My husband and I, being Jersey Italians living in Connecticut, have to have a ginzo fix once in a while. Today, we went back to the old hood and filled our culinary coffers with fine ginzo fare. Smoked muscles, spicy octopus, some sort of canned oysters (none of which I eat--it's the boy. If it is slimy or crawls, he wants to eat it.) We bought fresh bread--REAL semolina bread--vegetables (hot peppers, sweet peppers, sicilian eggplant, brussel sprouts, savoy cabbage, kale, crimini mushrooms, spanish onions, red onions, broccoli, tomatoes, the biggest, fattest leeks I've ever seen) fresh from the docks, ropes of garlic, stuffed cherry peppers (hot and sweet!) biscuit bread to make bread salad,<fabulous! hard biscuit bread, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, red onions and tomatoes, salt to taste--marinated for several hours--ginzo heaven.> Fussilli, thumbprints (aka, orichetti,)squid ink fetuccini, olives, olives and more olives, goat cheese, fontanella, brie,swiss and havarti and the biggest hunk of provolone in the universe--extra sharp provolone. You know the kind that smells exactly like vomit?? That's the one. It's huge, twice the size of my head--seriously.
Into the car it all went and off we drove to meet some old friends in a--you guessed it--ginzo restaurant in Teaneck, New Jersey. After dinner, we meandered back to the car--no, scratch that--we ran back to the car because it was so freaking cold--and opened the door to have all of Italy waft out to embrace us in all it's ginzo glory.
Just goes to prove the old saying, you can take the girl out of Jersey, but you can NEVER take the Jersey out of the girl. Thirteen and a half years in Connecticut and a trip back home, back to the ginzo market of my heart, and I'm nostalgic for the place I could not wait to get out of.
Now, you CAN buy all this stuff in Connecticut--if you want to take a second mortgage out on your home, sell a child, maybe two, sell an organ. In the market, it was all fresh, it was all ridiculously affordable and it was BEAUTIFUL!! Ah, one day, I'm opening a restaurant and ALL the food is going to come from Corrado's market in NJ.