bacchante

Best meal I ever ate:

Cooked myself: eggs laid that morning fried in olive oil that came from the trees right outside the door on stale Tuscan bread fried in the same oil, accompanied by wine from the vines outside the door.

My current drink of choice:

Woodford Reserve old fashioned with home-preserved kumquat garnish

My "Go-to" dinner party dish:

My own invention of chicken breast "scallopini" with a sauce of garlic, sage, lemon (juice and zest), dry vermouth, and cream.

My favorite comfort food:

bronze die-extruded pasta with a sauce of fresh, ripe, raw heirloom tomatoes, garlic, basil, and high quality extravirgin olive oil from Central Italy--no cheese, please

My top 5 favorite restaurants:

Lebanese Butcher, Myanmar, and Thai Square, in the D.C. area; Indian restaurant in the Speke Hotel in Kampala, Uganda; and Il Boschetto, at the end of a 1 km dirt road outside a small town in Central Italy, open only on weekends with trout fresh-caught from the pond in front for $5.

My most tattered cookbooks:

The Classic Italian Cookbook, The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating by Marcella Hazan. I'm on my second copy and pages are falling out; copies now go for over $100 on Amazon.com