We love Wikipedia, maybe not as much as we love Italian food, but we really think Wikipedia is a priceless resource for all the Internet users, including us. We referenced Wikipedia sources and articles several times in our blog posts, and also pointed a link or two to a couple of topics we asked you to explore more in-depth.

Last month, while browsing the popular online encyclopedia, we realized that their editorial team always welcomes new contributors in many area yet to be fully covered - one of which is Italian cuisine.

We couldn’t resist the call and started by creating a basic profile for Academia Barilla, before started experiencing the pleasure of online collaboration and contributing to an article we linked to in recent times, right before Christmas.

Remember the Zuppa Inglese recipe we published as part of our Christmas Recipe Series?

In that blog post we actually used part of Wikipedia knowledge, when reporting about the origins of the dessert’s name. In order to pay back for the knowledge we got, we decided to publish the complete recipe of the Zuppa Inglese dessert on the same Wikipedia page, so that other Web users will be able to find it easily in the future.

We will definitely contribute more and more to the Wikipedia, and we’ll let you know when we do - but don’t worry, we made a commitment on sharing our premium content with you at Italian Food Lovers before sharing it with everybody else, so we’ll always be blogging here before publishing everywhere else on the web! Stay tuned with us!

After helping us with the Valentine’s day recipe we published yesterday, our friends from the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library team sent us a Valentine’s card, wishing to both the blogging team and the readership of Italian Food Lovers an Happy Gourmet Valentine’s Day. The card we received is nice, and we want to share it with you.

Thanks BIGAB team for your nice thought and your constant support to our blog! (BIGAB is how we internally call the “BIblioteca Gastronomica Academia Barilla). We’ll be blogging more about you and the treasures of the Gastronomic Library soon!

Happy Valentine’s Day to everybody from Italian Food Lovers and Academia Barilla!

After proposing a couple of Italian cookbooks at the beginning of this week we browsed through Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library in Parma, in search of the perfect recipe for your Valentine’s Day dinner.

Impossible task, there are too many choices… we’ve found hundreds in our 7,000+ cookbook collection! But with the help of the Gastronomic Library team we managed to find a very good one.

Last year’s Valentine’s Day we delighted your senses and imagination with a series of aphrodisiac recipes, while this year we decided to focus on finding a recipe that is easy and fast to prepare, that is beautiful in presentation and that can be served as a finger food to begin the night well, and so you can avoid engaging with complicated table settings that might get in the way of setting up a romantic atmosphere.

This year our Valentine’s Day recipe is Cartoccio of Eggplant, with Cow’s milk Cheese, Thyme and Olives - a yummy and sensual dish we found in “La Cucina degli Innamorati” (Lovers’ Cuisine), by French cookbook writer Marianne Paquin.

Ready? Let’s go to the kitchen, this won’t take long to prepare!

CARTOCCIO OF EGGPLANT WITH COW’S MILK CHEESE, THYME AND OLIVES
(A recipe by Chef and cookbook writer Marianne Paquin)

INGREDIENTS
(serves 2)

- 2 tomini (soft cow’s milk cheese)
- 1 eggplant
- 3 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
- 2 stalks thyme
- 8 black olives
- salt and pepper to taste

PREPARATION

Preheat the oven grill. Cut the eggplant in thin slices, brush the slices of egg-plant with oil and place them on the grill rack with baking paper to be grilled.

Turn the slices as they start to get brown, and then take them out of the oven and let them cool. In the meantime, pre-heat the oven at 350 F.

Wrap the soft tomino with two slices of eggplant. Sprinkle it with thyme, salt and pepper. Tie the slices with a kitchen string.

Put the filled eggplant in a baking dish, add the olives, drizzle with the extra virgin olive oil and place into the oven for 10 minutes. The dish is now ready to be served!

Thank you to the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library team for finding this recipe, and Happy Gourmet Valentine’s Day to all Italian Food Lovers - keep up with your love for Italian food as we do!

Last December a group of American students from NY Universities (Monroe College and Paul Smith College, NY) spent some time in Parma to study Italian Cuisine at the Academia Barilla Culinary Center .

The group of students were headed by Giacomo Berselli, President of the Marco Polo Foundation, the organization who sponsored the students’ trip to Italy. After spending 7 weeks in Otranto (Puglia) and 3 weeks in Ferrara (Emilia-Romagna), the students attended cooking classes at the Academia Barilla Culinary School in Parma for additional 2 weeks.

During their Parma residency the US students of the Marco Polo project studied the typical products of the Parma region, and attended classes of olive oil tasting, Parmigiano Reggiano and Prosciutto di Parma tasting, as well as Balsamic Vinegar of Modena and wine tasting. After theory and tasting classes in the morning the young Chefs spent some time researching Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library, with the support of the Library Curator Giancarlo Gonizzi and his team.
The afternoon were generally spent in the kitchen, trying dishes and recipes containing the ingredients the students have been working on all day, under the guidance of Academia Barilla Executive Chef Nicola Bindini and his Chef team.

To complete the students’ full immersion into the art of Italian gastronomy, Academia Barilla organized also culinary and gastronomy tours for the students, allowing them to discover the secrets of producers and farmers of authentic regional products, and to meet the countryside traditions and history of the Emilia-Romagna region, that certainly is a key ingredient of our traditional recipes.

At the end of the 2 weeks of classes the Academia Barilla Culinary School released to each student a certificate of completion of studies that, join with the other certificates awarded by the students at the other learning locations across Italy, would have grant them the formal recognition of the exams and classes by their respective original colleges (Monroe College and Paul Smith College, both in the NY State).

Here below a couple of testimonial notes from the Marco Polo students, as written on the Academia guest book, pictured here above with more Marco Polo testimonials:

“Thank you Barilla for such an informative 2 weeks. I enjoyed myself thoroughly would tell my family friends about this wonderful place. Thank you so much.”

“Ciao, this school has taught me that food to the Italian is religion and the kitchen is their church. Thank you Academia Barilla.”

To know more about the student program we interviewed Marco Polo Foundation President Giacomo Berselli who firmly says that “Academia Barilla is state-of-the-art of the Italian Cuisine“!

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Today is the first anniversary of our Italian Food Lovers blog, we posted for the first time on December 21, 2006. Happy birthday, Italian Food Lovers!

It has been for us a very challenging year, trying to learn all the tricks of the trade of being bloggers, setting up a blogging team, writing engaging articles and blog posts about Italian food culture, events and, of course, recipes.

As a balance of our first year we would like to say thank you first of all our readership, all the users who are getting our regular RSS feed, all the users who left comments on our blog, and all the blogs and websites that are linking to our articles. And thank you to SooToday.com and to all the citizens of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada, for giving us a Best of the Blog Award!

Then, of course, it wouldn’t have been possible to create Italian Food Lovers stories without the input of all our friends at Academia Barilla and Barilla USA, at the Academia Barilla Culinary School, the Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library and, of course, to the Academia Barilla Italian Culinary Specialists Team in the United States!

Last but not least, a big thank you goes also to all the guest Chefs that shares their recipes and Chef’s tips with us. Next year we will have more and more inputs from top Chefs around the world!

Stay with Italian Food Lovers - 2008 will be an amazing gourmet year!