My father-in-law, Victor perhaps had too much chicken as a child, because he will happily go the rest of his life without eating it.  It is the opposite for Marcella, who loves it, but out of deference to Victor, rarely makes it in her own home.  We recently had them over to celebrate her 88^th birthday, and chicken was what we served my famous mother-in-law, Marcella Hazan. Out of deference to Victor we made a primo of pasta, of which he happily consumed multiple portions.

The lunch kicks off a celebratory week.  Giuliano’s new book, HAZAN FAMILY FAVORITES has just been published and he will be a guest on THE TODAY SHOW, on May 3^rd.  He usually appears between 9:00 & 10:00 am.  Our daughters, to keep their father’s head on straight, call him the filler; however, he was bumped only once, and that was for Michelle Obama’s inaugural gown.  On the Today Show he will be making recipes from the new book, a baklava recipe and Mahshi (stuffed cabbage). A recipe handed down from Giuliano’s grandmother.  We are very proud of this book.  Thanks to his publisher, Stewart Tabori & Chang, it is beautifully done and is almost a coffee table book.  It is also eminently readable and useable.  These are the foods Giuliano remembers from childhood and the ones we eat now.  They are as varied as they are delicious. On Thursday May 10th, just in time for Mother’s Day, will be purchase on Amazon day.  So… if you are thinking of getting the book that way, we would greatly appreciate it if you would buy it then.  Thanks.

This grilled marinated Chicken Breast recipe is in the new book.  It is a casual dish that solves the problem of dried out chicken.  Marinating it with lemon starts the cooking process and actually reduces the time on the grill.  The breasts come out succulent and flavorful, wonderful for all of us in the rest of the family who enjoy chicken.  It is also gluten free and good for those who are trying to cut red meat from their diet.  It is a terrific dish for the upcoming barbecueing season!

Cooking on salt blocks is very fashionable.  You can purchase salt bricks from around the world, from the Himalayas to Hawaii.  They can be beautiful and cooking on them perfectly seasons whatever food product you wish to put on them.

Recently we received some salt blocks from Cervia, Italy.  Known as the “sweet salt of the popes” this salt is harvested from salt flats in existence since Etruscan times and at one time, one of the salt flats was reserved exclusively for the Papal table. I must admit to looking at my husband, Giuliano Hazan, a bit askance, what were we going to do with a big box of salt blocks?  He then got a gleam in his eye that always means something delicious is cooking.

Giuliano decided that for lunch we should have beef tenderloin on a salt brick.  He superheated the brick and brought it out to the top of our counter.  After only a few minutes we had the most delectable, mouth watering, perfectly seasoned meat.  He finished it with a drizzle of olive oil and pepper.  It smelled and looked so good that I did not even wait until he put it on the table before tasting it.  It was an easy masterpiece.

Cleaning the salt brick was easy.  We just let it cool and scraped the surface with a dinner knife.  I’m looking forward to more fun as we try scallops, eggs, and vegetables on it. I figure when the salt block wears down to an unusable level, I can always put it in the bath to sooth my aches.

Sometimes it is nice to change even the most traditional dishes, and that’s how these truffle cheese scrambled eggs were created. Although we adore our girls, there are times when it is nice just to be the two of us.  We were reminded of this again when both girls had sleepovers at friend’s homes.  We woke up late on a Sunday morning and didn’t have to rush anywhere.  We were able to enjoy each other’s company like the, still in love, married couple that we are.  I made these easy eggs with Sottocenere truffle cheese and Giuliano pronounced them delicious.

Recently, at one of our hands-on Italian cooking classes in our home in Sarasota Florida, we served some Sottocenere – Italian truffle cheese – during the break we take to taste interesting Italian cheeses and meats.  Sottocenere literally means “under cinders”.  I don’t know why, but Giuliano hates it when I call it “under soot”, he prefers “under ash”.  It is a soft cow’s milk cheese from the Veneto region and has a mild creamy flavor.  The rind is covered in grey ash that not only acts as a preservative but also adds subtle flavors. The magnificence of this cheese is in the black truffles that fleck it throughout.  Served at room temperature, the aroma is elegant and intoxicating.

We were lucky enough to have some of the cheese leftover after the class so I decided to use it to enrich our romantic Sunday morning eggs.  We like to use relatively few ingredients but the best possible.  I used dried oregano from Sicily.  The aroma was fabulous. I used Safest Choice pasteurized eggs.  As many of you know, I’ve been diagnosed with stage III colorectal cancer.  While having a Daliesque roller coaster experience of good days and bad, I have to be particularly careful of not getting sick so pasteurized eggs, which eliminate the fear of salmonella, are an easy choice for us. Giuliano is quite impressed with them and (full disclosure) is a spokesperson for Safest Choice.

Modernist Cuisine is part of the attack on many fronts on the values of simple family cooking that better than other kind deserves to be called cooking.

“The business of a healthy eye is to see everything that is visible, not to demand no color but green.”Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations” (This quote was posted on Marcella’s page, here is her response).

In case you missed the intent of the Marcus Aurelius quote, it was a barb that was lofted from France in my direction. But, pace, I have grown old, but not color blind. El Bulli and Modernist Cuisine may be examples of ingenuity and engineering but they are not different colors of cooking because they are only about recreational eating, they are not about Cooking. Cooking is the institution that fosters the development and endurance of familial bonds in many of our worlds. In my world, the Mediterranean, it is based on simple meals freshly cooked with fresh ingredients, it is based on the sincerity of the home cook who through custom and experience is intuitively in tune with her craft. Why does Cooking needto be defended? Isn’t it only about food? It isn’t only about food the way love isn’t only about sex.

It is about the societal bonds that made us human. And it needs to be defended because the home cook’s grasp of her craft has been loosened and corrupted by the culture of celebrity chefs, by the homage paid to the technical exploits of such as Ferran and Myhrvold, and because for those that Frank Bruni, the Times critic, has recently described as “the growing ranks of the restaurant-obsessed” home is not the place where you prefer to eat.

Most of the meals Americans are now having, whether they come in the form of deli or Chinese take-out, or tacos and burgers, or packaged supermarket meals, or what the most recently canonized chef is serving at his restaurant, are no longer prepared fresh at home by a member of the family. It is probably too late for any kind of defense. The only thing we can do about it is talk. Futility.

Colman Andrews, a food writer of grace and erudition, has recently published a biography of Ferran Adrià, the Catalan chef. We admire the breadth of Colman’s research for this book, but we cannot agree with the tributes he bestows on Ferran, whom he compares to Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Charlie Parker. A more apt comparison would be to Charlie Chaplin, or to Houdini. Ferran’s routines and slights of hand can astonish, entertain or even please, although some of the culinary jokes fall flat. Colman cites a blogger who describes a dish of sea anemones and rabbit brains as being “Vile. Vomitous. Nightmare”. It is curious too that Ferran’s inventions have no space for meat, outside of offal, they do not agree with wine, outside of a champagne produced by a client of the chef, and they do not require bread, which is banned from the table. We cannot conceive of a cuisine that springs from Latin roots being served without bread. The subtitle of the book describes Ferran as the man who reinvented food, which is an absurdity. Food, like language, is constantly evolving, but the act of cooking, which, like language, made us human, had its moment of creation long before Ferran made foam out of smoke.

Coleman says that Ferran wants us to eat with our brains. Better to eat for pleasure, and to experience the sensations that generate that pleasure, sensations of recognition and reassurance. Even a new dish from an unfamiliar cuisine can reach deeply buried sources of pleasure and in so doing trigger recognition, generating reassurance. That is what the joy of eating is about. For us, as for everyone, there are cuisines whose flavors do not find the way to those sources in us. Coleman says that Ferran is drawn to the concept of food as a language. In Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, a book published 24 years ago, Marcella wrote, “Cooking well is like the telling use of language: Expression must be vigorous, clear, concise. There can be no unnecessary ingredient or unnecessary step. A dish may be complex, but every component, every procedure, must count. …Do not arbitrarily shuffle the vocabulary of one cuisine with that of another to make your cooking (original). There is no more use for use for such a hybrid than there was for Esperanto.” If Ferran has a cooking language may we call it Ferranto? We don’t care to learn it.

CATCHING FIRE,  How cooking made us Human, by Richard Wrangham is rightly taking the food world by storm.  Well researched and documented, the bibliography alone is thirty pages long, it is also an engaging read.  The book itself begs to be read in a group format.  While reading, I kept wanting to discuss passages with the author or fellow readers.  Astonishingly, no other writer has previously advocated the importance of how cooking effected the nutritional quality of food; therefore, enabling human beings to evolve.

Not only does Dr. Wrangham detail the evolution of human kind in terms of our understanding of fire, he also gives historical examples throughout the book.  He takes on the trendy raw food community as well as the fast food chemically processed nation.  He argues that eating calories that are too easy to digest is now a bigger problem for many than getting enough food.  His is a clarion call to gain understanding of how food is actually processed in our systems.

Catching fire, is definitely a book that will be talked about.  It is a must for any foodies library.