Hello friends,

The tour wraps up today, but sometimes when you travel, there are glitches and unexpected opportunities. In my case, it's the announcement of a national train strike for two days here in Italy. Currently, I’m in Monopoli, a small seaside town in Puglia on the Adriatic. I was supposed to get a train to Rome this morning, but instead, I'm being driven to Bari where I will spend two nights exploring the town, then I'll take the train to Rome to fly home.

I’ve been to Bari before when I’ve done the same tour, but it’s usually a relatively brief visit — just enough time to walk along the seaside promenade and dip into the old town and have lunch. It will be fun to wander through the city with no agenda for a couple of days.

This past visit, our truly amazing guide to the city, Georgio, introduced us to a woman who lives in one of the characteristic tower homes. They are made up of three rooms stacked on top of each other, accessible by a staircase external to the home. The kitchen is on the ground floor and the door opens to the small lane in front of the house. There are no additional windows, so people live open to the neighborhood. She isn’t one of the usual pasta ladies you see in many videos making orecchiette, so it was a treat to see the way she made the regional pasta and how different it was from what we learned in our cooking class in Lecce.

If you’re interested in joining me on one of these trips, there is one spot left for my Parma tour in the fall.

The Week's Dining Highlights from the GF Team:

From Evan: Al Sorso Preferito — Yes, you can get Pasta Assesina here, but I particularly liked the antipasti, which included two different artichoke preps, seafood salad, grilled mushrooms, meatballs (with no sauce), and homemade potato chips. We also tried the traditional dish Tiedda made of rice, potatoes, and mussels. 

From Elina: I had a delicious breakfast at Lodge Bread on Robertson. Didn't get the shakshuka, which is delicious, or the ginormous cinnamon roll, but I devoured their big breakfast.

All the best,
Evan

Hélène Jawhara Piñer is a French-Spanish scholar whose focus is medieval history and the history of food. Her meticulously researched book, Matzah and Flour: Recipes from the History of the Sephardic Jews, is deeply researched and uses Inquisition court transcripts to tease out what Iberian Jews were eating at that time. Did you know that the matzo of the time was incredibly variable and soft like today's flatbreads?

There are food memoirs written by people in their 30s and 40s. Then there is My Life in Recipes by Joan Nathan. Joan is the cookbook author who changed the way Jewish food was seen in America way back in the 1970s. She’s spent a lifetime exploring, learning, then writing and teaching about Jewish food all over the globe. In Jewish American households, her books are as fundamental as Julia Child’s were for a certain generation of cooks. This is a weighty memoir from a woman who has lived — and still lives — a big life. 

During times of chaos and crisis, it helps to focus on things that ground us and have real meaning. That may look different for everyone. For writer and pastor Jeff Chu, his time as a seminarian on a twenty-one-acre farm changed his outlook and unearthed who he was at his core. How did his time nurturing a compost pile force him to understand the concepts of rediscovery and relearning? He shares his journey in a new book, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand.

When I was pondering what to bring to our table for Easter, my mind went to Italy. Perhaps you're familiar with Giuseppe Dell'Anno, the 2021 winner of The Great British Bake Off. Giuseppe brought the precision of his engineering skills to the tent and married them to a set of flavors and techniques embedded in him since childhood. We turn to him for descriptions of Italian Easter classics like Ciambellone di Pasqua and Pastiera.

Spring is in full swing at farmers markets, which means there are snap peas and fava beans everywhere you look. Chef Nestor Silva of Camélia, a French Japanese bistro in the Arts District in Downtown LA, shops for English peas and fava leaves that he'll incorporate into a new dish.