February 2nd 2026

Buongiorno amici,

       Today is the day that many Americans use to predict how much longer winter will last. The way this winter has been for a large portion of the North America, people are anxiously rating the results. Of course it is Groundhog Day, made infamous in the great Bill Murray movie. The tradition stems from the Christian holiday of Candlemas which marks the midpoint between the winter solstice and spring equinox. In Germany, if the badger saw its shadow, it signified a long winter. In Italy, the very end of January is celebrated by the return of the black birds. The first official, organized Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, PA was held on February 2, 1887. At any rate, let’s hope we’re over the hump of very very difficult winter.

     Now, whenever I think of groundhogs, I think of my paternal grandfather. He was a short little guy with a full head of hair when he died….a far cry from me! I wasn’t very close to him growing up. He came to America in the early 1900s. He was a dirt poor immigrant from the hinterland of Sicily, hoping to make a better life than working in a sulfur mine.  He worked as a laborer and then would return to Sicily, get married, have some kids and go back-and-forth to America several times before bringing his family to settle in Rochester, New York. That included my father who was two years old at the time. He was a harsh man, he smoked cigarettes, hit his kids with a belt, and probably drank too much… and he hunted. He was always distant during my growing up years, perhaps because my grandmother had passed away when I was born and he remarried, and my father had issues with his new wife. At any rate, we never were very close until toward the end of his life. I remember him coming to my parent’s house and I had a long chat with him about life. He told me he started smoking cigarettes when he was eight years old, but he advised me to never ever have a cigarette before you have your first cup of coffee. And he always was a hunter and he loved his shotgun. When he first came to America, he would hunt for woodchuck (groundhog). Now, I had heard some tails from my father about grandpa coming home with whatever he had killed with his shotgun, but this was interesting to hear firsthand. I asked him how he hunted and he told me he would go to a farmer’s field and find the hole where the woodchuck lived. Then he would come back the next day with a shotgun before the sunrise, and when the woodchuck came out out of the hole he would shoot him in the head…. not quite the sportsman I had imagined. One had to watch out for buck shot in any of the meals that he prepared. I asked him why he ate woodchuck. He said to me, "da wood-a-chuck is like a little sheep, he eatsa the grass, he eatsa the clover. The chicken eatsa the worm, eatsa the poop. I no eata the chicken, I eata the wood-a-chuck." He went on to tell me when he was young, his boss, a German, would always tease him and call him Johnny Wood Chuck. One day he invited the boss over for dinner and he made meatballs. The German said they were the best meatballs he ever had and my grandfather looked at him and said now I’m calling you, Hans Woodachuck.

   The Sicily venture continues and every day is a new challenge and a new adventure. I miss everyone very much and I’m so excited that my daughter Grace and her friend Kylan are coming to visit me. It’ll be exciting to be able to show some people around and go out to some of the special places that I found for dinner. Grace is always been a traveler and she’s been to more countries than any of the other kids in the family even though she’s the youngest. I’m committed to being here the rest of this month and most of March anybody else wanna visit? Let me know.

Cu la paci,

John Bernunzio 

I continue my experiments in the kitchen. This one was prompted by the fact that I had bought too big of a bag of potatoes and I had to use them up. I also had bought too big of a container of ricotta cheese so I had to use that up, so I sort of made a version of scallop potatoes with onions, ricotta and capers and ground pistachio nuts and then baked it in my little oven. It was great but there was a lot left over.