False friends, the trouble with translating and two cicoria recipes
Beware of false friends. And no, I don’t mean the kind that are nice to your face but are mean behind your back. Though, you should probably watch out for those too. What I mean…
Cucina Conversations: Bugie, Revisited…
Sometimes I question the worth of my food-blogging past-time. It takes up a lot of what little free time I have between writing, recipe testing and photographing, not to mention broadcasting what I’ve been up…
Cucina Conversations: Piedmontese Stuffed Onions
Leftover bread. It’s January’s topic for the Cucina Conversations roundtable and this month, Carmen, Daniela, Francesca, Flavia, Lisa, Marialuisa and I are sharing recipes from around the boot which include the staff of life. From…
Home for the holidays and two simple Christmas menu ideas
Home. Where exactly is home for me now? It certainly was a question I struggled to answer as I was ordering savoury pies, vanilla slices and coffees for myself and my family in the Tasmanian…
An ode to bitterness and radicchio
She’s sitting on her high chair, eager to join the grown-ups around her for dinner. It’s been a few weeks since I started introducing solids to her diet. I’ve opted to take a less consumerist,…
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…
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….