Peasant Food/Hobo Food

My friend, Rich, got back from Italy a few weeks ago. He raved about the food in Venice. He said, few ingredients, not a lot of preparation, delicious! This reminds me of the time that my artist friend, Irene Woodbury stayed over at my place when she was going up the East Coast selling her art books, they are amazing!. She spent a lot of time in Italy, and now lives there. She made a pasta dish for me one night.  Now I was never a big mushroom fan, the thought of eating fungus always kind of creeped me out. She said, “ trust me”. The dish consisted of one simple tomato, finely chopped mushrooms, olive oil, and a clove or two of garlic. She chopped the shrooms, put them in the heated oil in the pan and cooked them down to a meat like consistency. While this was going on she boiled the pasta and chopped up the tomato. Somewhere along the line I'm sure garlic was involved. The tomatoes went in after the shrooms and cooked into a sauce. She put the sauce on the pasta. Simple right? Not much going on ,right? Two words,” mouth magic”! Absolutely, one of the best meals I've ever eaten in my entire life!

Now I have a ton of cookbooks, subscriptions to two cooking magazines, lots of recipes, nice pictures, but none of them can touch this dish. The lesson here is that fancy doesn't equal better, expensive doesn't equal better,… How many snobs does it take to screw in a lightbulb, make you an overpriced meal and then browbeat you into thinking it's really great, when it really isn't? Don't believe the hype!