of tomato canning. Given that our tradition only started relatively recently and with this stellar combination of people since 2019 it really struck me how much I missed having those home canned jars of sauce to use and bring to friends in lieu of flowers or wine. Not to mention the ebullient camaraderie of the day. We spend about eight hours prepping jars and washing tomatoes, running the fruit through the mill, cooking up gallons of sauce and finally water bath canning and labeling it all. We are constantly tasting the sauce, listening to each other’s opinions and adjusting. It’s hard work but completely gratifying and laughter buoys us along.

I’m a reader first and always so the intellectual satisfaction of exploring the expansive world of food has become innate. But it’s been fourteen years since I closed my restaurant which means that long since I’ve had daily hands on contact with food in large quantities. There are many different types of cooks but I’ve always referred to myself as a ‘witchy cook”. While my short order cooking skills were honed over years of making countless pans of a la minute pasta sauces, I so love stirring cauldrons of sauce, making vats of soups and braises. Tomatopalooza reconnects me to that joy of large scale hands-on work.

I try really hard not to start using the precious jars of sauce until tomato season has ended but I have to say that the sauce this year is exceptional so I might break that rule.

Reading and Watching

I’ve been racing through books. I continue to work through Michael Pollan’s book about consciousness, A World Appears and in between have gone through this eclectic list in the past several weeks. The Fire Agent by David Baerwald, based on his grandfather, a German Jewish secret agent is caught between two world wars in Germany and Japan. I can’t stop thinking about it. Homebound by Portia Elan, a 1980s video game whose unfinished story reverberates hundreds of years into the future. The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour argues that Italy’s enduring strength lies in its distinct regions, not the nation created by unification. David Sedaris’ latest. The Land and Its People. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz, a little sci-fi novel about abandoned robots who open a hand-pulled noodle shop in postwar San Francisco. Now I’m in Dave Eggers world with Contrapposto his latest novel which follows two friends, artists and sometimes lovers through sixty-five years of life and art.

The more anxious the world makes me the more I watch TV. I need to be released from the tyranny of crime/mystery shows. My absolute fave current watch is Furious on Hulu. Here are just a few. I don’t want to overwhelm you.

Britbox: After the Flood, Silent Witness (the 27th season), The Hardacres (prefer the 2024 version to the newest), watching both Inspector Lynley series though I prefer the older one. I might have to start re-watching Vera.

Prime Video: The Bastards of Pizzofalcone (Italy) started slow but now I love all the characters and I’m done. I am praying for another season. Reacher, Midnight Taxi (Japan), Hirayasumi (Japan), Tokyo Salad Bowl (Japan).

A dog loves music. LOVES

A cat and mouse game with an unusual ending.

Carlo Petrini, activist, intellectual, writer and one of the founders of Slow Food changed my life. But to explain that I have to go back.

In 1984 when I opened Angeli Caffè I had been cooking simple Italian food for more than a decade and had co-written my first cookbook. It was food I learned to make from an assortment of women I encountered on my nearly yearly pilgrimages to the country that had taken me hostage emotionally since I was seventeen. I gravitated to the grandmas of families who ran old fashioned pensione (B&Bs before air came into the picture). Or women I met who were cooking in osterie or trattorie that had just a few seats.

I was that weird food nerd besotted with a food culture that was still tied to the land. I had no grandmothers and craved connection and didn’t find it in my LA of the time. Curiosity and a need to learn overrode my infantile Italian and extreme shyness. So for example, if I heard that a portiera (the building watchdog who accepted mail and packages and in general was in everyone’s business) in a building where a friend was living made incredible potato ravioli with a ragù that had to be tasted to be believed I would introduce myself to her and ask to learn. At that time it was such an odd request that the women were usually charmed and agreed. I started hunting for regional cookbooks in Italian that focused on home cooking. I parsed the pages of Pelligrino Artusi’s La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangier Bene aka Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well as if it were the Talmud. All this is to say that before Angeli was even an idea, I already was on my way to understanding that good food’s underpinning started in the soil with farmers who tended the land well and eaters who respected that and understood. And all of it was supported by tradition and culture.

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I was an anomaly who didn’t have anyone to talk to about these ideas percolating in my head when I would return home. Of course there was M.F.K. Fisher and Ludwig Bemelmans and other literary writers who fed me. But my nearest and dearest thought I was odd. Eventually I opened Angeli and started meeting people who shared my passion for making food, and I found a few I could talk to about subjects beyond what was on the plate. I remember a conversation with a young Ruth Reichl that was startling in confirming my sense that food could be an intellectual pursuit as well as a culinary one.

Then in 1988 on a trip to Milan to visit a friend I saw a publication in a kiosk called La Gola. The cover fascinated me. What was this magazine named “The Throat?” The issue I bought was the sixteenth. By this time I had graduated from UCLA with a degree in Italian Literature and Film, so I could read the Italian even though it was slow going. The magazine was part of Arcigola, a non-profit food and wine association co-founded by Carlo Petrini who a year later in 1989 would found Slow Food in opposition to the giant fast food juggernaut MacDonald’s opening in Rome at the foot of the Spanish Steps. I met him at the second Salone del Gusto in Turin in the late 1990s. My pal Elizabeth Minchilli and I went together and almost literally danced through the aisles. We had countless bites of food that were traceable to the people in front of us. The deliciousness and commitment of the producers was moving and overwhelming. We ate revelatory butter with our fingers back in the hotel room. It’s hard to explain the impact those giant food halls had on us. There were hundreds of individual artisan producers working to maintain a culturally based food tradition showing their products. There were workshops on every subject imaginable led by smart people who were clearly thrilled to have an engaged audience. It was all done with a joyous curiosity underpinned with a sense of urgency that it would all be lost. I was a slightly burnt out chef-restauranteur at that point. I was gobsmacked and wanted in.

The English speaking face of the organization at that point was a young Patrick Martins, founder of Heritage Radio Network, “the world’s largest and most diverse collection of food and drink podcasts”. We talked and talked and talked and through Patrick I met Carlo. I’m not a person vulnerable to cults, but listening to Petrini’s passionate intelligence and beautifully articulated activism about the food system was a lightning bolt. I became involved and started the first chapter (then called convivia) of Slow Food in Los Angeles which I ran for many years. I met Michael Dimock and became involved with the statewide initiative Roots of Change which is still doing the work to create and support policy work for food system change, and I was one of the initial members of the Los Angeles Food Policy Council. It was clear to me that no change in food system would happen without policy being developed. I met many of my now closest friends during that time though events we did. I found a place of belonging and continuing education that is directly linked to the work the Good Food team has been doing for the past twenty eight years on KCRW.

Side note: At some point Carlo came to California and we convinced him to come to LA where we put together an extraordinary meal with farmers on the grounds of a friends home in Sierra Madre. It was the ultimate SoCal foothill setting. He was completely charmed by the environment filled with agaves, cacti and succulents of all kinds, but most of all for the iconic SoCal motel we found for him. The rooms around a pool, the palm trees, the surfboards as decor. Every time we met for the next few decades he talked about that motel.

Digestibles

A.I. Is a Public Resource. You Should Own Half of It. NYT op-ed by Bernie Sanders

When you turn to the NYT Sunday Styles section and see one of your extraordinary talented friends. Joana Avillez grew up in the historic waterfront district of Lower Manhattan. She was drawn to Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor which captured the vibrant and rough neighborhood of her memory. She took six years to illustrate a new edition of Joseph Mitchell’s “The Bottom of the Harbor.”

Have We Reached Peak Pop-Up? Jamie Feldmar explores the “current moment of restaurant-on-restaurant pop-up saturation—is a relatively recent phenomenon,” speaking with chefs and restauranteurs about what’s involved and why they do it. As a diner it’s enlightening to read the BTS of it all.

It’s still early, too early in the day to know if I’m actually hungry but I can’t stop thinking about the remainders of the Caprino al Pumate aka Goat Cheese with Sun-Dried Tomatoes, I made for lunch yesterday and the loaf of good bread from Gjusta one of my pals brought with her. She always brings bread and then makes a pre-meal of it dipped into copious amounts of very good extra virgin olive oil. I love that she takes care of herself, but leaves the remaining partial loaf behind.

So even though I just finished my mug of morning coffee and still have that taste of milky bitterness in my mouth I go to the fridge and root around for the small container with the two rounds of fresh goat cheese, now slightly crushed, sitting adjacent to golden cloves of caramelized garlic, a couple of random capers and leathery in a good way slivers of sun-dried tomato. There was still enough aromatic dried Greek oregano stuck to the cheese and floating in the slightly coagulated olive oil to call to me. This was one of the most popular appetizers at Angeli. We used the same combo to top pizzas and occasionally tossed into pasta.

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Despite serving the same basic menu for 27 years, once I closed Angeli it’s like I ran from the memory (and attendant grief) of what I loved most about it. Like this simple dish. Every time I remember, it makes me and my friends so happy. You have the creamy, slightly goaty base with just enough acidic bite to benefit from the chewy sweetness of the mellow dried tomato (I always buy the kind in oil) and the salty-piquant capers. Please remember that they are floral salt bombs and not peas. Judicious amounts always. Here’s my favorite brand. Remember to wash off the salt. Dried high quality Mediterranean oregano, especially the kind that come packaged as a bunch in a bag, feels like a deeply remembered aroma and brings the whole together. Finish it off with generous spoonfuls of the oil the garlic simmered in.

Eat it as a welcome starter, atop pizza, or tossed into hot spaghetti.

You really don’t need a recipe. I mean, it’s just sliced cheese with condiments but if you need something to lean on here it is. But when it’s not summer or when I’m lazy I just buy the sun dried tomatoes. Don’t feel that you have to make them.

Entertaining Myself

When the world is burning as hard as it is now I find it very difficult to focus on deep reading. Even complicated thrillers are too much. So I turn to scrolling. Too much time on Instagram yielded this image of our planet from a perspective I’d never seen before. Who knew our Pacific Ocean was bigger than all the land mass on earth put together? And a reminder of how thin our atmosphere is.

Fran Lebovitz drops some extreme sanity.

The cat documentary I still have to watch.

I’ve been traveling to Italy almost yearly since my first trip when I was seventeen and my excitement never diminishes. Each vista, alleyway or farm is another opportunity to enter into a conversation with people eager to share their culture. Of course, I’m a food focused person leading a food focused life so it’s no surprise that the tours I lead for Via Rosa, my longtime friend, Elizabeth Minchilli’s tour company are built around the culture of cuisine with enough architecture and history to give us context.

In March 2027, I’ll be leading The Culture of Food in Sicily Tour a journey focused on the food culture of Western Sicily—a part of the island where history isn’t just something you read about, it’s something you taste. Sicilian cuisine is a vivid layering of Mediterranean ingredients, shaped by Arab, Norman, Spanish, and Italian influences. Sweet meets savory and every dish carries the imprint of the island’s past.

We’ll be based in Palermo, a city that rewards curiosity at every turn. One minute you’re standing in front of a baroque façade, the next you’re elbow-to-elbow at a market stall, eating something fried, fragrant, and utterly irresistible. It’s deeply alive and beautiful.

From there, we’ll move between city and countryside—visiting farms, bakeries, and cheese makers, meeting the people who carry these traditions forward. There will be hands-on cooking, leisurely meals, conversations that stretch and meander, and moments that always seem to happen on these trips—the ones you couldn’t plan, but remember forever.

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Yes, we’ll chase the perfect cannolo. But what I’m most excited about is everything around it: the ricotta still warm from the morning’s production, the baker who fills the shell to order, the quiet pride behind something that looks simple but isn’t.

There will be time to wander on your own—to get lost in Palermo’s streets, to sit with a coffee, dine with new friends. These trips aren’t about checking boxes. They’re about immersion, discovery, and pleasure.

If Sicily has been calling to you—even quietly—this might be the moment to answer.
Here are more details and information on how to sign up.

The text thread starts up again between my two besties and me. It’s Sunday morning. We’re hungry. Where should we go? Brunch seems impossibly busy everywhere and we never think ahead to reserve, but really do we want to go where we need reservations for breakfast? One lives in Venice, the other in Los Feliz and I’m in the middle. It’s impossible to explain to a non Angeleno the role that traffic and parking play in any decision to leave the house. (Last week I met a friend for lunch. It took me 10 minutes to drive to the restaurant and 15 minutes to find parking).

On Saturday I picked up a friend who was back in town for a visit from her Costa Rica home. We drove from mid-Wilshire to Tomatomania in Encino then to Altadena to bring tomatoes to the best gardener I know who has a broken ankle. Catching up during car rides is a precious thing here. But now part of me never wants to leave again to go anywhere.

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Back to the text thread where we are still negotiating where to go for breakfast, or lunch, as the minutes tick by. We go through options as varied as coffee in Venice to fried chicken in K-town followed by KBBQ (but one of us doesn’t eat meat). Eventually I say “Although I could be convinced of something else. Or nothing. The indolence of Sunday is appealing”. Spellcheck changes appealing to appalling and for a minute I feel like this oft negotiation is that. Then one of us expresses that really, we need to live in the same neighborhood. Another oft expressed sentiment. I yearn for village life and after many, many, many decades living here still haven’t found it. I wish I loved more of the restaurants in my neighborhood I can walk to. I wish there was one more good bakery option. (thank you Roji!) There isn’t. Well there’s Republique which is phenomenal but sometimes it’s just too much work. Privilege, I know. I could continue down this vague philosophical thread about the particular frustration of meeting good friends in LA for a casual hang, but instead I’ll tell you about lunch.

There is too much reflection in the video above but I wanted to communicate the real life menu of options on offer at Seed Bakery in Pasadena.

Part of the traffic marathon last Saturday included a stop at Seed Bakery in Pasadena to pick up lunch. It’s a perfect place. I love that their covid reorganization of how they sell and how customers pick up was so successful for them that they never reopened the inside space to customers. Everyone stares at the pastries on display at eye level through the large front window and points. Then adds on a few of the creative sandwiches on offer over a card table conversation at an open door. We got the veggie quiche, an eggplant sandwich, a cauliflower one, another with a thick spinach-egg frittata on brioche and a turkey sammie. For sweets there was a passion fruit custard danish, a honking slice of an orange berry pound cake affair and something else I can’t remember. My laid up friend asked that I get her a jalapeno-cheddar pretzel roll and I bought a sourdough buckwheat loaf to take home. It is very very good. While my Costa Rica friend and I waited for our order we sipped iced lattes and continued to catch up. The banal is often precious. I can’t remember the last time I had an iced latte. And maybe the most efficient LA way to casually hang with friends is in the car.

Every year around February my tomato dreams begin. You never know if it will be a great or mediocre year but the yearly ritual holds so much hope. I do a clean out of all the pots from the previous year, saving some of the soil. (I only grow in pots because all my available in-ground areas are too shady for tomatoes). When you are planting four or five 15 gallon containers it’s a lot of soil. But this year I couldn’t wait to get my Tomatomania fix so I threw a couple of plants in their tidy homes in advance of the rains. But those were just regular varieties on offer at my local hardware/garden shop. I knew that a few weeks later I could go to a Tomatomania event and take my time to browse the seemingly unlimited tomato varieties to fill in my tomato dreams for the summer. That time is now. If you’re a home gardener, and even if you’re not, think about planting something, somewhere if possible. (Listen to my interview here with Kate Brown whose book Tiny Gardens Everywhere is so inspiring). Go to the 11 minute mark.

I reached out to Tomatomania co-founder Scott Daigre with some questions.

What was the first year you did Tomatomania?
Tomatomania was created by Gary Jones at Hortus, Pasadena, early in the 1990s. I was fortunate to work with Gary and helped build the event till it became the biggest weekend of the nursery’s year. When the nursery had to close in 2000 I picked up the event and took it on the road. 2001 was the first year I produced an event outside the original site.

Why? What was the impetus? How many varieties were available that first year? Now?
Our audience of good gardeners didn’t want the event to go away and neither did we! We found a host, Tapia Brothers Farm Stand, who was willing to foster us. We celebrated 25 years at that flagship location last year and will host this year’s event there March 20-22. In our first year we showcased over 100 varieties. Today our largest events boast 250 plus different tomato varieties.

How many growers do you work with now? How far in advance do they need to get seed to begin?
I work with four different growers now. These pros grow a list I develop and I devise a schedule for delivery to our various events. We work in greenhouses starting in early December for our first events. It generally takes us 11 weeks to grow and “size up” a one gallon plant and 8 weeks for a standard 4” plant.

How do you decide which varieties will be planted in any given year?

We’re constantly looking everywhere for new tomato varieties. Social media and other media of all kinds point up new opportunities all over the world. There are huge companies and small backyard hybridizers everywhere creating new varieties. Our old favorites are always considered for the spring list and we use our summer test gardens and farms, (there are three of those currently), to trial new varieties that intrigue us. In truth, however, a good number of varieties available at our events are new-to-us varieties that we will have in trials the following summer. That way our Tomatomania family can trial varieties right along with us.

What three/or more varieties are you most excited about this year?
Cowboy, a huge rust-colored beefsteak from a hybridizer in British Columbia,
Solar Vortex, a multicolored flat beefsteak from a long-time friend and hybridizer in Northern California. Scarlet Sunrise, a new red/yellow hybrid cherry introduction from the well respected Hort and breeding team at Rutgers University. It’s a new “Jersey” tomato.

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Are there particular types that are the most popular? Color? Shape? Size? Container?
Beefsteaks always amaze and temp our audience but I think it’s the cherry tomatoes that tend to be most universally loved and grown. They can be the easiest to have success with so they have wide appeal. The “black” tomatoes, particularly the black varieties from Russia, are the lovely characters that truly started the Tomatomania heirloom hysteria many years ago. They are still in high demand. Dwarf tomatoes are perhaps the newest tomato craze. Sturdy, compact and fruitful, the majority of those being introduced today are heirloom indeterminate plants, so very different from the dwarf plants we’ve grown for years. They can be tiny one-foot-tall wonders but some will grow to five feet. They are still sturdier though and require less staking. They offer the whole rainbow of colors, stripes and fruit sizes.

How many varieties does the average tomatomaniac buy to take home?
While some are happy with or limited to growing a couple plants in pots on a balcony we also champion home tomato farmers who grow a hundred or more varieties. I think the average tomatomaniac grows 8-10 plants.

The footprint of Tomatomania has grown. How many venues are participating this year?
This year will see 17 events in our lineup. Most of our events are in Southern California but there are two sites in Denver and one in the Seattle area (Issaquah) this season.

Looking back, what has been most surprising about the endeavor for you?
So many things have surprised me about this journey. The loyalty of our audience, the devoted staff “family” that returns to support me and the event each season, our generous hosts, the longevity and growth of the home gardening movement and the sincere enthusiasm expressed by people who engage in the simple act of planting a tomato all amaze me each year. Someone told me twenty years ago that heirlooms were “over”. Glad I didn’t pay attention to that.

Above all though I think I’m moved and excited by the true gratitude that we see and feel each season. Our customers and friends are so effusive and constantly expressing their thanks for all the work we do and this adventure we provide. And it IS an adventure. We’re happy they see it that way. Our friends walk into our events and we often hear “This is my favorite day of the year”.

They are why we do this. We’re grateful.

I kind of pride myself on not ordering delivery very often. It’s lazy and expensive, not just for us the eaters but for the restaurants too. Sometimes it costs a restaurant more in fees than they are making in profit on a particular order. But I’m not pure. Who amongst us is? So on one of the cold, rainy days a couple weeks ago all I wanted was two days worth of Chinese soups. I was dreaming of sitting on my couch sipping from a plastic container of won ton or hot and sour soup.

As it happens I have a decent Chinese place nearby. It’s probably eight minutes or less from my couch to their parking lot. And yet, this one afternoon I chose to place an order on Uber Eats as I basked in the faux warmth of a YouTube hearth. It was the height of laziness. But that sense of warm anticipation and permission to chill out was wiped away the second I saw that my order was being delivered by robot. I was unfamiliar with the part of the app that allows you to decline this option so I was locked in. What a strangely emotional experience. I knew the route it had to take and was dubious.

First, the order was delayed, once, twice, three times before it was picked up. Then once the robot started moving towards me the anxiety and worry set in. I felt like I was watching my teenage child try to navigate obstacles on the route. To get from the restaurant to my place there were two very large thoroughfares with harrowing intersections to cross, not to mention the obstacle of several stop lights with no one to press the crossing buttons. Streets and sidewalks in my neighborhood like many in LA are riddled with pot holes and tree roots that lift up portions of the sidewalk. In other words, it’s a minefield for a robot with limited capabilities and a human trouble shooter not close by. For insight to the humans who tend to the robots’ needs here’s a recent story.

The twenty minute delivery time expanded by five minute increments until it was clear that by the time the robot arrived it would be at least an hour late. I was fine with that. The tension I felt regarding the non-human’s experience getting here increased. I worried about it being out in the dark and the increasing rain. Nuts, right? Finally I saw that it had crossed the last large street and was headed down the long block to me. I went outside to see it in the distance trundling towards me.

A friend shared a story that the one time a robot delivered to her it arrived with a compromised delivery compartment sullied with debris from a previous order. When the oddly named Ghazal (pronounced guzzle) stopped in front of me, I unlocked the compartment and was pleased to see it was spotless. My order hadn’t fallen over. The soup was still contained. I always tip generously when I order delivery and I do it when I place my order not afterward. So Ghazal got a nice bonus that was never refunded to me. I hope the money ended up with its human wrangler but I doubt it.

As to that name. A Ghazal is an Arabic verse form “dealing with loss and romantic love” according to Poetry Foundation. This experience was neither. Well maybe a sense of loss of human connection in even its fleeting delivery form. This was more a loss of my own humanity in that I allowed myself to worry about and empathize with a robot.

I’ve been mulling over the conundrum of the cottage cheese container.

I eat a lot of cottage cheese. Not because I’m a protein hound but because I grew up with it and I like it. I go through at least one container a week. That is a lot of empty plastic containers. I tend to repurpose them to store leftover food. And yes, I’m aware of all the reasons I shouldn’t do this. On any given day I might open the fridge door and be greeted by 3 or 4 containers of identical size. Good and Kalona are my current faves. Since I can’t see through them, I’m constantly lifting the lids to see what’s inside. It’s like my own personal whacked out advent calendar. Sometimes I hit the jackpot, sometimes I find a collection of distateful molds and occasionally I’m surprised by actual cottage cheese. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I apologize if my chaos offends you. This morning I was delighted to find a cup of rapini braised in olive oil with garlic and Calabrian chile pepper in perfect condition that I had completely forgotten about. I broke a couple eggs into the container, added a hefty tablespoon of cottage cheese (why not?), beat it all up and made a scramble. My version of serendipity. A delicious and nutritious breakfast not beautiful enough for a photograph.

This is where I could give you a recipe for what to do with the cottage cheese in your fridge but don’t we all have our own ways? I eat it on toast with an avocado and chile crisp. I stir it into oatmeal and top with chile crisp. I nearly always add it to pancake batter. Have you ever added a couple tablespoons to your tuna salad mixture? It’s very good, the fresh curds of dairy kind of lighten and sweeten the tuna. And of course on occasion I’ll pretend it’s ricotta and add it to pasta with tomato sauce for a lazy lasagna-ish bowl for dinner.

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I started writing a Good Food Substack several weeks ago and I’m excited to share it with you. It’s where I put down what I’m thinking about, often related to the show segments that week, but also other subjects that are engaging me. If you subscribe you will receive two each week from me plus a monthly market report from Good Food Supervising Producer Gillian Ferguson. Her most recent post centers on a visit to a Paris farmers market with David Lebovitz. On Tuesdays you’ll get a sum up of my weekly conversation with Madeleine Brand on Press Play with relevant recipe or restaurant links. Press Play is the one opportunity I get to sit on the other side of the mic and answer the questions instead of ask them. Each week we chat about some kind of food related subject. It could be a particular food or a roundup of some sort. Recent posts: a roundup of Thanksgiving to-go options in Los Angeles, everything you need to know about making and eating sticky toffee pudding and foccacia and the seasonality of walnuts and what to make with them beyond using them in baking. Fruitcake is up next (with my personal recipe for a California Fruitcake made with only apricots, walnuts and dates).

On Fridays you get a preview link to that week’s show plus some thoughts on what is engaging me. Previous newsletters have been: my essay from an evening of readings on “bitter,” what we lose when we use delivery apps and a weekend bean extravaganza. Take a look and subscribe. It’s free!

I’ve always loved Thanksgiving. Maybe because it was my mom’s favorite holiday and one we celebrated with abandon each year. It was always me, my mom, my Aunt Ruth and Uncle Al, cousins Vicki and Bobbi. They lived in a Schindler house overlooking Silver Lake, so when we had the meal there it was extra special. The light! The sea foam blue-green of the walls bouncing off the Russell Wright plates and serving dishes.

The day before the meal, came the prep. We always had chestnut stuffing (yes, stuffed into the bird - oh the horrors!) so the roasting and peeling of chestnuts was the continuous background to all other activity of the day. My mom was from Philadelphia and my uncle from Patterson, New Jersey, places where cold weather announced itself with the scent of chestnuts cooked on outdoor braziers and sold to chilled pedestrians in newspaper cones. It was a fundamental sign of fall for them. Ergo chestnut stuffing. For a few weeks before prep day mom haunted various grocery stores looking for the imported Italian chestnuts that would irregularly appear before Thanksgiving. Some years the moldy ones outnumbered the perfect specimens. We had to build in a quantity that including the amount we ate during the arduous process of roasting and peeling them.

I don’t know if you’ve ever prepared chestnuts, but it is a slog. To avoid the drama of exploding chestnuts they have to be stabbed with a knife to let the steam emerge. Each year there would be great discussion aka fights about which method we should use. Should we pierce them on the flat or rounded side? High or low oven? And then there was the year no one ever referred to again when someone thought we should boil them. What a mess! There was threat of injury as the slippery devils might easily slide away so that the poised paring knife could impale a finger. My Uncle Al was an artist, a painter, who also loved creating constructions and collages of all kinds. After too many years of chestnut slippage he built a contraption that could hold a single nut. The women of the family thought it was too laborious to use and so continued to pierce the chestnuts free form. This stabbing was a grown-up activity akin to opening an oyster so I was relegated to coaxing the meat out of the shell once they were roasted, also a tedious job. Sometime the furry skin between the shell and the nut would easily slip off, other times it stuck with ferocious tenacity which meant having to pare it off without wasting chestnut meat. There was much supervision and commentary.

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As for the bread part of the stuffing it had to be Pepperidge Farm. Back then there was only one kind. My mom’s brand loyalty in this case traversed decades. When I started doing Thanksgiving at Angeli and made bread stuffing from scratch using Diamond Bakery’s lovely huge loaves of challah (I can’t believe they’re closed) she scowled. For years she scowled. Finally I started making one bag’s worth of Pepperidge Farm. The scowling stopped.

At the cousins the meal always started off with a tray of celery sticks, carrots and black olives which I would immediately stick on my fingers then prance about the living room. I hope you have occasion to prance this year.

I may lead the occasional Italy food tour for my longtime friend, Elizabeth Minchilli’s Via Rosa, but that doesn’t keep me from watching her videos with intense fomo. I’ve particularly been envious of her group jaunts to different parts of Sicily. And now I get to go! Are you coming along? The Culture of Food in Sicily Tour is May 10-16. Sicily has distinctly complex and layered culinary cultures. Every visit to the island reveals more of its history and the creative resilience of the people. For this exploration we’ll be focusing on the culinary history and traditions of Western Sicily.

We’ll be centered in the vibrant city of Palermo, staying at one of the city’s finest hotels (of course)! We’ll step out for city and countryside explorations, focusing on farms, cheese makers, hands-on cooking experiences and more. With us there is always more. But we know you’ll want to explore on your own or simply relax and there’s time for that too.

While I’m eagerly awaiting my first bite of a real Sicilian cannolo I mostly can’t wait to meet the artisans and farmers who keep this culture alive. I could continue to tantalize you but why not simply click through to the brochure for more information and details on how to sign up.

I had the great fortune to head to Parma in 2023 to lead a tour for my friend Elizabeth Minchilli of Via Rosa and I fell in love with the town. So much so that I looked at a couple of apartments there. It’s an elegant place and is the perfect size to get a good overview in a week. I’m grateful to be going back this fall. The region of Emilia Romagna has the greatest number of DOP and IGP (recognized and protected foods) in Italy. It’s also the region that developed and is famous for the most familiar Italian foods, think everything made with pasta sfoglia or pasta sheets i.e. lasagne, ravioli, tortellini, tagliatelle etc. Learning to make sfoglia has to be one of my favorite cooking classes to both teach and take. We’ll do that and so much more.

Parma sits at the center of some of the greatest culinary traditions in Italy. In addition to the sunny egg-based pastas, Parmigiano Reggiano, Prosciutto, Culatello and Balsamico are all made in the area, so eating our way through this delicious food culture is a focus of our travels. I experienced one of the best meals I’ve ever had in Italy on my last trip and I’m eager to eat again at the famed historic trattoria on the outskirts of Parma where we’ll lunch after our morning adventures one day. I wanted to have two stomachs last time to enjoy it all!

Photo courtesy of Via Rosa

We’re in Italy with its architectural and artistic patrimony, so you’ll have moments to wander through stunning castles filled with frescoes and dip into village churches. Parma is also a wonderful shopping town and you’ll have plenty of free time to explore the shops and dine on your own from an extensive list of suggestions we’ll have for you. As I write this I’m getting very excited about going back. Come with me!

One thing to keep in mind if you’re vegetarian, lactose intolerant or celiac. Emilia Romagna is a meat and dairy centered, gluten heavy region. Other Via Rosa tours are able to accommodate these needs more easily, while this tour, unfortunately cannot.

For more information, photos and itinerary

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I’m starting to gear up for my upcoming Puglia and Rome tours. What that means for me before I head to the airport is recording all the shows of Good Food that will air while I’m gone, as well as the weekly appearances on Press Play. I still take my set up with me so I can record as needed which sometimes means long days, as I connect to KCRW from a hotel room somewhere in Italy after I get back to the hotel from some fabulous dinner. It means a late night but is strangely grounding to hear the familiar voices of Good Food producer Gillian Ferguson and audio engineer Sue Margulies.

In addition to the anticipatory excitement for this October trip, I’m pleased to announce 2025 tour dates. This is another trip to Puglia. I love it so and what a treat to experience the region in springtime. Thank you again Elizabeth Minchilli for asking me to host another jaunt.

Puglia is the heel of the boot, a peninsula surrounded by both the Adriatic and Ionian Seas. In our six food focused days together we’ll feast on menus focused on vegetables, seafood, cheese, olive oil and pasta, of course. We’ll be centered in the Salento, the tip of the heel, where panoramas of the seasides are glorious. From my first visit to the stunning baroque town of Lecce decades ago the region captivated me. I’ve always thought of Puglia as Greek Italy in terms of the look of towns. The elemental simplicity of the food has similarities too. Traveling in Italy in Spring is always surprising as weather shifts and fresh floral displays spill forth.

We’ll be based in Lecce and Monopoli and visit some of the most beautiful  towns in the region:  (Gallipoli, Galatina, Martina Franca, Bari and Alberobello) while exploring southern and central Puglia's food, wine, and history.

A few of the things you’ll be doing:
-Welcome drinks and dinner in Lecce
-Market tour, cooking class, and lunch
-A day learning all about olive oil
-Cheese and pasta making at a traditional Apulian Masseria
-Visit the Unesco-protected, Trulli-filled, town of Alberobello
-Seafood feasts in Monopoli and Gallipoli
-Visit the pasta ladies in Bari
-and more (there is always more)

Details:
When: April 6-12, 2025
Where: You’ll be based in Lecce and Monopoli, staying in your private room
Who: The tour is limited to 12 guests
What: The tour is six nights and five very full days, with trips in our private 20-seat bus. But don’t worry; you’ll also have some downtime in Lecce and Monopoli to explore on your own.
How: If you’d like more information, including the pricing and the full itinerary, just click the button below. Contact email is minchillitours@gmail.com

Salento & Central Puglia With Evan

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Join me in April of 2025 for days filled with exploration of this gorgeous and engaging region.

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I am thrilled to announce that my dear friend Elizabeth Minchilli has asked me to host another tour, this time to the region of Puglia, the heel of the boot. How do six food focused days in October sound to you? It sounds pretty dreamy to me. From my first visit to the stunning baroque town of Lecce decades ago the region captivated me. I’ve always thought of Puglia as Greek Italy in terms of the look of towns and the food which is heavily focused on vegetables, seafood, cheese and olive oil. We’ll be centered in the Salento, the tip of the heel, where panoramas of the seasides are glorious. Fall is the perfect time to visit since the sweltering heat of summer is past yet it’s still warm enough to be outside. Maybe we’ll even be able to swim! We’ll be based in Lecce and Monopoli and visit some of the most beautiful  towns in the region:  (Ostuni, Gallipoli, Galatina, and Bari, while exploring southern and central Puglia's food, wine, and history.

A few of the things you’ll be doing:

-Welcome drinks and dinner in Lecce
-Market tour, cooking class, and lunch
-A day learning all about olive oil
-Cheese and pasta-making class at a farm
-Visit the Unesco-protected, Trulli-filled, town of Alberobello
-Seafood feasts in Monopoli and Gallipoli
-Visit the pasta ladies in Bari
-and more (there is always more)

Details:
When: October 13-19,  2024
Where: You’ll be based in Lecce and Monopoli, staying in your private room
Who: The tour is limited to 12 guests
What: The tour is six nights and five very full days, with trips in our private 20-seat bus. But don’t worry; you’ll also have some downtime in Lecce and Monopoli to explore on your own.
How: If you’d like more information, including the pricing and the full itinerary, just click the button below. Contact email is minchillitours@gmail.com

Salento & Central Puglia With Evan

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Last night’s salad was Puntarelle with a twist.

Puntarelle, an Italian chicory variety sometimes called cicoria asparago is my favorite green of the spring season. I first ate it in Rome literally decades ago and seek it out each time I’m there if they’re in season, usually in spring and sometimes in the fall. I’ve always eaten them prepared in the classic Roman way, cut into thin curled strips and dressed with an assertive anchovy-garlic dressing. I love the plant so much that in the late 1990s I brought some seed back and convinced Mary Ann and Paul Carpenter who farmed in Santa Paula to grow it. I promised I would buy it all. I could not fulfill that promise because I couldn’t get diners to buy the salad at my restaurant Angeli nor enlist prep cooks to help me prep the vegetable. I’m thrilled to see that at least two farmers in Southern California have started growing puntarelle. Roots Farm in the Santa Ynez Valley and Tutti Frutti Farms in the Santa Rita Hills of Santa Barbara County. There must be something about the micro climate in the area for these two farms to take the risk of planting this unusual variety of chicory, hoping customers will bite. It’s such an odd plant. When a new vegetable shows up at the markets there is a learning curve for both farmers and customers. A new cultural tradition to acquire, and Americans being Americans different ways of preparation to explore.

Video above taken by Sophie Minchilli in Rome. Romans are lucky to be able to purchase puntarelle already prepped by market vendors.

Seen whole, a head of puntarelle looks similar to a head of romaine with spikier, dandelion-like leaves. But when you peer into the head, instead of more leaves, you see a clump of asparagus-like shoots coming up from the base. Ergo the Italian name cicoria asparago. These shoots are hollow, and when eaten prepared in thin strips, they are super crunchy, which is why I suppose I love the plant. It’s the combination of the mild bitterness of a Belgian endive or radicchio combined with a juicy crunch. Puntarelle (in the plural in Italian) are extremely satisfying to eat.

Preparing them for salad takes some time, but it’s not difficult. In comparison to those big salads where one prepares five or six different vegetables before marrying them in the bowl, preparing puntarelle is a snap. One discards the external leaves and separates the shoots from the head. Sometimes they just pull away other times one must cut them off the base with a paring knife. Convention is to vertically cut each shoot into long julienne strips, which are placed in ice water to soak. The cold water causes the thin, long pieces to curl and helps maintain the crunch until you’re ready to eat. But I like to munch on the whole shoot much like I would a carrot. It’s a bit like eating a stalk of celery but without the strings and a more delicate crunch. They’re fun to include in a crudités display and are delicious swooped through hummus or a lebne based dip. Also considering that they are a chicory, you can also cook them much as you would Belgian endive or radicchio. They can be grilled or braised or sauteed in a pan.

But there’s a reason puntarelle are traditionally paired with an assertive garlic-anchovy vinaigrette. The combination of that slightly bitter crunch with the umami of anchovy and sharpness of garlic is moreish as Nigella would say. I’m in the throes of a daily engagement with the salad until I run out. That’s another great attribute of the plant is that a little goes a long way when you prep them in long strips. I just used two shoots to make myself a satisfying dinner salad. My twist was to add avocado. It was also on farmers tables at the market and I thought its richness would pair well. I was correct. You can’t see pieces of avocado in the photo above because the flesh was so perfectly ripe it ended up mixing in completely with the dressing and helped it adhere to the curls. Making this salad also reminded me how much I love Agostino Recco anchovies. I used the spicy kind I had in the pantry. Expect another post focused on the little beauties. I prefer to make the dressing or condimento by chopping the garlic and anchovy instead of pounding or pureeing them. Do not be afraid to use the anchovy. It makes the dish.

Here’s a step by step tutorial on how to prepare puntarelle and to make the dressing. If you want to buy a special cutter to make the work of prepping them easier like in the video above, you can order it here. And if you’d like to hear me expound on the vegetable here’s a link to my conversation with Madeleine Brand on KCRW’s Press Play.

Meanwhile…I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between air and aroma for a long time. After all, aromas swirl up into the air and are carried within it. The 18th century author of The Physiology of Taste, Brillat-Savarin wrote “Smell and taste form a single sense of which the mouth is the laboratory and the nose is the chimney”. If you lost your sense of taste due to covid you understand how true this is. I think of food and beverage aromas as clouds of pleasure. See reference to nerd fest. The last nerdy talk I gave before the pandemic was about the borderlessness of air.

Recently I was watching the small pot of ingredients for my mid-morning cup of mocha come to the boil when I started thinking about how how foam links air, taste, and aroma. It was so pleasurable to watch the bubbles start to form at the sides of the pot and gather together as the liquid begins the full boil then starts to rise. I promised myself (I don’t make resolutions per se since they’re all blown by January 2) to be more cognizant of small pleasures and nurture them than I have in the past. I realized watching the liquid gather and rise and how foam in beverages builds is one of these small pleasures. Think of how in Mexican beverage culture, foam, particularly on drinking chocolate, has a spiritual aspect. Foam was created by pouring the drink from one vessel to another until the molinillo came to be in general use. It’s the wooden tool held between two palms and twirled to aerate hot chocolate and is very fun if initially awkward to use.

But this gesture of pouring from one vessel to another is so beautiful, nearly a dance and it happens all over the place. Moroccan tea is often served from on high which allows the tea to aerate and form bubbles atop the hot beverage. In India chai wallahs will mix and aerate hot chai by repeatedly lifting and pouring the liquid from one container to another before finally serving it in a small cup or glass with an evanescent layer of foam that quickly dissipates. In Spain wine poured from high up using a porrón is a dramatic move that creates foam as the stream of liquid hits the wineglass (or mouth).

Many of the beverages we drink everyday are topped with foam. We delight in it. Think of that micro foamed Aussie flat white. Or beer, of course. So here’s my beginning of year reminder to take pleasure in small things. They’re all around us.

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As for what I’m thinking about, reading, watching etc. I lost one of my cousins a few weeks ago. She was a remarkable woman so I thought I’d share her NYT obit. At least once a year I fall down the rabbit hole that is the UN Migration Data Portal. Did you know that one in thirty people worldwide are migrants? A look at food inflation through the lens of a halal chicken cart, a staple street food in NYC. On a lighter note my international police procedural obsession is currently being fed by the Italian show, Imma Tataranni. Set in the gorgeous town of Matera in Basilicata, Deputy Prosecutor, Tataranni channels her inner Montalbano. I’m also enjoying Mord mit Aussicht aka Homicide Hills, a hilarious German show about a cosmopolitan police inspector who makes a wrong move and is sent to head up a small town police force of three. My favorite cookbook lately is one I recently covered for Good Food. It’s Zarghuna Adel’s The Best of Afghan Cooking.

Sometimes a great recipe comes from an unexpected place.

There are definite downsides to social media but one of the upsides is connecting with people you’ve never met face to face in places you’ve never been. One of these surprise friends is Daniel Quintero, a Venezuelan journalist and food writer living in Lima, Peru. He’s connected to chefs and food culture there in a really interesting way. We started chatting a few years ago and I’ve even sent friends who traveled to Lima to meet him. So when Daniel sent me the photo above I took notice. The recipe was developed by Chef Ashton Mullikin, an expat living in Lima who is the chef-owner at Café A Bistró.

For seven years Mullikin has provided Lima with a taste of American casual classics from burgers and eggs benedict to an extensive menu of Thanksgiving favorites to-go.

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He was asked by online magazine Traveling and Living in Peru to share a Thanksgiving sweet potato recipe. They expected some kind of puree but instead Mullikin gave them this gorgeous Sweet Potato Rose. It’s made by first peeling the potatoes and thinly slicing them into strips. After a bath in a spiced orange juice mixture the strips are formed into a rose and slowly baked until soft and caramelized.
I’m definitely making this to bring to the Thanksgiving dinner I attend. If you decide to make it, let me know how it goes.

Chef Ashton Mullikin’s Sweet Potato Rose

Sweet Potatoes: 4 medium
Salt and Pepper to taste
1 gm Cloves
250 gms Orange juice
Zest of 2 oranges
1 gm Ground Coffee
1 gm Ground Cinnamon
1 gm Nutmeg
1 Tbsp Molasses
200 gms Brown Sugar
1 Tbsp Butter

Prepare the Sweet Potatoes: Peel and thinly slice
your sweet potatoes into strips.

Seasoning: In a large bowl, combine all the seasonings and orange juice
with the sliced sweet potatoes, ensuring they are
completely covered. The sugar and the salt in the mixture
with help draw the moisture out of the sweet potatoes and
help bake more evenly.

Preheat Oven: Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Assemble the Rose Layers: Take a round baking dish and
start assembling the sweet potato layers in the shape of a
rose. Begin from the outer edge and work your way
towards the center, slightly overlapping each slice until you
reach complete the rose. Once you finish assembling the sweet
potatoes, pour the remaining sauce over them and add one
tablespoon of butter on top.

Cover and Bake: Cover the baking dish with parchment
paper, pressing it down to make contact with the sweet
potatoes for even cooking. Then cover with aluminum foil
and bake in the preheated oven for at least 2 hours or until
the sweet potatoes are completely cooked and soft. Be
cautious to prevent the liquid from reducing too much and
to avoid burning the sugars. If the liquids are reducing
before the sweet potatoes are cooked, add a little more
orange juice or water.

Plate: Once fully cooked, use a rubber spatula to free the
sides from the baking dish before it cools. After it cools,
place a plate over the baking dish, flip it over, and serve it
bottom side up.

Thanksgiving Help

If you want a deep dive into how to make a perfect pie crust here’s my video about it.
We’ve created a document at Good Food with links to 45 great pie recipes we’ve talked about on the show.

Let me introduce you to these women whose communities are quite different as is the work they do, but the result of their action is felt in waves that ripple out.

First up is Delilah Snell. I love her. We’ve been friends for years. Delilah owns Alta Baja Market in Santa Ana, a place that shines a light on products and culture on both sides of the border. But it’s so much more than a store or restaurant, it’s a community center. One morning in 2022 when the pandemic seemed to be easing and things were opening up Delilah arrived at her store to be greeted by the sight of the street immediately in front of her business completely ripped up. Without notifying any of the small businesses in the area, the city was going ahead with a long-planned tram installation in downtown Santa Ana which would mean another closure and months if not years of disruption. This was to bring local, small, mainly Latino owned, businesses to their knees at a time they were barely surviving the effects of the pandemic. Delilah was devastated. Then she got really angry. Then she organized. She became a voice for small businesses in the area. She helped owner write letters and created a series of town hall meetings so that city officials would understand how much business owners were hurting. In the process she created a way for local business owners, many of whom are not English speakers or familiar with speaking up for themselves to do so. Powerful action. She’s marginally less angry and has made a lot of people in her community feel empowered. Community has always been at the center of whatever she does. Siete Foods recently recognized her work with a $30k grant saying that she, “celebrates the flavors and the cultivators of Mexican-American culture. With her strong sense of entrepreneurship, she has built this business thoughtfully for her community,  aspiring to bring new and exciting offerings—from delicious foods and home goods to unique events.”

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Next up is Miry Whitehill of Miry’s List. How do I explain Miry to you? She’s like meeting a force of nature, someone who has such belief and trust in all of us that we’re going to do the right thing for the right reasons. And we do. For her. Here is an explanation of what the organization she founded does. Miry's List provides a mechanism for people to directly help new arrival refugee families with the incredible challenge of resettlement in the United States. With practical support and joyful friends waiting to welcome them, resettling families are set up to thrive through Miry's List's wrap-around programs that extend long beyond government support.

But that description doesn’t do justice to the joy one feels being able to give practical help to someone you’ve never met. The lists themselves are a magical reciprocity of giver and receiver. Miry’s monthly newsletter that’s used to introduce us to individual families who need help, is always accompanied by a letter from her. In August she spoke about mental health and a particular paragraph continues to resonate for me in light of so much grief felt by so many worldwide over these past several weeks. She wrote, All 7.8 billion people on planet earth, everyone in history who’s ever breathed our air, and everyone who will exist in the future faces difficult emotions. It starts from the moment we’re born and it lasts a lifetime. Managing a full range of feelings is our shared experience tying us together as humans. Our connections to one another make it possible for us to face the pain that life brings us…Through Miry’s List, I’ve learned that every ounce of compassion I find for myself becomes two ounces of compassion and understanding I can have for somebody else. In this way, when we care for ourselves, we are also caring for the whole world. 

I hope that sharing my admiration for these two women with you acts as a reminder that action (no matter how small) is a way to manage anger, fear and grief. Do it for yourself and your communities whoever they are.

Donate to Doctors Without Borders and to World Central Kitchen

Perhaps you’ve seen images on Instagram or YouTube of families gathering during prime tomato season to preserve all that fruit as I do each year. Some of you have asked me what I do with my yearly haul, if I eat that much pasta in tomato sauce. Well, no, I actually don’t eat that much pasta (as much as I long to). I do use the sauces we make nearly everyday though. Think about all the different tomato products you have in the house: peeled tomatoes in juice, unseasoned smooth tomato sauce, chopped tomatoes in sauce or juice, tomato paste, even ketchup. The sauces we make each year take the place of all of this, although I do admit to buying and using Mutti tomato paste and a really good artisan made “concentrato,” the Italian word for paste in this case. An aside, while in Parma leading a food tour we drove by the Mutti plant several times. If you’re going to buy tomato product to use in cooking I think Mutti is the best. The last time I was at Eataly they seemed to have a pretty full range of the stuff.

Back to our tomatoes. I say “ours” because the canning extravaganza is carried out by three of us. There is my friend Kazi Pitelka, former first chair violist with the LA Opera orchestra before she retired and now ceramicist and always amazing gardener. And there is Royce Burke a younger (than us) LA chef who adopted me during the pandemic and has become a dear friend. It is work that requires many hands.

Anyway, back to what I do with our haul which you can see in the photo above. That was the result of our most recent summer 2023 canning session. Three hundred pounds of tomatoes yielded sixty-eight quarts of sauce. We did three products this year. For the first time we did “passata,” which is made by first boiling the tomatoes to break down the cell walls and allow some of the tomato water to come out. They are then passed through the mill then canned with only salt. We always make two cooked sauces that we make with the puree that results from passing raw tomatoes through the mill. (I know that most people do not put the tomatoes through the mill raw). Pomodoro is cooked with olive oil, garlic and salt. Puttanesca is cooked with olive oil, garlic, Calabrian hot chile pepper flakes, Kalamata olives and capers packed in salt.

The pomodoro is a pretty neutral sauce I use in all non-Italian cooking whenever a dish calls for tomato sauce, or peeled tomatoes, tomatoes in juice and yes, even tomato paste. This simple switch amps up flavor in everything I make. If I want even more flavor and a piquant something-something I’ll use the puttanesca sauce. I love it for napping chile rellenos or occasionally in Indian dishes. But my greatest success has been making Spaghetti alla Puttanesca with my jarred puttanesca sauce as the base and recooking it with additional garlic, olives and capers and evo. Friends rave about the super flavored pasta dish. I have to say I am looking forward to using the passata for Amatriciana and Marcella’s buttery, onion inflected sauce.

A few years ago I had the opportunity to interview Lior Lev Sercarz when his book Mastering Spice came out. He has such a thoughtful take on blending spices with results that are surprising and delicious. The first recipe I made from his book was his Brown Sugar Banana Bread which uses an unusual blend of spices. I was instantly a fan. The blend didn’t stand out as aromatherapy which bad blends and overly aggressive spicing can do and which I detest. As a cook whose young adult palate was formed in Italy I’ve never been a huge user of spices, except when making a specific cuisine when spices are the backbone of flavor. India I see you. So reading about spice through Lior’s eyes was like entering a new world. Yes, he often begins with place, geography and tradition, but he goes beyond. His blends are thoughtful and not gratuitously weird. As a classically trained chef he strives for balance with a bit of surprise.

With the marketing machine behind pumpkin spice (PS) gearing up for another fall of everything PS I couldn’t think of a better person to ask about the phenomenon and to give a few alternatives for those of us who want a warming blend that goes beyond the typical. Here’s our Q and A.

What was your reaction to "pumpkin spice" becoming a yearly trend that encompasses everything from spice blends themselves to lattes and candles.

I must say that I never heard of PS until I moved to the US. I was sure it either had pumpkin in it or it was at least used in pumpkin dishes. Once I learned about the ingredients, I was surprised to see how popular it is. To me it was the American version of (quatre epices) the French 4 spice, nothing more. I still do not understand what is the big deal about it and why it is such a seasonal thing. I guess some very good marketing and sales people managed to make it so popular.

What do you think people are responding to in the blend and why they crush so hard on it?

I think people like rituals and the blend is also sweet and floral which makes it easy to love and use. At the end of the day it is a great ad and marketing campaign. It is very festive sounding. 

Have you ever created a PSB? Why, why not?

I created our own version at La Boite and we call it PMK. It was a client's request. I added some dry honey, mace and citrus to it just because I wanted something more complex and fun. Now we only sell it wholesale.

Personally when I make foods that call for warm spices I always look for spice blends that already exist in a culture with a tradition. For example I use chai spice masalas I find in Indian shops for pumpkin pie. And until I started using Mastering Spice I used garam masala in some baked goods. What are some traditional blends you recommend if people want to go beyond the simple sweetness of PS?

I love using things like four spice, five spice, Chai masala, and Hawayej coffee spice.

What are a couple untraditional blends you make at La Bôite that you recommend instead of PS?

We make a few blends that can be used such as Sri Lanka, Baharat, Reims, Yemen, Bombay, Mishmish (honey/saffron/lemon), Massalis. (In fact, he has a list of Top Ten Blends for Fall Baking).
”Here are some great blends to level up your favorite classics as well as some new ones to bring into the mix.  They all hover around the similar warm spice vibe with little aromatic twists and turns along the way.”

If there is a particular spice you wish people knew would rock their baking (or winter squash cooking) world what would you want them to try?

I think people should use more Amchoor! It is green dried mango powder that adds amazing fruit notes and acidity. It would be fantastic for baking and many other savory dishes.

Please feel free to vent about PS as much as you want.

21 years later, I am now at peace with PS. I do not use it but I am ok with it being a thing. I wish I had thought about it first!

Here is Lior’s advice on purchasing and using single spices and blends.

Are you a slave to Pumpkin Spice? What warming blends do you love?

Listen to my conversation with Madeleine Brand on Press Play about my thoughts on pumpkin spice.

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