January 5, 2006 Wow, hard to believe I haven’t posted anything since last December, despite intentions to the contrary.
The holiday season was busy, even though I managed to spend most of it at our ‘country retreat’ on Vancouver Island. I started thinking about my ‘resolutions’ for 2006 over the holidays, and even started implementing some of them before Jan. 01.
My wife and I are planning to go to Italy this spring, and although I am of Italian heritage, I often call myself a ‘failed Italian’, because I don’t speak Italian (other than a few basics of ‘hello, pleased to meet you, and ‘no more food!’. My culinary skills in Italian are also lacking, so it’s time to remedy my shortcomings in 2006.
I started with a traditional Italian Christmas Eve feast, which means seafood and lots of it. 
I started with research, spending a couple of hours on the Internet, and then poring over my Italian cookbooks. An unexpected bonus was an old issue of Gourmet magazine. I recently was given 20 years worth of back issues of Gourmet. (thank you, Ann!) December, 1996 featured an entire Christmas Eve menu….so I used some recipes from that magazine, including a delicious canned tuna spread that is jazzed up with anchovies and capers. Two other delicious courses included clams baked with an aromatic topping of breadcrumbs and herbs. 
The clams were actually easier to shuck than oysters, and I didn’t bother loosening them completely from the shells, as I figured everyone would be using a fork to eat them anyway. They were delicious, farmed BC Manila clams by the way. Another recipe from the magazine was for a fennel and orange salad. Fennel has been showing up in so many recipes and restaurant dishes lately I named it one of my ‘trend vegetables’ in a story I wrote for this month’s edition of Small Farm Canada. 
The fennel is thinly sliced, covered with sliced oranges and chopped celery, and dressed simply with salt and olive oil. The recipe called for some of the oranges to be the beautiful blood oranges, but I wasn’t able to find any at my local grocery stores then, although I have since seen them in my neighbourhood Chinese grocer in Vancouver. Another dish I really enjoyed was a Sicilian preparation of mussels steamed with tomato puree and fresh orange juice along with a fiery hot pepper. 
We were lacking pasta, so I added some spaghetti noodles to the bottom of the bowl and we slurped away to our heart’s content. The Italian vegetable rapini is served in many Christmas Eve feasts, but again, could not be found in any local grocery stores, so our main course consisted of salt cod cakes, which involved soaking dried, salt cod for 24 hours, a cauliflower, caper and caperberry salad and broccoli stems and florettes cut to kind of look like rapini. 
This is where I think the recipes let me down, as I was less than impressed with the salad and the cod cakes. Oh well, taste and learn! I won’t bore you with any more details of food experienced over the holidays, with the exception of a delicious meal at Sooke Harbour House, where we spent our birthdays (my wife Ramona and I share the same birthday) relaxing and enjoying mild weather and ocean views. The meals at Sooke are always an adventure and this meal was no exception. Highlights? The smoked sablefish, the crusted flounder, and the chicken breast stuffed with lamb sausage. Kudos to chef Edward Tuson.
Looking Ahead: On to the next year, and my attempts to become more Italian. One of Ramona’s friends gave her a great birthday gift of a visual Italian/English dictionary, a guidebook to Florence and Tuscany, and the Oxford ‘Take Off In Italian’ language learning kit, complete with 6 hours worth of audio instruction on CD. Now we have a way to spend our time while driving back and forth on the ferries between Vancouver and Vancouver Island.
Inspector Montalbano: This guy is my latest detective hero. He is the central character in a series of books written by Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri. Montalbano is Sicilian through and through, and pursues good food with the same zeal he employs when pursuing criminals. I have read two books in the series, The Snack Thief and the Terra Cotta Dog, and have the first in the series, The Shape of Water, on order. I highly recommend them.
The other book I’m enjoying right now is called ‘It Must Have Been Something I Ate’, by Jeffrey Steingarten, esteemed food columnist for Vogue magazine. 
This is his second book of collected columns. (The first one is ‘The Man Who Ate Everything’) People tell me that they want to have my job…well, I’d love to have Jeffrey Steingarten’s job. Although I can’t complain. I think my adventures in the world of food will be book-worthy one of these days.
One last note…my webmaster is away for the next month or so, but all the content you’re used to finding on my website will be available here on my blog, photos, recipes, links, etc.
