Rustico Cooking Blog
A Fresh Look at Italian Cooking
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Artwork by Bill Bateman at Rustico Cooking Studio in NYC
It's been almost 2 years since we closed our cooking school on West 39th street in Manhattan after 15 years to focus on our cooking tours to Italy. It was an a beautiful space that we, and hopefully many of you reading this post, w...
1 minute read
The Power of Suggestion and... Cabbage Bundles!
Funny how sometimes all it takes is hearing someone talk about an ingredient to make you crave that very ingredient, and crave it NOW. That's what happened to me today when I was on the phone with my friend Pino Golia in Italy. Pino is t...
3 minute read
Discovering Parsnip
I was looking through old cookbooks last night and happened upon one that I had bought in the early 90s, written by a Singaporean chef who owned a restaurant in San Francisco. Tucked away by...
3 minute read
What to Do When You Want to Lose a Few Pounds... AKA Our Weight Loss Strategy
I admit it: we returned from Italy a bit heavier than when we left. Those of you who know us from our cooking classes in NYC or from our culinary tours in Italy know that we lost a lot of weight over the years: Dino used to weigh 65 p...
10 minute read
Our Four Culinary Tours in a Nutshell
All our tours, no matter the regions we visit, are a way to enjoy Italy through a culinary lens. The only prerequisite is a love of food and an appetite for pleasure (and maybe some pants with an elastic waistand). Group size varies ...
3 minute read
Bread Gnocchi, aka one of my favorite cool weather comfort foods
Have you ever heard of canederli? Chances are you haven’t. Even most Italians are unfamiliar with these plump, herb-flecked bread gnocchi. Hailing from the northern region of Trentino-Alto Adige ...
3 minute read
Two for One: Tagliatelle with Beef Braciole
Let me preface this blog post by saying that I did not grow up eating braciole. My family is from Milan in northern Italy and braciole are southern Italian: a hearty braise of stuffed beef cooke...
3 minute read
For the love of beets
I grew up in a mostly beetless family. My maternal grandmother Lalla, a Romanian Jew, made borscht for many Friday lunches at her home in Milan, but truth be told, I never ate it: the bits of boiled beef floating in the soup put me off. ...
4 minute read
Turn a meat lover into a fish lover with branzino
When I first met my husband Dino, it was obvious he loved meat. Whether it was his father’s roasted leg of lamb with rosemary, his mother’s Haitian pork griot, my mother’s veal roast with white wine, or my father’s grilled T-bon...
3 minute read