Greeks, Romans, Moors, Normans, Spaniards, Garibaldi and his thousand, and finally hordes of tourists have visited Sicily over the milennia. Some stayed for centuries, some only for generations, but even those whose sojourn was comparatively brief played a role in the island’s blending of cultures and traditions.

If this human concoction can be distilled into a single dish, it might be pasta con le sarde. A strikingly simple plate of spaghetti, fennel, onions, and sardines garnished with golden raisins (sultanas) and pine nuts, but its layers of flavor and texture speak of Sicily’s multifarious heritage. Grapes, introduced by the Greeks in the 7th century BC, combining with the tradition of using dried fruit in savory dishes adopted from the Moors, the abundant use of saffron borrowed from the Spanish Bourbon monarchy, and the native reliance on cheap and readily-available ingredients of the highest quality in the onions, foraged wild fennel, pine nuts and the island’s golden olive oil.

And, just like the variegated Sicilian identity, the disagreements over what constitutes a real pasta con le sarde are multihued. Some prefer a thicker long pasta like perciatelli or bucatini over spaghetti, some add breadcrumbs, some refuse to add anchovies, others only saute half the sardines with the sauce, breaking the other half into mix after the pasta has been added to the pan, and yet others would crumble almonds over the assembled dish and bake it in a moderate oven for 20 minutes. The biggest philosophical difference though, lies in the presence of tomato paste. Palermitano’s typically leave it out altogether, whereas cooks further west and south in Trappani, Marsala and, particularly Agrigento, would claim it as an essential ingredient.

Ever the diplomats, we (probably to the aggravation of native Sicilians) chose the middle ground, and elected to use anchovies and bucatini, leave out the tomato paste, cook all the sardines in the sauce, and add both breadcrumbs and broken almonds, but we chose not to bake it. It was wonderful: crunchy, salty and sweet, and with a profound maritime flavor overlaid perfectly by the fennel.

Those of you with an aversion to small oily fish should probably avoid this dish completely for substitutions of whiter, milder species cannot be recommended, unless even greater Sicilian wrath is desired. And, if encouragement to try something different is needed, look no further than the twin factors of wholesomeness and economy. Sardines and pasta are still very affordable, and, for us, halfway through a month-long meatless regimen ahead of a warm weather vacation, it checked all the taste and healthful boxes.

It also checked the seasonal box, for, strictly-speaking, this dish should only be eaten between March and September when wild fennel can be found extending its spidery fronds all over the island’s uplands. For those of us without wild ingredients to hand, or such a favorable climate, cultivated fennel plus a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground fennel seeds (or a smaller quantity of fennel pollen), provide a similar perfume.

Please note that one should always use the freshest possible sardines, and not just for this recipe. The oilier the fish, the shorter the shelf life – hence why anchovies are so often salted and in oil – and the general rule of thumb is 8-12 hours out of water is about as long as it takes for sardines to go from glorious to gory mess. You can certainly freeze them too, but like most fish, especially small ones, the defrosting process has to be slow and delicate to prevent them from getting mushy.

*Credit should be given to Ferdinando’s Focacceria for inspiring us to cook this dish.

When you think of old-style Italian-American restaurants does red sauce spring to mind? Red check wax table cloths, family-style servings, a free salad with your entree, rotund red-faced guys with their sleeves rolled-up, going “ey!” and slapping each other on the back? Sure, it’s a cliché, but it’s also close to the truth in a lot of places, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I, for one, love a classic east coast red sauce and meatballs joint, but it’s not the complete picture.

Ferdinando’s Focacceria on Union Street in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood has been in business as long as any in New York City. In 1910, in the heart of what was then a burgeoning Italian community, it opened its doors principally to cater for expatriate paesani working at the nearby Brooklyn docks, and it’s been serving the neighborhood faithfully ever since. However, unlike many of the other Italian eateries in the area, Fernandino’s does not serve everything with lashings of tomato gravy (not that they don’t offer red sauce – try it with their tripe), instead, they serve their original regional Sicilian dishes as if they don’t care or aren’t aware that long-established Italian restaurants are supposed to top everything with a meatball. They are most famous for their panelle and vastedda (chick pea fritters and veal spleen sandwiches, respectively), which they didn’t just decide to start selling since David Chang and Michael Symon announced it was cool for Brooklyn hipsters to eat offal.

That Ferdinando’s and many other original Italian businesses are still in operation in Carroll Gardens speaks to the fact that descendants of the neighborhood’s original communities remain where their forefathers first landed, in sight of Ellis Island across New York harbor. Not that simply by merit they don’t deserve to be in business, but that health-ninnies and changing dietary proclivities have discouraged most people from looking kindly upon rolls filled with deep fried chickpea dough or boiled calf-innards.

Our recent visit was the culmination of several years of anticipation and a pleasant relief after a terrible, screamy morning with our 5-month old. It was planned as our first lunch out with the baby, and we arrived flustered and desperate that he would nap long enough to allow us to get through a meal in peace. Finding ourselves a table at the rear, as distant as possible from the other patrons, we settled ourselves in and admired the time-worn decor of sepia-tint photos of the old country, a thickly over-painted tin ceiling and some attractive stained glass. The baby sparked awake shortly after we’d ordered our wine, but to our amazement, he emerged from his car-seat cheerful, quiet and relaxed. Maybe he is as susceptible as we are to a relaxing restaurant atmosphere? Whatever the reason, cue a great lunch.

Owner Francesco Buffa’s food is unrepentantly rustic and from the mismatched plates to the friendly but slightly gruff service, it is a truly authentic experience of old Brooklyn that is increasingly hard to find. Starting with a cold octopus and celery salad and a plate of garlicky broccoli di rape with a basket of crisp Italian bread from Mazzola bakery two blocks up, before proceeding with a panelle and mozzarella sandwich and a vastedda special (with the most unctuous ricotta), our happiness reigned for nearly two hours. In fact, so becalmed were we and Paolo, that we had dessert and espresso as the wait staff cooed around the baby.

Buddhists say that expectations are the root of all suffering, but even if we’d had the greatest morning of our lives instead of one of the most grueling, Ferdinando’s would still have been special. We will be heading back again soon to try their famous pasta con le sarde (with sardines, raisins and pine nuts) and rice balls stuffed with house-made ragu and peas. Whether Paolo will cooperate remains to be seen, but the food is so good that it’s worth the risk.

There’s a show on public television here in America called “Moment of Luxury” in which the host very generously enjoys all manner of fine things on our behalf and then shares his collected pensees about the experience. Traveling around the food blogosphere lately has felt like a surprisingly similar experience for us since our three month old prevents us from experiencing any luxury ourselves.

Tough titty, I hear you cry. Fair enough, we have lived rather high on the hog these last several years and have been blessed with several unforgettable moments of luxury along the way, but like the princess and the pea, we are finding our current rather straightened circumstances somewhat uncomfortable.

Turning over a new (year’s) leaf, determined to gripe no longer and return to being active participants in our (gastronomic) lives, we had a deuce of a time this past weekend putting together some foie gras and wild mushroom ravioli, in the hope we would be able to enjoy at least one or two moments of luxury. Inspired by ZenChef’s oxtail and foie gras ravioli and our experience eating escargot-stuffed ravioli in France (both) around this time last year (when we bought the can of foie gras we used), we took a brief flight of fancy in the accompanying sauce, combining porcini stock, balsamic vinegar and red currants into a sort of impromptu agrodolce. Some dry roasted wild mushrooms completed this, quite frankly, sublime dish.

Savoring these rich and blissful parcels certainly felt like a moment of luxury. Indeed, when we were roused moments later from this temporary reverie by infantile caterwails echoing from the nursery, these few seconds of pleasure were all the more significant providing much-needed encouragement for us to gird our loins once more for our nightly skirmishes with our darling offspring.

In the very infancy of this blog, back when we had no appreciation for plating, lighting or anything else remotely aesthetic, my wife wrote about the first course of a truly memorable dinner we shared in the famous Florentine trattoria, Coco Lezzone. What she didn’t mention was that even though we were getting towards the end of our nearly month long sojourn in Italy that encompassed our wedding and honeymoon, by the time we wound up in that jewel of the Renaissance, we were feeling rather sorry for ourselves.

Two days earlier, we had arrived in Genoa after a magnificent and occasionally hair-raising drive through the rugged terrain of the lower reaches of Piemonte and Liguria, to find that the guest-house we had booked was expecting us the day before. Twenty-four hours off schedule, and with a large shipping conference dominating Genoa’s hotels for the rest of the week to complicate matters, we were unceremoniously turfed out of said accommodation the following morning. While I, who have been invited to leave much less salubrious establishments than this, met the news with a certain equanimity, without a roof under which to shelter, and quite literally no room at the inn, the combined strain of having single-handedly planned a wedding and honeymoon from New York suddenly hit my poor wife like a tidal wave, and gushing tears of frustration and exhaustion ensued. Where comforting nuzzles from Tim the hotel dog weren’t enough, a liter carafe of white wine and two dozen fried anchovies seemed to have a medicinal effect, but, as calming as that lunch was, in a fit of pique we still decided to put Genoa in our rearview mirror and hit the E80 autostrada down the coast into Tuscany.

After a magnificent drive, framed on our right by the sparkling Mediterranean and on our left by the often white, marble-rich mountains of the Ligurian Apennines, we rolled in to Florence just as the westering sun was painting the city’s monuments the luminous color of dried apricots. Spirits partially restored, and safe in the knowledge that our reservation for the night was kosher, we immediately set out to find something delicious as a salve for our emotional wounds.

Among the several traditional Tuscan comestibles we over-indulged in that evening was a rabbit roll, or involtino di coniglio, stuffed with prosciutto, boiled egg and sage. Dressed very simply with Luccan olive oil and aged balsamic vinegar, it screamed the Spartan simplicity for which Tuscan fare is best-known. In some ways, it also exemplified the ethos of our trip. I suspect some of the wedding guests may quibble, but in our opinion, both wedding and honeymoon, had a pared-down, no frills sense about them. Only a hard core of essential people attended the wedding, and there was little time for luxuriating on a honeymoon in which we banjoed our way around 10 northern Italian cities in a tiny, canary yellow motor.

On our gentle post-prandial stroll, feeling all rosy and content from food, wine and warm night air, we encountered a pair of English honeymooners who asked us in charming pidgin Italian, “por favore, it’s nostra luni da miel…!” to photograph them in front of Santa Maria del Fiore. We were then playfully accosted by a group of tipsy Sicilian students from Catania who made us sing football songs with them and insisted we all shake hands in the traditional, forearm-grasping Roman-style before they would let us depart. This memorable meal and displays of unprovoked goodwill sent us to bed marveling at how such basic pleasures can make ones mind transcend apparent troubles. An important lesson.

In truth, we are fully aware that this was just another sybaritic moment in a month of indulgence, and not worthy of anyone’s sympathy, but I was reminded of this experience and its underlying moral recently when the trepidation induced by the impending arrival of our first-born began to get the better of me. I suspect we shall be leaning heavily on these twin crutches of simple dishes and human kindness very soon.

With the summer over (sad face) but the warm days of Indian Summer lingering on (happy face), this dish will be relavant for a few more weeks (for those who are super traditional about eating warm weather dishes only in warm weather). For me, this will be an excellent dish to eat after months of freezing winter weather and extra fat stored from weeks of heavy stews. It’s a mix of light and heavy, but, for some reason, it feels lighter than heavier. Maybe that’s just what I’m telling myself?

Roughly translating to tuna’d tuna, tonno tonnato is grilled tuna with a cold tuna sauce, and probably doesn’t sound all that appealing. Even the photographs can not capture how delicious this dish really is (beige on beige – gorgeous!). That could be because it’s fish, but, if you think about the concept behind it, i.e. making a sauce out of the same thing as the principal element of the dish, you are reminded just how many times you’ve had a meat sauce. Taking it to it’s logical conclusion, how many times have you had leftover bolognese sauce cold the day after? It’s pretty good, right? In fact, most long-cooked sauces taste even better the day after.

Tonno Tonnato is take on the traditional Piedmontese dish, Vitello Tonnato, a cold, sliced veal dish topped with the cold tuna sauce (one we will make someday for this here blog). Vitello Tonnato is sure to make many American’s scratch their head in wonderment (or maybe even make their stomach churn at the mere idea of the dish). We are one food culture that doesn’t often mix fish with meat like many other countries do (with the exception of some Creole/Cajun and Lowcountry dishes). But, if you’ve ever given it a try, you’d realize just how well they can go together.

I think the tonnato sauce alone could be used in a variety of ways if you don’t feel like topping some tuna with it. It would make a great spread on some grilled bread with a bit of white beans and herbs mixed together as a bruchetta topping. Throw it in a bowl with some veggies as a dip? Toss it with some cold macaroni for a twist on tuna pasta salad? How about as a nice little condiment for your pannini (depending on the stuffing, of course) or maybe as a dipping sauce for some crispy fried shrimp, fried zucchini or fried oysters (or anything fried for that matter)?

It is important you try to have an open mind about tonnato. So, if you think of the tonnato (the sauce portion of the dish) as a fish version of a cold meat sauce, it might sound more appetizing. On the other hand, it might not. So feel free to skip this one if it grosses you out, but do us a favor and first ask yourself if you would turn your nose up at a nice medium-rare steak topped with bolognese sauce.

**A little on a personal note:  You may notice we’ve been kind of MIA for the past 4 or 5 months – we really haven’t been posting as much. Well, we have a little bambino coming our way within the month and, although we love this blog, we also love life and, as you know, sometimes blogging can feel like it’s getting in the way of living life.  Although we have still been cooking, we’ve also been trying to prepare for the kid, moved, Jonny started a new, more stressful job, we set up a nursery, learned about breast pumps, binky’s, boppy’s, barfy’s and any other stupid thing babies r us tries to make you think you need (I swear all I had growing up was a cardboard box for a toy and an umbrella stroller!).  Jonny and I have also been enjoying our time together before this child arrives and turns our relaxing twosome into, well, who knows, probably a crazy, loud, but fun 3-some (ok that sounds weird).  So you can see why blogging took a back seat to more important things.  We are excited but, naturally, nervous.  We swear we will still be cooking up a storm as soon as we learn how to parent a newborn so, please stick with us. We may be silent for a few months, but we won’t be gone.  And I promise I will not turn this blog into a way to showcase my kid and his latest round of “perfect poos or perfect coos” and I promise we will not feature recipes for homemade baby food!  This blog will remain Jonny and my baby – our thing.  We’ve still gotta have our little things that are just for us, right? That’s not being too selfish? So, again, we don’t often get too personal around We Are Never Full, but we felt like all 4 of you who actually read our blog deserved to know why we haven’t really been keeping up the way we used to recently.  Hopefully this new little life will inspire amazing dishes in the near future!  Stay tuned!

I daresay there is a traditional dish from somewhere on the Italian peninsula that resembles this dish in some way, but in a radical, free-form departure from our blogging norms, we didn’t follow any kind of recipe here nor do the slightest bit of research in preparation. By way of an excuse, we didn’t really have time.

We’d been out for almost the entire day on yet another soul-destroying search for a new place to live, and, feeling rather bilious and irritable, were in need of emotional restoration. Returning to our soon-to-be former residence, we passed the Japanese-run fishmongers and noticed a small pot of monkfish liver just aching to be ours. Then, passing Russo’s our neighboring Italian specialty store, we bagged ourselves a box of their freshly-made spaghetti alla chitarra. Some light cream that needed finishing off, some chopped garlic, a splash of white wine, a sprinkle of chopped parsley, and fifteen minutes later, we were enjoying a the slightly bitter, oily maritime flavor of monkfish liver with a glass of chewy, slightly leathery Basilicatan aglianico. And if we weren’t completely emotionally restored afterward, we were hopeful enough to risk making another series of appointments to see terminally-dismal overpriced Brooklyn apartments the next day.

In the single beat of a butterfly’s wing causing a hurricane sense, I am convinced this dinner had a key influence on our house-hunting travails, as by sundown the following day we were the mightily relieved soon-to-be tenants of an actual house. In fact, it’s a pity monkfish liver is such poor material for an amulet, otherwise I feel certain I would be henceforth sporting an oily brown luck charm around my neck.