The Sunny Kitchen - An Italian cook in Amsterdam

Culinary holiday in Italy

In October I'm going to cook in Italy again. To be completely honest, I'm going to let other people cook in Italy. :)

Together with Strada Nuova I've organized a week-long cooking holiday. We had the "tryout" with a small group during October last year. The holiday has been fantastic and the people in the group were extremely nice, curious about the local eating habits and products, and very, very enthousiastic. We've had fun, seen and tasted a lot of food and wine and, most of all, we've cooked lots of nice Italian stuff!

This Autumn we're going back to Nepi - about 50 km from Rome.
From a culinary point of view, this is de-fi-ni-te-ly my favourite season. I'm namely crazy about chestnuts, truffles, porcini mushroom, polenta, you name it. And I find a cozy after-dinner fireplace totally irresistible.
But, I admit, we could be in for some "unpleasant" surprises. Last year, for example, we've had fabulous sunshiny days and we've used the fireplace just a few times. :)

I surely hope the weather is going to be as nice as last year's. Warm sunny days are the perfect natural excursion-enhancer. And Rome in the Autumn sun is one of the things in life that make me deeply happy. A visit to the ricotta and pecorino maker, the great olive oil producer and the many local markets in the area is, of course, much more pleasurable when the sun is shining. And we're definitely going to visit the beautiful markets! First of all to learn how to buy "the Italian way" and IN Italian, and then to see, smell and taste everything that can be seen, smelled and tasted. After that, we're going to prepare everything we bought in the best and most appetizing possible way, and then - you can be sure about that - we'll eat everything we've made accompanied by some great local wines!

Should you wish to receive more information about this culinary holiday, please click here.

Arrivederci in Italia!

Another foodblog

A culinary blog. Another one. And with "another one" I don't just mean: another one while there's already half a million of them out there. I also mean: another one for me. I already have a foodblog in Dutch, you see.
My sister Francy, who lives in Italy and cannot read Dutch, wrote me a couple of days ago to ask me why I didn't translate my posts for her and all the food-oriented people who do not understand this fascinating and yet quite incomprehensible language (incomprehensible if you never learned it, that is).

I had already been playing with the idea for a while. I actually even started my Dutch blog as a multi-language blog, but after translating just one article I decided it was going to cost me too much time and energy and I'd better desist. And so I did.

And now here I am, putting a LOT of time and energy in a new blog. Not exactly a clever thing to do for someone who didn't want to invest too much in blogging in the first place, is it? I love blogging, don't get me wrong. I'm just not planning on translating each and every article I post on La Cucina del Sole (that's the name of my Dutch blog on http://cucinadelsole.typepad.com/).
What I want to do instead is to make this a whole new blog. I'm going to use some of the stuff I've already concocted for La Cucina del Sole too, that's for sure, but there's going to be some new material too.
And the name of this weblog, The Sunny Kitchen, reflects my idea of the perfect kitchen: huge, with a fireplace, a long table that can easily accomodate at least 20 people and very big windows that let lots of sunshine in.

I just love to write about one of my favourite subjects, food. And, of the several languages I speak, English is definitely my favourite one. That's because I find it more complex and thus interesting than any other language I speak, even my own (Italian). I really love that complexity, the rich vocabulary, the many nuances this language offers. And though I can express myself quite decently in other languages too, English is the one I prefer above all (which doesn't mean I can always use it properly, so I hope you'll excuse the inevitable mistakes).

Anyway, I'm not here to talk about languages (before starting my own cooking school in Amsterdam I've been a translator for such a long time that I'm still a linguist, body and soul).

I'll let the food, the recipes and all the rest speak.
Hope you'll enjoy the experience.
Feel free to drop me a line with comments, suggestions, criticisms (why not! I can learn a lot from them too) and anything you think is important.

Arrivederci!

Nicoletta