Hi! Here I am celebrating seven years of blogging and looking back at the past year as I do at this time every summer. Thank you for reading this post. Your choice to dedicate a bit of your precious time to me and to my work is humbling and makes me proud to be a blogger!
So, what happened in the last 12 months? The podcast Thoughts on the Table continued to be my main focus and has become a great passion. I enjoy every aspect of it, from the planning stages, through the ever-exciting moment of the recording, to the post production and its magic. But among everything, I especially love the fact that the podcast allows me to work together with amazing people around the world and meet them face-to-face on Skype. In the last 12 months, I published 12 episodes with new and returning guests, including food writer Mark Preston, food bloggers Linda (Signorina Spaghetti) and Ale Gambini (A Queen in the Kitchen), restaurateur Simon Pagotto, as well as travel blogger and storyteller Nick Zingale, who has quickly become a recurring guest. This year, the podcast also hit an important milestone, its 50th episode! For the occasion, I was joined by my buddy Jason (with whom I started this series four years ago) for a special episode dedicated to balance in food.
The series has since hit 59 episodes, and still counting! I have already started working on new outlines with future guests and I look forward to organizing many more. If you'd like to be on the show, I'd love to work with you on themes that you find meaningful - please contact me for more information. BTW, the podcast is now available on Google Play Music and on Stitcher, besides of course iTunes, and direct playback on the Internet Archive and on this blog.
In other news, this past year I have posted three new recipes: Buckwheat Gnocchi with Mascarpone Tomato Sauce, Mascarpone Cream as the perfect accompaniment to Panettone, and Piadina Romagnola, the iconic flatbread of the Adriatic region of Italy.
I also wrote an autobiographical article on my first impressions as I arrived in Vancouver, Canada, 16 years ago, to discover a whole new culinary world: An Italian in Canada - From the Food of Italy to "Italian Food."
" I had discovered a parallel universe! A pretty unappetizing one [...] the portions were too big, the pasta was either drowning in sauce or looked pale and overcooked, and the sauces looked overly rich."
Finally, I'd like to thank all of you who follow me on the various social networks. Thanks for joining the discussion and for helping me preserve authentic, continental Italian food and its main qualities of simplicity, balance, and flavor. If you don't already, please follow me on Instagram (where I also share my recommendations for good food in Vancouver or in Italy, and occasional pictures of my gorgeous cat); Facebook (where I sometimes take a provocative stance against the horrible Italian food aberrations I come across); Twitter (where I occasionally also share random thoughts of some wit); and of course on the blog itself, Disgraces on the Menu, which you can also subscribe to via email.
As always, your feedback is really important to me - if you have any corrections, suggestions, or ideas for future collaborations, please contact me! Thanks again.