Back in Denver this week, at a hotel whose restaurant is Northern Italian. Panzano. Can’t wait to try it. I strolled in this morning hoping to get the strawberry fig muffin, but they were out. They were, however, making bread. Lots and lots of bread. Right behind the counter in plain sight. I so wanted to join them in the sunlit space. Made a lunch date there Friday.

The Italians say, “chi mangia bene, viva bene” (those who eat well, live well).

Executive Chef Elise Wiggins lives up to that motto and assures that Panzano offers the best in contemporary Northern Italian cuisine with a focus on sustainable, local, seasonal and organic ingredients in a spectacular urban setting with uncompromised service and award-winning wine list. Under Chef Elise, sustainable practices are the norm at Panzano with a heavy emphasis on recycling, composting and source reduction. Chef Elise even features a gluten-free menu for lunch and dinner alongside her outstanding selection of Northern Italian specialties.

Named Top 5 Denver Restaurant by The Rocky Mountain News, one of America’s Top Restaurants by Zagat Survey, given 4 Stars by 5280 Magazine and “To die for” in the Gabby Gourmet Restaurant Guide, Panzano is a little bit of Italy in the heart of Denver, just blocks from the Denver Performing Arts Complex, the Colorado Convention Center, all the major hotels and the 16th Street Mall.

Centrally located, Panzano is the perfect spot to begin or end an evening at the theater, host a business meeting or celebrate a special occasion. The creative menu showcases the best that Colorado has to offer for breakfast, lunch, dinner and weekend brunch.

“Chi mangia bene, viva bene.” Eat well and live well at Panzano.

I’ve been eating lots of great apples this fall, mostly thanks to my friend Ray, who brings them back from the farms he visits. Last week I saw some “local apples ” at the supermarket and bought a few, thinking I’d make Jewish apple bread some weeknight. Instead, the work week got the best of me and I found myself with an extra hour on a Sunday morning and a desire to try something new.

Enter Biba Caggiano, and her recipe for torta di mele e mandorle from Masuelli trattoria in Milano, where Signora Masuelli “prepares the daily menu according to what she finds in the market in the morning”. Lisetta prepared the cake according to what she found in her cupboard, which unfortunately included almond only in its ‘extract’ form. Drat. I did have the apples, though, and the Amaretti di Saronno – little round almond cookies – the recipe called for, as well as the basics (butter, flour, eggs). I could substitute the almonds with pine nuts, right? Frangelico and Amaretto are similar, no?

It worked. Don’t ask me how. I pretty much followed the proportions of the published recipe, but with different ingredients, leaving out the lemon zest and cold espresso. Here’s what I did, and how it turned out.

Torta di mele e pignoli

4 oz. toasted pine nuts

6 large apples, peeled and diced

3/4 cup sugar

1/4 pound of butter, at room temp, cut into pieces

4 large eggs

about 10 pairs Amaretti di Saronno cookies

1 1/2 cups unbleached flour

1/2 cup almond flour

pinch of salt

1/4 cup Frangelico (hazlenut liquor)

about 2 tablespoons of honey

Blend the butter, sugar and eggs in a food processor. Add the amaretti, flour and salt, and pulse until blended. Add the Frangelico and honey to finish the batter.

Add the pine nuts and the batter to the bowl of diced apples, and pour the mixture into two buttered 10-inch cake pans. Smooth out the top with a spatula and make sure everything settles into the pan.

Bake at 400 degrees for about 45 minutes, until the tops are brown and a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

The cake is decidedly delicious, mostly apples, with just enough batter to bind them together. It remains a bit too dense and sweet for my tastes. Next time I’d cut down on the sugar and ask around for something to lighten up the batter. Other torta di mele recipes I saw used yeast … maybe I’ll try Marcella Hazan’s recipe next time around?

Found myself in another moment where I seek to eat with as little effort as possible. Fresh mint? Yes. Whole milk ricotta? Check. Blueberry honey? Check. Just a wee bit to round out the flavor. It was a delicious dinner. Seriously. I really like its levity. I imagine it would work well with any fresh herb. What more can I say?

Confessions of an Italophile foodie: I’ve ingested nothing Italian today. Started the day with yoga and lost track of time; ate a Luna bar on the run. Had peanut butter and jelly for lunch, with a mystery apple, plucked from an orchard somewhere in Massachusetts, or Virginia, or wherever else my neighbor Ray picked them up in his travels. Taught Spin tonight and rode home with lights, reminiscing about my partnered past, when dinners were shared along with the news of the day. Uninspired to cook anything requiring effort, I fried an egg and ate it with homemade challah. TMI? Perhaps. A few of you have been asking why the posts have been fewer in recent months.

Reconnected tonight with my longtime friend Francis, who’s been renovating a house in Pittsburgh for far too long. A few hours after some contractors found dog bones in a crawl space, he returned to the house to find it swarming with police and media! Francis’s telling of the tale only made viewing the multiple news reports of the story all the more entertaining. I’d long since forgotten how absurd local TV news media can be! Check it out at:

http://kdka.com/local/Lawrenceville.bones.found.2.1213721.html

Escaped the surreal tangles of administrativia today with a walk to the post office, where, after random small talk, the friendly clerk at the passport photo desk asked, “Do you have children?”  He was the fourth man in less than a week to ask this very same question (otherwise preceded by, “Are you married?” and followed by, “Do you you have a boyfriend?” and gasps of disbelief, to which I offer only a stare in response*). In conversational reflex, I returned the question, learning that he had two: a 9 year old girl and a 21 year old son, who had just been killed. His eyes welled with tears; I didn’t have the courage to ask what had happened, but expressed my sympathy as best I could. He said he couldn’t talk about it or else he’d cry, then walked me over to his buddy with a scale that worked and made sure my passport renewal was on its way. He’s been swirling through my thoughts all day.

Afternoon meeting was as fruitless as the morning; conversations leading to nowhere, with expectations scattered and promises unkept. It’s only fitting that I should come home to a refrigerator with random remnants of meals gone by.

Ravioli redux, disassembled

Boil water. Add salt.

Break apart leftover pieces of fresh pasta from the squash ravioli. Peel from the parchment the remaining three ravioli.

Crumble the once fresh sage leaves into the leftover squash, half of it mashed for filling and half left in chunks.

Toss the squash in the microwave and the pasta in the pot, and wait not very long.

Open the gigantic piece of vacuum packed parmigiano that Simona brought over in – gasp! – July.  Break a piece off and curse the wretched dry Reggiano we get even at the best stores here. Break another piece off and reassess the decision to eat less cheese. Look forward to my December trip to Italy.

Assemble the cooked pieces, microzest the parmigiano and eat in silence, grateful that all is well in my world.

*Any ideas for a formulaic comeback here? “No”, “nope” and “not yet” elicit, “Why not?”: a question I cannot answer even on my best days.

Rachel and Ben take me places I would otherwise never go: the KFC in a mansion on City Line, the  Whispering Bench in Fairmount, the Korean war memorial in Penn’s Landing. Expert geocachers with a penchant for bargain hunting, more than anyone I know they embody the spirit of modern day exploration. Tonight they took me to Aldi, a supermarket that, although somewhat close to our apartment building, I’ve never been in. Fascinating.

It smelled bad when we first got in, like some noxious blend of chemicals and rotten meat. Truly bothersome at first; I’m certain that if I had strayed in on my own, I’d have turned around immediately and left. Ben and Rachel wanted milk, so we continued down the aisle. Once over the smell, I was fascinated by the choice of foods, piled up and displayed directly in their shipping boxes. All was colorful, with brands I had never seen. Prices were incredibly low: $1.29 for a box of graham crackers, $.87 for a 2-pound can of crushed tomatoes, $3.99 for extra virgin olive oil (from Italy, Spain, Tunisia and Turkey). The cashews came from India and Vietnam, the frozen flounder from China … and the gelato from Italy.

I had to buy it and bring it home. Artisan gelato at Capogiro sells for about $ 5 for a half a cup; Aldi was selling this large container of Mamma Italia mixed berry gelato for only $3.99. Who doesn’t like frutti di bosco, and if it was made in Italy, surely it couldn’t be so bad. Despite a belly full of pizza, we bought it for dessert.

Its texture was just right: light and airy. The frozen fruits were tart and true to flavor. The gelato was neither too sweet nor particularly distinct in its flavors. Rachel said it tasted like the top layer of one of those paper-wrapped ice cream cones you buy at a convenience store near the beach. Ben noticed that it is only 130 calories for a half a cup. We ate more than half of it. What else can I say?

I’d like to believe that I could satisfice with a tub of this in my freezer, but must admit I am totally spoiled by the all-natural gourmet flavors of gelato at Stephanie and John’s homegrown Capogiro. Rosemary goat cheese, gianduja, Thai coconut …. must arrange another gelato date sometime soon.

When I first started investing in my friendship with Luca last year, I imagined that I’d somehow charm him into allowing me to cook on the line, perhaps making salads or desserts. Ha! One evening when I stopped in after a disappointing coffee date, he did allow me to cook with him, but only in desperation. His sous chef had quit and he was alone in the kitchen, with a rush on orders. I got to make grilled vegetables with bagna cauda and a few salads. My brief stint volunteering in a macrobiotic vegan cafe apparently did not prepare me (but I cut a mean burdock root, really).

A friend and I stopped by the restaurant last night, with a box of butternut squash ravioli I had made the day before. He had put them on his menu the week before, but included only the roasted squash in his filling. After tasting his, I insisted mine were better, with roasted shallots and chopped sage to round out the flavors. I took them in to prove my point. Humbled I was when both chefs, independently, had the same feedback: add parmigiano to the filling, which was both too scant and too “wet”. Good advice, I must admit.

The big news here is not so much that I got a new tip for making one of my specialties even better, but that Luca actually let me step *inside* the kitchen and make them myself! I grabbed the pan, scooped in the butter, pinched the sage and took a few (too many) walnuts …. turned on the gas to brown the butter …. and let Fabrizio step in to do the rest. LOL. Funny thing was that despite having watched them make ravioli hundreds of times, I never noticed that they added a bit of cooking water to the butter moments before adding the cooked ravioli. Hmmm.

I tried it at home tonight:

The butter right before it browned.

The ravioli, right before I ate some.

It felt good to learn a new trick. I’d have liked to cook this for a special occasion rather than a mundane post-Spin meal. Luca says that if I help him charm a woman, he’ll let me train on slow nights in the kitchen; I told him I’d only do it if Joey were my teacher when he wasn’t around. LOL. The more time I spend in the restaurant, the more it becomes clear to me that it’s a business I should be in more formally. Wonder how …

A few weeks ago at the Appetite for Awareness event, I ate a small cup of cassoulet – pork and beans – that stopped me in my tracks. Made by chef Gene Giuffi at Cochon, one of Philadelphia’s best BYOBs, its flavors were both complex yet simple, providing both pleasure and intrigue to even the most sophisticated palates. In anything other than its prosciutto form, pork had never intrigued me…until then.

Finally got there for dinner tonight, with longtime friend Jeff and (hopefully) new friend Cem. We ate lots of tasty treats: escargot with shiitake mushrooms, fried oysters with the loveliest shaved fennel slaw I’ve ever tasted, and a charcuterie plate with house-cured meats and a pickled tomato-cornichon salad topped with zesty arugula microgreens. And that was just the beginning.

Main dishes included duck breast with white bean cassoulet and garlic sausage (just the right amount), quail with roasted veggies and more sausage, and St. Canut Farm Porcelet – a baby pig fed only milk – served with wild mushroom risotto and juniper oil.

I’d never eaten porcelet before. Seared simply and fanned on a bed of rice, it was far more moist and tender than any pork that’s come before. How so? According to the Fermet St Canut Farms website:

Our milk-fed Yorkshire piglets, raised since birth in a family environment, maintain their natural nursing rhythm until reaching the live weight of 28 kg. … From the slaughter stage to the cutting, St-Canut products are air-chilled for 48 hours. … In the New York market, the cutting to delivery stage is no more than 60 hours.

I truly do not know what this really means; I’m just looking for something to anchor the experience of eating it.  The risotto, sadly, was the only thing in the entire meal that was not pleasing. While its flavors were earthy, its texture had turned to gruel, a testament to the peasant techniques Giuffi has mastered — in an otherwise good way.

Despite the textureless rice, the meal at Cochon was one of the best I’ve eaten in Philadelphia, hands down. Giuffi is brilliant; I love that he’s an Italian-American doing French better than anyone else in town. Can’t wait to go back.

Finally: a pizzeria in Philadelphia that’s not only thought deeply about how to get it right, but is striving to get there. Could domenica sera pizza parties actually be in my Philadelphia future?

Going to Stephen Starr’s Pizzeria Stella tonight was a total surprise, so no pictures. Our group included the chef, the architect and his cousin the art historian: all foodies, all Italian-born, and all longing for a taste of home.

The art historian ordered, unsurprisingly, the classic pizza margherita: with basil, tomato and mozzarella di bufala, it’s  the standard by which all other pizzas are judged. The basil leaves were giant-sized, the sauce not too heavy-handed, and the cheese neither scant nor plentiful. From across the table, it looked just about right. She neither said much about it nor shared it with others: a good sign that she was, in fact, enjoying it.

The chef ordered the pizza marinara: with san marzano tomato, oregano and sliced garlic, the least appealing choice on the menu, imho. Its center failed to hold its form as he picked up slice after slice, but the chef says the tomatoes were good. The crust, not so much. Some work is needed.

The architect got what most intrigued me, the finocchio: braised fennel, black olives, tomato and I’m not sure what else, as the pizza is not published on any of the online menus I’ve seen! I know we did, indeed, eat it, and that its flavors were lovely despite the sagging crust. Apparently, getting the right amount of toppings and the right “cottura” in the center of the pie is a trick the kitchen still needs to work out.

I was seduced by a twist on my all-time favorite prosciutto e arugula, and ordered the San Daniele: smoked mozzarella, San Daniele prosciutto and baby arugula. The crust on mine was just right: crispy through the center, bubbles of char, a bit of chew in the crust.  It was a bit dry, however, with the smoked mozzarella unassuming, and a bit salata (oversalted), masking what should have been the sweetness of one of Italy’s finest prosciutto. While no Il Pizzaiolo pie, it was by far the closest approximation to authentic Italian pizza that I’ve eaten in Philadelphia.

Am not sure what I think about the communal seating or the design of the dining room, but the service was good and the host/manager – a friendly bald man with an inviting smile – provided something of intrigue to gaze upon. Looking forward to my next visit!

Gian Luca got married to Laura last Sunday, in a beautiful service at a church a few blocks from Washington Square, in the Village, where they live. I was honored to ‘witness’ the ceremony as his best man, and sit with his family at the reception, at Aurora Restaurant in Brooklyn (Williamsburg). Here are some artifacts:

La mozzarella di bufala with heirloom tomatoes. I'd never seen orange tomatoes served at a restaurant. I love New York.

Dear God, how on earth did they manage to make so tender the grilled octopus? And the potatoes so tasty? Granted, I hadn't eaten all day, but still.

Cauliflower with a fontina fondue. How is it that Italians like cauliflower so much?

Il primo: pappardelle with wild boar ragu. Delicious! (But Luca's is better.)

OMG. I'm full. The flowers are really beautiful.

La spigola, with tasty herbs...and broccoli. Oh dear. Since when do Italians eat broccoli like this?

Lots of people ordered the grass-fed beef. It looked quite tender.

Just for cutting - tiramisu was the dessert of choice, from one of their neighborhood Italian shops. I was too busy eating it to photograph it. Oops!

Laura ordered this after seeing it in Italy. I want this too (but not the little dog in the basket). When's my turn?!

Imported from Rimini. Little bundles of love. So simple. A perfect day in every way.