Tempting Pastas and Sauces From Sicily

Though the name Corleone may be best known from “The Godfather,” Corleone is also a town near Palermo, Sicily, that is the source of some ancient grains used to make pasta, heirloom tomatoes for sauce and thousand-year-old olive trees for oil for a company based there, Bona Furtuna. Its pastas are particularly flavorful without being…

A Knife to Add Flash to Your Kitchen

It’s not your typical Swiss Army knife. Victorinox, the company that makes those gadget-laden implements, also has several lines of simpler kitchen cutlery. Its newest is a cross-cultural affair, made with a Japanese santoku-shaped seven-inch blade instead of a standard chef’s knife blade. It’s called Damast because the steel is forged according to the Damascus…

Hive Mind of Makers Rises to Meet Pandemic

It started with a fanciful email from one self-described science geek to another. “Hey, we should make a ventilator,” Dr. Chris Zahner, a University of Texas pathologist and former NASA engineer, wrote to Aisen Caro Chacin, an artist and medical device designer, after he learned about Italian hospitals struggling to treat the crush of coronavirus…