From Micol and Dino

Italy has been inspiring us even more than usual in the kitchen!

Culinary Inspiration Straight from Italy!

It’s been a very busy month for us planning our culinary tours to Italy. We have five incredible tours to Tuscany and Puglia scheduled this September and next spring.

Part of the fun of organizing the tours is determining the menus with each of the amazing restaurants we’re bringing our groups to, sifting through all the mouthwatering options to select just the right combination for each tour. Not to mention, deciding which recipes we'll be teaching in our daily hands-on cooking classes at the villa we've rented for the week. And so that translates to inspiration for us here in our kitchen: we find ourselves making fresh pasta two or three times a week, experimenting with regional recipes, unearthing some obscure culinary techniques—all the while dreaming of being back in Italy, enjoying the sights, sounds, and scents of our Italian kitchen in ITALY.

We’ll be sharing many of these regional gems with you over the next few months, and we plan on including some video recipes filmed in Italy as well. It will be fun for us to film these videos and hopefully fun for you to watch and learn!

New Recipes & Virtual Class July 10

In the meantime, this month we’ve posted four amazing new recipes for you to try: a rich, cheesy gratin of cauliflower (the bacon is optional); a fabulous sausage and tomato sauce for pasta; our favorite comfort dessert, panna cotta; and Tuscany’s refreshing summer bread and tomato salad.

Other than the new recipes, we’ve also added a new live virtual cooking class on July 10 at noon: Just perfect for a summer Saturday lunch, we’ll be making Umbrian-style wine-poached fish with rosemary and shallots (chicken works too if you like), handmade gnocchi with a zippy arugula-olive pesto, and a fruit-and-chocolate-filled phyllo pastry for dessert that is just incredible served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

As site members, you can buy virtual classes at 50% off, for just $24 per spot. So be sure to access discounted pricing here . And if you still haven’t taken your free virtual class (it was part of your membership package), let us know if you want to take the July 10 class.

Keep on cooking and keep us posted on which recipes you’ve cooked from the site!
Micol and Dino