Cucina conversations: back to school with amaretti morbidi
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…
On preserving the taste of summer, two tomato recipes and a cookbook giveaway!
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…
A New Country Kitchen and Two Plum Recipes to Celebrate
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…
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…
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…
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….
Cucina conversations: too many recipes for bagna cauda
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…
Cucina Conversations: Italian cuisine, a new blogging roundtable and Sicilian grape must pudding
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…
Amatriciana for Amatrice: a recipe and how to support the earthquake relief efforts
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…