Cannoli Tarts! [The Cookbook...sort of]

[This post is a little belated. I started it a while back after my birthday, but life intervened. Here is it, a month late, but still good! You can make them for San Giuseppe Day tomorrow! Enjoy!]

Another year. Another birthday. Another treat to take in for the coworkers. After last year's casata disaster, I decided to keep things a little more on the simple side this year: I would make cannolis! Little did I know that cannolis were quite possibly the furthest things from simple I could have possibly chosen.

The plan was to whip up a batch of filling according to Bisnonna's recipes and use it fill up store-bought shells. Unfortunately, the weekend of my birthday, as I scoured the grocery stores in my area (ultimately going to 4 different stores), I learned that store bought shells aren't as readily available as I thought they were for some reason. I could have sworn that grocery stores, at least where I grew up, carried boxed cannoli shells, but around these parts, they are definitely less accessible.

So there I was, shell-less with all the filling ingredients and out of treat ideas.For some reason I couldn't get the idea of cannolis out of my mind. Making my own shells was out because my madre has Bisnonna's shell molds. I was stumped. And then I decided to search the internet to see if there was some sort of cannoli shell mold DIY out there (pinterest has DIYs for everything after all) and I found my inspiration: Cannoli Bites! When I saw this recipe, hope rushed back to me. I could adapt Bisnonna's cannoli recipe to suit this new form of shell mold and save the day!

Bisnonna's Cannoli

Bisnonna writes: 1 2/4 c. flour, 1/2 c. crisco, 3T sugar 1 egg, 3oz sherry wine or 6 T

Filling: 2# ricotta, about 1 c powder sugar or more or less, 4 almond chocolate bars cut up, about 12 cherries cut up, 1/2 c. nuts, 1/2 container of Cool Whip. Mix together and put in shells.

Amy's version: I mix up the shell dough with her exact ingredients, except I used 3 oz of red wine and vegetable shortening instead of crisco. The instructions for making the shells are at the Cooking Classy. As for the filling; again, I follow Bisnonna to the letter except instead of Cool Whip, I just used regular whip cream. I find the specific name brand usage in some of Bisnonna's recipe cards very interesting. Surely she didn't always have these brands. Crisco may been around her whole life, but Cool Whip wasn't around until 1966. I'm sure that her recipe was likely adapted from some older recipe after much trial and error; and just like that, the life cycle of the recipe continues.

Waxing Rhapsodic on Spaghetti

I don't have a recipe for you this week. I was kind of embarrassed about that, honestly. I've been under the weather and in a bit of a funk when it comes to cooking lately. I still want to write something though, and I thought, since this blog isn't strictly about recipes, but learning about myself and my family through food, what better place to start than writing about the most ubiquitous and controversial Italian food: spaghetti.

I mean that. People can vicious when it comes to their opinion on proper spaghetti.

I think there's a reason for that. At least for me and mine. Unlike polenta, which I stated before was not a traditional food of my Sicilian heritage, spaghetti does indeed, historically, belong to the island my bisnonna originally called home. We all know the story of Marco Polo bringing macaroni back from China, and while the Chinese were indeed creating pasta as early as 1100 BCE, pasta worked into long forms was recorded by geographer/cartographer Muhammad al-Idrisi in his descriptions of Sicily during the 12th century over 100 years before Polo's journey.

The tomato sauce is a little harder to pin down. I think I might be weird in the Sicilian-American food department as my family never referred to it as gravy, but it's something I'm picky about. Good sauce can make or break a dish of spaghetti. Historically, of course, tomatoes were not introduced to Europe until the 1400s, but there are some recipes for sauces involving apricots and figs. Can you imagine what those medieval marinaras must have tasted like? One of the oldest known recorded recipes is for Roman pesto. Mmmm. Pesto.

It's funny now, looking back, that nutritionists at the turn of the century were -horrified- by the food the Italian immigrants brought to the United States. They determined that garlic and tomatoes were were of no nutritional value and far too expensive for people of lower class means. Social workers tried to teach immigrants how to "cook properly", luckily...they were mostly ignored.

I know that's really digging into the details, but there's something about the history of food that I find fascinating. Food roots us into who we are, and who we think we are.

For me there is a sense of identity in spaghetti.

Making it is a meditation. Not like continually stirring a double boiler of honey meditation, but more ritual meditation: coming home from work, salting water and putting it on the stove to let it reach a boil, adding the noodles, cooking them until they are just the right ratio of wiggly to al dente, trying to get as much of the pasta water into a jar for later reuse and failing miserably, add the perfect amount of marinara and grated romano cheese.

Spaghetti was the first thing I relearned how to cook. Spaghetti was my bridge from sodium-rich noodle packages nightly (A box of cheap low-quality spaghetti a local store was about comparable in price to 5 packages of noodles) back to myself .

It's funny because I was always a little bit of a pasta snob, turning up my nose when offered anything out of can, but cheap dry pasta actually gave me a lot. My roots are there: just the right ratio of wiggly to al dente.