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Rachel Priestley, a cook and wine and food consultant, has opened Italian restaurants and wine bars in Italy and in Vienna. Passionate about Italian food, she has spent 10 years living and working in Italy, including six years in Tuscany. She exports a line of gourmet artisan-produced Italian products and fine Italian wines into New Zealand, where she produces a range of products. She divides her time between Tuscany and New Zealand. You can contact her at info@prodigal-daughter.com and follow her on twitter: @ProdigaDaughter.
Autumn brings vibrant colors and mellow flavors to Italy’s markets and, in Tuscany especially, soups to the table. At the markets of Tuscany, the region that boasts more soups than pasta in its repertoire of first courses, cabbages, carrots, onions and silver-beet are ready to be mixed
Although spring has sprung and flowers are blossoming on all the herbs in my garden, the nights are still cool enough for comfort food, though not the heavy ragus of winter. As I always have some home-prepared guanciale affumicato (smoked pigs’ cheeks) in my fridge, now that the
Italian cuisine has an abundance of primi piatti, first courses, which are usually a starch, but in Tuscany, unlike elsewhere in Italy, more of the primi piatti are based on legumes and bread—such as zuppa di ceci, ribollita and pappa al pomodoro—and fewer on pasta. Yet
Well known for being tricky, rife with double meanings and open to various interpretations, the Italian language never ceases to surprise and delight me. What do Michelangelo’s 20 seated nudes, ...
The longest day has past, the heat is here to stay, and so is the summer fruit. The star of summer fruit in Tuscany is by far the watermelon. Citrullus vulgaris: luscious rich red in colour, juicy and glossy, sweet and syrupy, sticky on the fingers and face if you
Every week I buy some pigs’ heads to cure the cheeks to make guanciale, and I have been sad at discarding so many good bits of the head. Then I started thinking: most of my Italian friends get a pig every year, and the day becomes a family affair,
In the past, people's diets followed the seasons: eating fresh when nature offered an abundance of harvest and preserving as much as possible for use in the colder months, when plant activity slowed to a minimum. Autumn was a time for harvest and for making conserves to last for
When it comes to food and drink, the world has a lot to thank Tuscany for. Tuscan cuisine dates back to the time of the Etruscans, the ancient civilization once living in areas of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio a number of centuries before the Romans arrived. Etruscan frescoes show
Natale con i tuoi, Pasqua con chi vuoi (Christmas with your family, Easter with whoever you like) is how the great Italian saying goes, but when you are like me and have spent more than half your life in places other than home, the word ‘family’ gains a
The humble potato is often referred to as a tartufo bianco, a white truffle, both because of its looks and for its vital role in keeping people alive during World War II. But the potato-filled pillows of pasta that are tortelli di patate mugellani are close to divine. &
I love this time of the year: the autumnal colours intensify as the evenings begin their shorter fall into dusk. The shades become stronger just before nightfall, and we see more of that amazingly intense hue of the sky, il cielo azzurro, that powerful blue the heavens offer around sunset,
Colonnata, a very small town high up in the white marble mountains of Carrara, near the Tuscan coast, is known for its lardo, the cured back fat of the pig, a high-energy food developed out of necessity: to keep workers sustained during their several-day shifts working in the
As spring turns into summer, walking along the Arno—fresh in the morning, with beautiful sunsets in the evening—gets me thinking of the sea, for it is not far away, and the late spring breeze wafts its aroma inland. I love eating seafood at this time of
One of my favourite things to do at this time of the year is to go to the Sant’Ambrogio market to see what the beginning of spring mushroom season has to offer. My first experience of mushrooming in Italy occurred when I lived in the mountain town of
My memories of Easter as a little girl growing up in New Zealand involve camping, trout fishing and Easter egg hunts. To me, Easter meant a short break from school and an active home life, usually a long weekend road trip with family, and hot cross buns, chocolate and marshmallow
When I moved from New Zealand to Italy in 2001, I missed many things from home. Not only was the spoken language different, but the difference was deeper than vocabulary: the sentence structure of Italian was so unlike that of English; Italian has both formal and informal address, expressed in
I took a foreign friend to a local trattoria on my side of the river, diladdarno, to sample a favourite local dish, fritto misto alla fiorentina. When he heard my order, he wondered why on earth anyone would want to deep-fry a beautiful fiorentina steak and, even more perplexing,
In English, we categorise game into two distinct categories: furred game and feathered game. In Italian, the feathered game is called volatili (fliers). Christmas Day calls for a flier. Or maybe two! My morning walks take me past the restaurant Fuori Porta and into the back of the areas
A wonderfully memorable food-filled weekend with friends in the countryside near Siena has confirmed for me, once again, that Italians are the most food-passionate people in the world. Some of the guests brought their own wines and olive oils for me to taste, and we talked about the
With autumn truly upon us and the colours in the fields and markets changing, so are the flavours of our table. Now that the wine harvest is done and while the olive groves await harvest, it's time to store some of our autumn harvest-as well as eat some. &
The tomato sauce passata is made for the year, a variety of tomatoes procured already sun-dried from Puglia, Calabria and Sicily, some in oil with garlic and herbs, others halved and dried ready to be reconstituted in boiling water, and chillies in the pantry that are sun-dried then
While some people eat four-horned snails to help keep arguments at bay and to avoid betrayals by loved ones for the forthcoming year, others send barefoot virgins up walnut ...
Learning Italian can be tricky enough, especially when there are obstacles along the way, such as the Tuscan dialect, the Florentine accent and the frequent use of words with double meanings. Thus, speaking fluent Italian doesn't mean you are necessarily going to get what you think you want when
Once spring gives way to summer, it will be time to go to the Tuscan coast. But in the meantime, I find myself longing to eat more seafood and fresh green vegetables. Seppie in zimino, cuttlefish with leafy greens, is the perfect dish. When I make seppie in
