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…
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…
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 came close to throwing in the towel with this one. I was going to contact my fellow Cucina Conversations bloggers and say, I’m sorry but I won’t be joining you with an olive oil-related…
I had quite the epiphany a couple of years ago when I first read John Dickie’s highly readable account of Italian food and culinary history, Delizia. In the book’s second chapter, after describing Palermo’s totemic…
The almost eerie perfection of the Baroque reconstruction in Sicily’s Val di Noto. The twelfth century church three metres below street level in the same island’s port city of Messina. The ghost town of Romagnano…
I have a confession to make. Unless I’m baking or recipe-testing for this blog, I don’t always take out my kitchen scales to check how much an ingredient weighs. And I don’t think I am…
After Italy’s defeat at Caporetto by the German and Austro-Hungarian armies in October 1917, over three hundred thousand Italian soldiers were taken prisoner. The Italian government and military forces, embarrassed by how easily the weaknesses…
No, I haven’t suddenly realised the errors of my ways after advocating the consumption of offal in my previous post and gone vegan or dairy-free. My motto is, and always will be, all foods are…