The Italian countryside will soon be ablaze with warm colors, tables will be laden with comforting foods, and food festivals are gearing up to showcase Nature's best.
When it's time for the harvest of plentiful crops and brown leaves fall, chilly showers replenish the soil and procure Italians with a bounty of porcini mushrooms, truffles, pomegranate pouches of rubies, plump persimmons, bouncy new wine and cloudy green, freshly pressed olive oil.
Salads leave room to soups and flans, casseroles, fragrant loaves and rich cakes. Pumpkin, mushrooms, truffles, creamy Alpine cheeses, chestnuts and brassica greens will feature prominently in regional recipes. Risotto season is due to resume any minute!
Continue Reading ➔ Autumn in Italy, as appeared on Gambero Rosso International
Cilento is a subregion of Campania located between Paestum and Sapri, on the border with Basilicata. A huge territory, where nature is truly wild, where the population is less than a hundred thousand, and in which rural traditions and a slow, very slow pace of everyday life are carefully preserved. Nature and sea-loving Italy travellers who don’t mind the total absence of designer fashion and yacht slips, will find themselves in a part of southern Italy that has retained its authentic charm through a low profile. Don’t get us wrong, Cilento is packed with historical and archeological destinations, wildly untamed nature and gorgeous beaches. Here are our suggestions for a magical 3-day weekend in the heart of Cilento.
One out of three Italian children under 12 years is overweight. While these rates are far behind those of the United States and the UK, Italy is working hard to reverse the trend.
Back to school season in Italy also means celebrating the "Mediterranean diet" in the school cafeteria.
Here's how Italians have joined the global fight against the rise of child obesity.
The occasional posts I have been publishing are for the most part links to other sites to which I have contributed my writing.
It's not that I've been lazy, though.
Designing, developing and leading food, wine and cooking adventures in Rome, Florence, Sicily Naples & Amalfi for Casa Mia Italy Food & Wine, the company I co-founded, has definitely kept me busy.
And then there was cheese.
Another reason for not being consistent with blogging is that I've been all over Italy filming a cheese show called ABCheese. I wrote a few posts on this topic and an article for my column on The American. The show airs on Italian cable TV, with plans to hopefully sell internationally soon. I will keep you posted when that happens.
In the meantime, if you're interested in learning what the show is about, and watch me make silly faces when I taste amazing Italian cheese, you can click on the link to enjoy episode 1 of season 1 (uploaded in Italian with no subtitles).
For the past 6 years I've been leading gourmands and Italy-lovers on food-themed city walks, and six months ago I launched a independent travel company with two other partners. Many of the adventures I lead revolve around cheese.
Over the course of the almost 7 years of blogging and food-writing, I have discovered that many of my readers and followers share my same cheese fetish. This means what I write about resonates, and that's a good thing. Did you know that casein, the main protein present in milk and in cheese, is addictive? That explains a lot!
Other good cheese-related news came early this spring when the pitch of a TV show I co-authored received a green light. And when I say co-author the show I mean that I also star in it. Guess what the topic of said show is? You guessed it.
The show has been taping for the past four months all around Italy. Episode 1 premiered on November 12 on Italy's prime food network Gambero Rosso. It airs every Thursday at 9:30 p.m. (competing against big TV shows like X-Factor) on SKY, the Italian digital satellite broadcasting service. We still don't have definite numbers for the ratings, but people have begun recognizing me in the street. I say that's a pretty good sign the show's being watched.
The show is called ABCheese (in Italian this wordplay works better because we start the alphabet 'ah bee chi'). Not much fiction (other than the fancy sponsor car I drive) – as I play myself: a food writer who's in love with cheese, and is dedicated to traveling around Italy in search of the country's best, most famous, but also more obscure, lesser known and ultimately most delicious cheeses, on the basis that "I have to try them all".
When I first started writing and teaching about food, the idea of a book immediately took shape, but nobody knew Aglio, Olio e Peperoncino, back then I had very little visibility and investors were justly skeptical. I remember how one big cookbook publishing company, turning down the manuscript, told my literary agent back then, "Unfortunately she is still a 'nobody', she should get a food show gig before we consider her."
Well, it only took a few years of hard work, hundreds of articles published, thousands of Likes and accolades, awards and the firm will to succeed... and here I am. Thank you! I owe it all to you, my loyal readers, who have always supported my writing and put up with my inconsistent updates and my cheesy slant.
The majority of my readers is overseas, where SKY Italia satellite TV does not broadcast. While waiting for new episodes to be streamed online and become accessible to a wider public, here's an episode a fan uploaded. There are no subtitles and it's all in Italian, but see this as an opportunity for linguistic practice. And to see me eat lots of cheese.
