My friend Tamara lives in Lazio, north of Rome, below the Monti di Cimini range which is full of hazelnut trees.  We chat most weeks – she to improve her English, and me to improve my Italian (she is better and more confident than me).  Perhaps, inevitably, we often talk about food – and she shares some of the very very localised versions of recipes specific to the area, m and even to her village. Tozzetti is the name used in Lazio and Umbria for the twice baked (biscotto) biscuits that elsewhere in Italy are known as Cantucci (although Artusi calls them biscotti croccanti, or crunc ..read more

Most of the Sicilian food that I cook and write about here is essentially Palermitan, or is ubiquitous to the whole of Sicily, and so is close to generic as you get on that often fractious island.  I hardly know the east of Sicily – just from overnight stays as a tourist, sights out of hire car windows, a port to catch a ferry from.  And Messina, at the furthest east, almost touching mainland Italy, I have never visited at all. My only connection with that part of Sicily is via my friend Vincenzo, who somehow has a better English accent than most British people I know, and who allow ..read more

Scorzette di arancia I first made these four or five years ago now – I can’t exactly remember when. What I do remember is that I was trying to do it blind, my recipe had no image of the end product, and being all fingers and thumbs and an impatient bull in a china shop, my scorzette (literally, ‘peel’, plural) ended up torn and ragged. They resembled more the peelings of a Christmas satsuma than a refined treat of sweetness and bitterness. I love them, they are such an intense hit of orange and chocolate – they’re a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, distilled and perfected. Unlike the process for cand ..read more

BONET I’m going to need a bigger plate So many food likes and dislikes can be traced back to childhood encounters, experiences that fix an immoveable opinion. The lottery of school dinners in the 70s was the arena where I learnt to be faddy about what I ate, approaching meal times with suspicion and trepidation. I can remember a particularly vivid nightmare, where I was served up a stew of slugs – even today I can viscerally recall the muscular sliminess that I tasted, jolting me awake. Puddings were where the high stakes games were played – there was so much that could go right, or go awry.&n ..read more

I have been meaning to make vincotto for a while – but the essential ingredient (grape must – the juice of freshly crushed grapes, destined to be fermented into wine) is hard to come by in Birmingham. And I wasn’t going to buy all the grapes in the market, to make my own grape juice. Occasionally I do draw the line somewhere when it comes to experimental cooking. With a pedigree going back to the Romans, this is essence of grapes, caramelised, brown rather than purple and concentrated down to about a fifth of its original volume. Anyway – a heads up from italianhomecooking that Waitrose now s ..read more

Last week it was in the 30s.  Bournemouth beach was the scene of a national scandal.  We were both in lockdown and not in lockdown.  The frisson of something about to snap hung in the clammy air.  Deluges and thunderstorms were promised, but never showed up.  So I came to the rescue and wheeled out my sure fire, rain making, cloud busting box of tricks and made a granita. Granita, which I wrote a different piece on last year, is painfully, indelibly linked to the sun and heat of Sicily in July.  The month when only fools visit.  It is served, melting before ..read more

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This came from a birthday surprise and a challenge. Last month, my locked down, low key birthday rolled around.  Expectations were necessarily watered down.  The plan had been to go to see the new James Bond at The Electric, and drink cocktails delivered to out seats.  Instead I zoomed and made a cassatina.  You can call this taking pleasure from the small things, or clutching at straws.  Take your pick. Then, like a foundling on the doorstep, a bag of bread flour turned up, a gift from my oldest friend.  Wrapped in a translucent, blue plastic bag, it was the bes ..read more

  You may have read my account of a weekend in Rome last October. The weather was apocalyptic, I had a full on head cold, but the day of artichokes at Latteria Studio learning so much from Carla Tomesi and Rachel Roddy, was an antidote to everything.  A feast of knowledge and a bloody good lunch to boot.  I have written at length and often about my unseemly love of artichokes, so I shall spare you a repeat here. In some ways, it was a kind of a torture – spending that weekend surrounded by most loved vegetable flowers; everywhere I looked, they were on offer. And knowing that w ..read more

I could write about strange days, and new norms.  But I don’t want to.  All the conflictions of guilt, gratitude, anxiety for the future, loneliness, community;  there is nothing special or unique about my lockdown life.  Nothing that deserves to be heard before other, more urgent stories.  And there is an edginess, a tetchiness about, with short fuses and misunderstandings abounding.  Food seems frivolous to some, writing about it almost provocative.  So, as ever, I am in two minds. But within this, there is some continuity.  This is a food blog, it ha ..read more