This is a day after she and her twin sister Judy Vig, of Monroe, cooked up some chocolate cherry torts, a bevy of zucchini cakes and umpteen gooey chocolate chip cookies from scratch. The sisters were getting ready for an onslaught of relatives who were going to arrive for lunch after visiting their father's grave for his birthday. "We love to cook. Cooking is in our blood. Everybody in our family cooks and we love to eat, too," says Vig, who, like her twin, stands 5-feet-four and wears a teeny-tiny size 2. "Really, we love to eat, too. We just eat in moderation."
Their grandfather Tony Galliotti, of West Hartford, was a butcher who enjoyed cooking for his family, especially at Christmas. Whenever the sisters make one of his dishes, it reminds them of their youth, spending time with all of the relatives, 20 or 30 or more, gathered around a large dining room table with smaller tables pushed together so that everyone could eat together.
The sisters' love for food and their zany, vivacious personalities landed them an appearance recently on the Food Network's "Dear Food Network" program for an upcoming segment on holiday cooking.
The sisters are stay-at-home moms now, but they have run businesses together, including a high-end dessert catering company that has provided sweet treats for everything from weddings to bar mitzvahs to political fundraising events.
"We sent in this audition video of us grilling some meats that we wanted to get on" 'Grill It!' with Bobby Flay, Paoletti says. "We were making a panzanella salad, which is like the kitchen sink of dishes. It's got whatever meats you have in the fridge in it. Our brother-in-law Jimmy [Halpin] took one look at it, and he says, 'this is so ridiculous, so silly, it's gotta win.' "
As the sisters prepared the meat, the propane on the grill went poof and they found themselves ad libbing to cover their culinary faux pas.
The sisters didn't get picked. But the producers contacted them and asked them to submit another entry for a different program, "Dear Food Network," showcasing a culinary problem.
"We decided to use our Papa Tony's goose recipe," Vig says. "It's something that has been in our family for forever that we've had problems with."
In the audition tape, which their daughters recorded and then uploaded to the Food Network Web site, the twins kept cracking up, part out of nervous tension. The two are identical and sometimes their mannerisms are, too. So, watching the two in action is a bit like seeing double.
"Joy prepared our Papa Tony's goose last year," Vig says on the tape. "And it was a little bit greasy."
"Slid right off the plate," Paoletti says. "Whoompf onto the table."
The audition tape ends with the sisters imploring the program, "'Dear Food Network' can you help us?"
And of course, that was the entire premise of the segment that pairs the twins with celebrity chef Danny Boome. To help the sisters, the network flew in four geese. Why four? That's because it needed to show viewers what a roast goose would look like during different phases of the cooking process — from raw to the finished product.
"When we got to the studio, there were rows of ovens and sets where different chefs were working on our goose, preparing it at different stages," Vig says. "I didn't expect to see so many people for this one dish."
It took three hours to tape the segment with Boome, who advised the sisters to just be themselves. When the segment airs, sometime in either November or early December, it will be about seven minutes long.
The casting directors instructed them to avoid watching any of Boome's shows because they wanted the banter between the twins and Boome to be fresh and unrehearsed.
Vig recalls that the first time the two of them entertained the idea of getting on television was last March when they took their mom, Rosemarie Izzo, out to lunch at Johnny Ray's in Milford with their younger sister, Jackie Halpin.
"One of the co-owners of the restaurant came over to our table. It was a new restaurant and he was making small talk with us, asking what was up with us," Vig recalls. "We told him about this idea we had cooking on TV. Listening to us, he was really enthusiastic and it just gave us this confidence to try and see what happens."
Sipping a cup of orga
nic coffee in her kitchen with the aroma of the recently baked cookies wafting about her, Paoletti says, "Yeah, I think about it. And I could definitely see us on television. There are lots of cooking shows. But how many of them have twins? We've always gotten along and we have this great banter together. When one of us, like me, opens her mouth to say something and nothing err comes out, the other one is there to pitch in."
"Yeah, we love to cook and eat, too. But the things we make are things that anyone can make," Paoletti says. "And we're good at showing people how without them stressing out too much."
