With Felicia Mohan
This three-ingredient appetizer from Felicia Ciaramitaro Mohan travels very well and is so simple to make. All of the ingredients can be obtained in the supermarket.
Simply bake thin-cut Italian salami slices in an oven for about 10 minutes at 325 degrees F. and dry off excess grease between two pieces of paper towel. You want to get them crispy, like a potato chip. Once they are cooled and you are ready to complete them, add a dab of crème fraiche and top off with a leaf of fresh basil. (For a ore decorative touch Felicia uses a disposable piping bag to add the crème fraiche but you could use a spoon.)
Note: Creme fraiche is a thick and smooth soured cream with a rich and velvety texture. This matured cream has a nutty, slightly sour taste produced by culturing pasteurized cream with a special bacteria. It does tend to be expensive so you could substitute a soft cheese if you wish to.
Ingredients
24 Thin Slices of lite Italian dry salami
4 ounces cream Fraiche
24 small leaves of fresh basil
Instructions
Pre heat oven to 325 degrees F.
1. Line baking sheet w/ aluminum foil and arrange salami on foil.
2. Bake for 10 minutes until salami slices are slightly golden brown on the edges, and are beginning to curl.
3. Remove from oven and pat each piece with a paper towel.
4. Spoon Creme Fraiche into pastry bag, and pipe onto each salami slice. Top with basil.
Note: You can use a spoon if you do not have a piping bag.
Recipe courtesy of Felicia (Ciaramitaro) Mohan, 2010.
From "Food For Thought" Column by Heather Atwood:
Felicia Mohan lives in a sparkling new house in Gloucester, and has twin 11-year-olds: Amanda, playing 12-year-old tennis and ranked No. 32 in New England, and B.J., a catcher for AAU Baseball who will play in the Gloucester All-Star 11-year-old team. Felicia looks like a beautiful, modern mother, struggling to get her kids where they need to go while keeping up with life at home, but Felicia is also adamant about preserving her family's Sicilian heritage, particularly the dishes her grandmother, another Felicia, prepared.
Felicia Mohan's grandfathers were named Joseph Salvatore Ciaramitaro — both of them, spelled the exact same way. One Joseph fished first from his boat The Benjamin and Josephine, which was sunk by a German U-boat off the coast of Maine, and then he fished from his Benjamin C, named after his father-in-law, Benjamin Cucuru. Later he founded Capt'n Joe's Lobster Co. on the wharf in Gloucester, now run by Felicia's brother, Joey, and cousin Frankie.
Felicia's other grandfather owned Pat's Center Grocery, that not only sold groceries but provided all the fishing boats with food for their long trips, delivering the "speza," as the supplies were called, to each boat before it left port.
Grandpa with the wharf was married to Felicia's namesake. Holidays at this Felicia's house began a full week ahead as all the women in the family gathered at her home, which had two full kitchens, to cook together. When school let out at 3, the children went straight to Grandma's house that week because that's where their mothers were cooking. Not only were these women making all the traditional Italian holiday foods, from appetizers such as octopus salad, a standard which the men insisted upon at every holiday, to a wealth of Italian cookies, homemade bread, and New World foods such as pies, but the women were also making ordinary dinners those weeknights for all their husbands and children.
Felicia and Joseph have passed away. Now, holiday meals are at young Felicia's, where 35 to 40 people come to celebrate. Felicia, like her grandmother, still sets a formal table with china and linen; her custom-built table seats 25, with two more tables in the great room for overflow, replacing her grandmother's enormous table that started in the kitchen, extended through the dining room, the hallway and ended at the living room.
In her large, creamy, new kitchen, Felicia still makes dishes like braciole, spiedini, and olive gonzathe. She makes videos for this newspaper showing how to prepare her grandmother's special bread crumbs, "mudiga," with chicken and steak. This past December, Felicia gathered all the cousins together to make their great-grandmother's Santa Lucia dessert, "cuccia," a vanilla pudding made with wheatberries which the playful great-grandmother had always encouraged the children to eat in a race.
Contact Heather at heatheraa@aol.com. Her blog is at gloucestertimes.com/foodforthought
