Читать книгу Paleo Italian Cooking - Cindy Barbieri - Страница 8

WELCOME TO MY WORLD

Iam so happy you are here to share what I love most: cooking for my family and friends while drinking wine in my kitchen! I’ve found that inviting new friends home to share one of my homemade Paleo Italian dishes with a glass of wine is a wonderful way to deepen a friendship.

My family is from Naples, Italy, and many of the Paleo Italian recipes in this book are based on my family traditions and the flavors from this area. My husband and I also spend two weeks in Italy every year. We especially love the Tuscan area of central Italy, with its natural cobbled streets, wide-open windows, and friendly folks standing outside ready to welcome you into their restaurants or shops; but there are countless beautiful parts of Italy to be discovered while traveling through the countryside. I’ve been lucky enough to have traveled throughout Europe and the U.S., and I have found that I feel most at home in Italy. The importance of food and family in everyday life really resonates with my values.

Having spent a lot of time in my grandmother’s kitchen growing up, I’m thrilled to have this opportunity to share my extraordinary and easy cooking, which represents my heritage and my love for good, healthy food. In this book, I’ve included dishes I serve to my family and friends, many of which represent dishes my grandmother, Nana, made for us. My best childhood memories are of gatherings for birthdays, graduations, weddings, Sunday dinners or simple get-togethers—in which every conversation either began or ended with food. Nana had a very easygoing approach to life: always have enough food to feed the entire family and whoever stops by. Being old-fashioned, she also told me that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. “Feed your man,” she said, “and he’ll always come home to you.” My approach to cooking is very similar to my grandmother’s—keep it simple and add lots of flavor using fresh herbs! The quality of the ingredients plays a very important part in any recipe and enhances the beauty of each dish.

I love easy, authentic Italian food that can be prepared in advance without a lot of mess, and which are equally suitable for weeknight dinners or special occasions.

A typical Italian dinner is served family-style, with wine and laughter.

Weekends often involve more of a multicourse extravaganza that may last a few hours. Because I’m a bit of a selfish mother, it makes me happy to have my family at the table for a few uninterrupted hours, all of us enjoying delicious food together. In this book, I will show you how much fun cooking at home truly is, and how it offers quality time with the people you love around you. In Italy, families spend hours together eating several small meals and drinking local wine. There’s no need to consume a large plate of food in a single sitting; eating Italian-style means making a meal into more of an event, taking your time, with the food enhancing the special moments you spend together.

When I decided to leave corporate America and follow my passion into the kitchen, it was a very natural transition. I’m able to make great food for my family and friends every day. I feel blessed to have this opportunity to share my family traditions as well as all of the new recipes coming from my kitchen. I also deeply appreciate my husband’s willingness to make time for us to travel throughout Italy each year and enjoy the amazing food, views and wine. These trips have inspired me to create great food using all natural ingredients, and to embrace my Italian heritage. It’s a great pleasure to share my travels to Italy, my family traditions and authentic Italian recipes with you, and I hope you enjoy the results.

Chocolate Almond Torte (page 157)

Venetian Potatoes (page 140)

Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon & Arugula (page 52)