October in the popular imagination is supposed to be the month when we step lightly into the ‘normal’ life, when you finally manage to rearrange your time schedule including the essential-for-your-self-esteem swimming class, the well deserved drink with your best friend, the quiet, calm and old style hour under the wool blanket reading your last book.

This year I’m not yet there, I’m still struggling to reach my balance of warm socks, soft scarves and well organized calendars. Hopefully November will bring the lilting rhythm of winter, in the meantime I try to carve out when I can a few minutes of stillness, in a ritual that gives me peace of mind.

The protagonist of my ritual is the 6pm slanting light, the light of the afternoon that is getting shorter day by day, the light of the resting sun that casts warm golden glows on any surface it  caresses. Usually in this moment of the day I’m in the car, coming back home from the office, listening to the radio and dancing with my dreams in the afternoon light, lost in its games between the branches of trees.

I escape from reality and take a deep breath in the favourite corner of my mind. I built there an ideal pub where I can chat with my friends, enjoying the last sun of the day in the garden behind the kitchen, over a small stream that runs lively a few meters below.

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Until recently, the meat universe was generally unknown. What happened in the kitchen on Sunday mornings between my mum, the stove and the smell of roast was a mystery in which I used to cradle me, unaware of the joy you can feel when you are the author of those scents of home.

Yes, because if home is where there is a family, home is where there is a hot soup in the winter evenings and the five o’clock tea and biscuits, home is also where the earth smells wonderfully of forest after the rain, where the smell of roast welcomes you in the kitchen, caressing your senses and soothing the worries.

I decided to start cooking pieces of meat a little bit more challenging then a veal roll or a chicken curry for this reason: I wanted to be aware of the act of creating the magic spell of being at home, to be eventually the architect of a diffuse sense of well-being, of a pleasant numbness so typical of family Sunday mornings.

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Yet Emiko said it: don’t spread yourself too thin. Do not use all of your strength committing yourself into too many activities, otherwise at some point all your energy will slip out of your hand, scattering in thin streams and losing the usual sharp incisiveness.

When someone knows you so well is rarely wrong, and in fact it happened. I’m living a beautiful and intense time, crammed of things I want to do, see, learn, study, of friends who deserve my undivided attention because they are about to move away, too far away to answer the last minute call to cook together a winter and cosy lunch during one of the hottest days in August (with the fireplace roaring in the background, just to say).

And so I find myself sitting at my desk in the evening with the cool breeze that finally comes in from the ajar window, staring blankly at my to-do list scribbled down on a sheet of paper, list that increases instead of decreasing day by day.

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One of the elements of the Tuscan cuisine that most fascinates me and makes me proud is that there are just a few rules, but they are to be regarded as a dogma. These rules describe concisely – through the pairing of ingredients, herbs and spices – our culinary culture and Nature’s seasons. These rules are interpreted by every family, according to their personal tastes and likes.

At home my mother is the strictest judge in the enforcement of these rules, which apply equally to stuffed vegetables and legumes – herb matches.

If the rosemary – intense and camphorated with a distant incense smell – traditionally marries beautifully with roast meat, baked potatoes and grilled meats, for us its flavour calls for chickpeas and a hearty sprinkling of freshly ground black pepper.

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There are rules in my family, rules that must be followed if you don’t want to be banned from the kitchen: bell peppers have to be stuffed with rice. When you come to small green peppers, though, the story is totally different! This is a recipe that comes from the South of Italy, from my father’s branch of family, from Melfi (PZ).

The recipe belongs to my Aunt Patrizia (known as zizi), my granddad’s sister. When Aunt Teresa and Uncle Cesare go to Melfi to visit her, she knows that, as soon as they pass Rome, everything they expect and foretaste are these stuffed green peppers. Zia Patrizia makes the stuffed green peppers the day before, because if you give them a little while to rest, they are still better and gain a deeper flavour.

These peppers come in the late summer and are wisely filled with leftovers, with what is left in the house after the heath of the summer months. The poor version is made only with stale bread, capers and some anchovy fillets, nothing more. With the passing of time the technique has been refined and you end up putting into the stuffing tuna, some pickles and a generous handful of green and black olives.

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