Good beans make good coffee, it is that simple. But to make great coffee it takes a master to blend and roast the beans properly. Italian coffees use mainly the Arabica variety of coffee bean, known for its full flavor and low caffeine content. However depending upon the region and particular taste, the stronger and caffeine rich Robusta beans are blended with Arabica. The blends of the south tend to have more Robusta content in their blends which makes for a stronger espresso.

According to legend, human cultivation of coffee began after goats in Ethiopia were seen mounting each other after eating the leaves and fruits of the coffee tree. In reality, human consumption of coffee fruits probably began long before humans took up pastoralism. However, in Ethiopia there are still some locales where people drink a tisane made from the leaves of the coffee tree. The first written record of coffee made from roasted coffee beans comes from Arabian scholars who wrote that it was useful in prolonging their working hours. The Arab innovation in Yemen of making a brew from roasted beans, spread first among the Egyptians and Turks and later on found its way around the world. The picture above is of a flowering coffee tree.

The World of Italian Coffee. Today we continue on our journey through the history of coffee. Most of the world's coffee today comes from either South America or Indonesia, hence the nickname Java, but coffee originated in the highlands of Ethiopia and did not reach Europe for thousands of years. It was not until the 16th century that the introduction of coffee to Europe took place. Coffee arrived from the Middle East where it had achieved a near cult like following, with the first coffee houses being established in Istanbul. Once accepted by Islamic law the beverage followed the spread of Islam across Africa and Eastern Europe. It was very nearly banned, like alcohol many times. Venice, which relied heavily upon trade with the Muslim east, was first introduced to coffee in the mid 1570's. However coffee would remain a luxury item at this time and was not enjoyed for refreshment, but as a medical drink. Once coffee was transplanted to European colonies in Asia and South America the bean thrived and became accessible to the public.

The 17th century saw the opening of the first European coffeehouse in Venice, which later spawned over two hundred others along its canals. Coffee spread quickly at this point and other coffeehouses were founded in the major cities of Italy. Some of these dignified and elegant establishments are still in existence in Venice, Turin and Rome; virtual palaces to the national stimulant. To read more please visit Life In Italy.

I was expecting guests one day and needed to whip up something sweet to offer them with coffee. I often make a crostata, either with jam or with fresh fruit because they are so easy to put together yet so delicious, but this day I decided to experiment a bit. My Mother-In-Law makes these delicious apricot sliced cookies that are a cross between a cookie and a cake. I wanted something similar but with more of a buttery shortbread type of crust. I found an old shortbread recipe I often use as a base for squares, and topped that with some of my homemade Apricot Amaretto Jam. To finish it off I added slivered almonds and was very pleased with the results, as were our guests.

To toast the almonds, place on a baking sheet in a preheated 375 degree oven for about 5 minutes or until they just begin to color. The one thing I might do differently next time is to change the size of the pan. The original shortbread crust recipe called for an 8-inch pan but as I am just getting my kitchen set up here in Umbria all I had was a 9 inch pan. I think a little thicker crust would give these cookie slices more substance. You could use any fruit jam of choice in this recipe with great results. Serves 6 to by Deborah Mele.

1/2 Cup Sliced Lightly Toasted Almonds
1 Cup All-purpose Flour
1/2 Cup Granulated Sugar
8 Tablespoons (1 Stick) Unsalted, Softened Butter
1 Cup Apricot Jam (Or Other Fruit Jam)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Lightly grease an 8-inch square pan. Place the flour, sugar, and butter and pulse just until the mixture comes together. It will be crumbly but you should be able to pinch it into a soft ball. Be careful not to over mix which will make the crust tough rather than buttery and tender. Pour the mixture into your prepared pan and press it onto the bottom in an even layer. Pour the jam on top and carefully spread it across the dough evenly, leaving a 1 inch border all around. Sprinkle the almonds on top. Bake for about 25 minutes or until the sides are lightly browned and the jam bubbly and thick. Remove from the oven and let cool. Once cool cut into squares and serve.

Note: This dessert is best eaten within a day or two of baking.

I am always searching for the perfect market to compliment my regular shopping and I have discovered this company and do recommend them. Ironically they are located here in South Florida. Wholesale Italian Food has become a reliable supplier for many prestigious restaurants and grocery chains with our food products. Wholesale Italian Food offers home and restaurant delivery for many fresh imported Italian foods. WholesaleItalianFood.com is an e-commerce website operated by a privately-owned importer and distributor headquartered in South Florida.

In business for nearly 30 years as an importer and distributor of food products in the food service industry, our company in combination with our suppliers have become a reliable source for several large restaurant chains nationwide. Our products are supplied from some of the largest manufacturers in Italy bringing the highest quality items from some of the most traditional regions of this country.

With our experience and expertise, Wholesale Italian Food has created a strong relationship with our suppliers that has allowed us to be always capable of supplying a variety of products at the best prices. Combined with these great prices and our astonishingly low freight rates, Wholesale Italian Food believes that it has created a recipe for success for your restaurant or home kitchen!

If you cannot imagine how mere cornmeal can be turned into a tasty meal, then undoubtedly you have never eaten polenta prepared in an Italian kitchen. Once considered peasant food, polenta is now appearing in even the most elegant restaurants. Earlier in this century, polenta was a staple food eaten out of necessity, sometimes two or three times a day. Some families would dump a big mound of polenta onto a board, and everyone would sit around sharing it. It would be flavored with broth, a little sauce, vegetables or sausages. Polenta is still a staple in many homes in northern Italy today, particularly in the regions of Veneto, Piedmont, and Tuscany, although generally considered "home cooking" and not served for company.

Polenta has had a reputation for lengthy and extremely laborious cooking that originates in its Italian roots. Throughout history polenta was cooked over a wood fire in a central hearth or on a wood stove in a traditional curved bottom copper pot with a long handle called a paiolo. Copper was preferred as it conducts heat evenly, and the curved bottom of the pot exposed a greater portion of the cornmeal to the heat which insured there was no corners for the polenta to get stuck in and allowed for even cooking. The long handle of the pot kept the cook a comfortable distance from both the fire as well as the sputtering cornmeal. Constant stirring with a long-handled paddle, stick, or spoon was necessary to keep the polenta from burning. Today, there are very few of us that still cook over a wood fire, and our heavy bottomed cookware and modern stoves that have burners we can maintain at a constant low heat, allow us to let the polenta simmer away on its own with just occasional stirring to prevent lumps.

Polenta can be creamy, served soft with a scoop of sauce, or firm served as a side dish to grilled or roasted meats, or stirred into soups and stews to thicken and add flavor. Whatever way you choose to eat polenta, the basic principles of preparation remain the same. Although you now can buy instant polenta that can be prepared in under 5 minutes, or even precooked polenta ready to be sliced and fried or grilled, I find the effort it takes to prepare polenta the old fashioned way to be the best.

Basic Polenta Recipe
6 Cups Cold Water
1 Tablespoon Salt
1 Cup Cornmeal
3 Tablespoons Butter
2 Ounces Grated Parmesan Cheese

Bring the water to a boil in a medium saucepan. Add the salt and reduce the heat to medium low. As soon as the water begins to simmer, start pouring in the cornmeal in a thin stream, very slowly while stirring constantly with a wooden spoon to prevent lumps. Once all the cornmeal has been added, keep the water at a simmer, and stir frequently. It should take between 25-30 minutes to fully cook the polenta. Once cooked, the polenta should pull away from the sides of the pot easily. Just before it has completely cooked, stir in the butter and the cheese.

Why is Pizza so popular in Naples then you ask? This is so for the same reason that Italy has only one unifying Italian language, yet hundreds of different spoken dialects. Italy is a country of great variety, and cooking is just another aspect of the diversity of Italian culture.This diversity stems largely from peasant heritage and geographical differences. Italy is a peninsula separated from the rest of the continent by the highest chain of mountains in Europe. In addition, a long spine of mountains runs north to south down through this narrow country. These geographic features create a myriad of environments with noticeable variations: fertile valleys, mountains covered with forests, cool foothills, naked rocks, Mediterranean coastlines, and arid plains. A great variety of different climates have also created innumerable unique geographical and historical areas.But geographical fragmentation alone will not explain how the same country produced all of these: the rich, fat, baroque food of Bologna, based on butter, parmigiano, and meat; the light, tasty, spicy cooking of Naples, mainly based on olive oil, mozzarella, and seafood; the cuisine of Rome, rich in produce from the surrounding countryside; and the food of Sicily, full of North African influences.

Many non-Italians identify Italian cooking with a few of its most popular dishes, like pizza and spaghetti. People often express the opinion that Italian cooking is all pretty much alike. However, those who travel through Italy notice differences in eating habits between cities, even those only a few miles apart. Not only does each region have its own style, but each community and each valley has a different way of cooking as well. Every town has a distinctive way of making sausage, special kinds of cheese and wine, and a local type of bread. If you ask people, even in the same area, how to make pasta sauce, they will all have different answers. Variations in the omnipresent pasta are another example of this multiplicity: soft egg noodles in the north, hard-boiled spaghetti in the south, with every conceivable variation in size and shape. Perhaps no other country in the world has a cooking style so finely fragmented into different divisions. More to come in this subject in the next post! - Rita

Maybe it is because it is cold here in Miami and I have torn through my entire closet in the past few days to prepare and manage the cooler temperatures, none the less, I am going to share some of my favorite Italian Dressing styles with you this week. All of my closet clothes hunting tactics of the past few weeks has inspired me!

In a country where police uniforms are designed by Armani, it isn't surprising that the women take dressing very seriously. If you are planning a trip to Italy soon, and don't want to be pegged as a tourist, there is one important thing to remember. The objective of Italian dressing is NOT to blend in. Italian women take great pride in putting themselves together - "la bella figura". To show off your best features is the idea, so to blend in you must strive to stand out. So, where do you begin to acquire that special Italian flavor? In short, this week I will share a few of the key ingredients. We begin with Step One: Shoes! And I just love shoes!

Shoes: Nothing makes or breaks a look like footwear. Leave the tennis shoes for tennis and the walking shoes for the gym and park. Spice comes from style not comfort. The hottest designs incorporate pointed toes and high heels in the same shoe for maximum style and some discomfort.

More tips and tricks over the next few days! Stay tuned! - Rita

Italian is a Romance language, which means that Italian, just like Spanish, French, and Portuguese, is a child of Latin. Latin was once the official language in a large part of Europe because the Romans ruled so much of the area. Before the Romans came, people spoke their own languages, and the mixture of these original tongues with Latin produced many of the languages and dialects that are still in use today.

If you know one of the Romance languages, you can often understand bits of another. Just as members of the same family can look similar but have totally different characters. You find the same contradictions in the dialects (regional or local language differences) in Italy and in other countries.

If you visit Italy, you’ll hear various accents and dialects as you travel the country. Despite the number of dialects, you may be surprised to discover that everybody understands your Italian and you understand theirs. (Italians don’t normally speak in their dialect with foreigners.

What with all this interest in tall buildings and the world’s highest skyscrapers, I thought it would be interesting to discover how Italy measures up on the tall buildings front. It turns out that Italy has quite a way to go to compete with the Dubai Tower. Quite a long way, actually. If you’d like to find out what the tallest building in Italy is, and where it can be found, then read on, curious reader.

Technically, the tallest building in Italy today can be found in Naples - and it is the Torre Telecom Italia which is 129 meters (423 feet) in height. This 33 floor structure, however, is about to be beaten by a building in Milan, which is already being listed as Italy’s tallest building on Wikipedia. The successor to the Italy’s Tallest Building title will be 161 meters (528 feet) high with 39 floors, and it will house Lombardy regional authority personnel . However, at a measly 161 metres, it’s not much of a threat to the record breaking 818 meters of the Dubai Tower.

Other tall buildings are on Italy’s horizon though, twenty seven of them, including one which will snatch the Italy’s tallest building title from the Lombardy council skyscraper – I Dritto – the Straight (or maybe ‘upstanding’ would be a better translation).

Guests of private or public parties are sometimes entertained with a game called "Tombola", similar to Bingo. The New Year is also celebrated with spumante or prosecco, Italian sparkling wine. New Years parties, whether public or private, will often last until sunrise in order to watch the first sunrise of the newborn year. An old custom that is still followed in some places, especially in the south, is throwing your old things out the window to symbolize your readiness to accept the New Year. So, keep an eye out for falling objects if you're walking around near midnight!

Oh, one more thing, don't forget to wear your red underwear to ring in the new year! They say it'll bring you luck in the coming year.

The Umbrian city of Gubbio has a spectacular way to mark the end of Christmas. 800 water fountains illuminated with thousands of lights form a gigantic Christmas tree climbing the side of Mount Igino. The ‘biggest Christmas tree in the World’ (according to the Guinness Book of Records) is on show from 1-10 January and is absolutely spectacular.

Epiphany (Befana) rolls along on 6 January, a Catholic holiday vying with Christmas for importance. Epiphany celebrates the arrival of the Magi. Legend has it that the Wise Men asked an old woman for shelter. The woman (La Befana) refused, and has been wandering the planet ever since looking for the baby Jesus. Epiphany Eve (5 January) sees a good witch flying from rooftop to rooftop with gifts for children who’ve been good. If that sounds familiar, it’s a variation on the same folk tales that have come down to us as Father Christmas, with La Befana even popping down the chimney.

Travel to the Abruzzo region on 16 January and you can enjoy the Farchia festival. The people of the marvellously named mountain town of Fara Filiorum Petri construct 30ft bundles (fasce) of sticks, stand them on end and burn them like tapers. Songs are sung to celebrate Saint Antonio’s Day, and then it’s open house for a feast of sweets, wines and local spirit.

Carnivals or Carnevale are celebrated all over Italy, strictly speaking it is the lead up to Lent. Venice has a tremendous fortnight-long masked event and the celebrations on the Tuscan seaside resort of Viareggio are world famous. But the little Tuscan city of Foiano della Chiana, near Arezzo, claims its celebration as the oldest in the region, with the first Carnevale taking place on 18 January, 1809, 64 years before Viareggio. With parades of giant floats, colourful masks and costumes, music and dancing, and a feast of good food on sale in the streets, this is great fun for families. And if you’re used to carnivals running over a day or two … not in Italy. The celebrations here run from the last Sunday in January to the third Sunday in February.

Just north of Bologna, the Emilia-Romagna town of Cento is ‘twinned’ with the rather more famous Rio Carnival, with the winning float being shipped off to Brazil. The Cento events make Foiano appear a mere newcomer, with the city proudly pointing to artist Guercino’s painting of 1615 Maschere Folleggianti which depicts the celebrations. This is a serious business, with a guild of float makers training apprentices in the old craft. The spectacular celebrations culminate in 30,000 pounds of sweets being thrown to the crowds. The carnival runs for around a month from the penultimate Sunday in January.

TWVSEES8T9MH

I must say I usually make these several times a year but this recipe is certainly a must during the holiday season. The best part about these treats is simple, they are easy to make, simply delicious and it takes no time at all!

SPUMETTI (Chocolate-Hazelnut Meringues)

1lb. Hazelnut meats, coarsely chopped
1lb. Confectioner's sugar
1oz. Cocoa (Table Spoon)
2tsp. Cinnamon (Tea Spoon)
6 Egg whites

Preheat the over to 325F. Cut baking pan liner to fit 2 baking sheets and lightly grease. Mix hazelnuts, sugar, cocoa, and cinnamon in a large bowl; add egg whites and mix well until blended - about 5 minutes. Wet hands and break off small pieces of mixture (about 1tablespoon) and shape into round balls. Place on baking sheets, 1 inch apart and bake for approximately 30 minutes. This will make about 3/12 dozen!

When I refer to "scenes" I am taking about the elaborate nativity scenes which are most certainly a part of the Italian holiday tradition. Bear with me here, I want to talk about the traditions but I also don't want to offend anyone in regards to religious affiliation so, please know that it not my point. These "Scenes" consist of figures, in clay or plaster, of the infant Jesus, Mary and Joseph. An ox and a donkey nearby because legend has it that they warmed the child with their breath. It is around this basic focal point that individual artisans create their own intricate landscapes. There may be grottoes, small trees, lakes, rivers, the lights of "Bethlehem" in the background, angels hung from wires, and occasionally, even local heroes. The most elaborate scenes are usually set up in churches. There is also often a contest between churches of the same town for the best scene. It is also custom to stroll from church to church to view and compare.

Is there a custom you would like to talk about? Let us know!