The passion that surrounds food in Italy is infectious! During twenty years of living in Veneto and travelling the country, I found that the joy in good food here, where an immense amount of love goes onto the table, can be encapsulated in two simple concepts, eating 'seasonal' and celebrating 'regional'.
In 2017, our family moved to the Midlands when the beautiful cathedral city of Lichfield stole our hearts. Due to the outbreak of Covid and a wave of fresh perspectives on life, work and priorities, I opened Mangia Mangia, a small business cooking my mother-in-law’s lasagne recipe from home. We named it after a phrase heard in Nonna Lili’s kitchen: ‘Eat up, Eat up’.
Through the Mangia Mangia website, our customers would excitedly order lasagne, risotto, tiramisù and focaccia from an ever-changing seasonal menu, to be delivered to their homes. Over the years, I built our business to include a market stall, Italian Extravaganza evenings and a pop-up summer spritz bar, ‘Aperitivo Time’. As an advocate for supporting 'small and local', I work hard to promote and market the Mangia Mangia ethos which now includes my debut cookbook ‘Appetito - The Life, Soul and Tastes of Italian Home Cooking (Meze Publishing).
This year has already taken a different path, having accepted invitations to host cooking demos and talks in Italian and UK book shops, taking on masterclasses at the Yorkshire Dales Food Festival and being interviewed for ‘A Writer in Italy’ podcast. I have adapted my business to spend more time in Italy, focusing on events and experiences in line with customer purchasing trends and plan to be back on Lichfield Market Square this spring, having just begun a cookery class!
In 2021, I founded a blog on Italian food, travel and culture called ‘The Italian Way’. This began, and remains, purely for the joy of writing, photography and exploring. My aim is to share the true nature of Italian lifestyle and provide my readers with tips on getting off the beaten track, getting stuck into the spirit of Italian cooking, discovering new foods, new territories and exploring the connections between the two. Throughout my posts runs a thread of honouring ‘regional’ with deep dives into the produce of specific areas, cities and even small villages. Understanding Italian cuisine means understanding the unwavering pride of individual homelands where local ingredients are prized and protected.
Through the light-hearted, conversational tone of my book, I encourage readers to use what they have available - foraging wild garlic for risotto, shopping at farmers’ markets for what’s fresh and choosing ‘Locally Grown’ at the supermarket. The recipes in ‘Appetito’ are respected as ‘local’ dishes you’ll find all over Italy, some classic and some quirky. Within these pages, I write to share a well-established, well-loved cuisine that comes to your kitchens in an informative, comprehensible and hopefully relatable publication, which many have complimented as ‘much more than a cookbook’.
I feel strongly that if we celebrate what grows around us and cherish our surroundings, we can live and eat to the tune of the seasons and nourish ourselves with what's ripe and fresh. We'd excitedly anticipate every month's bounty and delight in our food, appreciating the passion farmers and producers put into their lands, adding value to our communities and to our sustenance. Through a deeper treasuring of good food and a well-informed awareness of its provenance, we’d join a sustainable journey, adding value right from the source to nurture ourselves and our precious Mother Earth.
