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Saturday, November 23, 2013
Another Weekend, Another Food Festival! Gorgonzola!
2:56 AM |
Dana Kaplan,
Stresa Sights |
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Another food festival in the piazza! I love how all these winter events are starting to fill up otherwise-empty Piazza Cadorna. This past weekend it was the Stresa nel gusto con il gorgonzola festival, which featured, naturally, gorgonzola cheese. Restaurants around town who chose to participate were also featuring gorgonzola on their menus, and at lunchtime Polenta Concia was served from a large tent in the center of the piazza. Polenta Concia, translated as 'Dirty Polenta,' is a comfy-sounding sort of mix of polenta, ragu, and gorgonzola cheese.I took a walk around the piazza in the afternoon; it was nicely crowded, and not only that, I saw many people purchasing, from all of the vendors.
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Friday, November 15, 2013
Food: Bollito Misto
8:18 AM |
Dana Kaplan,
Stresa Sights |
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Bollito Misto is a traditional Northern Italian dish, much loved and prepared in the cold winter months. The name means "boiled mix," and that is exactly what the dish is. Bollito is most popular in the northern regions of Italy, such as Piemonte, Lombardia, and Emilia-Romagna, and has been so for centuries, as is witnessed by its common inclusion in several historic cookbooks. For example, a cookbook printed in 1694, Lo Scalco alla Moderna (The Modern Steward), includes 38 different varieties of bolliti.
In keeping with this tradition, we recently went to a special Serata Bolliti, featuring an all-inclusive, fixed-price bollito menu. Here's the traditional menu:
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Wednesday, November 6, 2013
A Piazza Filled With Chocolate
12:24 PM |
Dana Kaplan,
Stresa Sights |
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Question: On a chilly, dark, Friday evening in November, not tourist season, what can one do to fill Piazza Cadorna with people?
Answer: Chocolate!
If there's anything worth devoting an entire weekend to, it's chocolate. And that is exactly what happened in Stresa last weekend, in the season's first event of the "Stresa nel gusto" program. Beginning with this evening that I photographed, chocolate festivities continued on Saturday with a slicing of the giant chocolate salami made by the students of Stresa's hotel management school, Maggia. And on Sunday, there was a reading by the author Rossana Girotto of excerpts of her book, "Ofelia sapeva nuotare," along with servings of hot chocolate and musical accompaniment by flutist Emiliana Parenzi Colombo. And always, the booths selling and demonstrating chocolate.
Here are a few photos that I took on Friday evening; just really a tip of the chocolate iceberg:
This producer, from Lecco, had an incredibly realistic display of chocolates shaped like metal tools -- gears, wrenches, pliers, etc. The perfect gift for the men, no? I especially liked the collection of nuts, bolts, and screws. All these are coated in a dusting of cocoa powder that recreates rust almost too well.
( Continued ... )
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events
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