Typical Italian Lunchbag sandwich back in the day
 

Here is a typical brown bag lunch sandwich made by Italian moms of old, when we weren't allowed to eat meat on Friday.....such as today.

In high school, all the girls who had older brothers would say how
their moms would either make peppers and eggs, potatoes and eggs or eggplant parm sandwiches for their older brothers and dads to take to work on Fridays............

(now it's drive through the local Dunkin Doughnuts, etc.)

I still love them, esp. on a rainy day like today (again rain).

Italian Pepper and Egg Sandwich

Ingredients :

• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
• 2 green bell peppers, cut into strips ( or 2 red bell peppers, or one of each)
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 4 large eggs
• salt & fresh ground pepper, to taste

• 2 fresh hoagie rolls ( torpedo or grinder rolls, or 4 slices of fresh Italian bread)

Directions

1. In a frying pan, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the sliced onions and peppers. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the peppers are tender, about 15 minutes. Add the minced garlic during the last couple of minutes.
2. Meanwhile, in a small bowl, combine the eggs, salt, and ground pepper. Beat until well mixed. Add the egg mixture to the pepper mixture in the skillet.
3. Cook until done......stirring occasionally until eggs are “set” about five minutes. CAN BE DOUBLED or multiplied as per how many you are feeding.
4. Enjoy.

I loved potato and eggs with ketchup on a wedge type bread. :mmmm:

I know. Me too. I know exactly what type of bread you mean but I can't think of the name. My dad would actually have it delivered from the other side of town on Saturdays. He missed his N.Y.C. breads.

Potatoes and eggs were my favorite as well, but peppers and eggs good too.

What they could all do with such simple ingredients.

p.s.
My dad's parents (and all their HUGE family of cousins, etc.) came from Laurenzana Potenza Basilicata Italy to New York City's "Little Italy".
From there they all branched out "later". My grandmother's brother's daughters moved to West Hartford Connecticut area plus other "cousins" to that area. Some are now on Cape Cod, MA.
Ditto for her husband's family (my grandfather)......many went to Connecticut for jobs. Others followed the river up to the Great Lakes region ; while others went to Canada....some stayed upstate N.Y.

We called them wedges that came from Birratella's bakery. They came two to a package and were joined together, You just pulled them apart. You either got a half of a wedge or a whole wedge. In CT, they call them grinders and some places call them submarines, (not quite the same). Mom was a very good cook who was born outside of Naples in a town called Vitulazio, (now called Villa Fortuna). Dad was from Melo, (about 70 miles out of Lisbon, Portugal, (he didn't cook as he never lifted a pot or pan in his life). LOL

My grandfather landed in Younstown Ohio to stay with his brother and then moved to Yonkers, New York where all of my immediate family was born. All aunts and uncles were born in Italy. Dad's family landed in Bedford, Ma, and then he ran away to Newark, N.J. where my granfather followed him with the family. He then ran away to Yonkers where my grandfather tracked him down again so he gave up. At least thats the story I was told. All aunts and uncles were born in Portugal.

Wish I had a potato and wedge for my lunch today. :mmmm:

YUM!!! Your post brought back memories of my youth.

Every summer we went from Upstate NY to Hampton Beach for vacation and my mother would make eggplant sandwiches on Italian bread as well as pickeled eggplant sandwiches. We would stop along the way shortly after entering NH from VT at a roadside picnic table and... mangiare!

My father worked the 4-12 shift at GE Silicones in Waterford NY and his co-workers were always begging for him to have my mother make those eggplant sandwiches for them.

:mmmm:

Eggplant sandwiches. :mmmm:

My all time favorite Italian hero, leftover chicken cutlet and braccoli rabe with the "juice" from the broccoli rabe.

Anyone ever go to that hero place in the Bronx (Joey's ???) where they put fried eggplant and steamed peppers with all the cold cuts? I still make them, call them Bronx hero's

Never went to Joey's in the Bronx. Sounds delicious. :mmmm:

I went to a place called The Wedge Inn, (Bronx/Pelham line), that didn't serve wedges but wonderfully large portions of Italian food. They made the greatest zeppoles.

Back to wedges and sandwiches.

Well, it is a small world indeed..........I couldn't find your mom's town. The village must be very small. However, Naples was the big port city that everyone from Laurenzana sailed out of , in the late 1800's....to New York City. My dad also went to Newark New Jersey to work and that's where he met my mom. He later moved there; the only one to leave New York , except for the one who went to Connecticut. Earlier ones went all over for jobs.

I think the bread I was referring to was circular with a little "hole" in the middle..........great for cappacola (ham) sandwiches.

Getting back to Naples, it is in the province of Campania .
Naples is the big seaport. The "cousins" who stayed in Italy , all ended up in Naples for work. Some went up to Venice in the north.

Campania is right next to the province of Basilicata where Laurenzana was, high up in the mountains........it was kind of southeast of ANZI. I have photos of World War II American soldiers who , after the war ended, on their free time, went to my grandmother's village and took a lot of photos.....these were found in her suitcase in her closet when she passed in 1965....plus pics of the old castle on the hill.........all those old villages had castles dating back from the 11th century, built by the Greeks........

If you ever saw the HGTV channel, on the international homes, they've been going to Italy and people are buying these extremely old "humble" homesteads for like $40,000 or less..........nothing has changed. It's like time stood still. This is what they call the "old town" section of the towns.....all of these mountain villages are extremely HILLY.

She would have been very surprised to learn that I ended up in a mountainous state (out of New Jersey).

My grandmother's family had a bakery but in the '70s it was destroyed by an earthquake in Laurenzana. I have pics of that. Totally destroyed.

I sent you your sandwich. Didn't you get it????? Look in your in box.

Shucks, It's not there. I only had the Lean Cuisine stuffed rigatoni but somehow I survived. My mother and father went to Europe to visit their respective birthplaces and my cousin uploaded my uncles film video to youtube under "ciriello". I don't have access to it at this moment in time. I believe there are still relatives there but I don't know if their original structures are standing, (almost one hundred years old). My aunt and uncle who are also in the video are still living. He is 99 and she will soon be 97, (married 75 years).

My great grandfather's business was fireworks. Ironically, it went out in a bang as fire destroyed the factory.

My mother and father met while in Yonkers, New York and the rest is history............

Lard bread?

I adore lard bread. We have it for holiday celebrations, my husband buys it over on Smith Street in Carroll Gardens. We all would eat it daily, but it is clearly a heart attack in a loaf.

Sorry, never heard of that type of bread.

I think it was "pisa" bread......not pita like the Lebanese or Syrian bread as this bread has more "bread inside it".......not as flat as pita.

But it was circular. I think nowadays they call it artisan bread.
My husband thinks it might have been made from the same dough they made pizza from; I don't think so. He calls it pizza bread.

My dad called it pisa bread.....or something like that. Don't know if they put lard in it. Italians didn't cook with lard that I knew of.

Now, my Polish mother in law did cook with lard and bacon grease.

I love eggplant......any which way. When my children were teenagers and still at home, all of their friends loved my eggplant parm. It's a long long process, but well worth the effort.

My dad's uncle Luigi (Louie) was a barber in the Bronx......

You are making me very hungry. Like your mom, my mom would also pack sandwiches, but my dad would drive us to Coney Island, N.Y. and we'd eat under the boardwalk. He was from N.Y. so that was his youthful remembrance.....it wasn't until my husband and I were dating at age 17 that we began going to the Jersey shore.......

We also would take our own children to Hampton Beach N.H. when they were little........lately, we use it as a rest break and then head up the Maine coast on the coastal road.......takes longer but nicer than the Maine Pike.

Do you remember the older roads? It took much longer. You'd go through Manchester, New Hampshire.

Now, it's very fast to get from Vermont to the New Hampshire seacoast.

My mother would make "froshias" (spelling?) It basically is an egg omelet only it is not like the omelets we have now, but in a frying pan mixed together and cooked flat.
It HAS to be a black cast iron pan, well seasoned, where nothing ever sticks, and food always comes out perfectly. She would use whatever she had handy, ie, broccoli, asparagus, tomato and onion, spinach, green peppers, etc and only using olive oil to cook with. It would be an addition to our suppers.

Could it be Frittata??? Frittata is an Italian omelet; many variations.

http://www.explore-italian-culture.c...#axzz29qmTgqCa

Click on above hyperlink..........



Keep scrolling down for a FRITTATA recipe........you can add whatever you like, even the kitchen sink.



Frittata’s are again popular with the “younger crowd” who are discovering that everything old is new again.



Peasant food is “new” again.



Scroll all the way to the bottom for recipe, ideas and photo........you can also dice some pepperoni, zucchini, onions, whatever you feel like to saute.

Lard bread is also called pork bread, it has little pieces of pork in it, I guess when the lard cooks.

The perception is that Italians don't cook with lard, well.... there is a lot of pork, kind of the same thing?

My mom still makes "froshias" (I know exactly what you mean) at age 91, and I make them, too. Maybe it's a Sicilian version of a frittata - a word I never heard growing up! When she wasn't making her own pizza on Fridays, she made a "froshia", which we ate with hunks of italian bread.

As for peppers and eggs, or potato, peppers and eggs...never taste as good as mom's. Still a great sandwich (she uses Italian frying peppers - the green bell peppers always gave her agita!)

http://25.media.tumblr.com/1o2NBqhAY...mimfo1_400.jpg

It was stuck in my out box......and then went into the junk mail box at your end..........but better late than never.

Potato and egg on a hero roll with a smidgen of ketchup.

I got this at the Parisi Bakery "Deli" site.........N.Y.C.

They were originally just a bakery and have been thus for 100 plus years.
40 years ago they opened the deli and used their own fresh baked bread.


LUNCH STUDIO: Search results for parisi bakery
Click this hyperlink and keep scrolling down; you will have enough lunches till Thanksgiving time..............all these next photos look much better than above.........

Keep scrolling downward using far right "arrow"..........

My Uncle Leonard married the sister of the original founder of the bakery. Their children, now in their 80's, are my cousins....but the Parisi family is not.

Thanks for posting. :smiley:

:mmmm::mmmm::mmmm:

In Connecticut we knew it as Ciccioli Bread (made with rendered pork and pork fat or pancetta) ...Half a loaf for lunch; hot and fresh from DiSorbos Bakery on Grand Ave!!!!! worth a few pounds!!!!

Also on this sandwich subject, has anyone else noticed that the good old italian bread I loved (its not good italian bread unless the crust scratches up the roof of your mouth) is nowhere to be found. It's all soft and limp!

Yes, the long skinny green Italian frying peppers. Great in peppers & eggs.

I know a quick tip if you do not have fresh peppers in the home and crave the sandwich.

Keep small jars of Progresso roasted peppers in olive oil in the pantry.
Heat them in a saute pan and crack your eggs, etc......mix/ pour over peppers..........it's a good substitute for the real thing.

I like the semi crunch of the real , fresh from the farmers market , Italian frying peppers..........but Progresso has some good pantry staples.

Send me your Mom !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I still have my mom's room here; unfortunately she passed at age 91. Now our grandaughter uses it when she visits.

How blessed you are to still have her ..........and cooking at that.
God bless her.