This one is actually a repost from last year. Today was Easter Pie/Pizza Chiena Day at my Nana's house, and even though there's no specific recipe in this post, doing this photo study last year was a really fun project, and I want it to get a little more air time. So, an oldie but relevant goodie from last year's archives, enjoy!
Lynn (4/1/12)
Hello Darlings :)
This post was a long time coming, because I wasn't quite sure how to present it to you all. The weekend of Palm Sunday, we (Mom, Mikey, cousin Sharon, Nana, Boppa, and I) made Pizza Chiena, or Easter Meat Pie, in the basement kitchen of my grandparent's house. Yes, my Italian grandfather has a full kitchen in his finished basement. I'll pause for any obligatory Italian stereotype jokes or comments that need to be made........................................okay, there we go :) But I digress. My grandparents have made Pizza Chiena for every year of my life, and probably for a very long time before that. They make a bunch of pies and then give them out to family and friends for Easter, just like they do with fried dough on Saint Joseph's Day in March, but that's another blog post:)
I'm not really sure what is particularly Easter-ish about these pies, other than the fact that they contain ingredients that are often traditionally given up for Lent; eggs, red meat, cheese, etc (btw, the literal translation of *Pizza Chiena* is *Pizza Pie*). So, by the time Easter rolls around, after forty days of Lenten fasting, these rich meat pies with their sweet dough crust are beyond indulgent. As I said, my grandparents make these every year, and I have often helped with the preparation in years past. I missed a few years recently whilst living in Rochester, or sometimes I was in a show that ran through the Easter weekends, but this year I was at their disposal. I brought along my trusty camera to document the experience and present it here to all of you :)
But here's the thing. The more I looked at the photos from that day, and the more I tried to compose a blog post around them, the more I thought that what I wanted for this particular post was for it to be more of a photo study of cooking with my family, rather than a few paragraphs and a recipe regarding the same. Someone way wiser than me once said that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in this case, I think I agree. I could wax poetic all the live-long day about what cooking with and for my loved ones means to me, but I think the photographs speak for themselves, and I should let them. Don't get me wrong, it's not that they're especially spectacular photos, because I am most certainly not a spectacular photographer, but I feel they do a good job illustrating the essence of cooking with my family. Also, small confession, I do not have my own copy of this recipe, it is my Nana's, and I didn't get a chance to write it down. I'm oddly okay with this, though, there's always next year, and, like I said, this get-together wasn't necessarily about an ingredient list :) Look at the photos and you will be able to cobble together how these pies are made, but I hope that is the least you get out of them :) Enjoy :)
Lynn
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