STILL LIFE WITH BREAD & BUTTER (OR: EVEN MORE ABOUT THE DOLOMITES)

Still harping on my Bon Appétit story about the Dolomites. For some reason my pictures of the bread and butter at La Perla hotel's La Stüa de Michil in Corvara came out very arty. I wasn't sure what kind of arty so I asked my good and wise friend Val who is a fancy art dealer (I believe that's the term) what kind of pretty picture I was taking. Val writes: "That's a goddamn beautiful bread basket. Too sensual to be Dutch. I'm going to put your photo in with the Spanish painters of the 17th c., for its contrast of dark to light, its stagelit aura. Zubaran. Velasquez." So the Zubaran-Velasquez setting on my camera works!

MORE ABOUT THAT POLENTA

This is Rifugio Scotoni, the little mountainside hut I mentioned in my Dolomites story in this month's Bon Appétit, and this is the polenta at Scotoni, the best polenta in the world. If you are some other polenta, really it's time to pack it in, give up, go home and just be happy being cornmeal and get a job being a taco or at the bottom of an english muffin. This is the polenta elite and you don't have what it takes. And what it takes apparently is a lot of cheese. The cook here sees polenta as primarily a cheese delivery system. He takes three local cheeses—Fontina, Schiz and Dobbiaco—and folds them into the polenta and flips and turns it and keeps working the stuff until as, as I say in the story, he somehow manages to "elevate the humble polenta to a many-textured thing of complex, creamy, grainy, crisp-edged, gooey-but-sturdy wonder. The magic polenta sits next to a pork sausage, more German or Austrian than Italian, split down the middle and grilled—simple, salty, good. This is fortifying food that cries out for its own classification in the Michelin Guide: Worth Climbing a Mountain For."
(Whole story is HERE)

DOLOMITES (FINALLY)

My story about hiking up snowy mountain passes in search of perfect polenta and driving the rental car into walls of ice in the insanely beautiful Dolomites region of northern Italy is finally out in the March issue of Bon Appétit magazine. Check out the story HERE. Hope you like it.

HALL OF FAME OF PORK (II)

Savory smoked-pork strudel. Restaurant Pretzhof. Tulve, Alto Adige, Italy. 2/2/08.

before/after: italian dolomites edition

In & around Corvara and San Cassiano over the Brenner Pass from the Austrian border.
Beautiful mountains, exhilarating air, insane snowy roads, so much pork.
Next stop…Liverpool?

Sunday: to the Dolomites