HOLIDAY MARKETPLACE THIS WEEKENDAT BERKSHIRE BOTANICAL GARDEN • PAGE B3

By Leigh Davis

ARE WE THERE YET?

SHEFFIELD—Housa-tonic Valley Art league will present a Holiday Art Show at historic Dewey Memorial Hall on Route 7. Reception festivities will be Friday, December 2 from 4:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m. Artwork by lo-cal artists of the Housatonic River Valley area will be on view every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in December (10 a.m.-5 p.m.). The art league is known for its creative diversity and quality work rendered in oils, watercolour, pastel, scatch-board, etching, collage, and mixed media. All are available for sale. The Holiday Art Show is free and open to the public. HVAL is a nonprofi t orga-nization which supports art in local schools. For more information please see www.hvart.org.

Photo contributed

‘Winter Village’ by Hans Heuberger is among the art being displayed.

HVAL to hold holiday art show

‘Big Night’s menu to be recreated at Fiori restaurant

Iconic food fi lm will also be shown

By Gary LeveilleTHEN AND NOW

The Monument Mills complex in Housatonic has been making headlines in recent months. The photo shown [at left] depicts the mill at the peak of success in the 1920s. Old-timers still remember the day the textile factory suddenly closed its doors in October 1956, the apparent victim of southern competition and labor disputes. Since that time, some of the buildings have been torn down, others renovated. During the early 1990s, movie director and special effects innovator Douglas Trumbull developed his “Back to the Future” theme-park ride here.

As interested parties now debate the best way to uti l ize the aging factory b u i l d i n g s , the future of Monument Mills remains uncertain.

Photos contributed

By Allison Sheardy

GREAT BARRINGTON – On Wednesday, Dec. 7, Fiori restaurant owners and brothers Alex and Matt Feldman will honor the movie “Big Night” by recreating the unforgettable dinner. The evening will include a screening of the fi lm. “We’ve loved the movie for many years,” Alex said when explaining the inspiration for the event. The 1996 fi lm is perhaps one of the best-known “food fi lms,” that genre that celebrates both the cinematic and the gastronomic. Big Night centers around two brothers, Primo and Secondo, who run an Italian restaurant on the New Jersey shore in the 1950s. Despite the brothers’ combined talents, the restaurant is failing – mostly because Primo refuses to “Americanize” the authentic Italian food he so passionately prepares. As a result of some advice from a competitor, they decide to place all their bets on one extravagant benefi t dinner, which famed jazz singer Louis Prima is slated to attend. The brothers pour everything they have into planning the dinner, although their honored guest fails to show up. In many ways, the Feldman brothers parallel those in the fi lm. Alex, the eldest, is the chef, while Matt manages several different aspects of the business. Matt attended Johnson and Wales University for four years, two in the culinary program and two in business. Alex also attended culinary school for a year, but much of his experience was gained from hands-on exposure, including three separate trips to Italy. He worked in a different res-taurant in a different city each time. “I was in Florence for almost a year – I got to know the people, the food, how they eat, not just the recipes,” Alex explained. He also spent time in Bologna and Piedmont. The Fiori dinner will feature a prezzo fi sso (fi xed price) menu for $50 per person. The

courses at the dinner will mir-ror those from the fi lm. “It’s my interpretation of the dishes they do in the fi lm,” Alex explained. “I can’t taste the food in the movie, so there’s some interpretation. Historical research in how they prepared food was also involved.” He added, “We’ll be serving food from the movie during the movie.” For an appetizer, the chef will serve a mixed appetizer of fried eggplant, roasted peppers and garlic, caponata, grilled vegetables, olives, parmigiano, and bread sticks, along with a crostini of goat cheese, mozzarella, tomato, and anchovy, polenta and mushrooms. The next course is garganelli in brodo, which are hand rolled pasta tubes in a savory vegetable broth. The soup course will be followed by timpano, which consists of penne, meatballs, salami, hard cooked eggs, and house-made mozzarella baked inside a pasta crust. This dish is straight out of the movie, adding another dimension to the dining experience. In the fi lm, it is a secret family recipe honored by Primo and Secondo and the show-stopper of the meal. “Timpano is described as ‘all the good things in the world baked into a pastry crust,’” Alex explained. There is a question of interpretation here – in southern Italy, the dish involves a pastry crust; in the north, a pasta one. Because Fiori is based on northern Italian cuisine, the dish will be prepared with the pasta crust. Alex also gave a brief overview of northern Italian food. “There’s no true Italian cuisine,” he said. “It is all very regional.” He explained that northern Italians use more dairy in their cooking than those in the southern part of the country – for example, when a southern dish might call for olive oil, its norther counterpart would use butter. The timpano will be followed by a mixed

grill of chicken, salmon, and vegetables. To fi nish the night, diners will be served biscotti and campari-orange granita. The restaurant, located at 47 Railroad St., opened earlier this year. The cuisine is based on that of northern Italy and features many house-made items, including bread, pasta, ge-lato, pickles, and ricotta and mozzarella cheeses. The brothers source as much food locally as they can while still keeping prices affordable. Prior to moving to the Berkshires and open-ing Fiori, the brothers ran a restaurant in Boul-der, Colo. There, they held their fi rst Big Night dinner. The Feldman brothers plan on the Big Night dinner becoming a regular event. They also hold a wine dinner the third Wednesday of every month, each of which features the food and drink of a different region of Italy. “We want the wine dinners to be the whole culinary package of what you’d eat and drink in that region of Italy,” Alex said. The later seating includes a ticket to the Berkshire Bateria show and a midnight toast. Reservations are now being accepted for the Big Night at Fiori. Guests are asked to arrive by 6:30 p.m. for cocktails; the movie and dinner will begin at 7 p.m. “Of course, Louis Prima will be in atten-dance,” said the brothers, each with a sly smile. “The current story in that he lives in Westchester and is friends with our parents, who are musicians.”

Record Photo

The Feldman brothers, Matt and Alex, will host a ‘Big Night’ event Dec. 7 at their restaurant Fiori. The event will include dinner and a showing of the fi lm.

Photo contributed

Secondo (Stanley Tucci) and Primo (Tony Shalhoulb).

The other day my friend and I were discussing the topic of parents over-scheduling their children. Being the father of two “tween-age” girls, my friend was able to recall numerous instances where “pushy parenting” had become an obstacle to his children establishing new friendships with other children; examples given of suggested play-dates being re-buffed due to a child’s overloaded week of extracurricular activities and instances where unstructured downtime was seen as a viable op-tion only if booked well in advance and if a hole appeared in little Mary’s schedule (that is of course, if there wasn’t a birthday party, rescheduled game/lesson/practice that didn’t take precedence). What I fi nd most troubling from my own experience of hav-ing children is an attitude by some parents that enrolling their child in as many extracurricular activities as possible is benefi cial to the child even when the child himself is resistant to it and already over-programmed as it. No longer content with allow-ing children the freedom to be children, some parents frown upon the notion of nothing time; failing to realize instead that boredom is often the gateway to spurring on a child’s imagination, and that new-found interests and friendships can be fostered when given time to fl ourish. How often we forget that making something out of nothing can be a beautiful thing! Spurred on by our conversa-tion, I went on to further investi-gate this notion of “pushy parent-ing”, only to discover a disturbing trend where some parents had begun using DNA tests on chil-dren as young as one to provide them with early information on their child’s genetic predisposi-tion for success and where baby immersion classes have become as important as adult classes - all based on some misguided notion that getting a leg up early on the competition is the way to succeed! Whether this need to over-program children is spurred on by a parent’s own unfulfi lled child-hood dreams, ego-driven desires, or through simply not knowing any better, the notion of apply-ing pressure on young children to achieve seems destined to cultivate a world of stress-prone individuals who lack the capacity to draw upon their own resources when faced with fi lling in the in-evitable holes that come with life. So next time you fi nd yourself signing up your son or daughter for yet another program, ask your-self fi rst to who’s benefi t is this really for; perhaps your answer may surprise you and you may fi nd that setting free time aside for your child instead is the most benefi cial thing that you can do.

Pushy Parenting

THIS WEEK Section BBERKSHIRE RECORD •DECEMBER 2-8, 2011

‘BEIN’ GREEN’ MUPPETS EXHIBITOPENS FRIDAY, DEC. 3 • PAGE B3