It's a Mrs. Wonderful life
<p>Gino Caselli pulls Mrs. Wonderful’s rustic Italian bread out from his oven in the backyard of his home in Polson, May 17. Caselli bought the oven from a restaurant, and says it has been worth every dollar.</p>
<p>Mary Frances Caselli, left, and her husband Gino team up to bake Mrs. Wonderful’s rustic Italian bread from their home in Polson. They say the secret to making good bread is good ingredients and keeping it simple.</p>
Ever heard of orzechownik?
Mary Frances Caselli — also known as Mrs. Wonderful — makes piles of the Polish pastry and sells it at the Polson Farmers Market along with Italian country bread and classic chocolate-chip cookies.
She also markets a line of Mrs. Wonderful sea-salt blends and has a cooking show on a local cable TV station based in Hot Springs. And she’d really like her own cooking show on the Travel Channel.
Welcome to the world of Mrs. Wonderful, or as her husband Gino lovingly puts it, the “vortex of Mary Frances.”
All of Caselli’s entrepreneurial energy spins around her basic desire to reconnect with family, friends and the home-cooked meal.
“Mrs. Wonderful taps into a resurgence of American homes wanting home-cooked meals using fresh ingredients and family recipes from the past that celebrate togetherness and the utter joy of creating wonderful food moments,” she explained.
After raising four children on her own in Chicago for some 15 years, she met Gino via an online dating service for members of the Catholic Church.
“I knew I was going to marry him immediately,” she recalled.
They tied the knot nine years ago, and she spent the first three years of their marriage going back and forth between Polson and Chicago to care for her aging father. Six years ago, she moved to Polson permanently along with her father, who now lives next door and has end-stage dementia that requires a good portion of her time.
Caselli’s dilemma was simply this: “What can I do in Polson, and at home?”
She had spent 10 years as a single mother working at various jobs and chipping away at a degree in theology, with a minor in medieval studies. That bank of knowledge wasn’t at all applicable to making a living in Polson.
So while Gino manned his landscaping and yard service business, she slowly began making a name for herself at the farmers market, tapping into her great-grandmother Babunia’s special recipe for orzechownik, a traditional nut roll made with thin layers of pastry dough. That in itself has created a “cult following” at the market.
Then she added the pane rustica — Italian round country bread — to her market basket. She painstakingly bakes 80 loaves in cast-iron pans during the two days leading up to the weekly farmers market.
Her signature item is a line of salt blends made by combining Celtic sea salt with fresh organic herbs grown in Dixon. The salt blends were an immediate hit, so Caselli got a wholesale license and began producing the salts at the Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center in Ronan.
The three salt blend flavors — Montana, Tuscan and Provence — are sold at a number of stores throughout western Montana, including Withey’s Health Foods in Kalispell, Markus Foods and Great Northern Pasta Co. in Whitefish, Roma’s in Bigfork, and Super 1 Foods and Mission Mountain Naturals in Polson.
“The rub, no pun intended, is that the salt keeps the herbs fresh, creating a wonderful alternative to the ubiquitous dry herbs that languish in kitchen cabinets everywhere,” she said.
Caselli recently got a rude awakening about the competitive nature of the food industry when she was notified by the Wonderful Pistachios company that she couldn’t use the name Mrs. Wonderful.
“I’m being trademark-bullied,” she said.
Caselli’s Mrs. Wonderful trademark should be finalized in the next couple of weeks, and she’s hired a lawyer to stand her ground.
“I’ve put a lot of money into labels,” she said.
Around Polson, people now call her Mrs. Wonderful when they see her.
“I’ll fight for my name,” she added.
The latest twist in Caselli’s journey through the food business is her own local cable TV cooking show called “Wonderful Family Favorites,” produced by Hot Springs Cable Co.
“We’ve done two episodes,” she said.
During the show, she encourages family dinners and entertaining with friends while sharing her family’s favorite meals. It’s a concept she’d love to catapult to a larger audience.
“I providentially met a guy who got a show on the Travel Channel,” she said. “And I’ve talked to a producer in L.A. I’m ready to do a demo.”
Caselli said she’s mapped out in her mind the first 15 episodes.
“The beautiful thing about Montana is that it’s very freeing,” she said. “Things seem more daunting in big cities. Here, anything is possible.”
She envisions Gino being the mixologist on her show, providing the perfect drinks and refreshments for each meal. Her sister in Italy will play into the show, too, somehow.
The idea is to profile “regular people” in cities throughout the country as they share insight about where to get the freshest foods. Caselli’s 50th birthday gathering with friends and family in California’s Napa Valley last year was a springboard for her ideas.
But she needs investors, “so I’m calling everyone I know,” she said.
One thing that’s not in short supply with Caselli is gumption.
More information about Mrs. Wonderful products, along with recipes and how-to video clips are available online at www.mrswonderful.net.
Features editor Lynnette Hintze may be reached at 758-4421 or by email at lhintze@dailyinterlake.com.