Ciao and welcome to The Sicilian Penthouse.  I’m here to bring you my mother’s cooking:  pastas, meats, sweets, etc., she cooked up everyday while growing up in Bushwick, where we lived among many other Sicilians from the same town she came from, Santa Ninfa nella Provincia di Trapani.  I will be passing on to you the cooking traditions of my mother, Lina “Whadeyouwanteh?”and her family.  These are the foods I grew up eating from the time we lived on Stanhope Street and Knickerbocker Avenue to DeKalb and St. Nicholas Avenue, in the Bushwick section of (very North) Brooklyn, New York.  This section of Bushwick is called Wykcoff Heights.

A few years ago, I visited my mother’s family and found that they are still making the dishes I grew up eating in Brooklyn.  In addition, though,  it was evident that Sicilian cooking has been been influenced over the years by Northern Italian cuisine.  And that’s a GOOD thing!  There was a lot of seafood, bechamel based sauces, spinach pastas and other flavored pastas, etc., along with the traditional tomato sauces, meats, pastas and fresh dairy based dishes.  EVERYTHING was delicious and absolutely fresh!  There are bakeries and lattacini right in the town, so my aunt would come home with bread still hot from the ovens and fresh ricotta warm and creamy, and my favorite – the softest creamiest mozzarella.  All made that day, how can you beat that?

So it is my quest to bring you this regional home cooking from Momma Lina in the hopes that you out there will carry on these traditional dishes and learn some new things about Sicilian Home Cooking.  Amoninni! <— that’s Sicilian dialect for “let’s go!”

And one more  thing – I would like to thank some of my friends who inspired me to do this in the first place.  When my mom passed away they mentioned  how they learned how to make sauce and eggplant caponata from her.  So here I am now and we can continue learning from her.

Margaret Romolo Zukor