La Buona Tavola

Italian chef, Massimo Bottura and American actor, Rober De Niro, launched a joint venture that will to fight against food waste to the United States. Bottura launched the Ambrosiano Refectory project at the Milan Expo World Fair in 2015 with …

It’s no surprise that vegetables are the bedrock of the Italian diet. For one thing, the climate is temperate and the growing seasons are blessedly long. For another, there is a relationship between the Italians and their vegetables that can …

The Romagnoli people have been eating piada or piadina flat bread for centuries. Indeed, it’s thought that the recipe might even date back to the Etruscans, ancient precursors to the Romans. Increasingly others are catching on to the piadina’s signature …

Every now and then someone sends me a message that’s a real charmer. Here’s one I received about a recipe that appears in my first cookbook, Pasta Classica: The Art of Italian Pasta Cooking. Because the writer and so many other …

While we were in Marche, Italy this spring, we had stuffed calamari prepared by my cousin’s wife, Maria, several times. These beautiful squid from the Adriatic were stuffed with a simple mixture of their own tentacles (chopped), breadcrumbs, parsley, salt-and-pepper …

My idea of supper in Venice is eating at a finely set table on-board a flat-bottom boat enjoying the calm, cool quiet of the lagoon after a day of sailing its secret estuaries and hopping its tiny islands with their …

As the heat of summer gives way to the cooler chill of fall, my garden harvest begins to slow.  The last of the tomatoes remain on the vine waiting for a last gasp of heat. The little eggplants struggle for …

As summer takes its final bow, I find that I am left with armloads of parsley and basil still overtaking the garden beds.  Not wanting these beautiful herbs to go out with the cold, it is time to head into …

It is not easy to imagine that streets paved by the Romans that we still walk today could tremble savagely beneath our feet like they did in Amatrice on August 24, a town famous around the world for a dish …

“I was still young when my life changed…. drastically. Shortly after midnight one Saturday… the smell of smoke awakened me. I ran to my mother’s bed…. The next thing I saw was a wall of fire shooting up the staircase. …