The Pasta Faggioli. courtesy of Dan Fink and Lisa Bloss We moved to Maine in 2015. We’re from Illinois and spent the majority of our lives living in Chicago.
For a dozen years, we lived in the Avondale neighborhood near La Villa, a classic Italian family restaurant, banquet hall and pizzeria. It’s the kind of place that is embedded in the community, hosting wedding receptions, baby showers and birthday parties. The last meal we ate before leaving Chicago was at La Villa.
And whenever I visit Chicago now, I always order La Villa pizza (the cracker-thin kind, not the deep dish people associate with Chicago). If you’d like to contribute to Home Plates, send a recipe and a story telling us how you came to cook it, who you cook it for and why it’s found a place in your life to pgrodinsky@pressherald.com .
Also, please tell us a little bit about your life as a home cook, include a photo of the dish, and yourself, possibly together, and let us know the source of the recipe. My husband Dan’s La Villa menu favorite was Pasta Faggioli. It’s a pasta dish made from white beans in wine sauce, and it goes well with a Peroni beer.
We liked it so much, we started making our own version at home as a quick, tasty weeknight meal. We’d sauté garlic and herbs in olive oil, add a can of beans and some fresh spinach or chard (which is not in the La Villa version), let the mixture cook until the pasta was ready, and then mix everything together. It has been a staple in our house for .