Culinary Adventures with Camilla

After our field trip to the Ferry Building, in San Francisco, and my shopping spree at Boccalone , I tried to figure out what to do with my sanguinaccio, blood sausage. I have no idea what possessed me to pick up a package; I had Andrew Zimmern's voice in my head, urging me to be a little bit adventurous, I guess. So, I did some reading and loved the suggestion of pairing the blood sausage with something oceany and salty. Boccalone has a recipe for sanguinaccio  + oysters on their website. But since oysters are hit and miss for me - sometimes I have an allergic reaction and sometimes I don't - I usually avoid them. I took their lead, however, and went with sanguinaccio + scallops. My Vadar's Darkside Towers were one of the things I brought to a post-holiday Star Wars brunch. To start, I poached the sausages for 20 minutes. Then I browned them on the stove until they were crisped on the sides. Then I let them cool slightly and sliced them into thick coins. ...

Have you ever been to the Ferry Building in San Francisco? If so - and you're not a vegetarian - you might have seen Boccalone . Their tag line is 'tasty salted pig parts.' No joke. So, if you don't eat pork, look away. Now. But if tasty salted pig parts float your boat, read on. They have a glass case that basically screams: look at me. Hanging salumi...I wanted every since piece! Every. Single. Piece. I'm not kidding. But I restrained myself and ended up with sanguinaccio ... ...Orange & Wild Fennel Salame that we sliced up on a post-Christmas cheese platter... ...and, lastly, guanciale - salt-cured pork jowl - that I used in my Strozzapretti alla Carbonara . I'm in love. Now I just need to figure out if they ship! Or I need to create an excuse to get back up to the City.

There are two "secrets" to making the perfect carbonara ...and one of them is not cream. In fact, in authentic carbonara , there is no cream at all. Oh, so the two secrets: guanciale (that's salt-cured pork jowl) and acqua gassata (bubbly water). That's it. Carbonara is fairly new to Roman tables, maybe a century old or so. Some attribute its creation to US troops in the post World War era for whom eggs and bacon were staples. The other school of thought is that it was invented by i carbonari (coal-carbon workers) as a quick, easy dish to be eaten during a lunch break. And yet another idea: the pepper in a carbonara resembles the coal...hence the name. The only ingredients you need to make a true Roman carbonara are pasta of course, eggs, pecorino Romano (sheep’s milk cheese), guanciale (salt-cured pork jowl), and black pepper. I like to add fresh herbs as well. So, when we were at the Ferry Building in San Francisco and I saw guanciale at Boccalone ...