Real Sicilian comfort food. Pasta with dry fava beans to which I added dandelions. Healthy and delicious.

 Before going to the caffe' for a cornetto and cappuccino, when in Sicily I take advantage of the great selection of foods or alimentari. I made what I call a pe breakfast of healthy antioxidant food. All this goodness atop delicious bread. Just delicious.

Have a delicious weekend

Sicilian panini

These are the real thing. They are full of flavor, rich in aroma and in their simplicity recall the complex history of the island. These are naturally made at home after buying the ingredients at the appropriate stores. Amazing.

Mafaldina con mortadella di Bologna

Panino alle olive con salame ungherese

Muffulettu cunzatu

Mafaldina con panelle di ceci

Something for your Sunday brunch. Enjoy your Sunday.

Photos to brighten up your Monday

Remember that eating well is an absolute necessity. You must live to eat not eat to live. Buon appetito.

Cooked at home

Cooked at home

From Ristorante Peccati di Gola, Castellammare del Golfo, Italy

I'm not rubbing it in, but.....

For some inexplicable reason the senses are enhanced in Sicily where colors are more saturated, aromas are stronger, the noises more boisterous  and food is tastier. Many foreign writers from Anatole France to Wolfgang Goethe have commented on this phenomenon. Sicily is Italy looked through a magnifying glass. Barzini in his book The Italians comments at length about this.
These make up just a small sample of the delight that await a visitor. The dish is my usual light lunch when I am alone. All  fresh local products.

Tuna salad

Something I whipped up last night for a light supper. Fresh carrots and celery, great canned Italian tuna fish in olive oil, fresh lemon juice, real olive oil and a few local olives thrown in for good measure, Fantastic.

GMO's, you must be kidding

These broccoletti siciliani as they are called in the mainland are known with a variety of names here in Trinaacria. When I was growing up we hardly saw any in me are and because we called cailiflower broccoli, when we arrived in the States we used to call them broccoli andi boia or Andy Boy Broccoli. to distinguish them from plain broccoli or cauliflower. This sounds like a circular sentence if there's such a grammatical phrase. My  mother still calls them this way.

I am about to cook this for a late lunch. Just boiled in slightly sea salted waterr and then served with a little garlic  and olive oil. Che delizia della natura.

Sarde alla beccafico

This is not a dish for those who are not too kitchen savvy but it's absolutely delicious. It's a dish made with sardines that have been cleaned of their bones and skins, marinated in vinegar and some sugar as to give their agrodolce or sweet and sour taste, breaded in flour and finally sauteed in olive oil and red onions. The sweet and sour type of cooking came to the Mediterranean region from the far east eons ago and it appears in many of it's cuisines. I must confess that I saw these in the take out food section of the Spaccio Alimentare super market here in Castellammare and bought a nice amount. Delicious. This is a uniquely Sicilian dish, by the way.
It must be noted that sardines and other fish known as pesci azzurri or blue fish have all sort of healthful benefits especially on the cardiovascular system,

Minestra

Olympus E PL-2

This is a seasonally appropriate minestra or thick soup and in this case it's a minestra di fave e burragini or fava beans and borrage soup. It's very simply yet tasty and hearty. Nice on a fall day.