Pomato Revival

  My mom hates her KitchenAid Mixer. She’s been trying to pawn it off on me for the last decade. She’s more of a get-out-the-whisk kind of woman. A stop-complaining-and-knead-it-by-hand mom whose daughter won’t toughen up to dominate a simple bread dough. I’ve tried. Really. There’s something about throwing all your weight into the dough […]

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  Last month’s spaghetti with clams recipe got me thinking about neighbors. When I was growing up in Brooklyn, we had the kind of neighbors you’d share a stoop with on summer nights, killing time waiting for the ice cream truck to pass (at least, that’s what I was waiting for). Our stoop mates were […]

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(c) Andrea Sparacio   My favorite dish on the menu at Joe and Ian’s beer pairing dinners for Slice was a Persian Soup-e jow inspired by our friend Saba. His mom Zarrin would make huge batches of this soup for household gatherings when he was growing up. I got to hang around while he and […]

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(c) Andrea Sparacio This weekend was something else. Some of you know that when I’m not blogging, I’m a book geek. By day, I’m a book editor. By night/ weekend/ any-other-free-second, I’m a co-publisher of Slice, a literary magazine I started in 2007 with my dear friend Celia. As a non-profit magazine on a shoestring […]

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  I’ve talked about clams before. I like them. A lot. Okay, more than a lot. It’s a problem. Sometimes, they’re all I can think about. When I get it in my mind that I want them, nothing else will suffice. It’s like a nervous tick. I’m sure it has to do with my childhood. […]

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  A kid’s universe really unfolds when they start to see things in the world that they’d previously only known at home. Like the first time I’d heard people speaking Sicilian who weren’t my family or neighbors. Obviously, I knew we hadn’t invented the language. I understood that millions of immigrants brought it with them […]

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It’s September, and although it’s still pushing 80 degrees outside, we’re eager for fall in our house. Let’s just ignore the weather, shall we? There’s so much more to get excited about. For one thing, football is here. While I don’t care about the sport at all, I love the cozy feeling that a football […]

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The figs keep flowing in my parents’ New Jersey garden, and this week we finally went to the source. Joe had never been fig picking, and my dear, short parents (Mom is 4′ 10″ and Dad is 5′ 3″) had a surplus of overripe figs on the tree that they just couldn’t reach. So it […]

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This is it, guys. Arguably the biggest day of the year in our family (or at least, it used to be). It’s Saturday in late August. Earlier in the week, Dad packed the station wagon with bushels of plum tomatoes from Brooklyn. Blankets were outstretched on the basement floor. The bushels were let loose and […]

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It’s that glorious time of year….figs have arrived! My parents just picked these plump babies from their tree in New Jersey. We wait all year for them, then spend August and September eating figs full-time. I feel a subtle obligation to make something fancy and then share my prolific recipe. But honestly, we never let […]

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