Tuscany - Distinctive Cuisine Featuring Soups and Fresh Ingredients

Richard Busch is an Austin, Texas, entrepreneur who maintains a technology consultancy firm and previously served as Globalfoundries’ vice president of IP strategy and product line management. Richard Busch has a passion for Italian cooking and regularly travels from Austin, Texas, to Italy to visit the small Tuscan farmhouse his wife’s family maintains.

The roots of Tuscan cuisine are in its gentle hills, which yield fresh ingrediants and simple cooking styles. Soups are particularly popular and include hearty tomato-based papa al pomodoro, which is ideal for cold winder days. Another common soup ribollita combines vegetables and bread, and the latter ingredient also finds a creative use in panzanella. This dish features bread soaked in balsamic vinegar, combined with basil, tomatoes, and onions, and served with a drizzle of olive oil.

Cannellini beans also find their way into a multitude of Tuscan dishes, including fagioli all’uccelletto, which also features stewed sage, garlic, and tomatoes. Perhaps the most famous local ingredient is the truffle, which is found in white and black varieties in locales such as San Miniato and Spoleto. The flavor of truffle can be infused in nearly any Tuscan dish and is prominently featured with pasta in tagliatelle al tartufo.

Clifford Brown - Seminal Hard Bop Trumpeter of the Early 1950s

Based in Austin, Texas, Richard Busch is the founder of a consultancy that offers multinational technology enterprises of all sizes technical and business solutions. Richard Busch maintains an active interest in music in Austin, Texas, and previously played in a funk cover band in the Northeast. Among his favorite musicians are the classic jazz trumpeters Miles Davis and Clifford Brown.

A fixture in the Philadelphia jazz scene as a teenager in the late 1940s, Clifford Brown gained his full tone from Theodore "Fats" Navarro. Unlike his mentor, he was known for strictly refusing to use alcohol and drugs and emerged as a rising star in New York in 1953. Traveling on a tour of Europe with Lionel Hampton, he made seminal recordings with other musicians in Paris, including band mate Quincy Jones.

Brown subsequently began a fruitful collaboration in California with Max Roach that included a quintet that brought the new “hard bop” style to the forefront. Over a whirlwind three years, he created a number of jazz classic albums, including Study in Brown and At Basin Street. Unfortunately, this creative wellspring was cut short in 1956 when the car Brown’s wife was driving tumbled down a 75-foot embankment. Today, the name Clifford Brown always evokes a feeling of the lost potential of a jazz giant who was died in his prime.