It’s been quite a while since I’ve shared any recipes from Sicily, hasn’t it?  I learned this Zucca Gialla in Agrodolce, or Pumpkin in Sweet and Sour Sauce, in a cooking class I took from my friends Alberto and Liliana in Catania.  In the version I learned, the pumpkin slices were sauteed in olive oil rather than grilled, but I decided to put my own twist on it today!

I’m wondering if there are any people out there who bought a few sugar pumpkins this year with the intention of finally making homemade pumpkin puree for their Thanksgiving pies.  I did.  And no, I never got around to baking those pumpkin pies from scratch.  But this recipe is so delicious and so simple to make, I’m not regretting it all!

I have the original recipe somewhere around here, along with the other recipes I learned from Alberto and Liliana.  But I just didn’t feel like digging through my (still unpacked) boxes in the office.  So you’re getting my improvised and Americanized version of Zucca Gialla in Agrodolce.  I do remember hearing that the old Sicilian way to serve this dish is with thinly sliced raw garlic and chopped fresh mint adorning each slice of pumpkin.  I didn’t do that, but feel free to try it!

For those of you who don’t live in San Diego, land of year-round grilling, you may revert to the original recipe and brown the pumpkin slices in olive oil rather than cooking them on the grill.  You could even throw a smashed clove of garlic into the oil to flavor it while it’s heating.  Just remove the garlic before adding the pumpkin so it doesn’t burn.  Brown the pumpkin slices in batches over medium heat, adding olive oil as needed, then remove them to a serving platter.  Drizzle with the sweet and sour sauce before serving.

Zucca Gialla in Agrodolce (Sweet and Sour Grilled Pumpkin)

1 – 1 1/2 pounds sugar pumpkin*
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 clove garlic, pressed or minced
kosher salt
3 tablespoons wine vinegar (red or white)
3 tablespoons white sugar
chopped fresh mint or parsley (optional)
thinly sliced garlic (optional)

1. Prepare coals or preheat your gas grill. Cut Pumpkin in half, scrape out seeds and membrane. Peel each half and cut into 1/4-1/2 inch slices.

2. In a large bowl, whisk together olive oil, one clove of minced garlic, and a generous pinch of kosher salt.  Add pumpkin slices and toss well to coat.

3. Grill pumpkin slices over medium to medium-heat for a few minutes on each side or until just tender. Watch closely and don’t let them burn.  Remove grilled pumpkin to a serving platter.

4. In a small saucepan, mix vinegar, sugar, and any garlic oil left in the bowl.  Cook until sugar is dissolved and mixture thickens just slightly.  Drizzle sweet and sour sauce over the pumpkin on the serving platter.  Garnish with fresh chopped mint or parsley and thin slices of raw garlic if desired.

Recipe Notes: *If you can’t find sugar pumpkins, try substituting butternut squash or acorn squash.  If you decide to saute the pumpkin slices rather than grill them, start with two tablespoons of oil in the pan, and add more as needed.  When all the slices have been cooked, add the vinegar and sugar to the remaining olive oil in the pan and heat until sugar is dissolved and sauce thickens just a bit.  Serving the pumpkin with thinly sliced fresh garlic and fresh chopped mint is traditional.  I prefer to skip the raw garlic and serve it with either fresh chopped mint or parsley.

Yield: four servings.

This sugar pumpkin was intended for a pie, but we're happy he ended up on the grill instead!

Cut the pumpkin in half and scrape out the insides. Save the seeds for roasting if you're into that kind of thing!

I find that a vegetable peeler works very well for peeling pumpkins (and butternut squash).

Cut the pumpkin into slices that are between 1/4 and 1/2 inch thick. They don't have to be perfectly uniform.

The whole process only takes a few minutes!

Toss the pumpkin with olive oil, garlic, and salt until well coated.

Grill pumpkin over direct medium heat for a few minutes on each side.

To get decent grill marks when using a gas grill, make sure you preheat the grill while you are preparing the pumpkin.

Related Recipes:

• Bruschetta
• Blood Orange and Green Olive Salad
• Pasta with Pistachio Cream Sauce

Around the Web:

• Grilled Kabocha Pumpkin and Asian Pear Salad from Fresh Approach Cooking
• Toasted Pumpkin Seeds from Simply Recipes
• Thai-Spiced Pumpkin Soup from 101 Cookbooks

It’s not the best sourdough I’ve ever made. I didn’t worry about having an open crumb or a perfect crust. I just wanted some good bread. I wanted to know for certain that my well-traveled sourdough starter was indeed in good health. No, it may not be the best sourdough I’ve made and these photos may not be the best I’ve taken. But this bread, this blog post, and these photos will always have a special place in my heart.

Some simple bruschetta to start.

Pizza Calabrese with spicy salami, hot peppers and capers.

And Justin’s favorite: pizza with french fries!

We decided to have our last meal at the very first pizzeria we tried four years ago on our first night in Sicily. It’s not the best pizza, but it’s pretty good. And it was fun to relive our first dining experience in Sicily. Afterwards we walked down the street to get some pastries for dessert.

As you can imagine, it took a while to choose one

Well, we are now officially back in the United States.

Although we won’t make it to San Diego until tomorrow morning, we arrived in Virginia this afternoon and have checked into our hotel. The animals survived the trip with absolutely no problems and we humans are doing fine despite the fact that we haven’t really slept in about 42 hours. Now as long as we can make it to the airport by 4 am tomorrow, everything should work out fine!

Off to sleep…more tomorrow!

Not yet, unfortunately.

I am really going to miss Sicilian blood oranges! Driving around, I can see them turning orange on the trees but it’s just not quite time for them yet. It’s almost a crime to leave the island before getting to taste one last glass of blood orange juice…

Our time here is nearing an end and I can say now that we are officially homeless. After hours of move-out cleaning, we are now completely out of our house and into a hotel. We don’t leave the island until early Friday morning but there are a million last minute details to keep us busy in the meantime.

I do plan to keep posting for the next few days in order to keep up with National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo), but you won’t be seeing much food since I don’t have a kitchen. And, as of tomorrow, I won’t even have a car to get to any Sicilian restaurants!

But, I might have a few recipes and photos tucked away. I’ll see what I can do!

Remember how I joined NaBloPoMo and made a promise to post something every day for the entire month of November? Well, it’s day eleven now and I’m starting to feel the pressure. But here I am, back again!

This is our last weekend in Sicily so we have been trying hard to squeeze in as much last minute sightseeing as we can. Today was a beautiful sunny day so we took a road trip through the island’s interior, visiting the towns of Agira, Nicosia and Sperlinga. Since we were gone all day and it’s now getting close to my bedtime, I am just going to share some photos taken throughout the day rather than writing about the trip. Enjoy!

You can check out my Flickr photoset if you want to see more from the trip!

Serious Eats, I seriously ate one of these cannoli this afternoon in honor of your win.

I then proceeded to eat one of those mini strawberry cream tarts (top right) to celebrate my own fifth place victory!

Cheers to us all!

No time for a recipe today but wanted to share some photos from our drive up to the volcano last weekend. The fall colors were breathtaking against the backdrop of black lava rock on the south side of the mountain. But after driving around to the north side, we found some beautiful misty forests and for a moment it felt more like Oregon than Sicily.

Antipasti (appetizer): Two types of salami (one spicy, one not), cheese, olives, peperonata (marinated sweet and sour peppers with pine nuts and raisins), garlicky eggplant slices, one square of something really tasty that was obviously made with eggs and cheese but I’m not sure what it’s called, and one square of something else (again, I have no idea what it’s called) that was layered with eggplant, tomato, cheese, and some other things.

Antipasto is always my favorite course!

Primo (first course): Homemade pasta with ragu (meat sauce) and Risotto with porcini mushrooms. Both of these were excellent! The pasta with ragu was some of the best I’ve tasted and I’ve eaten a lot of ragu since I’ve been on this island! The risotto had just a hint of saffron and the porcini mushrooms (the only type of mushroom that I really like) were wonderful!

Secondo (second course): Grilled sausage, veal scallopine with porcini mushroom cream sauce, chicken involtini (thin chicken breast layered with cheese, bread crumbs and ham, rolled up, breaded with seasoned bread crumbs and fried), mixed salad. This was also really good. Justin thought this was the best sausage he’s had in Sicily and I think I have to agree. The veal was a little tough but the porcini cream sauce made up for it. The involtini was pretty standard but a little on the dry side. What was really surprising was that the salad had potatoes in it. In Sicily you’re generally lucky to find even a tomato in a mixed salad because ‘mixed’ could simply mean some lettuce mixed with radicchio. But this salad had lettuce, radicchio, tomato, carrot and potato. It was good.

Dolce (dessert): Apple Cake. For dessert we were served a slice of torta di mela (apple cake). It was ok, but a little dry. I have to admit that I’m not a huge fan of many Italian cakes. But, I ate all of it

And, of course, the only way to end an Italian meal is with a shot of espresso!

I thought you might be interested to know what a typical Sicilian lunch might look like. In Italy, lunch is the most substantial meal of the day. Although most people don’t sit down to this type of meal every day anymore, it is still a must on the weekends.

Many restaurants will have a fixed price lunch like this where you just sit down and eat whatever they bring you. It’s my favorite way to dine in Sicily because you know that what you are eating is most likely fresh and local. In my experience, the normal price for this type of meal ranges between 20 and 25 euros.

The photos above show the lunch we had today in a restaurant in the small mountain town of Sant’Alfio. The town’s claim to fame is a giant Chestnut tree that is supposedly the largest tree and oldest tree in Europe. It is estimated to be between 3000 and 4000 years old.

This is only one small part of the tree, it was difficult to get a shot that showed the immensity of it. But I liked this one with the couple standing under the umbrella.

We had quite a few adventures driving around Mount Etna today but I’ll have to tell you more about it tomorrow! We’ve been out all day and I still need to sort through the rest of my photos before I can tell you the rest of the story. I did, however, need to share something with you today in order to fulfill my NaBloPoMo commitment!

And just a quick reminder to cast a vote today for your Best Food Blog pick in the 2007 Weblog Awards. Remember, you can vote once every 24 hours until November 8th! If you haven’t done so already, you can go vote here.

We struck out with the men’s carryall but look what I found in the parking lot!

Like I’ve said before, you just never know what you’ll run across in Sicily.

Isn’t this the scariest looking tree you’ve ever seen? It took about ten minutes of googling when we got home, but I figured out that this is a Floss Silk Tree. And guess what? They grow in San Diego, too! I guess I’d better watch my step when I get there!

The cool thing about this tree was the contrast between the frighteningly evil-looking trunk and bright beautiful flowers hanging off the branches. It was really quite amazing and I have no idea how I missed these trees all the other times I shopped there. If you’re interested, you can go check out some more spiky tree photos on my flickr page.

After shopping, we came back home for our own ‘riposo’ and decided to head out to Catania later in the evening to continue the quest for a decent man purse.

Riposo in Sicily generally lasts from 1 pm until 4 pm. Pretty much everything closes up except for restaurants and bars (I’m talking about espresso bars, not whiskey joints). And then most businesses grudgingly open their doors back up by around 4:30 or 5:00 and will continue to do business until about 8pm.

It’s a completely different lifestyle because many Italians are still working during a normal American dinner time. Dinner time here is 9 pm or later and most restaurants will not even be open before 8 pm. It’s not uncommon for large groups of people, kids in tow, to come rolling into a restaurant at 10 pm or later on a weeknight.

So what do Sicilians do in the evening when most Americans are eating dinner or passed out in front of the TV?

They walk.

They shop for dinner.

They sell vegetables.

They bake bread.

I love wandering around Catania after dark. The city comes alive. The dirtier, crumbling aspects of the city disappear with the sun and streetlights bring alive baroque details along side streets and in shadowed courtyards.

It’s always a shock to my system to walk inside one of Catania’s modern department stores after first wandering the dark cobblestone streets. But we were still in search Justin’s carryall, so into Coin we went! I will miss Coin not because of the clothing (I don’t fit into most Italian clothing), but because of their housewares department! They have the coolest kitchen stuff and every time I go there, I find something different! Oh, and they have good shoes too

We did eventually find a bag for Justin, and then it was time for pizza!

The restaurant was too dark to take photos of our actual pizza, but I did manage to get a shot of their pizza kitchen on the way out. I would love to have one of these ovens in my house!

While we were eating pizza, it started raining. At first it was nice because we were sitting on the second floor, and our table was next to an open door that led out to a covered terrace. We could hear the rain and it was relaxing. And then it started raining harder.

And then it rained harder.

Then it was raining so hard that the rain was coming in the restaurant so we had to close the door. I didn’t think much about it until it came time to leave. As we were walking down the stairs we noticed a group of people gathered around the exit.

It was then we realized that we were trapped. You see, the streets in Sicily don’t drain. When it rains hard, the streets turn into rivers. Since it’s been a while since I’ve experienced it, I had forgotten how bad it can get. The water outside the door had risen so much that we would have had to wade through it. But, the restaurant owner quickly took care of the problem.

They somehow managed to build a bridge to get us across the water to a dry patch. It wasn’t until we crossed the makeshift bridge that we saw the real problem.

Remember the photo earlier in the post, where people are walking down the street? Well, this is the same street a couple of hours later. Again, we were trapped. We huddled under the umbrella we purchased from one of the enterprising street vendors who were out wading in the water and I managed to take a few photos. But we saw some crazy things that I wasn’t able to photograph.

We saw restaurants and stores flooded, cars and scooters stalled in the road, an old woman bravely wading across the river (street) with water up above her knees, two friends fall into a manhole at the same time (the lids of the manholes had been washed away).

It was crazy. Ambulances and fire trucks were everywhere. All of this had happened in the time it took to eat some pizza.

Luckily, the rain slowed and the water started to recede after a few minutes. We did have to wade through some ankle-deep water a few times as we made our way back to the car but at least we didn’t fall into any manholes!

So that was our Saturday.

If you haven’t already, don’t forget to read part one of A Weekend in Sicily.

More pumpkin recipes coming up!