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Focus on Florence
By Francine Segan
for www.BettyConfidential.com, 2009
| Florence is a gorgeous city, filled with great art like Michelangelo's David and wonderful shopping, like Ferragamo's hand-made shoes (www.salvatoreferragamo.it) and Prada purses (www.prada.com).
It's small enough that, after a day or so, it feels familiar and cozy. The only downside to Florence is us…the tourists!
Tourists actually outnumber the natives during the summer, spring and fall, so the best time to experience Florence is actually in the winter. In winter not only is it less crowded, but also everything, from restaurants to hotels and designer shoes, are cheaper.
-1- I've always avoided eating in hotel dining rooms, but not in Florence. Some of the best meals you'll get in Florence are at hotels. My hands-down favorite is Il Palagio Restaurant at the stunningly gorgeous Four Seasons Hotel (www.fourseasons.com/florence).
Their Executive Chef, Vito Mollica, shares some cooking tips:
-Select the very best ingredients and then cook them simply. The more simply you cook the ingredients, the more intense the flavor.
-Don't add olive oil to water when you cook pasta. If your pasta is sticking it just means you aren't using a big enough pot or enough water.
-Almost any combination of leftover veggies makes a great pasta sauce. Just toss the cooked pasta with the veggies and a little garlic, oil, and Parmesan cheese for an instant pasta primavera.
 -2- The best in show in Florence is at Teatro del Sale (www.teatrodelsale.com), a dinner theater spot. Usually I run away from dinner theater, it's almost always lousy theater and worse food. But this was some of the BEST food and most funny entertainment I've ever experienced.
First you eat, then they swap out the tables and set up theater-style seating for the show. They serve dozens and dozens of amazing dishes, yelling out the name of each one as it comes out of the kitchen. It's fresh, delicious, and you get all you can eat. With all the wine you can drink too. All for 30 euros!
The owner and chef, Fabio Picchi, is a hoot. He's a three-ring circus all by himself, and that's before the performance. To give you an idea take a peek at this bread he serves that looks like a Flintstone style brontosaurus bone.
-3- Winter is the best time of year for food in Florence. The best Tuscan dishes are hearty winter dishes like sole Florentine style, steak Florentine, and ribollita, a thick vegetable chowder, that's even better the next day.
RECIPE:
 Ribollita
1/2 pound dried white beans, like Great Northern or cannellini
1 bay leaf
Salt
2 onions, 1 chopped, 1 thinly sliced
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil, plus more for serving
3 garlic cloves
1 (28-ounce) can Italian plum tomatoes in puree, chopped
2 cups vegetable or chicken stock, plus more as needed
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 stalk celery, finely chopped
1/2 Savoy cabbage, washed and chopped
1 red cabbage, washed and chopped
1 bunch chard, washed and chopped
2 potatoes, peeled, diced
Pepper
6 to 8 thin slices of day-old Italian bread or baguette
Parmesan cheese
Soak the beans in 2 quarts of water overnight, and then boil them with the bay leaf and 1 tablespoon of salt until tender, about 1 hour. Discard bay leaf.
Put about 3/4 of the beans, and the cooking liquid, into a blender and puree until smooth. Reserve the remaining whole beans.
In a large soup pot sauté the chopped onion in the oil on medium heat until golden, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and sauté an additional minute. Add the tomatoes, stock, carrots, celery, the cabbages, chard, and the potatoes. Season with salt and pepper, cook for a few minutes and then add the pureed beans and sliced onions.
Cook for about 1 hour, adding more stock, if needed. Then add the bread and the reserved whole beans and simmer for another 10 minutes. Mix well.
Serve with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil and sprinkle of Parmesan cheese.
-4- There's lots of great chocolate in Florence, yet I didn't see one overweight Italian in any of the sweets shops. I think its because they go for quality not quantity. Probably the most important yummy thing I learned in Florence is that if you treat yourself to a really fine piece of chocolate, it's so rich and satisfying that one piece is enough. It actually stops your cravings for other sweets. I think of it as diet food.
-5- The butcher shops in Florence do everything for you but come to your house, cut the meat and feed you! The butchers totally season all sorts of meat with herbs and even veggies. You just cook and serve.
A few tricks I learned from these oh-so-helpful Italian butchers are:
 -Wrap lean roasts with thick crusty bread and then few slices of bacon and fresh herbs like bay leaves and rosemary. Tie everything together with kitchen string. The bacon will be crisp, and the bread will have absorbed all they delicious smoky salty bacon flavors, so you'll have a sort of instant stuffing side dish to go with the meat.
-Roast duck breast covered in lots of slices of orange tied on with kitchen string. As it bakes it makes it's own orange sauce.
-Ask your butcher to butterfly and pound a round or flank steak then spread all sorts of thinly sliced steamed veggies like carrots, potatoes, and celery over the meat. Roll it up and tie it closed with kitchen string. Season with salt and pepper, and bake covered with aluminum foil. Its like sliced stew!
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