Wine, Culture and Lore with Filippo Bartolotta

We have invited Filippo Bartolotta, an Italian sommelier, to offer us two evenings of entertainment and fun around the foods and wine of Italy.

Both evenings offer amazing wines to sip and enjoy while learning of the wines as well as producers of food. We will learn about some of the finest producers and their products.

Dinner and Wine

Guest will have the chance to enjoy a true Tuscan cooking experience. Using menu selections from locally harvested ingredients, our own pork, shellfish, and Chilmark greens, we will begin the evening with cooking demonstrations. The evening will flow into learning about products and wine of Italy. The Italian Filippo will of course bring amazing wines and wine knowledge.

Discover step-by-step how to make a satisfying, full Italian meal from appetizers to dessert, including the art of making pasta.

Do you want to know how to keep your spaghetti from sticking together or what wine to serve with dinner? Come with your questions and we will have fun learning the answers.

In addition to the tasting of quality wines, we will explore extra virgin olive oils, balsamic vinegars, chocolate, cheeses and salamis, all under the guidance of Filippo. The evenings will be filed with good humor and unsurpassed knowledge.

Why Italian wine and products?

Italy is a culture steeped in food traditions. Italians are intimately tied to the products not just of their country, but of their region or even more correctly of their home town. They take a special pride in the olive oil grown in the nearby countryside, the special fish found only in their bay or the grape varietal grown only on their hillsides. This special connection between food and culture is what has made movements like Slow Food resonate so deeply in Italy. It is why Italians still shop at the local open air market on Fridays or prefer to buy the prosciutto raised nearby to one trucked in from Spain.

Winemaking in Italy in some ways has been modernized. There are some monocrops of vineyard or wineries producing over a million bottles… but on average, the landscape of Italy is still a patchwork of thousands of small family run vineyards, interspersed with olive oil crops, vegetables, and woodlands. The average vineyard in Italy is a mere 2 hectares, an entirely different scale than the mega-wineries in the “new world”. These small wineries have passed down winemaking knowledge from generation to generation. Many never even transitioned to using chemicals, so they were “organic” before even knowing the buzz word existed (and still might not even bother to mention it on their label). Filippo is an ambassador of this wine world, and comes with endless knowledge of this patchwork of wineries all over Italy. He will transport you to the world of small producers, wine on the family table, special grape varietals and old and new winemaking techniques.

Thursday
$75
Upon receipt of payment, you will be e-mailed with location

Filippo Bartolotta is a wine journalist, writing for major European and American wine publications such as Decanter and serving as the editor for the bestselling L’Espresso Italian Wine Guide (English version). He also teaches about wine at the prestigious University of Siena and hosts countless wine events each year in Italy and abroad. Filippo works with the winemakers association “Vini Veri” (“Real Wines”) a group of organic and biodynamic producers and he has attended their alternative to Vinitaly, a special wine expo of “natural” wines outside of Verona. Filippo strives to connect participants at his events and visitors to Italy with a sense of place, the real Italy, through careful exploration of authentic tastes and towns. He has developed a series of unique events with the Siena Tourism Board creating an emotional connection for participants between a specific Sienese wine, food, work of art and the territory of Siena. Through their senses, participants experience the land and its products, both artistic and agricultural. His unique, entertaining style and his incredible breadth of knowledge create the ideal environment for anyone to fall in love with wine and in the process to fall in love with Italy.

Visit his website

March 5

We have invited Filippo Bartolotta, an Italian sommelier, to offer us two evenings of entertainment and fun around the foods and wine of Italy.

Both evenings offer amazing wines to sip and enjoy while learning of the wines as well as producers of food. We will learn about some of the finest producers and their products.

In addition to the tasting of quality wines, we will explore extra virgin olive oils, balsamic vinegars, chocolate, cheeses and salamis, all under the guidance of Filippo. The evenings will be filed with good humor and unsurpassed knowledge.

Why Italian wine and products?

Italy is a culture steeped in food traditions. Italians are intimately tied to the products not just of their country, but of their region or even more correctly of their home town. They take a special pride in the olive oil grown in the nearby countryside, the special fish found only in their bay or the grape varietal grown only on their hillsides. This special connection between food and culture is what has made movements like Slow Food resonate so deeply in Italy. It is why Italians still shop at the local open air market on Fridays or prefer to buy the prosciutto raised nearby to one trucked in from Spain.

Winemaking in Italy in some ways has been modernized. There are some monocrops of vineyard or wineries producing over a million bottles… but on average, the landscape of Italy is still a patchwork of thousands of small family run vineyards, interspersed with olive oil crops, vegetables, and woodlands. The average vineyard in Italy is a mere 2 hectares, an entirely different scale than the mega-wineries in the “new world”. These small wineries have passed down winemaking knowledge from generation to generation. Many never even transitioned to using chemicals, so they were “organic” before even knowing the buzz word existed (and still might not even bother to mention it on their label). Filippo is an ambassador of this wine world, and comes with endless knowledge of this patchwork of wineries all over Italy. He will transport you to the world of small producers, wine on the family table, special grape varietals and old and new winemaking techniques.

Thursday 6 to 8 pm
$85
Upon receipt of payment, you will be e-mailed with location

Filippo Bartolotta is a wine journalist, writing for major European and American wine publications such as Decanter and serving as the editor for the bestselling L’Espresso Italian Wine Guide (English version). He also teaches about wine at the prestigious University of Siena and hosts countless wine events each year in Italy and abroad. Filippo works with the winemakers association “Vini Veri” (“Real Wines”) a group of organic and biodynamic producers and he has attended their alternative to Vinitaly, a special wine expo of “natural” wines outside of Verona. Filippo strives to connect participants at his events and visitors to Italy with a sense of place, the real Italy, through careful exploration of authentic tastes and towns. He has developed a series of unique events with the Siena Tourism Board creating an emotional connection for participants between a specific Sienese wine, food, work of art and the territory of Siena. Through their senses, participants experience the land and its products, both artistic and agricultural. His unique, entertaining style and his incredible breadth of knowledge create the ideal environment for anyone to fall in love with wine and in the process to fall in love with Italy.

Visit his website

Well… it clearly depends on what I am doing.

And so today, I will begin to share my tools with you, one by one as I find myself in the kitchen, grateful for a tool or wishing I had a better one. A classic piece of inexpensive cookware that I can’t live without is the cast iron skillet. Lodge is the brand on my skillets and I have them in all sizes and I even own a few enamel cast iron cookware  as well, which I also use daily. I am making roasted Brussel sprouts, AGAIN! I can’t seem to get enough of them this time of year as I have been buying them by the 10# case. I love them reheated for breakfast with a poached egg. Today, I’m roasting the Brussel sprouts in my cast iron skillet with shallots, balsamic vinegar and salt ( I love the salt crystals in this dish!). I cook everything in my cast iron skillets –case in point, as I write I have a pork shoulder in the skillet IN the oven. I seared the shoulder on the stovetop and then placed onions and apples around it and placed the whole skillet in the oven. Now that’s what I call a one-dish meal, FAST! Some of the cast iron benefits are: I have never ruined a cast iron skillet from too much heat!  I can reheat a dinner over our open fire without worrying about damaging the pan. I use these pans in my fireplace without a worry. I rarely use soap on my skillets as I mostly just wipe the pan out with a damp cloth and hot water. If it needs a scrub, I use a metal scouring pad. The down sides? They are heavy, but do make a good weapon. And never had to use one as such it does provide a good threat! I once broke the handle off a skillet when I dropped it on my slate floor.  I was relieved that the result was only the broken handle, not a cracked tile as well!

My skillets live on my stovetop ready for a quick meal or a long slow roast. The extras are stored hanging on hooks on the brick chimney next to my stovetop. This is the standard gift I give to my young college bound friends or ones who are setting up a home for the first time. Bottom line: No kitchen should be without a cast iron skillet in as many sizes as possible

Cast Iron Line Up

We seem to try different sausage recipes every year. This year Fernando read us a family recipe for Butifarra. A search for Butifarra on the internet described another recipe using raw pork for a white sausage in the Catalan tradition. Fernando’s recipe was straight from an Argentinean book which was well worn and had a 1943 publishers date. This was his grandfather’s book and Fernando laughs at me when I ask him to translate the title of the book for me into English: “It’s not possible, this was already translated once-from Italian to Spanish, it does not go to English!”  This recipe is more like stuffed head cheese. We make a stock of carrots, celery, spices and water. The heads of the pigs are simmered for a few hours, the meat is thoroughly separated, then sent through the fine holes of the grinder. The meat is then sent through the stuffer and guided into casings. The casings are then dipped intro simmering water and plunked into cold water to pull out any remaining fat.

I take to making pate. I normally use a shoulder and the liver and that was my intentions, but somehow when I wasn’t looking, the shoulder got mixed in with the pork fat/ venison mixture. I love a course country pate that is full of texture with kirsch and loads of parsley. This is more French than Italian, but is my personal preference. One liver produced 12 terrines. I must make a note to try to collect more terrine molds as next year I would like to use all the liver. We sautéed the other one with onions and had it for lunch with gremolata which is simply chopped parsley, garlic and lemon zest. I am ready for the holidays with the gathering of friends and I have ready a basket with a plum pudding, a pate, and a bottle of port. Now this is holiday cheer!

So with a pig shortage we ended up with two pigs cross bred with Old Spot and Tamworth, born at Native Earth Farm. After all was said and done we were not disappointed. We usually get piglets in June and feed them for six months until the weather changes to cold. These were born late so we did not pick them up until mid August. Although they were small when we got them, after four months they still weighed in at around 200 pounds at slaughter. In the past, our pig’s typical diet consisted of food from my catering business, organic grain, organic corn and fallen acorns. This season, we fed them less organic grain, ($23 per 50lb bag compared with $16 per 50 lbs organic corn), BUT, due to a surplus of milk from our friend’s dairy farm, were able to finish them with over five gallons of raw milk per day, in addition to their usual diet. Our dear friends at Mermaid Farm sell raw milk. Three weeks before the slaughter, there was a slightly high bacteria count in the milk that prevented them from selling  milk to the public. Their loss was our pig’s gain.

I don’t take part in the slaughter anymore. I don’t even care to watch or be there, nor do I need to be. Our friend Fernando, and my husband Rich, manage the job fine without my commentaries. Our pigs we raised two years ago had become my favorites. I am not sure what happened. They were sisters; we normally get males, and we just bonded which is never a good idea when you plan on slaughtering them.  I had fed them often and knew their quirks, personalities and joys.  I was particularly fond of one and the night before the slaughter, I asked my husband to reconsider the slaughter of my favorite. We were not set up for raising a pig over the winter. She would need to become a breeder, (mother), in order for us to justify keeping her over the winter and one pig would certainly bond even more so with us and it seemed a most impractical decision. As we carried on with the slaughter, the deed was sad and upsetting, and I was unable to eat any pork that year.

I know better now. I don’t take part in the slaughter and instead get myself geared up for the processing of the meat. Sausage and pate and head cheese sounds delicious to me and so that is where I focus my energies. I get excited just thinking about the process. There is something enticing that takes place when animal becomes meat.  I am grateful to our pigs. We have an understanding about a quality of life we offer each other. We give them a life of delicious food and fresh water, a big open pen and a nice little hut with loads of straw and doses of intimacy; pats on their back and scratches behind their ears. And the pigs give me, my family and friends delicious meat. Perhaps it is not a balanced agreement, but I feel so grateful for their lives and am at peace with the fact that I have given them the best life possible. There is no comparison of their lives to that of a feed lot.

OF NOTE: The day we slaughtered, we heard from Allen at Mermaid Farm that their milk finally tested well for consumption and that we would not be able to pick up buckets of milk for our pigs anymore. Amazing how nature works this way…

Last year a group of us women ( we call ourselves The Sowing Circle) decided we wanted to form a project around gleaning and we met throughout the winter and early spring to discuss the logistics and needs of how we might best go about it.  Emails, gloves, boxes, bags, scissors and small knives seemed to be the basic necessities. Each of us aligned with a municipality that would take the food. I aligned myself with our local charter school asking the chef of the school if she would be willing to take produce and determining the conditions and logistics that she would receive the produce. Others aligned with other schools, day cares, elder centers, food pantry, etc.. We notified farmers of our project and waited for a call that they had a field ready for us.

Our first gleaning happened  over peppers, and eggplant.  Emails went out the night before and 14 of us showed up. A group of high school students came from a class bringing along their teenage energy which made for a jolly time. The day before a hard frost was expected we harvested what seemed like thousands of rows of lettuce.

Recently, about 16 of us gathered in a potato field to harvest 700 pounds of potatoes. It took us less than an hour to clear the field that Simon Athern of Morning Glory Farm turned over for us. His tractor turned five rows approximately 75 feet long. The turning allowed for us to see and gather the potatoes easily. As we glean the fields we tossed the ones spotted with green or those that were a bit mushy. The green in the potatoes contain high levels of a toxin, solanine, which can cause nausea, headaches and neurological problems. Potatoes naturally produce small amounts of solanine as a defense against insects, but the levels increase with prolonged exposure to light and warm temperatures. Some of the potatoes were very green.

We  each delivered well over a car load of food to each of our alliances

Each time I gather with my fellow gleaning comrades, I feel a sense of gratitude. Gratitude towards the farm that is thoughtful and generous to invite us into their fields and also for their time for the extra work that is needed to accommodate our needs to be there. It’s a sense of community, a sense of giving and receiving.

I ran into the chef from the charter school where I delivered the food a few days ago and she was so grateful to be serving local food on the menu.  I walked away from her with a feeling of fulfillment and gratefulness.  It’s a small amount of time, but a huge impact in getting local foods to those that need it the most.

To which he replied, “They’re farm fresh eggs! They have to be, they’re brown.”

This is a serious problem.

There are millions of people, you might be one of them, walking around thinking they’re actually eating farm fresh eggs when they aren’t. And why do they think this? Because they’re brown and because the carton says so, of course.

Maybe the distributor has ‘farm’ in the name or the carton proudly states, ‘Farmer Brown’s Eggs’ or ‘Just like the ones from the farm’ – whichever it is, consumers believe it. And they think that they’re eating something different then white eggs.

The other problem is the confusing line between conventional and pastured eggs, cage free and free range:

Conventional: Most people are beginning to understand what conventional means. The chickens are caged, living in their own excrement, their feed has hormones and antibiotics – possibly even animal by-products.

But then things get a little sticky…

Cage Free: This one sounds better and most people jump at the chance to eat eggs from chickens that are treated well. But, the reality of the situation is that the chickens are still in a crowded pen, not free to roam, still living in their excrement – only they aren’t caged individually so they’re in each other’s excrement as well.

Free Range: Is really a fancy way of saying Cage Free. These chickens, while allowed to range freely in their overcrowded, dirty pen, aren’t allowed to range in the sunshine in a clean place.

Pastured: Now this is what we’re going for. A pastured chicken is outside, running around in fresh, sunshine filled air, eating grass and plants and the bugs that live on them. Their environment is clean and they are healthy. They roam on a pasture, as nature intended.

I would encourage you to crack a conventional egg open next to a pastured egg and examine them side by side. Look at the yolk and the white, and you’ll see a marked difference. The yolk of the conventional egg is light yellow and doesn’t hold its shape well, while the pastured yolk is a deep yellow, often orange like a pumpkin and it’s firm and large. The white of the conventional egg is dull and mucous-like, while the pastured egg white is a vibrant white and very firm to the touch.

The difference is a direct result of the dietary and living conditions of the chickens. Pastured eggs have been tested to be higher in omega 3’s, higher in antioxidants, vitamins and beta carotene. In 2007, Mother Jones conducted a study that broke down nutritional levels in the two kinds of eggs, proving the wealth of nutrients in pastured eggs.

All the hype about eggs being unhealthy? Those are the conventional eggs, not the pastured eggs from your local farm. Conventional eggs, with their lack of vitamins and their abundance of hormones, antibiotics and genetically modified corn, are having an ill effect. But pastured eggs are not.

So, when marketing tactics are so influential and confusing, how do you tell the difference?

• Know where your chickens live and where your eggs come from.
• Make sure the chickens are outside scratching in the dirt, eating grass and bugs and soaking up the sun.
• Know how they’re living, if they have room to roam, if it’s clean.

Of course, this is much easier and the best case scenario when the eggs are being laid in your backyard or just down the road, as opposed to across the country. Visit a local farm or farmer’s market – or just ask around. Find eggs that you know!

Check our Mother Earth Egg Study

Kombucha, sometimes mistakenly referred to as a mushroom, is a symbiotic, probiotic colony of yeast and bacteria (the friendly type). Kombucha Tea is made by combining the culture, with a mixture of black tea, and sugar. The ingredients are allowed to “ferment”, usually from 7-10 days. The resulting beverage contains dozens of elements, many of which are known to promote healing for a variety of conditions.

Demonstration, instructions, and your own mother culture to take home and use again and again.

2:00- 4:00 PM

Bring a jar! $45 per person, includes instructions and culture

$45

Option 1 $65.00 Facebook Friend $50.00

12 burgers and two fries $11.40

What are White Castle sliders and Twinkies doing on a localvore blog?

Food is medicine. Good nutrition comes from good clean local food. These are my mantras. So what happens when the family wants to engage in junk food consumption?

Yesterday, we drove through Flushing, New York where my husband grew up.

We had just buried his mother and driving through the old neighborhood seemed  necessary. Our 12 year old son, Oren was with us and my husband, Rich began his stories of youth and his favorite snack haunts as a kid; Gloria Pizza, Mickey’s Candy store, Sy’s  Creamy Egg Creams, Carvel and White Castle.  When my son heard the words “White Castle” he said, “White Castle, I love White Castle!” I was suspicious. I am the control freak that knows his every move, and the junk food avoider. “How could my kid know about White Castle?” I asked.  As it turned out, Oren, who is a hockey player, had them at the rink, where they were served straight from the freezer to the microwave.  And he LOVED them!

Cheap fast food. This kind of food has become just fuel, and bad fuel at that. But this fuel has history and meaning. We park our car in one of the six available slots in the parking lot off the intersection of Bell and Northern Boulevards, but there are customers in cars waiting to get to the drive through and they are wrapped around the corner blocking traffic.

The selections are far more than all beef hamburgers, but we simply order 12 burgers, (no cheese), two fries and a soda .  The original slider of an all beef square burger with 5 holes on a steamed bun served with ketchup, a pickle and grilled onions. My husband informed me that the old marketing statement was that the holes added flavor. We are handed a soda cup that is bigger than my head. Supersize me! I am interested in what is going on behind the counter. Are they really cooking this stuff? The buns are steamed, there is a giant dispensing unit that is hand squeezed for ketchup and each slider is served in a box.

We sat at a table and I withheld judgement  and absorbed the scene around me. I considered the amount and cost of cardboard that was wasted on packaging, the processing plant this beef came from and the chemical lased potato fields.  The customers included a family in a booth eating perhaps both their lunch and dinner and the elderly woman with piles of bags and coats hanging off her cart who helped me with the locked bathroom door that needed a buzzer from behind the counter to get in. Could I enjoy this burger without the guilt that I have choice about not eating this? I knew how bad this was for our health but what about the soul? There is nourishment in learning about a person’s past.  There is nourishment in sharing a meal. (Okay, this isn’t a meal!).

I noticed the historic pictures of white castle surrounding us on the walls and felt a sense of time passing. These brought reflections of my life and that of my husband. This experience of showing our son his life, his neighborhood and the telling of his stories was historic. My son couldn’t be happier and looked at me and ever so slowly took a burger out of the box and said, “slow food”.  I burst out laughing. I took a bite as both Oren and Rich watched and waited.  Interesting; I got the flavor of the onions, the pickle and the ketchup. I helped myself to the fries with ketchup.

I didn’t grow up with White Castle. I do have a vague memory of late night munchies  at White Castle while at college in Minneapolis. I didn’t even remember that the burgers were square! Certainly not the fact that the holes add flavor!

Later, at my sister and brother- in-law’s house for Shiva, I scoped the dessert table    and noticed a wooden bowl filled with individually wrapped Twinkies. “Now that’s interesting”, I say to my sister. “It’s my birthday and I always get a Twinkie on my birthday” she explains. But today is a day that we all need “special” nourishment and so there is a bowl of Twinkies for everyone.  She asks me to eat one with her, and without thought I take a bite and enjoy the moment with her as this is about nurturing the soul and celebrating life.

At breakfast the following morning, my son retold his White Castle experience to my brother –in- law who told us the last time he had a White Castle burger was when his office was in the building next to the towers of 9/11.  On that day he walked over three miles home to his apartment, then later that night had White Castle burgers for dinner. He needed the extra comfort, he explained.

I am not the purest that I thought I was.  Perhaps junk food has a place in my life after all.

Sharing moments and memories, this is what brings us joy and nourishes our soul, no matter where the food comes from.

Twinkies for all