Summer has come to an end and so has much of the time we spent together during the days in that season. Instead, Monday to Friday, morning and afternoon, we make our way down tree-lined…

What can I say except that part of me doesn’t want summer, or rather, the fruit and vegetables that characterise it, to end? Mother nature would seem to agree with me too. There’s still plenty…

Ritual: (noun) ‘a series of actions or type of behaviour regularly and invariably followed by someone’; (adjective) (of an action) ‘arising from convention or habit’. Italy is home to many of these, especially regarding food…

It’s TT’s birthday. Or, at least it was earlier in the week when she turned 3. We’re holding her party at the weekend instead, so all the people we’ve invited can come into the verdant…

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…

  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’….

Here I am, finally arriving in the city I came very close to moving to almost ten years ago. This time though, I will actually have the chance to explore Florence’s cobblestoned vicoli a little…