I started to look at recipes with a different perspective. While I am preparing dinner for us, on the marble table upstairs in our house, or while I am cooking during one of the classes, where many hands and experiences meet around the same wooden table now marked by time,…
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.…
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…
I slept for two nights in a single bed in a tiny white room while visiting Tommaso’s family in Puglia. I could hear him sleeping, breathing heavily just twenty centimetres far from my bed. Yet, finding myself in a single bed, carefully made with freshly laundered linen, made me feel…
This year the Christmas countdown, the never ending checklists, the holly that stings me every time I take it in the wrong way, the songs you have to listen to and the movies you have to watch otherwise it is not Christmas are stressing me out. I've always embodied a…
May I ask you something? Usually this question arises during a cooking class, after the market visit and after my enthusiast praise for seasonal vegetables. Where are the vegetables on the menu at the restaurant? I thought they would have a predominant role in Italy, but they barely serve vegetables during the…
You might think I had lost the password to enter the blog or that I had chosen a strictly off line holidays, as I've been strangely silent in the last weeks. I traveled, I went to the Oxford Syposium on Food and Cookery, I devoured all Ruth Reichl's books, captured by…
I started to read again. I read a book that had no recipes, but a story, one of those books I bought some time ago because I wanted to read it, sooner or later. It happened by chance, one morning I got up earlier than usual and I picked a book from the…
I’ve written my first acceptance speech, sitting at my tiny desk in the living room with a stained apron, dreaming to wear a red dress and high heels and to stand in front of some of the best food writers, bloggers and editors of our time. I am sure I would have cried, I’m emotional.