This is a recipe that combines three favourite things. Pizza. Speck (or prosciutto if you can’t find it). And mascarpone. But not just any mascarpone — homemade mascarpone. Because homemade is so incredibly easy, you’ll wonder why you never tried it before, and because it’s so fresh, you’ll find it hard to go back to store-bought. Although often thought of as a sort of... Read More

It’s been a busy new year — moving to a new city, trying to entertain and raise a fast-growing, handful of a toddler and keeping up with my blog and my Regional Italian Food column for Food52. And now I have a new gig as a recipe writer for the weekly Food & Wine supplement of The Canberra Times! For locals, it comes out on a Wednesday with the paper. For everyone else, the recipes... Read More

This is a 123 year old recipe for apricot jam. It comes from my battered and worn pocket sized edition of Pellegrino Artusi‘s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. I only bought it a few years ago, it’s just battered because I use it all the time. I carry it around in my bag and read it’s old fashioned Italian like a novel. It’s often held open on one page with... Read More

Soup is the measure of a good cook. It may be a simple and humble vegetable soup or an extravagent bisque, but either way, it needs to be made with the knowledge of how to get the flavour out of your ingredients. Layers are key. As is texture. And a good stock goes a long way. It’s a dish that takes not necessarily time but a certain amount of skill and instinct in the kitchen. We decided that... Read More

Summer wouldn’t be summer without that perfect salad, a must when it’s simply too hot to cook and all you crave are the season’s fresh offerings. Things like this caprese salad, made with heirloom tomatoes straight out of the garden and torn hunks of buffalo mozzarella. In Tuscany, it’s always and forever, panzanella, a rustic bread salad born as a way of using up day old bread... Read More