Click on this link Making Artisan Pasta at Fante’s to see me preparing fresh pasta at Fante’s Kitchenware in the Ninth Street Italian Market, Philadelphia. Please send me your comments and pasta questions by clicking on the Ask Aliza tab on my website.

Italian Maremma & Umbria: A Pasta & Wine Lover’s Culinary Tour with Aliza Green: October 3 –13, 2012

Join Aliza Green, Italian food expert and author of 12 cookbooks, including Making Artisan Pasta, for a 10-day small-group exploration of autumn culinary delights, fresh pasta, and wine in wild, ancient Etruscan Maremma and Umbria, “Italy’s green heart.”

Visit Tarquinia and fifteenth-century Palazzo Vitelleschi with its fabulous winged horses.   Stay at Ramerino in the heart of the wild Maremma in southwestern Tuscany. Dine at small, local restaurants and meet the chefs. Visit medieval towns Suvereto, Massa Marittima, and Campiglia-Marittima. Pasta demonstration by “mama” at tiny Taverna del Tiburzi. Chocolate and wine pairing workshop with cioccolataio Dominico d’Affronto. Relax at Terme Calidario, elegant Etruscan/Roman style spa.

Tour Barrati Archeological Park on the site of an ancient Etruscan iron-working village. Decorate with fruits, vegetables, and flowers with Fiorella Falavigna De Leo.

Walk the beautiful trails at Ramerino then enjoy a special meal prepared by master salumaio (cured meat specialist), Davide Fedele. Tour and tasting at hyper-local sheep cheese farm, Podere Paterno, powered by geothermic steam. Tour and tasting at renowned Super-Tuscan Winery Petra designed by star-chitect Mario Botto.

Guided tour of Pitigliano (“la piccola gerusalemme”) by local expert with visit to the old Jewish quarter followed by lunch of Jewish specialties.

In Orvieto, stay at the Hotel Palazzo Piccolomini in a restored Renaissance palazzo. Welcome reception at La Champagneria. Tour and tasting at Castello della Sala winery in a medieval castle. Dinner and hand-stretched pasta demo with Chef Valentina Santanicchio. Tour, tasting, and leisurely lunch overlooking the vineyards at Falesco Winery.

Visit to Monterubaglio with demo by three local pasta queens, then a hands-on class with Chef Velia de Angelis. Gala farewell dinner at La Badia, a restored 12^th century abbey.

Land Package Price:  $4,985.00* per person based on two sharing

Single Supplement:   $895.00 limited availability, please inquire

*Price subject to revision at 90 days prior to travel date. Rate is based on a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 14 guests traveling together throughout. Price based on currency exchange as of March 2, 2012.

Includes:

• Hosted throughout by Epicopia Experience Director, Aliza Green
• Transportation to and from Rome’s Fiumicino Airport
• All transfers and baggage handling
• 10 nights’ accommodation (as listed or similar)
• Daily breakfast, 8 lunches, and 9 dinners (total of 3 meals on own)
• Limited local wines (or non-alcoholic beverages) with included meals
• Transportation by deluxe mini-coach with an experienced, professional driver
• All cooking classes and demonstrations
• Licensed professional guide in Pitigliano and Barrati
• 3 winery visits & tastings
• Entrance fees to museums and sites according to the itinerary
• VAT and other taxes
• Signed copy of Aliza Green’s Making Artisan Pasta upon your return
• Welcome package

Not included:

• Gratuities to driver and guides
• Two lunches and one dinner not included in the itinerary
• International airfares to/from Rome
• Travel Protection and Cancellation Insurance is recommended (must provide proof of coverage or signed statement)

FoodTrekker fox

“FIGHT THE CHAINS!” FUNDRAISING DRIVE

SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT FOOD & DRINK BUSINESSES

 (Portland, Oregon, USA  25 February 2012) – Today FoodTrekker.com announced the launch of “Fight the Chains!”  – calling all foodies to support a crowdsourced fundraising drive to develop key technology tools in support of its effort to preserve and promote culinary cultures, food and drink businesses, culinarian people and groups, and foodie destinations. “Nobody we know wants to be eating and drinking the same global burgers and coffees for the rest of their lives. We must fight back and support independent businesses.” says Erik Wolf, Founder and CEO of the International Culinary tourism Association and FoodTrekker.com. Interested parties can support the campaign directly at www.indiegogo.com/foodtrekker.

THE GOAL

Funds raised from this campaign will help build key technology tools like FoodTrekker’s Tasting Team module, which enables its Tasting Team – independent food/drink journalists and chefs like Aliza Green and Harry Pagancoss (two of FoodTrekker’s advisors) – to maintain an online portfolio, write about food & drink businesses, connect with their audiences, and showcase their original food/drink editorial, photo and video content in multiple languages.  This is just one of the ways FoodTrekker helps support independent food and drink businesses.

WHY CHAINS ACTUALLY HURT LOCAL ECONOMIES

Multinational chains swallow customers from independent food and drink businesses.  Since 2008, according to leading market research firm The NPD Group, a shocking 87% of restaurant industry traffic lost has been at independent restaurants. In other words, people are eating more at chains, and less at independent food and drink establishments.  “The independents don’t have the same deep pockets as the chains. It’s harder for us to survive,” says Tommy Klauber, a serial entrepreneur and owner of Pattigeorge’s Restaurant, Polo Grill & Bar and other independent foodservice businesses in Florida. Chains tend to export profits to corporate headquarters, leaving a smaller local economic impact than residents realize.

CELEBRITY CHEFS & AUTHORS FURNISH REWARDS

Campaign donors can choose cool rewards like cookbooks by James Beard-award winning author Aliza Green or celebrity chef & Association spokesperson Harry Pagancoss; a customized culinary tour in the US city of your choice; or even a personal celebrity chef cooking lesson in Portland, Oregon –home to the hottest culinary scene in the USA.

ABOUT FOODTREKKER

FoodTrekker.com is new kind of sales and marketing platform for all kinds of independent food and drink businesses and people. It covers a lot more than just restaurants – think the long tail of the food industry, including cooking schools, wineries & breweries, small food producers, farms & farmers’ markets, culinary magazines, chefs, food writers and much more. Big chains are banned. Unique to the site is proprietary matchmaking technology, which pairs foodies perfectly to the kinds of culinary experiences they’ll truly love. FoodTrekker just soft launched in its hometown of Portland, Oregon, with more cities and features coming soon.

WHY CROWDSOURCING WORKS

Crowdsourcing projects are a new way for new projects to raise the money they need to grow. Crowdsourced projects are all the rage now – with some garnering over US$1 million in a single campaign. Crowdsourcing works because it is funded by billions of raving fans,

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Erik Wolf, CEO and Founder, erik@foodtrekker.com, (+1) 503-213-3700

About International Culinary Tourism Association (ICTA) and FoodTrekker The ICTA is the world’s leading authority on culinary travel, with 16,000 members in 120 countries. The Association offers education and product development solutions to the world’s food and travel industries. FoodTrekker is a consumer-facing site that focuses on the preservation and promotion of the world’s culinary cultures.  Visit www.culinarytourism.org and www.foodtrekker.com for more information.

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hand-stretched rich egg-yolk pasta for tortellini

Fun, Easy and Delicious--Making Artisan Pasta

MAKING ARTISAN PASTA: How to Make a World of Handmade Noodles, Stuffed Pasta, Dumplings, and More

 Homemade rules in the kitchen, and everyone from artisan bakers to canners and picklers know it. Culinary enthusiasts are exploring classic skills again, and home cooks are making homemade, hand-shaped pasta faster than you can say tagliatelle.

With simple, fresh ingredients and easy-to-follow instructions, MAKING ARTISAN PASTA (Quarry Books) teaches you how make your own fettuccine, ravioli, lasagna, and dozens of other styles of pasta and noodles by hand. The fully illustrated, step-by-step tutorials will walk you through the entire tasty process, from mixing dough, rolling, and shaping pasta through cooking, serving, and storing. Artisan pasta is fun to make and fun to eat for everyone from kids to seniors. Colorful doughs flavored with red pepper, porcini mushrooms, and asparagus and flours like buckwheat, chestnut, and rye inspire the creative cook.

Going far beyond noodles, though, this book includes tutorials on gnocchi, Chinese pot stickers, pierogi, and dozens of other world pastas.

Inside you’ll find:

• History of pasta in China, Italy and modern day variations
• Clear explanations of  flour, eggs and other basic ingredients a pasta artisan might use
• Complete tutorial for making artisan-style hand-stretched pasta, the ultimate for flavor and texture
• Special kitchen tools and suggestions for using  tools you already have
• “Artisan Notes” providing special tips and tricks for every recipe
• Page after page of full-color photo diagrams showing techniques for successful results
• Comprehensive information on storage, freezing,  and more

Through author and chef Aliza Green’s expertise and encyclopedia knowledge of all things culinary, plus hundreds of gorgeous photos by acclaimed food photographer Steve Legato, MAKING ARTISAN PASTA will teach you everything there is to know about making fresh, delicious pasta in your home kitchen….and you’ll never look at the supermarket pasta aisle the same way again.

About the Author

ALIZA GREEN, author, consultant, and influential chef, has been a pasta fanatic ever since she spent a summer in Italy at age six. She studied with Marcella Hazan, from whom she learned to make fresh pasta for the Bolognese-inspired Ristorante DiLullo, where she served as Executive Chef. She studied Italian to read cookbooks and culinary publications and to work with chefs and food producers in Italy. With the help of the restaurant’s three pasta artisans, Green prepared enough fresh pasta to serve hundreds of customers daily, all cooked to order—a formidable task in a restaurant that seated more than 200. Green is the James Beard Award–winning author of ten suc­cessful food guides and cookbooks including The Fishmonger’s Apprentice (Quarry Books, 2010), Starting with Ingredients: Baking (Running Press, 2008) and Starting with Ingredients (Running Press, 2006), four Field Guides to food (Quirk, 2004-2007), Beans: More than 200 Delicious, Wholesome Recipes from Around the World (Running Press, 2004). To learn more about Green or to ask a culinary question, visit her website, www.alizagreen.com.

• • •

 MAKING ARTISAN PASTA

How to Make a World of Handmade Noodles, Stuffed Pasta, Dumplings, and More

by Aliza Green

Quarry Books

$24.99 US / $27.99 CAN

ISBN-13: 978-1-59253-732-7

 Please consider attending the New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival this weekend. Visit this link for more information: www.workingwaterfrontfestival.org

For fish and seafood lover’s only: New Bedford Working Waterfront Festival

 and to find out when and where I’ll be appearing.

Aliza Making Hand-Stretched Pasta at a Slow Food event

With the publication of my new book, Making Artisan Pasta (Quarry Books, January 2012), I will be traveling to the mysterious and wild Maremma in coastal Tuscany and to Italy’s “green heart”–Umbria with a group of 15 pasta lover’s this October. We’ll be learning to make our own fresh pasta and watching artisan pastai hand-stretch pasta for the ultimate in chewy but tender texture and rough surface that perfectly absorbs the sauce as well as touring top wineries, learning chocolate artistry, eating in some of the best regional restaurants and meeting chefs and producers, visiting markets, picking olives, and going on a wild mushroom hunt.

That tour is now sold out but I am starting to take names and contact information for those interested in joining me on my next culinary tour in fall 2012. Our tentative itinerary starts with a stay at a beautiful agriturismo (farm-inn) in the heart of the Maremma surrounded by medieval walled towns, geothermal springs, abundant game and wild mushrooms, and some of the most famous “Super-Tuscan” vineyards.

Antica Schiamadda, Genoa

Romanengo Genoa

From there, we’ll travel to Genoa–a marvelous multi-faceted seaport that is not visited by many tourists and home to superb fresh-herb pasta and fillings. Genoa is a center for artisanal food production and well worth a visit to wander the narrow streets of its walking quarter, home to Pietro Romanengo, which has been making superb candied fruits, bonbons and preserves in Genoa since the 18th century at the oldest candy factory in the world. We’ll be tasting and learning to make authentic  Pesto alla Genovese, Pansotti al Sugo di Noce (triangular ravioli stuffed with white cheese and fresh herbs including borage), Farinata (crispy, thin chickpea flour torte baked in a wood-burning oven) at l’Antica Schiamadda, and Torta Pasqualina (layered Easter pie filled with greens, hard-cooked eggs, and cheese). 

Antique copper pots in Lucca restaurant

 We’ll also visit the small, charming city of Lucca, home of top-quality olive oil, and famed for its intact Renaissance-era city walls as well as the delicious traditional Tuscan fare at its fine restaurants, considered by many to be the best in Tuscany.  Tortelli Lucchese, fresh ravioli made from bright golden yellow egg-rich dough, stuffed with ricotta, and topped with a rich meat ragu is a typical dish.  Also farro (ancient wheat grain), local heirloom beans, rabbit, and baccalà (salt cod). And, we wouldn’t want to miss exploring Tuscany’s Chocolate Valley nearby along the Via Cioccolato.

If you’d like to know more, please send an email message to me on the Ask Aliza tab and I’ll be sure to send you more details.

Buon appetito!

You may have heard of Italian stallions (and I knew quite a few during my years of cheffing at Italian restaurants!) but how about Italian cowboys? The marshy areas of the Tuscan Maremma are home to Italy’s few remaining traditional cowboys, responsible for herding the enormous native Maremman cattle with their lyre-shaped horns, which may reach 2,500 pounds, over double the size of American Angus cattle! Read about the cattle and the revival of this heritage breed and the cowboys who work with them here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/05/world/europe/05italy.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=maremma&st=cse.

I’ll be taking a small group to visit this fascinating and non-touristy region on my Pasta Lover’s Culinary Tour, October 19 to 29. Just 4 spaces left (www.epicopia.com). You’ll learn to make your own hand-stretched pasta–the ultimate in flavor and texture. You haven’t tasted fresh pasta until you’ve experienced hand-stretched pasta, a specialty of the region along with game and wild mushrooms.  

Buon Giorno,

This fall (October 19 to 29),  I am taking a group of Pasta Lover’s to the Tuscan Maremma and Italy’s “green heart”, Umbria for 10 days of fun, cooking classes and demos, encounters with local producers, market visits, spa day, tours, fantastic local restaurant meals, winery visits and tastings, mushroom hunting, and a fantastic chocolate workshop. I have just six places left for this small group tour.

We’ll be staying a Ramerino, a beautiful, rustic agriturismo located on a farm at the top of a large hill with a 360 degree view of the rugged green forests of the region and complete with olive groves, which we’ll be invited to help pick for the first part of the tour. Then, it’s on to Orvieto, a dramatic walled medieval town with a world famous gold mosaic cathedral (we’ll be staying right on the cathedral piazza), underground caves, and a tradition of rustic game, fresh pasta, and truffle cucina. .

I’ve been working on a new book, Making Artisan Pasta, which brings my love and many years of experience in working with fresh pasta and studying the Italian language together in a beautiful photo-filled book. The book will be published in January of 2011 by Quarry Books. Everyone that comes on the tour will receive a signed copy (one per couple or single). We’ll be learning how to make our own hand-stretched fresh pasta–the ultimate–in classes given by two of my chef-pasta artisan friends in Orvieto, during the second part of our tour. We’ll also enjoy meals at their restaurans where we’ll enjoy their modern take on  local, seasonal recipes.

I have gathered together a great group of people who love food, travel, and all things Italian for our culinary journey of exploration. Please consider joining us. I’m happy to answer your questions. Please write to me at cranberrybean@comcast.net.

For complete tour details, pricing, and registration, please follow this link: http://www.epicopia.com/italy/item/62-italian-maremma-umbria-a-pasta-lovers-culinary-tour.

Arrivaderci!

Aliza Green

Cuisine, Culture and Community:

A dynamic one-day educational event highlighting local food, wine, and spirits in the Delaware Valley, open to everyone who wants to learn more from an array of lively experts.

Date:                Saturday, June 11, 2011, 8:00 am to 5:30 pm

Location:                 The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College  
4207 Walnut St., Phila., 19104;  www.walnuthillcollege.edu

Cost:              Registration $85, includes breakfast, lunch and dessert provided by Dame restaurateurs and caterers, choice of four sessions, and reception    (limited to 100 attendees)

Contact:         Chapter President Aliza Green:  cranberrybean@comcast.net

Registration:  Download registration brochure at www.lesdamesphiladelphia.com. Pay with Paypal, credit card, or check

This unique event features workshops, panel discussions, demonstrations, hands-on classes and tastings. Highlights include: keynote talk by Judy Wicks, international leader in the local living economies movement; talk by William Woys Weaver (Culinary Ephemera); cooking class with renowned chef/restaurateur Susanna Foo; and talk and tasting by Stephen Fried (Appetite for America.

• Meet farmers, bakers, chefs, and artisan food producers. Taste international and local sheep’s milk cheeses, locally-distilled spirits, baked goods made by Dame Pastry Chefs and Bakers, local meats including Linda Geren (HighView Farm), and Michel Cluizel’s bean-to-bar chocolate.
• Participate in panel discussions about food writing for print and electronic media. Learn how to get your artisanal food product to market in a valuable special double-session workshop.
• Explore African-American culinary history with Toni Martin (A Taste of Heritage: The New African-American Cuisine). Learn how local chefs keep their seafood sustainable and best ways of working with local meats in a panel led by local food systems activist Marilyn Anthony.
• Discover kitchen secrets of top culinarians like Cici Williamson (The Best of Virginia Farms), Rozanne Gold (Radically Simple: Brilliant Flavors with Breathtaking Ease), and Ellie Krieger (So Easy: Luscious, Healthy Recipes for Every Meal of the Week).
• Cook Bangkok street snacks with Moon Krapugthong (Chabaa Thai Bistro, Turkish regional food with Sheilah Kaufman (The Turkish Cookbook), and bread made from local wheat from Pete’s Produce Farm with Chef John Gallagher (The Restaurant School) in these hands-on classes.
• Chat with cookbook authors like Lari Robling (Endangered Recipes), Aliza Green (The Fishmonger’s Apprentice), Tara Desmond (Almost Meatless), Jennifer Linder McGlinn (Gingerbread), and Andy Schloss (Mastering the Grill). Buy personalized signed books. Bring home a special goodie bag.  

 SEAFOOD 101:

FEATURING AUTHOR ALIZA GREEN AND SAMUELS SEAFOOD

PHILADELPHIA, PA – Spots are still available for Oyster House (1516 Sansom Street, 215-567-7683) Seafood 101 event with renowned cookbook author Aliza Green who will teach tips on how to prepare and cook fresh fish from her latest book, The Fishmonger’s Apprentice (Quarry, 2010) on Saturday, April 23 at 3 p.m. 

Seafood 101 will feature a variety of demonstrations from acclaimed author Green, drawing from The Fishmonger’s Apprentice including how to clean and cook calamari and how to pickle mackerel.  Samuels Seafood will also have a fish monger at the event, taking attendees through the challenge of deboning a shad fillet. 

 “Tuition” is $30 per person, and includes a signed copy of The Fishmonger’s Apprentice, as well as samples of dishes being prepared and two full hours of instruction and question-and-answer time. 

“Butchering whole fish is a task that is somewhat shrouded in mystery – but it shouldn’t be,” says Green.  “Preparing and cooking seafood is wonderfully rewarding, and I’m excited to illustrate that knowledge for our guests.”

For more information, or to make a reservation, please call (215) 567-7683 or visit www.oysterhousephilly.com or follow them on twitter @PHLoysterhouse.