I was really tempted to categorize this post under ‘main course’ or entree. I love cheese so much, I could eat it for a meal. And being in Italy is my perfect excuse to focus on—and consume more—cheese. Really good cheese, with rich history and familial care and world-class quality.
I am learning that in [...]

Spending a year in Italy added so many dimensions to my culinary experience and food knowledge—I hardly know where to begin. I like the idea of revisiting individual ingredients, now that I am back-in-the-states and reflecting on my experience.
When I was in Italy it was about tasting the flavors of each season, traveling around Tuscany, [...]

Italy is big into protecting their food-and-wine making techniques of the past. They know a good thing when they see it. Fresh buffalo mozzarella is made exclusively from water buffalo milk; cow’s milk mozzarella is also called fior di latte.
Buffalo Mozzarella—specifically Mozzarella di Bufala Campana—is the most notorious of mozzarella cheeses in all of Italy—and [...]

Bites, nibbles, crumbly blobs of Parmesan and breadcrumbs on small pieces of eggplant. This experiment made at least a dozen rounds in my kitchen before reaching this blog. It sounded good, but unless I took out duck-tape, the ‘breading’ had no inclination whatsoever to actually stick to the eggplant. I tried egg whites and whole [...]

Every so often, the boys and I trek to the Paperback Exchange—an English bookstore—near the Duomo in Florence. While their books are a bit overpriced, it remains a gem as it is full of paperbacks, cookbooks, school books and more. Plus you can turn in already-read books for pennies on the dollar (we are big [...]

Love when little markets are set up in various piazzas around Florence. Toward the end of our stay (10 months), I started to catch on to the fact that seasonal markets would hit a few piazzas on a regular basis. So on weekends, I started to make it a point to routinely walk through Piazza [...]