Rob Chirico of Greenfield is the quintessential Renaissance man. He writes. He paints. He gardens. He cooks. He teaches.
I have reviewed several of his books for this paper. My favorite is probably his 2016 cookbook “Not My Mother’s Kitchen: Rediscovering Italian-American Cooking Through Stories and Recipes.”
The book shares Italian-American recipes he learned to prepare not because of but despite his mother’s culinary skills. He calls his mother an “assassin” when it comes to food.
“I basically learned to cook as a defense,” he told me recently. “I had a sense that there was more, and I experimented.”
He has also written a couple of novels and a history of swearing titled “Damn!” His “Field Guide to Cocktails” has sold 30,000 copies.
I asked Chirico how he chooses the projects he pursues each morning.
“Let’s say more like afternoon,” he corrected me with a chuckle. “It really depends. This has been a crazy time, as we all know. [I do] whatever comes up in the moment. I just finished a painting I really loved, which was a commission.”
He more or less fell into his current lines of work.
“Growing up, I was going to be a spy,” he announced. “I could always draw. I was always into art. The problem was, I went to a silly Catholic high school, and they didn’t teach any art.”
He tried to get into art school but found that the other aspiring art students were better equipped and more experienced. He studied art history instead. That endeavor led to teaching and also inspired one of his novels and his art, which he characterized as “in the style of, let us say, the Dutch masters.”
He began cooking seriously in graduate school and gained a lot of experience when he first dated the woman who is now his wife.
Her family gave frequent parties, he recalled. “The people were so boring that I went into the kitchen…. That was my other teacher, being kind of the outsider.”
In the 1990s he went to work for Lisa Ekus, the culinary agent in Hatfield, who was then specializing in public relations for food writers. He moved from mail boy to creative director in the first year … and read a lot of cookbooks.
Another inspiration for Chirico’s culinary skills was his grandmother, Philomena. Like her grandson, she had a passion for gardening and cooking.
“She was illiterate,” he recalled. “She was kind of a mail-order bride. She came to the United States [from Italy] to marry somebody she’d never met. He wasn’t crazy about the pastas and so forth…. I never saw them smile at each other.”
Because his grandmother couldn’t read, Chirico would accompany her when she shopped for food near her home in the New York borough of Queens. “I was her constant young companion,” he said with a smile.
He was awed by her green thumb. “She would touch something, and it would grow,” remembered Chirico.
Like all of Philomena’s recipes, I learned, the formula for the seasonal butternut-squash soup below was never set in stone. After all, his grandmother couldn’t write it down.
“I watched her make it,” said Chirico. “I tasted it. When you do that, you try to figure out what the ingredients are…. As my father said, I had a 20-20 sniffer.
“Tasting food, you get a sense of what’s in there, and then you adapt it to the way you think it’s going to work.”
Chirico informed me that he likes the way the sausage in the soup balances the slight sweetness of the butternut squash. He purchases his sausage from his neighbors at Bostrom Farm in Greenfield.
He passionately supports our plentiful local food producers just as he passionately gardens, cooks, and writes. “To be where we are, and the abundance that we have, can be startling,” he said. “An embarrassment of riches.”
To learn more about Rob Chirico, visit his website at http://robchirico.homestead.com/. To taste his interpretation of his grandmother’s soup, make the recipe below.
Ingredients:
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup diced yellow onion
1½ pounds (about 4 cups) butternut squash (peeled and seeded), cut into1-inch cubes
several large sprigs of fresh rosemary
3 cups low-sodium chicken stock (or vegetable broth)
coarse salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
2 tablespoons minced garlic
½ pound hot or sweet Italian sausage, removed from its casing
½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for passing
coarsely chopped fresh parsley for garnish
Instructions:
Heat a large pot over medium heat, and add 1 tablespoon olive oil. When it gets hot, add the onion and sauté until it becomes translucent, 4 to 5 minutes.
Add the butternut squash and stir to coat it. Stir in the rosemary and cover. Lower the heat and cook until squash begins to soften, about 30 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes.
Remove the rosemary and puree the squash with an immersion blender until it is smooth. (If you don’t have an immersion blender, puree the squash in batches in a regular blender and return it to the pot.)
Slowly stir the chicken stock or broth into the squash puree. Add salt and pepper to taste. Cover the soup and keep it warm over low heat.
Heat a frying pan over medium heat, and add the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. When it is warm but not too hot, add the garlic and sauté until it becomes translucent but not brown, about 30 seconds.
Add the sausage, breaking it into small pieces, and cook until it browns, about 8 to 10 minutes. When the sausage is done, stir it into the soup along with the Parmesan.
Adjust the seasonings and serve garnished with chopped parsley. Pass the extra Parmesan and feel free to add a few grinds of black pepper for an extra kick. Serves 4.
Tinky Weisblat is the award-winning author of “The Pudding Hollow Cookbook,” “Pulling Taffy,” and “Love, Laughter, and Rhubarb.” Visit her website, TinkyCooks.com.