Culinary Adventures with Camilla

  Katarina is hosting the Italian Food Wine Travel bloggers this month and our theme is Lazio. Read her invitation here . If you are reading this early enough, feel to  join the group for a live Twitter chat. We'll be live on Saturday, April 3rd at 8am Pacific time. Just follow the hashtag - #ItalianFWT - and be sure to add it to anything you tweet so we can see it. In the meantime, all of these posts will go live before Saturday.  Cin cin! Camilla at Culinary Adventures with Camilla: Lazio in California: The Quintessential Roman Pasta + 2017 Big Sur Vineyards Pinot Noir Reserve Wendy at A Day in the Life on the Farm: Alberico Appia Antica 400 Rosso 2016 Paired with Stracci di Antrodoco Terri at Our Good Life: Pietro Est! Est!! Est!!! with Crab Dip Crostinis Susannah at Avvinare: Cesanese del Piglio, Classic Wines From Lazio Gwendolyn at Wine Predator: Lazio to Paso Robles: “if you see kay” Robin at Crushed Grape Chronicles: Lazio – Exploring Low Intervention Wines Inspir...

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 ...