Quote of the day

As you can guess from my name, I am of Italian heritage. My mother was born in Italy and moved to Montreal when she was 9, my father's parents came from Italy after WWI. Food has been an important part of my life. When I travel to Montreal, almost all our activities revolve around food. When I come home from a long day at work, I always have the energy to cook dinner. I even bake my own bread.
And yes, I love eating out, provided that the restaurant offers something new and interesting. What I hate is Italian restaurants. It's always the same fare and it is usually done badly ... you could say that I know Italian food and thus am very fussy when eating pasta or other Italian staples. The only establishments where I've eaten really great Italian food in the US, are at Mario Batali's three operations in Manhattan, Babbo, Esca, and Lupa. So when I heard about Bill Buford's new book, Heat, I just had to get it. Buford, a journalist at the New Yorker, decides to become a kitchen slave at Babbo. He quickly becomes a cooking junky. After working his way up to line cook, he leaves Babbo, and following Batali's footsteps, travels to Italy where he learns pasta and then butchery.

Here he is meeting the world famous butcher, Dario Cecchini, his future teacher:

I thought: So this is Dario Cecchini, and he spotted me spotting him. He turned off the music and commanded silence. The place went quiet. "Nel mezzo del cammin de nostra vita," he boomed, "mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita." Even I recognized that this was the beginning of Dante's Inferno. "Midway through the road of life, I found myself in a dark wood, on a lost road." Midway through my life, indeed. Is that where I was? Lost, on the road to Hell?