Yes, I'm italian, and I learnt that sometime this seems to be enough to make you a good cook.
But no, before this year I had never spent lot of time in the kitchen, or at least not so much time.
Only when I moved to Milan, four years ago, I started enjoying the deliciousness of food, restaurant after restaurant, sometime traditional, sometime more innovative, finding out how much I love trying different dishes, tempted of italian's cuisine ingredients and flavors.
But being a student I didn't have time, desire and above all a furnished kitchen, to try on my own cooking this pasta or that fish I had try the last dinner or lunch out.
The only exception was with dessert.
Being really, really, greedy for cakes, cookies, ice-creams and everything that leave your mouth sweet and you mind extraordinary happy, now and then I started baking.
More to have fun than anything else, I also did follow some kitchen course, learning some new recipes and finding out how big is the satisfaction tasting an apple cake or a macaron you just made, and thinking that is simply delicious.
But when I moved to Sydney, early this year, for my "life experience" post-graduation, I accepted to cook for an entire family, something I had never ever done before.
The first night I asked what they wanted me to cook the answer has been "It's up to you", and it has never changed, dinner after dinner.
So I just thought about the food I like the best to eat, here in Italy, knowing was probably different from australian meals, but at the same time, knowing how much italian food is appreciate all around the world.
Being sincere, most of the recipes I tried have been kind of experiment, but the family is still alive, and I think they've been happy most of the times.
I did try to pop out a different meal every night, maybe just changing one or two ingredients, learning once you know the cuisine basis, cooking can be easy and fun, and also a success.
Now that I'm back in my lovely Bologna I'm going to keep cooking, keen to experiment new dishes, but always respecting italian tradition.
Indeed most of the people I met abroad are totally in love with our food, even if sometime they think they are eating italian, but they are not.
So, here is my purpose: to share my country's authentic recipes, the traditional ones, made with a pure passion for simple things.
I'm not going to tell you the spaghetti bolognese recipe (do not exist!), and one of the pizza's topping is not going to be pineapple, but I'm pretty sure you will enjoy cooking and tasting the result.
