For years Mensanello has been just a nearby working Tuscan farm. My grandmother has aways referred to the Fattore and Fattoressa, the farm manager and his wife, with enormous respect. Mum used to buy fresh eggs from the Fattoressa, we used to go there on a Sunday to mass. There was a…
I have always lived in the countryside, in the same house where grandma and dad were born, but for years the countryside was little more than a well-kept garden, an olive tree orchard and a hedgerow of blackberries at the end of summer. My parents belong to that generation, grown…
April gave us a foretaste of the good weather, with clear days, warm temperatures and a fragrant air soaked with the smell of flowers. I walked a lot, on the Francigena and in the woods, with an organized group and just with my family. I needed to shake off the…
I usually respect the seasons with devotion. My benchmark are the local farmers' markets and our vegetable garden, which, however, is always a little behind the rhythms that you would normally expect from a Tuscan garden. It is lazy, just like me. This year, though, after the first snowy and…
When we talk about chocolate salame, my mind goes immediately to what we call rotolino in my family, a soft sponge roll brushed with the ubiquitous pinkish alchermes and spread with chocolate and custard. But there is another chocolate salame, which is made with very few ingredients that you will…
A friend told us about this almost ninety-year-old gentleman who made beautiful copper pots in his old-fashioned workshop near Pistoia, then life, by chance, put us in contact with his grandson, and here begins our story. First we met Francesco on line, then in his family shop, Bottega Donnini, in…
In these days, the philosophy guiding my efforts to produce good content I could be proud of is perfectly synthetized in a Nicole Gulotta’s sentence I found in one her latest newsletters, a brilliant source of inspiration: in this writing life, the only thing we can control is whether or not we…
I've been making often ragù in these days. In one of the first cooking classes, just after the long-awaited snowfall, when the temperatures outside reached minus ten, we made my grandma's classic ragù, chopping, stirring, simmering with wine and cooking slowly with tomato sauce. We dressed a bowl of home…
