Play Book Tag discussion

Cooking With My Sisters – Adriana Trigiani & Mary Yolanda Trigiani
With contributions by Lucia Anna, Antonio, Francesca and Ida Trigiani
3***

Subtitle: One Hundred Years of Family Recipes from Bari to Big Stone Gap

Trigiani is well-known for her fiction, frequently drawing from her family history to draw her characters and launch her plots.

This book is a combination of memoir and cookbook, in which she relates many family stories from how her grandparents met, to Easters spent on her grandfather’s farm, to raucous family gatherings, to her parents’ words of wisdom, and that special time of year when she and her siblings and cousins would be sent out into the fields to pick the dandelion greens for a special dish. (Note: My own “adopted” Sicilian grandmother made delicious “dandelion patties” each spring, making sure the greens were harvested before her sons came to treat the yard with weed killer. I really miss that dish!)

I like how there are asides by her sisters sprinkled throughout, adding bits of advice or alternate ingredients for a particular dish.

This is a delicious treat. It's a fun read and has some great recipes, some of which are simple for even a beginning cook, and others of which are quite complicated and best done with an assembly line of helpers. One thing is clear, though, the main ingredient in any good family kitchen is love.


LINK to my review

B.C., I enjoyed your review! Hearing about the dandelion patties made me think of a dish I made years ago - dandelion salad - back in college. How were the dandelion patties made?

Holly R W wrote: "B.C., I enjoyed your review! Hearing about the dandelion patties made me think of a dish I made years ago - dandelion salad - back in college. How were the dandelion patties made?"

She never taught me to make them (and back then, I wasn't much interested in cooking ... just eating). As I recall: eggs, bread crumbs, parmesan and chopped greens. Formed into "patties" and fried in oil. When one of her grandchildren balked she called them "Italian egg foo Yung" and they scarffed them up! I don't recall if she pre-cooked the greens or added them raw. I'm guessing she seasoned with salt, pepper, oregano and perhaps a little garlic? They were DELICIOUS. And all the more special because they only appeared for a week or so in early spring.

What a nice memory of your adopted grandmother! The patties sound so good!