The week before harvest, the whole valley disappears into the work. So I set one long table under the oaks and fed eight people the last of the summer: grilled peaches with burrata, a corn and zucchini risotto made with everyone leaning on the counter, and figs by candlelight. A late summer dinner party built to be easy on the cook.
I have spent a dozen summers cooking in Lake Como with my family, and it always begins the same way: a morning at the market, a basket of zucchini with their flowers still attached, and an afternoon that turns into a meal no one wants to leave. Here are the two dishes I make every time, and the stories that come with them.
In Tuscany, stale bread is never a loss, it is an invitation. Panzanella di mare turns a hard summer loaf into a bread salad of the sea, with seared squid, shrimp, sweet mussels, and the one briny step most cooks throw away.
For six years I cooked food I never saw anyone eat. This is the story of why I left fine dining in Milan, returned to Tuscany, and built a slower life around the table.
Restaurant food does not taste expensive because of secret ingredients. It tastes that way because of attention. Here are five pantry habits a former chef kept, no gadgets required.
People assume eating well must be expensive. So I tracked every euro for a week. Here is what a real Tuscan food week actually costs, and where the money truly goes.
The best meal I ate in Tuscany had four ingredients, and one of them was water. What a seventy-eight-year-old Italian grandmother taught me about cooking beautifully out of almost nothing, and why a kitchen with fifteen ingredients beats one with a hundred.