Another year goes by and another olive harvest completed.

I couldn’t now imagine life without the cycle of looking after the trees and then seeing the fruits of all our labour; this wonderful, fresh, peppery, green oil.  This is the third year that we have completed the...

I have done it at last. After years of yearning I have finally taken the plunge and built a pizza oven. And what a pizza oven it is!

The 101st Giro D’Italia arrived in Penne on Sunday the 13th May to host the start of stage 10 of a race that covers 3500 kilometres with an average of 170 km per day.

The town had been preparing for this momentous occasion for months and on Monday night there were bands...

There seems to be a strange reverence around making fresh pasta…few seem to attempt it, and most of those who do view the process as a dinner party chore that takes too much effort; their pasta machines destined to remain dormant at the back of a kitchen cupboard....

I was standing in a group of men, a dozen or so, watching, in an off-hand way, a pot of mutton stew cooking. It was a massive pot, 11 kilos of meat, slowly stewing over an open fire, high in the hills of Abruzzo, outside a mountain refuge for climbers.

I had arrived lat...

Abruzzo emigration and how people are now tracing their roots.

I was enjoying a coffee in a local bar when Nino (not his real name) approached me; in a hushed tone, careful that we would not be overheard, he asked me if I was free later that day and interested in going truffle hunting with him.

Nino, like others who search for the...

The olive harvest has just finished. Not a good harvest, as the yield was too low, but the quality is excellent and prices have risen to their highest level ever, so there is a sense of buoyancy from the farmers. What they lost in overall production they have partially...

In Italy it is time to celebrate the tomato harvest, and what tomatoes they are: gnarled and misshapen they may be, but a joy to eat! Why can’t we get tomatoes like these in the UK; instead of the tasteless, insipid, watery, but perfectly formed and uniformly round red...

Chianti, Prosecco, Brunello – Italy has always been synonymous with world-famous wine, but craft beer? Sure…a Moretti is acceptable on a hot summer’s day but I bet my bottom euro that I’m not alone in associating Italian beer with mass-produced, characterless - and exp...

Excellent vineyard tours and tastings of some of the Abruzzo's best producers of wine. Read on for details...

Crespelle in brodo and pecora alla callara. Perfect little pancakes served in an unusual way... 

I am out in Italy, mainly to put down fertiliser on the olive trees: essential if you want a good yield. Whilst we have been organic in the true sense of the word for at lea...

Marion and I were out for a quiet dinner together last week. We went to one of our favourite places in Bristol to try out a new restaurant that we had heard good things about in Wapping Wharf, an area I love not just because it is a vibrant part of the old dockland but...

Polenta was once a staple throughout Italy until it was replaced by pasta in the early 20th century. This hearty-carb was the mainstay of a peasant diet, supplemented with bits of meat and vegetables to complete the meal.

This is a dish with an interestin...

Eating out in the Abruzzo is a pleasure that I will never tire of enjoying. Simple food that relies, like most Italian cooking, upon the freshness and quality of local seasonal ingredients - and never a chain restaurant, let alone a Starbucks, in sight. The fact that s...