Love and food go together.......

Joe and I became engaged over a wonderful 7 course Chef tasting/wine pairing dinner at the "Radius" in Boston on New Year's Eve 2012. This was the perfect way for us to share the moment for a few reasons: Radius is just an incredible restaurant that we go to repeatedly for their unparalleled tasting menu ( changes frequently). Their Sommelier also pairs wonderful wines with each course and actually gives you a brief education about why it was chosen. The atmosphere is romantic, chique, contemporary.  You can feel apart from the rest of the customers in most parts of the restaurant.  The room is circular, hence the name. It allows for enough intimacy for a wedding proposal! ( with the exception of our waiter who arrived the second I opened the ring box!). I really can't think of a better way for us to have started our journey through life together.

Cooking has been a favorite pastime for us.  We enjoy being in the kitchen together. We can work on one meal and split the job.  Often I will be Joe's sous chef.  Sometimes I need him to be sous chef because he is wonderful with a knife and his cuts are even and perfect, mine are not! Consistency in the size and smoothness of food allows for even cooking, which is essential to making the finished product yummy vs. not so yummy with some cooked and uncooked parts. In this photo, Joe made a deconstructed tuna Nicoise dish. I will follow up with the details after I tell you a little bit about us.

I started cooking as a very young child, around the age of 4. My mother is  the queen of sicilian cuisine! I grew up in an old-world cooking kitchen, with a grandmother who spent the summers canning olives in the backyard and laying salted tomatoes in the sun to dry on door screens.  I knew how to cook intuitively.  I watched my mother cook everyday but seemed to understand what she was going to do next without ever formally learning.  It all made sense to me...you start with oil, garlic and onions for most things and you never let your focus down or you will burn it all. Then you add whatever else might be yummy. Most times, it was eggplant, broccoli, peppers, zucchini, fennel, olives, wine, vinegar, etc... by tasting the food, I knew what tasted good with what.

In our kitchen, we try to serve up healthy meals. Joe has two daughters ages 8 and 11.  Luckily, they get excited over our food and think it's pretty to look at too! I can't say they would try anything we give them, but the nicer it looks, the more likely they are to consider it.  We are teaching them to cook and are hoping that they will grow to appreciate the joy the cooking healthy, beautiful food.

 Over the years  I have experimented more and more with non-conventional pairings of ingredients. I have never been afraid to try weird food. I still mostly cook in an Italian/Sicilian style, but have experimented with other European cuisines and tastes from the Asian continent. I also have a tremendous Venezuelan influence from my mother who moved there from Italy when she was a young girl. The spices, the wonderful slow cooked meats, corn flour breads and beans are also integrated into my personal style of cooking. With a mix of cultural cooking styles, it is important to know how they can be mixed together to create delicious meals.  I am more conscious now of how things are paired on a plate. I take texture, color, taste, and temperature into consideration.

A good example of this is Joe's dish above. This is a fennel crusted tuna which is lightly seared. Cool in the middle, warm on the outside. It is plated on a bed of baby arugula and the tuna and greens are drizzled with a lemon/pepper vinaigrette.  Haricot Verts ( french green beans) which have been blanched, are topped with a poached egg. A refreshing cucumber sorbet accompanies the dish.  Here you have a mix of temperatures, textures ( runny egg yolk on crisp beans), flavors of the cucumber and fennel together and then the cold cucumber sorbet to refresh the palette and create contrast.