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Greeks beat the heat with watermelon salad

Greeks beat the heat with watermelon salad

Even Hippocrates, the ancient Greek father of medicine, was apparently a watermelon fan, prescribing the fruit as a diuretic. (He also suggested treating children with heat stroke by placing cool, wet rinds on their brows.) But the good doctor had nothing to say about watermelon as food. That could be because watermelons of his era were still at least as bitter as an overgrown cucumber. A half millennium would elapse before farmers were raising the sweet modern watermelon. But the Greeks made up for lost time. One of the quintessential summer delights of Greek cuisine is some variation of watermelon salad. There are really only three essential elements: pieces of watermelon, mint leaves, and crumbled feta cheese. Personally, we like to add cubed pieces of...Read More
Pasta fazool, for the immigrants we have all become

Pasta fazool, for the immigrants we have all become

We've never eaten pasta e fagioli in Italy. We've never even seen it on a menu there, though a reliable source (Michele Sciocolone) tells us it is Neapolitan. (That's why we posted the Neapolitan chef and food vendor miniatures above. They're masked for Carnavale and sold on the same street as Christmas creche figures.) The dish—‶pasta fazool″ in the Neapolitan dialect—has an Italian-flavored familiarity that marks it as real comfort food. Turns out that it's known mainly in Italian-American cuisine. It's from that branch of cooking born when immigrants made do with canned and dried commodities rather than the fresh ingredients they knew in the old country. We're all immigrants now to the world of social distancing and staying indoors. We're making do with canned...Read More