Milan Fashion Week is back

It’s been a busy month in Milan. The beginning of September saw the city’s Design Week make a welcome comeback after the usual events in April 2020 were cancelled because…

Living the high life in Alto Adige

I loved writing this piece about mountains, lakes, strudel and more for Italia Magazine this month. Alto Adige is one of Italy’s beautiful mountain regions and famous for the UNESCO-protected…

Eating pizzoccheri in Valchiavenna

It’s a lazy Sunday lunchtime on a February Sunday and I’m having lunch in a restaurant with family and friends. The restaurant is La Genzianella in the hamlet of Fraciscio…

Spaghetti and sauce: online workshop for kids

We’ll be cooking spaghetti, making our very own fresh tomato sauce, busting spaghetti myths, exploring a bit of spaghetti history and learning a bit of Italian along the way. The…

Casarecce with romanesco cauliflower

This is one of my favourites: pasta with Romanesco cauliflower (cavolfiore romanesco). I made today’s recipe also because I was feeling inspired by a cookery class I did with a…

Tales from Italian haute couture online talk

Had a very enjoyable talk this morning with the loveliest bunch of ladies from the Benvenuto International Club in Monza about fashion, Rome and la dolce vita. It’s the time…

Focaccine

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m making focaccine, or little focaccia as adding the diminutive ‘ino’ or in this case ‘ina’ makes it little. So these are little focaccia, although if…

Breakfast with a view, Florence

Life is a series of breakfasts, or at least sometimes it’s felt like that and has been all the sweeter because of it. The current restrictions mean that it’s not…

A night in Pleiney

If you go to the Aosta Valley and follow the signs for the Great Saint Bernard’s Pass, you’ll get to one of the region’s lesser-frequented valleys, the Great Saint Bernard…

Pandemic

The last time I wrote this was almost two years ago after coming back from the UK when the world was still as we knew it. Two years later and we’ve…

Home, memory, sand in your sandwiches

Then we came home again, after a summer that included our usual trips to Spain and the UK, via the two month mark of the three month Italian school holidays…

Chicken dinners

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…

A tale of two lasagne

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…

Memories will be made of meatballs

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…

Comfort comes in the shape of meatballs

I had this phase once where just about every Friday night I’d make chicken risotto, and every Friday night my son would curl up his nose and wail “that’s not…

Pesto(ish) for a rainy day

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…

Wild boar stew is part of my identity

When I told my family I was toying with the idea of being vegan or at least vegetarian, my younger son looked at me in that way he has when…

Cacciucco, or chickpea soup amidst the snow

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…

Monday soup for the soul

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…

We are what we eat (but make it Italian)

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…

Bologna porticoes and the women’s marches

I took the picture last Thursday in Bologna before the women’s marches. There’s something so calming about Bologna. It manages to be lively and vibrant without feeling chaotic. It’s also…

November is sausage ragù

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…

Easy Saturday cooking

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…

Up Lake Como without a plan

It started off as it often does with a vague idea to go off somewhere that ends up somewhere else which is always the best thing about it. On this…

Eating chisciöi above Lake Como

True to every stereotype, it’s a beautiful Spring day up on Lake Como and I’m sitting on the sheltered terrace of Crotto di Biosio, feeling like I’ve hit the jackpot in…

Easter cakes in Lodi

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…

Penitent processions and the women’s social club

“Mummy, can we follow the procession?” my son asked me. We were walking down the street in the seaside town of Nerja in southern Spain, more specifically the sun-baked lands…

Montespluga

“Go there today,” the woman in the café tells me. “You don’t get many days like today.” “No?”  “Not up the Spluga. You probably get about five clear days every…

Memories are made of breakfasts

When I was young, I can distinctly remember going around telling everyone: “When I grow up, I’m going to live in France,” France being the only place that I’d visited…

Being home

It changes when you move away, the perspective. The familiar is still familiar but you see it through a different lens. The old lens has long been cast aside. Or…

Leftover risotto and the women’s refuge

Arancini di riso are literally small oranges of rice or leftover risotto, deep-fried and delicious. My kids love them, so whenever I make risotto I generally make extra for arancini the day after.…

Nutella for grown-ups

My kids were little and we were by the lake. I was making Nutella sandwiches. “And if we ever have kids, they’re not eating any of that crap,” this guy…

Focaccia genovese and Recco beach

Focaccia will always have a special place in my heart, or rather in my stomach. Food is emotional, and it’s what I remember eating when I first came here twenty years…

Down amidst the cheeses at the deli

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…

Cappuccino, brioche and the day is mine

I love Italian cafés, or bars as they’re called here. Of course you can’t generalise. Not all of them are such shrines to all things sweet. Some are best avoided,…

Car

I needed a new car. My old one had reached the stage that if I drove it any longer it would die. Literally. And probably somewhere very inconvenient with the…

Things I’ve learned from living abroad

Living abroad is very different to being on holiday. Sounds obvious, but needs saying. Of course you can stretch out that holiday feeling but sooner or later reality kicks in.…

Live Italian, eat Italian

Living in Italy you soon become aware that food has god-like status, on a par with football, Ferrari and your mother. It’s the focus of animated conversations, the holy grail…

Up Grigna, Lake Como way

It was supposed to be a family affair, the four of us. “Have we got enough petrol?” “Yes, of course we have.” Of course we have enough petrol. “Excuse me, how much further…

Pizzoccheri

I can trace my life in a dish of pizzoccheri. I’d just met my husband and we were spending all our weekends driving backwards and forwards in the dead of…

Mountain refuge

Yesterday I was sitting in a mountain refuge with my oldest Italian friends. It’s the thing I like doing best. Walking up a mountain, taking in the views of the…