The decorator had been in all week and we were living in that state of chaos which is slightly too much. Meals on the coffee table (or rather what serves as the coffee table which is actually my old university trunk) eventually lose their appeal. Or rather than losing their appeal, we’d got to the […]

If we’re talking lasagne, then it’s a tale of two. The first is my mother’s from my childhood, when lasagne was a food of ’80s dinners, along with the stir fried chicken that came from her copy of the St Michael Cookery Library’s Chinese Cooking. It was often made using dried lasagne verdi, and generally […]

A friend asked me for the recipe for my meatballs. “How do you make yours?” she asked. “I love to hear how other people make them.” Good question. My meatballs are generally recipe-less. They’re usually a mix of the meat I’ve bought and what I have in the fridge. The other day I made them […]

So after Spring made a very brief appearance, in particular yesterday which gave us a day in which we all breathed a sigh of relief from the awful weather we seem to be having recently, today it is cold, grey, raining and utterly miserable. Burian 2 is on its way, or the beast from the […]

Cacciucco, a fish soup associated with Tuscan coastal towns such as Livorno, Viareggio, and in my case memories of a camping holiday in Castiglione della Pescaia where I had these rather romantic visions of the good life in a tent until the people in the tent next to us started singing Carpenters songs. I have […]

After last week’s impromptu “let’s just all have a week off as everyone got ill”, everyone’s back and out of the house and so I spent the whole of my Monday morning – err, cleaning the kitchen. Yes, really, life is that glamorous, although it’s actually quite a nice feeling in a way, kind of […]

Call it a modern day version of one of those much loved and much stained notebooks that I have sitting on my bookshelves in my kitchen, the ones that belong to my grandmothers and mother. They’re the ones hidden between the other books, Italian classics such as Artusi’s The Art of Eating Well, various other books […]

You can’t beat a sausage ragù. You can’t beat any ragù, and I generally make mine with half beef mince and half sausage Italian sausage meat anyway. But today went pear-shaped and I was in a hurry, and so the sausage casserole with polenta I’d planned to feed my family for lunch and was feeling […]

Saturday cooking. When the week is over and although the workload might not exactly be finished, there’s nothing I love more than a bit of Saturday lunchtime pottering in the kitchen. At the moment I’ve got Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well on the kitchen worktop, along with a […]

The Agnello di Pasqua (Paschal Lamb or Easter Lamb) is a classic Easter cake from the Lodi area or the Lodigiana. It’s made of flaky pastry and is usually filled with crema pasticciera (Italian custard). Variations are fillings of Chantilly cream or chocolate. At Pasticceria La Lombarda (the Lombard) in Lodi, they have been preparing cakes […]

People say that you rarely get chance to eat anything on your wedding day. Wrong. I ate everything, deliberately made a point of finishing every single morsel of the menu me and my husband had painstakingly discussed with the chef. It was a three-day lakeside wedding (Lake Como), where English ladies in hats met Italian […]