Letter from Lidia – September

All this talk about Lidia’s Favorite Recipes has me asking myself what my other favorites are: What’s my favorite color? Who is my favorite opera singer? I’m grateful that this book has encouraged me to look inward, and I find it especially appropriate that it’s being released in my favorite season: fall.

I need only look out my kitchen window at my mother’s garden to know that autumn is on its way.  What used to be a veritable forest of fruits, vegetables, and herbs seems to have been reduced to a patchy, wintry landscape overnight. If you were to take a close look,  though, you would notice that all that lonely looking soil has already been seeded with an array of hearty fall and winter vegetables; I’m particularly excited for the garlic, which we will harvest, braid, and hang to dry in the spring.

Fortunately, what can appear to be the start of a descent into the depths of winter is actually the beginning of a whole new cycle, and I’ve always found that to be true of fall. I know that when Tanya and Joe were kids the “back to school” season certainly never felt like a time to hibernate!  For me, the fall is the time to get in gear; this year I’ll certainly have my hands full with my newest cookbook, Lidia’s Favorite Recipes. I feel particularly attached to this latest book; I truly love all 100 recipes I included, and I feel that in many ways this book is quintessentially Lidia–a neatly bundled and accessible guide to Italian cooking that features my family’s tried and true recipes.