We run out of recipes from the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Garden Chef Series and the Barilla Italian Cooking Weekend, at least for this year - next year we’ll make sure to have one of our bloggers from the Italian Food Lovers editorial team on site, so we can actually video the Chef demos and interview the Chefs (not while they demo, of course).

First of all, we would like to say thank you to Barilla USA’s Chef Lorenzo Boni, Trattoria N. 10’s Chef Doug D’Avico, Francesca Restaurants’ Executive Chef Laura Piper, Pinstripes’ Chef Mark Grimes and Mado’s Chef Rob Levitt for sharing their recipes with us. Thank you again, see you again on Italian Food Lovers!

Just to recap, this year we had the pleasure to publish on Italian Food Lovers recipes for 7 gourmet dishes. Did you try any of them at home? 

• Sautéed Wild Mushrooms Bruschetta
• Grilled Baby Octopus with Watercress Salad and Oranges
• Farfalle Piccolini Pasta Salad
• Linguine Fagottaro Pasta Salad
• Lobster Bread Salad
• Chicken Parmesan with Campanelle Pasta
• Grilled Peach and Prosciutto with Parmigiano-Reggiano and Bulsamic Must

Also, we have to say thank you to Stephanie Sette from the Academia Barilla USA Marketing Team (in the picture above) for getting all the content together for us (she does it all the time with the US events content, by the way) and of course also to Academia Barilla Italian Culinary Specialist Mario Rizzotti, who has been conducing several rounds of educational and tasting demos during the Barilla Italian Cooking Weekend.

In these pictures taken during the Barilla Italian Cooking Weekend Mario Rizzotti shares his Italian culinary knowledge with the show participants, teaching them how to professionally taste some of the best Italian gourmet products, such Italian extra virgin olive oils and traditional Italian cheese specialties such as Parmigiano-Reggiano and the several varieties of Pecorino, from Sardinian Pecorino Dolce to Pecorino Toscano DOP and Pecorino Sardo Gran Cru. Follow the link to see more pictures of Mario Rizzotti’s tasting demos at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

A final thank you goes of course also to all the guests and visitors and participated to the Chicago’s Chef show. If you liked the Italian cooking and Italian food culture you experienced at the Chicago Botanic Garden, you now you can find it also here on Italian Food Lovers all year round!

Also remember that you can experience the flavor and taste of Academia Barilla’s Italian gourmet food specialties all year round too, they are all available at the Academia Barilla online store, where you can also find Italian cookbooks, Chef tools, Italian gastronomy gift boxes and gift certificates!

Our readership knows that Academia Barilla established, back in 2005, a unique Gastronomic Library in Parma, Italy, that we often reference for cookbooks, recipes, and other Italian culinary culture highlights.

The Academia Barilla Gastronomic Library, annexed to the Academia Barilla Culinary School, is unique in its kind, and definitely is the most complete collection in the world of knowledge, history and resources for everything gastronomy.

The Library, also nicknamed BIGAB (acronym of the Italian BIblioteca Gastronomica Academia Barilla), counts today more than 8,000 titles and some of them are unique items, such as handwritten cookbooks or historic menus, or some books that date back to the 15th century.

All the books are indexed and included in the Italian Public Library system, and are retrievable online. But to be able to examine BIGAB’s item one has to pay a visit to the Library in Parma, which is always a very pleasant thing to do, specially after the recent remodeling and rearrangement of the Library space, which is now more comfy then ever.

Many visitors every year book their visits or just drop in during Library hours, and some of them come from abroad to perform some very specific culinary research, specially when involving historic aspects of the food culture, or very specific “long tail” niches of culinary culture.

In order to properly index the huge amount of books, menus, objects and other gastronomic treasures, BIGAB’s Curator Dott. Giancarlo Gonizzi and his team created a very unique indexing method, which is based on the general Library index code that ranges 1-9 for topics from the more general (0) to the more specific (9).

As explained by Dott. Gonizzi, the BIGAB team developed a parallel indexing mode where library items are also indexed with a separate code still ranging 0-9, but on a scale of exclusively culinary and gastronomic topics.

Just to recap the excellent explanation from Dott. Gonizzi of how the indexing system works, under the 0 code are indexed more general culinary items`such as standard cookbooks, while code 1 will index all historic recipes and cuisine books, 2 is the code to retrieve all the culinary books about ingredients only, while 3 is all about Italian regional cuisine.

Code 4 is for the international cuisine, and 5 is the code to index all books dedicated to professional Chef techniques, from food conservation to cooking and preparation. Code 6 defines all books and library items dedicated to thematic cuisines such as, for example, cooking for communities, cooking for singles, the VIP cookbooks, or the cuisine of love, the session we have been browsing a lot for our Valentine’s Day recipes, or our series of aphrodisiac recipes for last year’s Valentine Day.

The code list goes of course to 9, and will talk more in the future about it - just for you to know, the indexing method is absolutely amazing; on a search for a book on “Asburgic Cuisine in Trentino” requested by a visitor, it took less then 1 minute to spot the exact location of the rare cookbook and handle the copy to the visitor for her consultation (I personally witnessed this at my latest visit to BIGAB).

Dott. Giancarlo Gonizzi is pictured here above during a video interview at the Gastronomic Library, that we’ll publish here soon. For those who are curious, the sculpture next to him is the Guggenheim Award, offered to Academia Barilla at the end of last year by the Italian Foreign Trade Board (ICE - Istituto per il Commercio Estero) for being the Italian industrial company who invested more in culture not only in terms of sponsorships, but mostly on developing cultural activities in support of the business activity (BIGAB, of course), and for promoting Italian culture abroad.

BIGAB is not just a Library - on my latest visit last week for an interview to Dott. Gonizzi (that we’ll publish here soon), I discovered the full schedule of cultural and educational events BIGAB is involved with. Last week, the day after my visit, a meeting with approx. 80 Nutrition Science students from the University of Parma was scheduled at Academia Barilla’s Gastronomic Library. The focus of the meeting was introducing BIGAB’s Library system, and all the tools the students will be able to access for their research, thanks to a convention between Academia Barilla and the University of Parma.

A few cultural events are in BIGAB’s program for the first half of this year, such as Gusti d’Autore (Tastes of Author), an event scheduled on April 7-9, 2008, that includes literature and poetry readings about cooking, as well as food-related cinema screenings, all in conjunction with other special cultural events organized by the City of Parma. We’ll talk soon in details about Gusti d’Autore.

On May 6, 2008, BIGAB will be again under the cultural spotlights for the Premio Academia Barilla (Academia Barilla Award), a prize awarded by Academia Barilla to the best short movies about food and cooking. The event is organized by Academia Barilla in parallel with the leading Italian food expo CIBUS - you can be sure we will be blogging a lot more in details about it.

Other plans? We can give here a little anticipation about a Museum of Tomato, and a Museum of pasta just outside Parma… but we prefer to give you full updates about it as soon as we get more details. As always, stay tuned with Italian Food Lovers.

Want to catch-up with Italian cookbook writer and Food Network celebrity Chef Giada De Laurentiis and get an autographed copy of her popular cookbooks, Everyday Pasta, Everyday Italian, and Giada’s Family Dinners?

Just head tomorrow, February 20th between 1:00 pm and 3:00 pm, to the Crate&Barrel store on Union Street, in San Francisco, CA. During Giada’s book signing there will also be free sample tastings available for guests, made with Giada’s new Italian Gourmet specialty foods created in collaboration with Academia Barilla.

Space is limited, so please contact the store for more information and booking. Below find store info, including a Google Map for driving directions to the Crate & Barrel shop:

CRATE & BARREL
55 Stockton Street
San Francisco, CA 94108
(415) 982-5200

Get driving directions on Google Maps

As suggested by the Food Network Recipe Fan Club on their blog, you can also wish Giada big congrats on her first new little baby, a girl due in April!

Today we would like to introduce a couple of interesting publication that can be of interest for our Italian Food Lovers readership.
The first one is The New Regional Italian Cuisine Cookbook, written by Reinhardt Hess, Cornelia Schinharl, and Sabine Sälzer.

Reinhardt Hess is a Munich-based Bavarian food and wine journalist who has a special love for Italian and other Mediterranean foods and cooking styles. Cornelia Schinharl is a food editor at Graf und Unser, a major German book publisher, the author of several cookbooks, and an expert on Italian cuisine. She lives in Munich and visits Italy often to discover new foods and new wines. Sabine Sälzer is a world renowned cookbook editor.

When food lovers open this cookbook they’ll find themselves on a lively excursion through eight distinct and innovative culinary Italian regions. It’s an illustrated, recipe-filled cookbook and a coffee table guide to Italy’s people and traditions, from the Alpine Piedmont area in the north to the southern island of Sicily.

The book is structured into separate chapter for each of the eight regions, each opening with a landscape photo followed by several photo-filled pages describing the region’s people, their way of life, and their locally-produced foods and wines. The rest of each chapter is devoted to the region’s recipes.

Two dozen or more recipes per region are introduced, each of them illustrated with plenty of photos, and presented in the typical Italian style for hearty five-course dinners. The authors present great ways to prepare and serve meats, fish, pasta, sauces, fruits, vegetables, soups, salads, and desserts, and also offer suggestions for regional wines that go perfectly with each delightful Italian meal.

Among the several reviews for this cookbook, a couple of them caught our attention. Mat Schaffer at the Boston Herald reviewed it as “… A pictorial tour of Italy, its culture and customs. It’s like a gastronomic visit to Italy.”, while the internationally renowned Chef and restaurateur Mario Batali defines it “Definitive in a way that few books attempt, the recipes in this beautiful tome reflect the delicious diversity all dancing under the umbrella of Italian food. This beautiful book captures (Italy’s) entire boot in its mellifluous magnificence.”

Published by the NY-based publisher Barron’s Books for its Educational Series, the book is available at major bookstore worldwide, and also online at this link.

We really like this cookbook, even if it skipped our beautiful Emilia-Romagna region during the virtual Italian gastronomic tour - as our readers know, Academia Barilla and the Academia Barilla Culinary School are headquartered in Parma, the heart of the Italian Food Valley.

If you want to add to your virtual gastronomy tour Parma’s culinary traditions, culture and recipes, we also strongly suggest to check out world-renowed Chef and cookbook writer Giuliano Bugialli’s “Parma, A capital of Italian Gastronomy“, Academia Barilla’s first venture as a publisher.

Giuliano Bugialli’s cookbook celebrates the art, culture and tradition of the city of Parma, an extraordinary mix that you can find in our traditional plates. The Parma cookbook contains dozens of typical local recipes explained through stunning pictures and detailed descriptions, and infuses gastronomy tradition with culinary innovation, according to the true spirit of Parma.

The cookbook is available online at the Academia Barilla online store. Its luxury hardcover makes it a perfect gift - maybe the right gift idea for next Valentine’s Day?