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At the peak of the dotcom hype, I distinctly remember hearing people ooh and ahh over what was, at the time, a huge innovation: peapod.com. You would simply log on, enter what groceries you wanted delivered, and a truck would arrive with all the food your little heart desired.

I, however, was not impressed. Why? Because New Yorkers have been doing this for ages. My mother is on a first-name basis with a guy at our local D’Agostinos, and has been known to call him from a taxicab to ask to personally hand-select “two pounds of your prettiest strawberries.”

Personally, I love the grocery store. I like wandering the produce aisle, finding new vegetables I’ve never tried. I like browsing the cheese counter, wondering how long it would take to eat an entire wheel of Brie by myself (not very long, I can assure you). But if I were to order groceries, I would do it over the phone, like my mother, and so many other New Yorkers. With peapod, I doubt that there’s an option to select “the 1% milk farthest back in the case, and whatever berries look good to you.”

Drool-worthy, ain’t it?

This is the counter of Mike’s Deli, one of several Italian food counters at the now-infamous covered market at Arthur Avenue, in the Bronx.

Only a few years ago, this was not a neighborhood you wanted to enter if you didn’t live there, and even now, it’s pretty hard to get to, even from the nearest subway station. But the trek is totally worth it.

Not only is this area of the Bronx still populated by real Italians, but they are willing to share all that is good and holy in the realm of Italian food… which brings me to the market, and Mike’s.

Mike’s is famous in the Belmont community, and even outside of it for providing amazing quality Italian meats, cheeses, and cold antipasti. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been sent up to Mike’s with an order so long that I had to bring the toughest male friend I have to help me haul it back downtown.

But, if it’s possible, even better than the food is the atmosphere. I know, it doesn’t seem possible. It’s just a deli, right? But it’s one of my favorite places on Earth, and I’m not the only one to say it. I think that most of the credit for this goes to the proprietor, Michele Greco. Famous in the community, Michele always remembers his customers, and is always proffering a slice of cheese or meat taken off what he’s slicing while you peruse.

I have to say, sometimes my absolute favourite snack is a little slice of Parmigiano-Reggiano or some prosciutto di Parma. And I’m not above a half-hour voyage to get it.

I am still sans camera, so the words in this post are going to have to do. I may come back and edit in some pictures later. Hopefully I’ll have my little baby back and functioning soon!

This weekend, I took a nice walk from my apartment to Kensington, taking advantage of some of the last nice, sunny days. I did most of my grocery shopping, but the butcher I usually use was closed, and considering the fact that one of the other two smelled like a farm, and the last one was very poorly stocked and didn’t have what I was looking for, I went down a few more blocks along College to Little Italy.

When I first moved to Toronto, last year, one of the first things I did was to hit the city’s website (toronto.ca) and look for Little Italy. I’ve always felt that no matter where I go, the Italian neighbourhood of a city will always feel somewhat like home.

I spent a lot of time in Little Italy last year, mostly because it was so close to home. I did most of my grocery shopping at the Magnolia Specialty Foods Store, which I sadly discovered this weekend was closed. A little more expensive than most grocery stores, Magnolia made up for it in quality. All of the name brand olive oils I recognized, San Marzano canned tomatoes from Italy, and beautiful produce filled the small store, and I know it will be missed by the entire neighbourhood (a lady who was reading the notice with me shared my sentiments).

That is one of the nice things about Little Italy; much like the country it’s named for, the people who live here are friendly even to strangers. People are known to hang out in Caffe Diplomatico and meet random strangers while enjoying a piece of pizza or an espresso and biscotto.

I finally arrived at my destination, Grace’s Meat Market, at Grace and College to procure ground veal. I walked up to the counter and asked about it, and the woman behind the counter looked at me, pondering, and then called into the back in Italian. A man in a white butcher’s coat came out and looked at me, repeating my order, “Ground veal?”

“Yes,” I answered, worried that I had come all this way in vain.

He looked at me one more moment, then rolled up his sleeves and asked, “How much?”

The fact that this tiny meat market will grind meat to order for customers, even such a paltry amount as I needed, reminded me why I love this community. I brought my wares straight home and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening making my bolognese sauce, canning most of it, but serving some over some artisinal orecchiete that I picked up at Grace’s.

Orecchiete Bolognese

As with most recipes that have been passed down, there is really no exact recipe to this. Taste as you go, and if something doesn’t taste right, adjust. Here’s a jumping off point, to get you started.

Brown half a pound of ground veal in extra-virgin olive oil in a sturdy dutch-oven or similar large pot. Remove the veal and keep it warm. Sweat one sweet onion, finely chopped, and one carrot, also finely chopped, in the same pot, until very tender and sweet. Season with salt, pepper, dried oregano, and dried red pepper flakes. Use a pair of kitchen shears to cut up the contents of two cans of whole San Marzano tomatoes and add them to the pot. Add a tablespoon of tomato paste and a teaspoon of sugar. Bring to a simmer, then reduce the heat to low and cook, uncovered, stirring from time to time. Once the tomatoes have mostly broken down, add the cooked meat, and cook for an hour or two. Sauce can be stored in tupperware in the fridge for a week, or canned and frozen (or kept in the cellar).

When ready to serve, heat the sauce in a saucepan while your pasta cooks in salted water. Add a little bit of cream to the sauce, and stir in the hot pasta. Serve with grated Parmesan or Pecorino cheese.

OK… I can see how this could be getting a little confusing… see… I live in two cities.

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. If I’ve lived anywhere (and I mean lived in the lightest of ways. I count places I’ve lived in for three months), then I count it as home. I was born and raised in New York City, but spent weekends, summers, and holidays in Westhampton Beach, on Long Island. In the seventh grade, my family moved to San Francisco, California, and then the year after, we moved back to New York. One year after moving back, I spent three months in Mouvaux, a neighbor town of Lille, in the north of France. The year after that, I started going to boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. I graduated three years later, and now find myself in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. *Whew* that’s a mouthful.

So as you can see, I have a connection to many places all over the globe, however, I feel the strongest connections to my hometown, New York, and my newest home, Toronto, which is why I’ve decided to devote a daily blog to each one.

Which brings me to today, and Porto Rico. My sister and I discovered Porto Rico after passing it one day on Bleecker street and recognizing the name from a book we had both just read called Smart vs. Pretty (I’m smart, she’s pretty).

Porto Rico is heaven on Earth for any coffee-lover. It’s a wholesale coffee store displaying its wares in the big, burlap sacks they come in. They provide coffee in bulk to the coffee stores nearby, but they also sell brewed coffee and pound and half pound bags to the public.

Whenever I’m in the area, I hit Porto Rico. We generally buy our coffee from Peet’s, but at half the price and twice the quality, I often find myself coming back up on the subway, my bag and clothes, reeking of coffee, concealing what has been termed by the MTA “a suspicious package”.

The store has three locations, and perhaps its the one I frequent that forbids photos, but every time I’ve been, one of the employees has lunged at me the second my digital camera threatens to even come out of my bag. However, I did puruse flickr and find a few pictures, the credit for which I must attribue to roboppy and aaroncorey.

According to my friend Izzy, who hails from Wisconsin, her father had never even heard of a bagel until he visited New York City for the first time in the seventies. Thankfully, news of the bagel has spread far and wide, and while New York still has the best bagels (not Montreal, contrary to the beliefs of my roommate) bagels are accessible to people in all cities.

One variation of the bagel, however, that non-New Yorkers may not have encountered thus far is the “flagel.”

The flagel is an ingenious idea, invented in New York at Tasty Bagel. Essentially, it is a flat bagel, and it is much easier to toast in a conventional toaster than even a split bagel half, especially now that traditional bagels have gotten bigger, at approximately 6 ounces, double the size of the original bagel.

One of the only problems with a flagel is that, because it is so flat, it is difficult to split, and it is therefore difficult to enjoy with cream cheese and lox, as so many of us do. If you don’t have the patience to split it (I find that a chef’s knife works nicely, although don’t use an expensive one if you enjoy flagels often, because it will quickly dull your knife), you can either place the cream cheese and lox on one of the seeded sides of the flagel, or just dip pieces of flagel in cream cheese. Either way, the flagel is quite delicious, and hopefully it will soon be as widespread as its ancestor.