famiglia

  I have been going through some drawers, trying to clear things out, and found a bunch of old tee shirts that I hadn't seen in ages. Most were saved by my mom, I think. And did they bring me back. It's amazing how something like an old tee shirt could tell a story. For instance, this shirt, from the mid-70s. I didn't know that any of these had survived. My dad was a newspaperman , who worked the political beat for New Jersey papers  The Newark News  and later,  The Daily Observer,  which operates out of Ocean County. In the '70s he decided he wanted to be his own boss and opened a local weekly paper called  The Hometown News . He did everything — wrote the stories, taught my mom and me how to do layout, took and developed the photos in the darkroom (which he taught my brother and me how to do, too), sold advertising (until he could hire someone else to do that),  even delivered the papers  to stores and to the homes of paper boys and girls. And h...

My Aunt Rose was always proud that she shared her birthday with John Lennon. She was beautiful, brash and funny as hell. She wouldn't take crap from anyone. And even though her husband, my uncle John Massimo, was considered the family storyteller, Rose could tell a great story too. Some of my favorite memories are of sitting across her Long Island kitchen table and she telling me the "real dope" on some of our family history. My father adored her, and was probably always a bit jealous of his older brother and his good fortune. When I was in college at Parsons in New York City, so far away from my family in south Jersey I really got to know Aunt Rose, who insisted that I come visit any weekend that I didn't have something else to do or was going home to Jersey. And I did. Uncle John would pick me up at the L.I.R.R. station, and as soon as I crossed the threshold of their home a plate of food would come my way and the stories would start. "You look so thin! Want a ...

cousins . . .

  I think Grandma would be proud that I am picking up her holiday tradition of making  sfincioni . Last year I tried it with a phyllo dough. This year I did two versions - one with a french bread dough, one with a pizza dough. All attempts were quite tasty. I think she would say, "Delicious, dear, but it's not  sfincioni ..." What is this elusive delicacy, you might ask? There are many  versions , but basically it is a Sicilian cheese pie, served at Christmas. Some say it is the ancient precursor of  pizza . It has been called  pizza rustica . It can be on the sweet or savory side, depending on what fillings you choose. In Palermo, it is actually  sold on the street , the square slices looking like what they call "Sicilian pizza" in the States. Some present it like a  calzone . Not  sfincioni ! In our family version, Grandma used mozzarella, provolone, and small bits of salami as the base for the filling. Sometimes she would add bits of ...