Dad, I want to cook you something special for your birthday. What do you want? And his answer, always the same: something made au gratin. Yesterday was my dad's birthday. He is a handyman, who built our wood burning oven for pizza and bread just by watching videos on YouTube.…
These are sunny days that taste like early Spring, days of morning walks in the countryside before work. I feel the vibrations of the upcoming season, so I try to shake off the fatigue of a tiring winter, which I had completely underestimated. I channel this energy in the kitchen,…
How many meat sauces exist in Italy? In between the rich and self-indulgent Bolognese ragù, where the ground beef and the ground pork are cooked with white wine, milk and tomato paste, and the Neapolitan one, where tradition has it that there is no ground meat, but whole pieces of…
I like bulbs in a pot: they bloom slowly and, one morning, the smell of spring floods the kitchen. I adore dark chocolate, a crafted bar with salt crystals wrapped in a colourful paper. I like a book, because with that you give me an adventure and the chance to…
January and February are two months that we spend mostly working from home. During the rest of the year, we divide ourselves in between the studio kitchen and our smaller kitchen at home, bringing up and down the stairs cast iron pots, already photographed recipes that need only need to…
That day, coming back home from work, I found mum in the kitchen. She was preparing dinner, her glasses lowered on her nose, a faded apron that could not protect her from oil splashes and clumsiness, a family prerogative, and an old woollen sweater to keep her warm. The wooden…
When I forget to cook our lunch or dinner – believe me, it happens – fennel becomes my best friend. I buy fennel bulbs by the box at the market, I choose the chubby ones, as they are more tender, firm to the touch, with bright tops. I stash them into…
On the morning of our wedding my alarm clock rang at six. The night before I brought all my bride beauty essentials to my parents' house, into my old room where I used to sleep with my sister Claudia what look like decades ago. Only a dozen yards from my…