Cook the Caboto Club Way - The Windsor Star

Biblioasis Typesetter & IT Saint
Chris Andrechek, flipping zucchini
crepes. Chris, our resident man
of all seasons, is also a chef.

Well these are beautiful days over in BiblioLand. The sun is glinting off the wet roads like (ugh) ice, and temperatures might be plunging to near-freezing at night, but we were warm by our griddles and chafing dishes last night: we're proud to say that Cooking with Giovanni Caboto launched to great local enthusiasm, with a packed joint nibbling happily on Chris Andrechek's creations, and we were greeted this morning by a full-page spread in the Food section of The Windsor Star. In the area? Pick up a copy. It's got neat stats about the book, a seasonally appropriate recipe sample (can anyone say pumpkin?), a couple beaut photos of Gino, Mauro, and chefs Steven and Remo. Otherwise you can sneak a peek online. 

Editor Gino Piazza (left), and
Photographer Maura
Chechi (right). Where
would we be without them?

In other BiblioNews, we had a thoughtful meditation from Daniel Green run this weekend on experimentalism and Anakana Schofield's Malarky, and a shout-out for Alice Petersen from Stephen Beattie over at That Shakespearean Rag. We're basking in the digi-love these days. Keep it coming! And keep an eye out for Anakana at the Victoria Book Festival, Wordstock, and the Vancouver International Writers Festival over the next few weeks.

Largehearted Ogres

Afternoon, all, and happy Friday. Because nothing says Thanksgiving like lawyer-eating ogres (??), I thought I'd send you off to your long weekends with Mike Barnes's Reasonable Ogre playlist, which just went up on the Largehearted Boy site today. What's stimming? What's stemming? What songs can Mike Barnes listen to 80 times in a day and why? Find out here.

For those of you who haven't yet seen The Draught yet, issue 2 just went out yesterday, and you can take a little swig online. It's harvest-festival-themed. Enjoy your tofurkey stuffing, all: we hit the ground running on Tuesday with the Caboto Club Cookbook launch and we're in Office-Moving-Crazy-Land for the next week or two, but we're still going to keep you posted on all our happenings. Phone number remains the same. Should be in and nesting by the 15th.

What Makes Cooking with Giovanni Caboto so Special?

Cooking with Giovanni Caboto launches
Tuesday October 9th
at Biblioasis Headquarters,
1520 Wyandotte St. East.

Morning, folks, and happy Monday. There's a superabundance of news over here in BiblioLand—the BiblioBash tour finished with a bang on Thursday at our first Headquarters launch, the BiblioTourees are scattered to the four winds, Craig Boyko is reading tonight in Saskatoon, Mark Kingwell was reviewed in the National Post, and Alice Petersen interviewed in the mRb—but all that aside, and if you'll permit me, for a moment I'd like wax Thanksgiving-y and talk instead about FOOD.

For the past several months Biblioasis has been collaborating with the Caboto Club of Windsor on a cookbook. It's been fun. It's been (frequently) delicious. The Caboto Club is  southwestern Ontario's oldest and largest Italian organization, boasting spacious reception and banquet facilities, a long history of community involvement and charitable donations, and a now-famous kitchen and catering service. Founded in 1925 and named for the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, the Club still serves its original purpose—to encourage camaraderie among new Italian-Canadian citizens—but it has also become an Essex County landmark, and a meeting-place for the Windsor community at large. 

We're having a launch for the cookbook on October 9th; we're putting down our inkes & formes, we're picking up our spiders and spirtles, and we're trying a few recipes out. There'll be free food, mulled wine, and beautifully photographed books (... ready for smudging with happily oiled fingers). Zucchini pancakes. Risotto. Lasagna. Should be both fun AND delicious.

And in case you're wondering why we wandered down this particular road, well, this isn't just any cookbook. For starters it's massive. Gino Piazza and the Cookbook Committee canvassed hundreds of people in search of their best family recipes. They sorted them, in some cases translated them, and tried them individually in the Caboto kitchen. Photographer Mauro Chechi took stunning pictures of each and every dish. It's hard to say this without sounding hyperbolic, but it really is the all-you'll-need-in-a-lifetime resource book for Italian cuisine. 230+ recipes, a glossary of terms, a how-to guide for all the staples of the genre, and photos that will make you, um, hungry. 

Says one of the copy-editors.

For those of you who'd like to know a little more about the cookbook, I've included a little write-up below.

Cooking with Giovanni Caboto

a book launch at

BIBLIOASIS

Tuesday, Oct. 9

7 PM

1520 Wyandotte St. East

RSVP on Facebook Today!

Edited by Gino Piazza

Photographed by Mauro Chechi

978-1-926845-97-5 (cloth)

978-1-927428-05-4 (ebook)

$34.95

October 2012

What makes Cooking with Giovanni Caboto so special?

Most Italian cookbooks feature a selection of well-known, old-favourite recipes drawn haphazardly from northern and southern Italy alike. Italian cooking, however, is as diverse as the Italian landscape, and each of the country’s twenty regions has its own flavours, procedures, and ingredients. Cooking with Giovanni Caboto is one of the only commercially available cookbooks to provide an exhaustive survey of recipes and techniques by region, and certainly the only book to do it all in one volume.

Cooking with Giovanni Caboto therefore not only provides authentic recipes for all your favourite dishes—pastas, pizzas, polentas, lasagnas, risottos—but will show you how to prepare a range of local delicacies and staples, the recipes of which are often hard to find. It also includes valuable glossaries and how-to guides to explain the fundamental procedures of Italian cooking. The Club’s easy-to-follow instructions are suitable for beginner cooks, and our individually tested, generations-old recipes will please more seasoned chefs. Altogether Cooking with Giovanni Caboto provides the combination of breadth and in-depth instruction that will make it, like The Joy of Cooking, indispensable to every home.

Includes:

Over 250 full-colour photographs

10 recipes from each of Italy’s 20 regions, many of which are hard to find in North America

Dessert recipes

Antipasto recipes

An extensive guide to basic procedures, including the preparation of dough, sauces, polenta, salted cod, and more

A glossary of terms