#Sicilian Cuisine

[goofygoldengirl]

Sicilian cuisine|la cucina Siciliana pt 1

[whatthekale]

Side of penne pasta

White pizza

House salad

Olive oil & red wine vinegar & bread baked in-house

Gnocci

Sicilian sub

This cute guy

And me. Another cute guy 😚💕 😂

[goinsidesicil]

Sicilian Cuisine Cooking Classes | Goinsidesicily.Com

Delve into Sicilian cuisine with our specialized cooking classes. Discover the secrets of traditional dishes and enhance your culinary repertoire with authentic recipes. Sign up for a class at Go Inside Sicily.

Sicilian Cuisine Cooking Classes

[tancamera]

Spinach and Sun-Dried Tomato Pasta Recipe I created this simple Sicilian-style pasta dish one day when trying to use up some sun-dried tomatoes.

[ie9game]

Sweet and Sour Sicilian Tuna Recipe Sweet and sour pan sauce and caramelized onions are poured over seared tuna steaks.

[radhamilton]

Braccialoni Recipe This is a Sicilian rolled and stuffed roast, simmered in spaghetti sauce. The name as I heard it is pronounced broo-zha-lee-nee. This can also be made in a large slow cooker.

[dolcevalletta]

Taste the Delight of Maltese Pastries at Dolce Valletta!

Indulging in the flavors of a foreign land is an experience that transports us to different cultures and traditions. If you find yourself in Georgia craving a taste of the Mediterranean, look no further than Dolce Valletta – the Mediterranean Bakery in New York. This hidden gem brings the authentic flavors of Malta, allowing you to savor the mouthwatering delights of Maltese pastries. From the famous Maltese honey rings to the beloved Malta pastizzi, Dolce Valletta Bakery is a haven for pastry enthusiasts.

Maltese Honey Rings

One of the highlights of Dolce Valletta Bakery's menu is the exquisite Maltese honey rings. These delectable pastries boast a flaky, golden exterior, encasing a luscious filling of honey and spices. The combination of sweetness and aromatic flavors creates a harmonious taste that is simply irresistible. Biting into a Maltese honey ring is like experiencing a burst of Mediterranean sunshine in every mouthful.

Malta Pastizzi

Another must-try delicacy at Dolce Valletta is the Malta pastizzi. These savory pastries are a true Maltese culinary delight. Imagine a light, buttery pastry shell filled with a choice of delectable fillings such as ricotta cheese, peas, or spiced minced beef. Each bite offers a perfect balance of textures and flavors, leaving you craving for more. The Dolce Valletta skillfully captures the essence of this traditional Maltese pastry, ensuring an authentic experience for every customer.

If you're seeking a culinary adventure and a taste of Malta in Georgia, Dolce Valletta is the place to be. Indulge in the mouthwatering Maltese honey rings and pastizzi valletta, expertly crafted to perfection. Let the flavors transport you to the sun-kissed shores of Malta as you savor the delightful pastries. With every bite, you'll experience the rich culinary heritage and warm hospitality that the Maltese culture is renowned for. Visit Dolce Valletta bakery Georgia, and embark on a gastronomic journey that will leave you craving more of these authentic Mediterranean delights.

[jewsingermany]

A Celebration Canceled: Valentina Marcenaro’s Fight to Keep Jewish Culture Alive in Dresden

When Food Becomes a Political Battlefield

Can something as simple as food become a flashpoint in global conflicts? Is it now impossible to enjoy a serving of gefilte fish or hummus without invoking political strife? For Valentina Marcenaro, the answer is painfully clear. The chairwoman of Jewish Week Dresden, Marcenaro was forced to cancel the annual Gefilte Festival, a Jewish culinary celebration, due to mounting fears among participants. Scheduled for early November, the event was meant to showcase Jewish cuisine and culture, but growing insecurity made it impossible to proceed.

"Some of those who had been scheduled to take part in the festival were too scared to identify themselves as Jewish," Marcenaro explains. Despite her deep desire to go ahead with the event, she recognized that fear is not something to argue against but to respect. The current climate in Germany, particularly in Dresden, made it impossible for people to celebrate their own heritage without fear of reprisal.

A Life Woven with Jewish Culture

Marcenaro, 50, considers herself more culturally Jewish than religiously observant. Born in Italy, she moved to Dresden in 1998 with the intention of staying briefly to learn German—but love and life kept her rooted in the city. Her passion for Jewish culture has shaped her career, particularly in her role with Jewish Week Dresden, where she strives to teach people about the everyday aspects of Jewish life beyond its tragic history.

For Marcenaro, food is an essential tool for cultural understanding. "The best recipe against anti-Semitism," she believes, "is teaching people how to cook Jewish food." This sentiment has driven her mission to share Jewish cuisine with the broader German community, fostering connections through shared meals and traditions. But the cancellation of the Gefilte Festival has cast a shadow over her efforts.

A City’s Complicated Jewish History

Dresden’s Jewish community numbers around 700, with many members having arrived from Russia and Ukraine following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The city’s Jewish history is one of resilience, but also hardship. In East Germany, the Nazi terror was followed by communist-era anti-Semitism, leaving only a few hundred Jews in the region by the late 1980s. Today, Dresden remains a place where Jewish identity is often met with hesitation, if not outright hostility.

"Germans are rather inhibited when it comes to all things Jewish," Marcenaro observes. To many, Jewish identity is a mirror reflecting their own feelings of historical guilt rather than a vibrant, living culture. Through her work, she aims to change that by integrating Jewish traditions into everyday life—one meal at a time.

When Cuisine Becomes Controversial

The idea of cultural exchange through food is beautiful but, as Marcenaro has learned, also naive in today’s climate. Across the world, particularly in the United States, debates over food have turned political. The so-called "hummus wars" have reemerged, with accusations that Israel has "stolen" Lebanese and Palestinian dishes. Social media is flooded with calls to boycott Israeli restaurants, met with retaliatory smear campaigns against Palestinian-owned establishments. The kitchen, once a space of comfort and unity, has become yet another battlefield.

Marcenaro rejects these divisive narratives. "It’s nonsense," she says. "What others see as cultural appropriation, I see as diversity." Jewish cuisine, she explains, has always been a melting pot, reflecting the influences of the many places where Jewish communities have lived. From Ukrainian borscht to Sicilian Caponata, Jewish food is a testament to cultural fusion rather than theft.

Holding Onto Hope

On Marcenaro’s desk sits a porcelain pomegranate, a gift from Israel. The fruit, rich with seeds, is a symbol of fertility and abundance in Jewish culture and serves as the logo of the organization behind the Gefilte Festival. Though the festival has been canceled this year, Marcenaro refuses to give up hope.

For her, the act of sharing Jewish food remains an act of resilience. It is a way to ensure that Jewish culture is not only remembered but lived. Even in the face of fear, new beginnings are always possible.

[bookish-bogwitch]

Boyo in the Old Country, Part 2

Part 1

Today Baz explored some of the historic towns of southeast Sicily. First he stopped in Modica, where some of the first chocolate was made in Europe after cocoa beans started being imported from the New World. The town is still full of chocolate factories, and Baz enjoyed a literal melted candy bar before checking out the town.

Baz was bummed that the Warhol exhibit didn’t open until later in the day, but the Baroque cathedral was an acceptable substitute.

Next Baz visited Scicli, where people have been digging caves out of the soft volcanic rock for centuries, and continued living in them until the 1950s. He visited a museum maintained by a man whose grandfather grew up in one. No numpties in were in evidence.

Baz below the caves.

After all that educational sightseeing, Baz had earned an afternoon at the beautiful Donnalucata beach.

The water was perfect.

Baz returned that night to Ragusa Ibla, where he grudgingly rode the Trenino Barocco (“baroque little train”) along with fifty of his newest, drunkest best friends. He secretly loved it but refused to be photographed on it.

Baz’s view from the trenino:

Cqoming up in Part 3: Baz experiences some unique Sicilian weather, explores local cuisine, and finds a new life motto.

Part 4

[grecoromanyaoi]

i saw a recipe video of sicilian couscous and ik there has obv been massive tunisian n generally nordaf influence on sicilian culture n cuisine (n vice versa) but i. truly cannot comprehend how someone can transform the couscous i know into its sicilian version. like did someone look at the couscous im used to and go 'ok but what if we did literally every single thing differently' like how did that evolve

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Grist:

Twelve years ago, Vincenzo Amata stumbled upon a plot of flowering trees while wandering the Sicilian countryside. Before long, he found a farmer tending the grove. As Amata asked one question after another, the stranger tugged a mango off a tree and offered it to him. He didn’t know it, but his first bite of the bright yellow fruit would change his life. 

“I can still taste it to this day,” Amata said in Italian. The burst of sweet flavor, coupled with its smooth, velvety texture, was unlike anything he’d ever tasted. “I got chills, goosebumps all over my skin, it was so delicious.”

Six months later, Amata left a lifelong career as a clothing salesman to launch his own mango farm. It put him “very out of my element. But I just fell in love with it.” Amata has since grown six popular varieties of the tropical fruit on PapaMango, his 17-acre grove in Messina on the northeastern coast of Sicily. 

As climate change complicates growing the region’s historically emblematic crops, like olives and lemons, Amata is seeing more farmers follow the same path. They are all “already starting to change from lemons to mangoes,” he said.

Rising temperatures, shifting precipitation, and emerging diseases are among the mélange of climate impacts changing what’s grown in breadbaskets around the world. As warming brings significant challenges to agriculture, growers are abandoning crops with dwindling yields or those threatened by pathogens and pests for those better suited to changing local conditions. Producers in pockets of Latin America and Asia are increasingly turning to highly-adaptable and stress-tolerant varieties of quinoa instead of climate-sensitive crops such as coffee. Corn farmers across the Midwest are experimenting with drought-resistant millets, while growers in Sub-Saharan Africa are embracing varieties of sorghum and legumes that require less water than other grains.  

This trend will only accelerate, radically redefining what different regions are known for. Before the end of the century, parts of the United Kingdom, to offer one example, may be forced to swap top commodities such as oats and wheat for everything from soy to chickpeas to grapes.

The mango, that beloved linchpin of cuisines and cultures around the world, typifies this trend. This juicy, flavorful fruit, which outsells most of its tropical counterparts, is grown in some 120 countries. But many leading producers face higher temperatures, greater aridity, and other challenges to raising a crop that requires very specific conditions to thrive. As it grows more popular — global production is expected to reach 65 million metric tons next year — production is beginning to shift to new areas, making the mango a fitting emblem of yet another way climate change is reshaping global agriculture.

[goofygoldengirl]

Sicilian cuisine| la cucina siciliana pt 2

[freezing-kaiju]

New Italian Marcille evidence: milt (well, lattume in italian) is a specifically Sicilian dish, implying she's either from Fantasy Sicily specificaly or her family's from the area. It's a pasta topping over there.

(It's also in Korean, Romanian, Japanese, Indonesian, Russian, and Bri'ish cuisine too. I'd like to see if there's any evidence for Russian or Indonesian Marcille...)

[mariacallous]

Some years ago, while celebrating Hanukkah at the home of Moroccan Jewish friends, I got my first taste of sfenj. I knew (and loved) the Israeli jelly donuts called sufganiyot, but sfenj, while also donuts, were something different. The yeasted dough was familiarly puffy, but instead of being shaped into a plump round, it was formed into rings. And instead of sufganiyot’s jam filling and snowy cap of powdered sugar, my friends served sfenj two ways: dipped into granulated sugar or generously drizzled with an orange-blossom-scented syrup. Naturally, I was smitten with this new-to-me expression of Hanukkah frying.

A few years after tasting sfenj, I learned about sfingi — another doughy fritter, which hails from Southern Italy and can be found in many Italian American bakeries. The term “sfingi” refers to a couple of different pastries, including simple, free-form donut holes rolled in sugar, and a more elaborate fried round that gets topped or filled with sweetened ricotta (think: cannoli filling) and sweet Amarena cherries. In Naples, the fritters are sometimes called zeppole, but in Sicily and other parts of Southern Italy, they usually go by sfingi or, to further confuse matters, sfinci. 

Some Italian families make sfingi to celebrate Christmas, but they really shine on March 19th, or Saint Joseph’s Day, which honors the Virgin Mary’s husband. On that day, many Italians — particularly Sicilians who consider St. Joseph to be their patron saint — pull out all the stops to throw a feast that often ends with sfingi and other decadent sweets. 

Sfenj. Sfingi. Two donuts with remarkably similar names. There had to be a connection, right? As it turns out, the North African Hanukkah treat and Southern Italy’s feast-day fritter likely do share a common ancestor. The name for both pastries comes from the Arabic word “isfenj,” which translates to“sponge,” and refers to the way dough soaks up oil while it fries, and also to its bouncy texture. (Interestingly, sufganiyot also means sponge in Hebrew, suggesting a linguistic connection between all three donuts.)

This connection also hints to the influence that Arabic cuisine had across both North Africa and Southern Italy. According to some historical accounts, sfenj originated in Moorish Spain in the Middle Ages. (The era and region similarly gave rise to the traditional Sephardic Hanukkah dish, bimuelos — small, sweet fritters that are often round in shape.) From there, the dish spread to places where Moorish traders traveled, including the Maghreb – North African countries that border the Mediterranean Sea.

Today, sfenj are popular across Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya. In Morocco, they were traditionally prepared by sufnajeen — bakers dedicated to the craft of making sfenj. They were (and are) considered an everyday breakfast pastry or street food snack, and are served alongside coffee or mint tea. 

Jewish Moroccans, meanwhile, adopted the fritter for Hanukkah, when Jews traditionally eat foods fried in oil. They introduced sfenj to Israel when they immigrated there in the mid-20th century. In Israel, however, sfenj never caught on in quite the same way as sufganiyot. Moroccan Jewish families still make them, and they’re available in food markets nationwide, but you are not likely to see piles of sfenj in bakery windows across Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, they way you will sufganiyot.

Sfingi, meanwhile, hail from Palermo, Sicily’s capital. The recipe for the ricotta-cream-filled version was invented by nuns, who adapted the dessert from Arabic cuisine and dedicated it to St. Joseph. In the weeks leading up to St. Joseph’s Day, you will find sfingi di San Giuseppe – in all of its fried, cream-filled glory — in bakeries across Southern Italy, and in communities across the world that are home to Southern Italian communities.

I like to joke that the reason Hanukkah lasts for eight nights is so home cooks can dedicate each night to a different fried treat. From potato latkes and sufganiyot to bimuelos and sfenj, there is no shortage of Hanukkah dishes to celebrate. But this year, if my patience for frying (and my appetite for fried foods!) hold, I might just add sfingi to my Hanukkah menu.

[hoeratius]

Sicilian cuisine save me... save me Sicilian cuisine...

[countriesgame]

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Info: Sicily is not a country. The blog is open to non-country polls now. In this case, it refers to the region in Italy.