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Florentine the cookbook

My first baby, Florentine: The True Cuisine of Florence, which I started writing in 2014, was published in 2016. And this month it has been launched in Australia and the UK (the US will have to wait a few more months until 9 February 2021) with a brand new look! It has a slightly smaller format to the original, still hardback only, and a moodier, darker, beautiful marbled cover.
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When I was writing the manuscript for Florentine, I enlisted the help of an army of recipe testers — about 80 people from all over the world — to test every recipe thoroughly. Only one came back to me consistently with problems. From Minnesota to Melbourne, three testers wrote to me that their very first attempt at making Tuscan gnudi (ricotta and spinach balls that, rather than be encased in pasta like for ravioli, are simply dusted in flour) resulted in a pot of simmering water with “dissolved” gnudi. 
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Lady fingers, also known as savoiardi in Italian, are widely used in dessert making, namely, for soaking up rum-splashed coffee and layering into a glass dish with that creamy, rich, sweetened and egg-fortified mascarpone for tiramisu. There are other biscuits you can use but I consider savoiardi indispensable for tiramisu. My Tuscan mother in law prefers to use Pavesini, which are thin, finger-shaped children’s cookies, but being so thin, they get soggy very quickly and they just don’t have the wonderful soft and springy texture of perfectly re-hydrated savoiardi.
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It’s officially out! We launched Florentine last week and the cookbook has started arriving on shelves. It’s finally out there. Now that it is, and this huge project, which began two years ago, is out there for everyone to see, I feel the urge to talk about the wonderful people who I worked with to make it what it is, because it is very much a collaborative project — from the publishing team, to the designer who created the beautiful marbling on the book’s cover, to the recipe testers who responded to my blog call out, to my friends and family who I forced to eat Florentine food for months on end, to my husband Marco’s advice and support, to my sister Hana who flew with me to Florence to take care of my then nearly-two-year-old while I took photographs for the cookbook, I had help.
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Two years ago I received an email from a publisher asking if I would like to make a cookbook. It was a wild, far fetched dream of mine come true. And finally, it’s here – an ode to the city where I met my soul mate, started my blog and feel most at home. To celebrate the release of the book, I have a series of events lined up in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.
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