I’ve been invited over for Sunday lunch by my great aunt and uncle in a town along the Ionian coast between Messina and Taormina. Pranzo, as usual, is an abundant affair. A bevy of dishes is…
When the Cucina Conversations ladies and I decided to dedicate this month’s edition of our roundtable to dishes named after body parts, I immediately made a beeline for two books. One was Mary Taylor-Simeti’s Sicilian…
‘No one who cooks, cooks alone. Even at her most solitary, a cook in the kitchen is surrounded by generations of cooks past, the advice and menus of cooks present, the wisdom of cookbook writers’….
There they were, standing in a bucket with just enough water to keep their stems hydrated. My in-laws had just spent a month enjoying the bounties of nature only spring in Liguria can provide and…
If there’s one thing I have learnt since starting this blog a little over two years ago, it’s that food blogging is one big learning curve. There was the lesson in deciding what I actually…
In The Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson wrote, “In the latter part of the 20th century, crème caramel occupied an excessively large amount of territory in European restaurant dessert menus. This was probably due…
Calabrian proverb: Those who marry are only happy for a day, but those who slaughter their pig are happy for an entire year. It was January 16, the eve of Saint Anthony Abbot’s Day. The family…
Semolina. In English, the coarsely-ground meal resembling polenta milled from triticum durum or durum wheat. In Italian supermarkets, often comes in convenient 250 gram-sized packets for making soups, gnocchi, puddings and Italian babies’ first primi….
I got lots of lovely presents this Christmas. There was the gorgeous waxed canvas handbag with leather trimming that doubles as a camera bag from TP. Friends, colleagues and students gave me some handmade cards…