A Visit to Eataly yields a delicious Veal Pasta Sauce

        Eataly, in case you haven’t heard, is a 42,000 square foot grocery emporium that’s just opened at 200 Fifth Avenue.  And everything in it hails from or owes its existence to Italy from the on-premises cooking school to the rooftop beer garden.   The original Eataly opened in Turin in 2007.  At 50,000 square feet, the mother ship is even larger than this enormously impressive store in New York.  And Turin was followed by the opening of smaller branches in Bologna and Milano and even smaller ones in two locations in Japan.  The full name of the store is Eataly Alti Cibi which translates to “High Food”.  But think “Specialty Foods” and you get better idea of both the selection and the price points. 

South Indian-style Vegetable Curry

All these beautiful vegetables go into this delicious Curry

       I don’t know what verb I’d use to describe my reaction to the latest statistics showing that Americans just don’t eat their vegetables….Appalled? Shocked? Disturbed?  I’d have to say none of the above.  I started doing a check on what I’d been eating in a week.  There was the day I had a Porchetta sandwich for lunch—devoid of even a piece of lettuce, then followed that with a dinner out of Speck and Figs, followed by the most delicious Scallops but absent any vegetables of any kind.  Of course, this day I ate both meals out.  It’s amazing how many very good restaurants don’t incorporate vegetables into their main courses.  But I guess when you can charge $9.00 for a bowl of spinach as a side, you’d be hard pressed to rationalize putting a carrot on the plate to accompany a main dish.  At home, we do a lot better.  Although we hardly qualify as vegetarians, there are always vegetables or, at minimum, a salad.   And while we have yet to put a strictly vegetarian dinner on our weekly schedule, this fantastic Vegetable Curry could change that.