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You are here: Home / Archives for The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy

Sugo al pomodoro classico (classic tomato pasta sauce)

November 3, 2015 by natalie 3 Comments

Sugo rosso classico

Sugo rosso classico

 

Classic tomato sauce aka sugo.  

There is no reason any non-native Italian shouldn’t be able to make an authentic, reliable, tasty, easy go-to pasta sauce.  I advise you to just shrug off the casual snobbery / subtly xenophobic tendency that fellow Italians have, where they are deeply suspicious of any other nationality making anything from their classic culinary repertoire.

This classic red sauce will cause disagreements in every household and by my estimation is probably the primary source of initial rifts between daughters-and-mothers-in-law as there are as many recipes for it and opinions on it as there are families in Italy.   Often but not exclusively, each family hands their recipe down from mother to daughter (and of course sometimes son, look at Bottura, Carluccio, Contaldo, Locatelli et al) in this way for generations.  it’s not a secret recipe usually, it’s just a basic survival skill in all families an a very polarizing one at that.  IMG_2360Some don’t diverge from a minimalist, purist version (tomato, olive oil, garlic and salt and maybe (oooh!) a single basil leaf) – my friend Ute calls it “sugo finto” in her house (which means “fake sauce” and recommends this particularly with fresh, seasonal summery tomatoes – I will provide her exact recipe soon… others will only approve of a soffritto base and then the addition of tomato.  To give you another example of a totally valid yet surprising departure from the majority of recipes – from a bona fide, card-carrying Sicilian friend of mine, Elena who is a paediatrician living in the UK called her mother in a panic when pregnant in order to get the exact recipe for her sugo such were her cravings.  She used to make her own (just one of her mother’s variations) but the nostalgia component was insurmountable as she craved a particular recipe which had no soffritto or oil at all involved in the cooking.  Controversially Elena’s mother’s recipe involved boiling the tomato and carrot and celery and onion without the initial frying off, just the combining and boiling of all the ingredients and the addition of fresh, raw extra virgin olive oil just before serving….

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Filed Under: Gluten-Free, Mains, Recipe Vault, Recipes, Starters, The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy, Tips, Tricks and shortcuts, Veggie Headliner Act

The BASICS: How to cook pasta

October 16, 2015 by natalie 2 Comments

IMG_8030Apologies to anyone who doesn’t require these pointers but I do get asked frequently for the genuine, Italian method for cooking pasta.  I do find that many of my non-Italian friends get little things “wrong” and this does make things trickier / less reliable in terms of outcome.  My best friend in Italy, Ute who has the family run restaurant has whole banks of water on the boil, in the way that Brits would have deep-fat friers constantly on the go with wire baskets bubbling away, except in Italy these contain hot salted water.  Gluten-free vats are set aside to be left totally free from wheat contamination and this is now becoming the norm in Italy.  The tips below may seem to only define minor differences between the happy-go-lucky most cooks employ, but they make the difference between authentic tasting pasta and slop.  Trust me.

Here we go:

  1.   Use a larger pan than you think (at least a c.3L pan for 500g [ie. one pack] pasta)
  2.   Use more water than you think (fill the pan 3/4 full) and be prepared to top up the water from a kettle or boiling tap if the water looks overly cloudy or gloopy or simply insufficient if need be
  3.   Salt well (eg. at least one heaped tablespoon of salt for a pan that size) – you will get a hang of doing this by eye. I do it by throwing in a hanful of sea salt or one swirl of fine salt
  4.   Do not bother with adding oil etc. to the boiling water, if you stir it properly (and this is the only true way to avoid it gumming together) then it will turn out well
  5.   Be prepared to stir a lot in the first 5 minutes to prevent the pasta from gluing itself together and to the base of the pan
  6.   If you are cooking ‘long’ pasta (spaghetti, linguine, tagliatelle, fettuccine, bucatini, capelli d’angelo, chitarra etc.) then stand over the pas with a large wooden fork and twist the long stems into the water until they are all covered up and stir until flowing freely under the water with no clumping.
  7.   Remove the pasta before it is really cooked through to your desired bite level (very ‘al dente’ for me) and, crucially DO NOT OVER DRAIN it, leave a small puddle of cooking water in the pan (about 2-3 tablespoons) so that when you tip the pan, a corner of water can be seen.  This is because the pasta will keep on cooking and absorbing the water until you eat it and it can become ever so dry and stodgy in that time unless you pre-empt this.  Alternatively you can drain the pasta very cursorily (so it is still sopping wet) leaving plenty of milky-looking cooking water aside in case it is needed, until you dress the pasta and combine it properly with the ‘sugo’
  8.   OPTIONAL: you can stir in a tiny drizzle of olive oil if you are afraid of it sticking but only if there is a delay between cooking the pasta and adding the sauce.  In Italy most health conscious families tend to add fresh olive oil just before serving as it is healthier uncooked and is almost always a welcome addition
  9.   Lastly, a trick I see used at my bestie’s restaurant is to complete the cooking of the pasta with the sauce in a large sauté pan so that the pasta and the sauce “fuse” and really combine.  You can either do this in the boiling pan if your sauce is pre-made, or add your pasta to the sauce sauté pan which is still cooking away on the stove alongside the boiling pasta.  Not only does this allow me to serve pasta that is hot enough but more importantly it allows the flavour to penetrate the pasta and to perfect the “cuisson/cottura”, ie how al dente the pasta is.  This last step is not necessary but it does make a real difference.

NOTE:  I rarely if ever see a mound of naked boiled pasta with a pile of sauce pooled in the middle.  This is a bastardization of our way of serving that has been propagated by countless commercial pasta sauce adverts and is a method that Italians never use.  We might lightly stir in a sauce and then serve a blob in the middle for effect upon serving but that is it.  No-one is seasoning and stirring in their pasta on their plate as if it has been plopped there by some two part pasta dispensing process, it is messy and doesn’t allow the flavours to meld.

Now you know.

Filed Under: Gluten-Free, Recipe Vault, Recipes, The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy

The Basics: Soffritto, my umami – how I love thee, let me count the ways!

October 3, 2015 by natalie Leave a Comment

IMG_1902I can’t keep up with writing up the volume of things that I think can be useful / interesting to share on here.   Sometimes I master something new and I think – wow, what took me so long?  There are countless other elements like broths and stock, and bread dough that I can pull together and which make the rest of my cooking more tasty, more flexible, more interesting.  It is definitely a confidence thing, being able to make any kind of soup, sling any fish of any size and shape in the oven and to not have to consult a  recipe book or double check the correct oven temperature, the ability to eye progress and adjust,  how to pre-empt ‘doneness’ by bearing in mind the residual heat a dish contains before you serve it…  At last, turning 40 a month from today, I actually have that elusive ‘feel’ for things – both in the kitchen and without.  It is as if the culinary trajectory runs parallel to other elements in life:  you become seasoned with a patina of firsthand exposure, layer upon layer of trials and tribulations borne of personal effort, time and experience that not matter how beautiful and fresh the greenness of youth may be, it simply cannot match it.

Recently I realized that I can make caramel by eye, and a few months back I mastered something that seemed so unfamiliar and Anglo/French and faux-grand that I thought it would be fiddly but it really wasn’t: roux and by extension, béchamel.  Then my friend Brooke said: “i feel I could do with a real intro in to the basics… like how to make a roux, or a soffritto as these things crop up all the time…”.  So I’m going to include this and many others on here, with hyperlinks so that you can refer to these recipes when they crop up as a subset of another recipe.  I would also be very open to suggestions (grateful) at what to include in the basics section, as I think different families and cultures have a particular “house style” and a different way of approaching things and therefore everyone has their ‘essentials’ list.  My take on cooking is that to be a successful intuitive cook (ie. someone broadly competent and comfortable in the kitchen), it helps to learn some of the extensive culinary alphabet.   For me, coming at this cooking lark from a definitely Italian angle, soffritto is definitely one of the basic building blocks.

Soffritto is one of those things that Italians assume everyone beyond the confines of Italy must familiar with, as it is a ‘starter’ and enhancer of simply so many dishes.    I use soffritto to make variations of “shepherd’s pie” and “cottage pie” that I would otherwise never be tempted to make for my family.  My childhood memories of eating Shepherd’s pie and its relatives, is one of a dark and muddy 2 dimensional gristly meat base taking its colour from bovril or bisto granules.  We do use stock cubes in our house, and Bouillon powder, but there is nothing that can compare with the savoury and wholesome tang that comes from frying over a little pile of diced vegetables.  The classic soffritto I am referring to is basically a sepia take on the Italian flag:

  1. Celery (green)
  2. Onion (white)
  3. Carrot (red – sort of!)

I have often heard that celery is rich in umami and this must be why it is a key vegetable in soffritto.  Apparently Parmesan is also rich in umami (no wonder Italian food is so addictive and why I end up using so much of these ingredients in my own cooking).  Anyway, carrot has sweetness, as does onion once golden, and combined they produce that perfectly synergistic collision of several of three of the five key tastes once you throw in seasoning ie. sweet, salty and umami.   According to Wikipedia:

Many foods that may be consumed daily are rich in umami components. Naturally occurring glutamate can be found in meats and vegetables, whereas inosinate comes primarily from meats and guanylate from vegetables. Thus, umami taste is common to foods that contain high levels of L-glutamate, IMP and GMP, most notably in fish, shellfish, cured meats, mushrooms, vegetables (e.g., ripe tomatoes, Chinese cabbage, spinach, celery, etc.) or green tea, and fermented and aged products involving bacterial or yeast cultures, such as cheeses, shrimp pastes, fish sauce, soy sauce, nutritional yeast, and yeast extracts such as Vegemite and Marmite.[26]

Many humans’ first encounter with umami components is breast milk.[27] It contains roughly the same amount of umami as broths.

There are some distinctions among stocks from different countries. In dashi, L-glutamate comes from sea kombu (Laminaria japonica) and inosinate from dried bonito flakes (katsuobushi) or small dried sardines (niboshi).

It would seem that most food cultures try and access that umami perfection but I had never consciously realized that the flavours I am drawn to most (many of the apparently eccentric elements in my store cupboard such as dashi, bonito, kombu, and less eccentric more widespread ones such as fish sauce and yeast flakes)  are precisely things that boost flavour in this category.  Umami is said to ‘magnify’ taste, which to me seems like a cook’s cheat, a way to just make things taste more, taste better.  Retroactively I feel less of an obsessive saddo for making my own fish stock and faffing around pouring it in to my baby weaning cubes and freezing it for future use as in fact I am just lusting after umami in my cooking.  To me it makes the world of difference but I get it that for a lot of people making stock is just a bridge too far in terms of hassle sometimes…  In which case I highly recommend soffritto as it gets you a lot of the way there in terms of amping up the taste of many a dish.

A soffritto can also contain garlic and chilli, (especially in Abruzzo) and in Italy we often use celery leaves rather than the stem.  This is probably due to the fact that the celery you find there is much more leggy and hardy, over all much greener and more wiry (when you buy it at a real market) than the water-rich, virtually albino variety found further north.  For this reason you may find that your frying time varies, depending on water content.

Lastly, when I make a pasta sauce for the kids and I want to morph it in to something more compelling and more dashing with heat and oomph, I will often slice up a clove or two of garlic and give it a gentle fry with some fresh chillies (or dried if that’s what you have to hand) and then heat the sugo up in the two-ingredient soffritto before adding to the pasta.  Soffritto is also the key to tomato sauce, most of my risotti, the key to making an amazing Ragù and basically anything you care to make with mince. Look no further:

IMG_2348

Slice off one edge to stop the carrot rolling then slice the removed edge and the remaining carrot into 3mm-deep slices…

 

IMG_2349

In turn flip the slices on to their sides, slice them up lengthways in to matchsticks and then once more slice these matchsticks crossways (perpendicular) to create tiny chunks…

IMG_2332

cut the stems of celery in to pieces roughly 10cm long and one inch across, then ribbon these in to long matchsticks as you did with the carrots…

IMG_2345

then slice these crossways into small cubes

IMG_2346

remove the core of the onion, peel it and flip it over for slicing finely…

IMG_2347

chop the slices perpendicular to the onion layers and little chunks will be the outcome

IMG_2352

place the vegetables for the soffritto into a heavy-based pan and fry gently in enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan and coat the veg… be sure to add the garlic once the onion starts to turn golden, not before or it will burn and ruin the flavour.

 

The Basics: Soffritto, my umami – how I love thee, let me count the ways!

Print this recipe
natalie
October 3, 2015
by natalie
Category Gluten-Free Pantry and Suppliers Recipe Vault The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy Tips, Tricks and shortcuts Veggie Headliner Act
This recipe is a soffritto that would be suit a sugo that would serve c. 10 people (made with 2-3 x 700g bottles of passata). Simply halve this amount for a regular 2L saucepan size.
You don't need to weigh your veg unless you want to, it may be helpful first time around, until you 'get you eye in'. I know a large handful of each vegetable is a good measure for me, and should occupy most of the bottom of the sauté I use, once dropped in and spread thinly and evenly across the breadth.
Sorry to delve in to detail with the chopping technique, but it makes a whole word of difference to your speed and outcome. You could of course use an electric chopper appliance but it doesn't make cubes, it makes little chiselled pieces of varying size so your veg don't fry very reliably. I have done this many a time with no qualms, when horribly pressed for time.
Prep Time
10 minutes
Cook Time
5 minutes

Ingredients

  • 4 tbsp olive oil or 2-3 heaped spoons of coconut oil 'cuisine' (the odourless variety) or high-smoke point neutral oil of your choice.
  • 1-2 sticks of celery (70g approx or about 5 tbsp once chopped finely)
  • 1 medium carrot (c. 70g)
  • 1 small onion or large shallot (c.70g)
  • 3 large cloves garlic
  • additionally some people add herbs at the early stage or make preserve raw soffritto veg all prepped in jars with herbs, I will explain how to do this in a separate recipe.

Instructions

  1. You can start by pouring a thin stream of your oil or measuring out enough oil to cover the base of your pan well.
  2. No need to turn on the heat until your veg are all finely chopped (except the garlic)
  3. Take your celery and pare it down in to roughly 10cm lengths about 1 inch (2-3cm) wide (see photos in soffritto post) as this will make chopping it much faster and more systematic.
  4. With a sharp knife, slice through it lengthways, following the long fibres visible in the celery, slicing about every 3-4mm or so if possible. In places where the celery is thick, you may need to turn some of these slices over a quarter turn and slice them down their length again, in order to give them a square (rather than rectangular) cross-section.
  5. This is so that when you spin these long thin matchsticks round 90° to cut them crossways, they turn in to tiny cubes not rectangular prisms. This ensures they brown evenly rather than sweating on side and burning on another.
  6. Do the same thing with your carrot(s). Slice a sliver off its length so that it can sit without rocking.
  7. Then cut them into 3mm slices lengthways. These should now be long rectangular slices almost the same width as the diameter of the carrot (minus the part you pared away intitally) and about 3mm in cross-section.
  8. Flip these slices standing up on their side, over a quarter turn so that they lie flat and slice these flat fat slices in to 3mm matchsticks lengthways again. Turn these matchsticks round 90° and chop through them in to tiny fine orange cubes.
  9. For your onion, peel off any dry outer layers of skin, slice lengthways from hairy root to leathery top and then peel off the outer, fiddlier layers until you reach the first of the fresh, juicy unblemished onion layers.
  10. Remove the heart of the onion (see photo) to ensure the acrid, sulphurous quality of the allium is toned down. I do this by scoring a deep pyramid around the root and lifting out the flame-shaped bulb that attaches to it.
  11. Do the same to the other half.
  12. With the onion lying flat half down, pungent core removed, leathery top to your left (if right- handed) control the opposite outer edges of the onion with your fore-finger and thumb of your free hand. With your knife-wielding hand, slice horizontally from the tip of the onion to the base, the onion top and your hand combined, will ensure the onion stays together instead of fanning out in to a mess.
  13. Then as you did with the other veg and slice perpendicularly through the cuts you have made. The onion layers will break up along with your slices to give fine white onion cubes. Perfect!
  14. Turn on your heat and when the oil is warm throw in your finely chopped soffritto vegetables.
  15. Stir regularly to avoid sticking and uneven colour.
  16. While these are slowly going golden, peel and finely slice your garlic (don't chop as the greater surface-area will make it burn faster if you do)
  17. When the onion is turning from transparent to a light golden colour at the edges, slide the garlic in to the pan with the other veg, and stir.
  18. Do not let the garlic burn (ie. it must be lightly crispy and yellow not brown in colour) or else it will taste horribly bitter and ruin your dish.
  19. Proceed with your dish of choice!
© 2025 Recipes property of www.WoodsmokeandWildStrawberries.com

You can also, if you are the kind of person who in your more manic moments likes to batch cook and store for a rainy day, you can make an industrial amount and preserve it in jars…

All you do is up the quantities of the above veg in proportion, (you might want to skip the garlic as then you have the option of adding it without too much hassle when needed), salting it (1 part salt to 4 parts veg, in weight –  1:4).  In Italy they often advise the following:

1/2 kg rock salt

1kg carrot

1kg celery

1kg onion

2 tbsp fresh parsley / thyme (I don’t recommend basil as it doesn’t keep well at all so is best added fresh).

… Make sure these are, as ever, all finely chopped and then sprinkled with the salt and allowed to sit for 10 minutes in a large bowl.   The veg are then strained and patted dry and then mixed with olive oil so as to be thoroughly coated, and then spooned in to glass jars (sterilized if you prefer, but I never bother) and covered over with more oil.   Make sure you bang these jars firmly on a tea-towel on a work surface to allow any air-bubbles to escape, then top up again with oil, so that unlike an iceberg, no single point of the soffritto mix is surfacing above the oil. Close with a lid and store somewhere cool such as a cellar or fridge or shed for a month or more.  When my aunt does them they keep for months!

As you use the jars, but perhaps don’t finish them, simply top them up with more oil to create an air-seal and continue to store.  Voilà!  Next time you are making something on the hoof, no faffing with peeling and chopping, two heaped tablespoons and you’re done.  Just be sure not to add any more salt to your final dish as the preserving salt will be quite potent.

Filed Under: Gluten-Free, Pantry and Suppliers, Recipe Vault, The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy, Tips, Tricks and shortcuts, Veggie Headliner Act

Spaghetti allo Scoglio in bianco (Seafood Spaghetti – no tomato)

August 10, 2015 by natalie Leave a Comment

IMG_8612So in the spirit of nostalgia triggered by the roadtrip post, one of the most evocative tastes for me is seafood pasta, usually linguine with clams (I will do a specific post on this later) but also any long pasta with seafood.  This inimitable aroma is so wonderful that this would be, if pressed, my Last Supper.

It’s the Trinity of flavours I am fixated with, which for me represent quite utterly, Summer at the Italian seaside and ergo, childhood.

The trio of flavours are:  garlic, olive oil…..

IMG_7564 (1)

The basis for most beginnings in our “cucina”: garlic and extra virgin olive oil… all “soffritto” starts in this way…

…and fresh parsley… And if you are from the Abruzzo, or simply you put some store by a teensy taste-bud-induced adrenaline hit, then ramp this up an all-important notch with CHILLIES!  (in case you were going to protest, read this: they’re good for you)

Chilli unique to the Abruzzo with its characteristic curl and wrinkles

IMG_7521 (1)

This is the Abruzzo chilli, growing on the plant. It barely looks real, but this one I snapped on a plant at La Bilancia restaurant, Loreto Aprutino.

…

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Filed Under: Holidays and Travel, Mains, Recipes, Starters, The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy

Affogato al Caffé: aka The Sophisticated Dessert shortcut

July 9, 2015 by natalie Leave a Comment

IMG_6982

It is finally Summer.  Even here in London.

The temperature has swung like a like a gravity-defying pendulum from 22°C to 36° and back down again, these fluctuations punctuated with violent, electric, torrential, midnight storms.  At home we have all fallen victim to concatenations of sneezes and nose-blowing, burning eyes and dry, scratchy throats, all five of us, yet managing all the while to fill a decomissioned sand pit in the garden with water, the kids wading in to the icy shallows with levels of pleasure more suited to the most luxurious infinity pool….

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Filed Under: Gluten-Free, Parenting and Family, Puds, Recipes, The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy, Topics from the School Run

The toughest eaters to crack are the Italians

July 1, 2015 by natalie Leave a Comment

Most Italians think nothing of cooking every meal from scratch and therefore I would get NO applause, back home.  They think some of my Londonized Italo-fusion food is weird and wacky, but I am prepared to take that on the chin if it means we benefit nutritionally.  I like to change the proportions of vegetables and herbs in classic dishes so I can shoehorn in all sorts of greens, then I blend them so I can hide them in pasta sauces so the kids will eat them with less resistance… More on all of those strategies later.  What would shock them more than irreverence with Italian recipes, however, would be to not cook at all.  It has taken years of my mother’s fabulous cooking and my brother and me following in her footsteps for them to accept that despite being mudbloods we have proven our worth are now in their very snobby and demanding Italian club.  My other side of the family, the Poles lived in the Middle East for more than two decades and I remember my aunt explaining that they were appreciated and respected for their religion as religiosity was the key, not so much the religion one followed.  It feels the same way with Italians.  That you have standards when it comes to food is the key, not so much that the food has to be only Italian.  These standards are obviously taste but also hygiene, integrity, aesthetics and health.

Italians are in fact, the biggest snobs when it comes to any nationality other than themselves trying to turn out Italian food, even if that individual is an accomplished Italianophile.  Wanting to be like the Italians is not enough.  It reminds me of my days working in a huge cosmetics company, when we used to blind test Chanel No.5 vs new fragrances we were developing.  When tested blind (in an unmarked lab bottle), Chanel never did well at all, but when presented with the “marketing mix” of ad, concept, bottle, brand, then it smelled better to the testee and always whipped every other fragrance’s ass.  This is because so much of the trust, expectation and enjoyment comes from the pre-conditioning of the smeller or in the kitchen, the taster.  With the exception of people like Massimo Bottura, most Italians are ultra-conservative when it comes to food in general, critical even of each other.   There is endless debate, for example, on what constitutes the best way to make sugo (pasta sauce – more on that later) as there are as many recipes and techniques as there are households and each one attests they are the right.

The more open-minded of them enjoy other cuisines but few and far between are those who feel open enough to credit a foreigner who attempts to cook Italian food.   The prejudice is all-powerful.  It took much longer for burgers, sushi, Chinese food, and other imports to crack the Italian market, and I am not surprised.  It is almost a latent xenophobia, the suspicion that foreign food elicits.  Thankfully and also in some ways tragically there is change afoot.

Italians are very demanding in general.  This may surprise you as from the outside they may seem shambolic.   With their knackered political system and last-minute organization of major events, you might assume they are falling apart at the seams but I can tell you that their houses are spotless, their hygiene is like no other and their kitchens are for the most part organized and shipshape.  They also don’t tend to like gimmicks and in my experience, turn their noses up at restaurants if there is even a hint of corners being cut.  I remember one of my best friends (who happens to manage her large family-run restaurant set up by her father) pursing her lips and explaining that the pasta she was chewing (we were out for dinner) had had “la cottura frenata” (direct translation = the “breaks applied” to the cooking it was undergoing).  The result was that since her pasta had been par-cooked to almost al dente, then dunked in cold water and then reheated with the sauce just before serving, it had a chewier, less yielding texture which smacked of fast food and bulk-cooking.   Here are a few other foibles / sins in the eyes of Italians that I know:

  1. Italians look down on those who twiddle their spaghetti and other “long” pasta with the help of a spoon, which amusingly, foreigners think make them appear sophisticated.
  2. They frown upon mixing disparate flavours in the same plate, so always use clean crockery for different dishes
  3. They prefer their mineral water from glass bottles
  4. For digestive reasons don’t drink milk in any form beyond 11 am (hence all the eye-rolling at foreigners ordering cappuccini post lunch).
  5. Will almost exclusively eat fish in specialized fish restaurants or in their own homes
  6. They will almost always peel their fruit (peaches, apples, pears, you name it)

Digestion, manners, cleanliness, structure and punctuality around meals are equally all-important.   The culture around food is not dissimilar from the huge crumbling millenia-old relics you see casually dotted about the land: both part of the scenery, taken for granted and immutable.

I aim to crack some of those myths by reporting back from my nearest and dearest, and present you with the “capsule collection” of failsafe family dishes cooked by my beloveds.  What do we eat?  How do we get our kids to eat? IMG_2899What are the things we insist upon at the table so that our kids grow up with sophisticated and discerning palates?  Un-filtered home-cooked secrets are soon to be revealed…. Watch this space.

Filed Under: Food & Health Trends, Parenting and Family, The Abruzzo... the most underrated region of Italy, Topics from the School Run, Uncategorized

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Musings and culinary endeavours of a polyglot mother of three, shining a spotlight on family life and food from the Abruzzo region and beyond.
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