A Taste of Corsica
I know, I’m breaking my self-imposed rule. Some point after starting this blog over two years ago, I realised what I really wanted to write about was Italian food, traditions and travel. A decision to…
Cucina conversations: a Sicilian coffee for the summer months
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…
Cucina conversations: pansotti liguri
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…
Lessons and recipes from a retreat in the Tuscan countryside
‘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’….
Cucina conversations: carciofi trifolati
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…
Reflections on food-blogging, videos and a recipe for rabatòn alessandrini
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…
Bonet: crème caramel’s Piedmontese cousin
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…
Cucina Conversations: Fagioli grassi for Carnival
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…
Cucina Conversations: Frittura dolce (deep-fried semolina squares)
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….