Culinary workshops for 2024 at Enoteca Marilu! Spring workshop, April 8-12 (now sold out)  Early summer workshop, June 3-7 (1 spot left)  Summer workshop, July 1-5  Autumn harvest workshop, September 23-27 Autumn workshop, October 14-18 White truffle workshop, November 12-16 About the workshops These are 5 day food and wine workshops based in our cooking school and wine bar in our lovely hilltop town, San Miniato. We will cook together, eat and drink wine, hunt for truffles, visit and get to know many local producers, and more. As each workshop is highly seasonal and super loca ..read more

At Easter 2023, my husband Marco and I finally opened our own cooking school and enoteca, Enoteca Marilu. It’s a small, cosy space in an ex-stable in a hidden laneway of our town, San Miniato. We waited for 19 months of restoration and paperwork (and even a crowdfunding campaign in the middle of it all to help give us a little extra push) before we could open the space and welcome our first guests and our first year was a great success, with almost completely booked out classes! We had such a busy year I didn’t have time to write much about them so I thought I’d introduce it now to give you a ..read more

I have been lucky to visit many beautiful places in my home region of Tuscany but Castello di Fighine is so special, it is hard to describe in words what kind of place it is. Picture a hilltop in the middle of the rustic southern countryside and an empty, 11th century hamlet, brought back to life after sitting for centuries in ruins that had been taken over by nature. Joy Ulfane, the South African owner, shows me her old photo album of the castle’s history, and the first photographs are of the vines, trees and even cows that were its residents when she and her husband Max arrived in 1995. Max ..read more

My Japanese grandparents lived in an area with many Buddhist temples (where meat is not eaten) so they were spoiled for choice when it came to fresh tofu shops on their street. I remember those old fashioned shops – spartan, concrete floors and stainless steel vats of water holding the morning’s just-made tofu, and the a smiling old woman selling them, but I especially remember my grandmother’s breakfasts of hiyayyako or chilled, fresh tofu, simply dressed with soy sauce and grated ginger. I’ve been seeking out that flavour and texture again for a long time and decided the only way I would eve ..read more

VENICE — The Lagoon Workshop, 2-7 May 2024 I’ve only been back from the Venetian Lagoon Workshop for a month (read more about the trip here if you missed it) but every time I spend time on the lagoon it leaves a mark on me and this time I’ve decided to try to keep that magic by staying even longer on the lagoon and adding more of the lesser known islands onto the itinerary. We will be well off the beaten track in this workshop that keeps growing — for 2024 it has become a 5 day Venetian lagoon extravaganza. We will stay in colourful Burano, dine in some of the most wonderful restaur ..read more

“To have seen Italy without having seen Sicily is not to have seen Italy at all, for Sicily is the clue to everything. The purity of the contours, the softness of everything, the exchange of soft colours, the harmonious unity of the sky with the sea and the sea to the land… who saw them once, shall possess them for a lifetime.” I couldn’t help think of this Goethe quote while I was soaking in the sunset views from the corner of Sicily where Adler have their latest resort, Adler Spa Resort Sicilia, perched on a nature reserve in Agrigento province. I’d never before been to this part of Sicily ..read more

I have had my eye out on interesting food books for kids and came across this Magic Ramen book from a post by Amy Palanjian from Yummy Toddler Food and it immediately caught my eye because, well, ramen! The girls (4 and 10) both immediately loved the story, honestly so did I — the inspiring true story of Momofuku Ando, who invented instant ramen after witnessing the devastation of hunger and food shortages of World War Two. “Peace will come to the world when everyone has enough to eat,” he said. It’s a wonderful story for a couple of reasons — it is firstly a story of hard work, dedication an ..read more

There is a bar I pop into now and then that always has a pastry in the counter that I almost never say no to — they call it simply a fig and walnut pastry (treccia con fichi e noci) and while it’s different to this (that one has something like a frangipane type base and a deep caramel flavour), it definitely inspired the braided shape of this pastry. The thing is that making pastries at home means you get to eat them while they are fresh out of the oven, shatteringly crisp, the filling oozing and warm. This filling is essentially the filling of a Sicilian cookie that I love called buccellati ..read more

I have been coming to Japan my whole life, ever since I was a baby, my Japanese mother would bring me home with her to visit my grandparents. In 1985, when I was about to turn five, the government made a law that children of Japanese women could now claim citizenship and I got my first Japanese passport, a complicated privilege since children can only hold this dual citizenship until they turn 20 years of age. We continued visiting, every single year until both my grandparents passed away within a year of each other, 17 years ago. One summer I even flew over alone, I think I was 12, and spent ..read more

I will just say first of all, traveling in Italy in summer is not for the faint of heart (you might want to read this post on how to survive an Italian heatwave). This was our first full-blown summer in Puglia experience. Most of my trips have been either in autumn or winter and I personally love visiting in these months (this New York Times article agrees). Our very first visit was in early June, 11 years ago. It was a pleasantly warm trip with beautiful early summer produce, but not a sweltering one (hello climate change). This June it was almost too hot to even be at the beach but the wate ..read more