Hi! I’m Ellen…

…and if covid hadn’t happened I would probably never have gotten around to writing a blog. I love food and wine and good company. One of the great pleasures of my life is having friends over for long lunches and convivial suppers. I enjoy everything connected with food from shopping to cooking to photographing and, of course, eating………preferably, as I’ve just mentioned, in good company. So I thought that maybe in this period of isolation and social distancing writing about what I’m cooking (usually just for myself) might help me to fill the gap that’s left in not being able to see friends and if it helps to distract you for a while from the difficult moment we’re all living through, well then we can keep each other company!

I’m a Dubliner and proud of it but I fell in love with Puglia during a cultural exchange programme in Bari many years ago. I decided to extend my 6 week stay to a year then a second year and …………I have lived in Puglia ever since. I still love Dublin and visit as often as I can but home is now Bari (although home home will always be Dublin 🙂 ) So while most of the recipes will be traditional Italian some of them will, like myself, be hybrids. In my experience Irish and Italian mix very well. Apart from sharing recipes and food experiences I’ll also show you some of my favourite places in my adopted home and talk to you about local traditions and feasts and festivals and the food traditions associated with them. Eating ‘Italiano’ is not just about the food…it’s a philosophy of life.

There used to be a painting hanging in O’Briens of Leeson Street, Dublin, entitled ‘A Bird never Flew on One Wing’.

Well, that second wing for me is wine. I qualified as a sommelier in 2017 and am a member of AIS, Associazione Italiana Sommelier. So I will also use this blog to talk about wines, mostly Italian, but not only. Outside of Italy I’ve been lucky enough to visit wineries in France, South Africa and California….and hopefully in the not too distant future I will be able to visit many more.

Wine or Cruel World…no problem here about which arrow to follow 🙂