I am a dad. Out of love for my children and to help my wife, I grew passionate about cooking. In particular, I try to find the tastiest and healthiest recipes for the family.
On one hand, the passion for cooking led me to discover the different techniques behind recipes; there is far more chemistry in cooking than one imagines, and far, far more in pastry. On the other hand, the desire for healthy recipes led me to read up on and study many aspects of nutrition and metabolism.
When I talk about these subjects with other people, or when a guest enjoys my dishes, I often get questions both about technique and about the recipes. That is where the idea of publishing the recipes on a website came from, making them accessible to everyone.
Along the way I discovered, at my own expense and through many mistakes, that in cooking experience and practice are essential: you have to know the flavour, the texture, how ingredients “transform” and all their characteristics. That lets you know what you are doing during preparation and predict, with reasonable accuracy, the final result. This awareness also lets you judge the substitutions and variations that can suitably be applied to a preparation.
And while I rationally recognise that technique, practice and experience are essential, on a more emotional level I like to believe that passion and love matter just as much: without them, every preparation described on this site, and this site itself, would not exist.
Italian
Because I am Italian. Most of the recipes you find here are Italian; the ones that are not, I have tried to reinterpret in a Mediterranean key (if you like, you will tell me whether, and how far, I managed it).
It is not only a matter of taste: the Mediterranean diet is one of the best studied and best documented dietary models, and I take it as a reference for building a varied, balanced diet. In particular I use the Mediterranean food pyramid as a guiding scheme: at the base the foods to eat most often (whole grains, vegetables, fruit, legumes, extra-virgin olive oil), moving upward the ones to eat less frequently. It is a model backed by decades of research and still associated with a reduced risk of several chronic diseases.
Healthy
Because nutrition is a complex subject, and there are several guidelines one can follow when choosing ingredients and preparation techniques to make dishes that are good on the palate and healthy for the body.
The site’s underlying choices follow a few principles for which the scientific evidence is solid.
I try to prefer: fruit, vegetables, grains (preferably whole), legumes, seeds, nuts, herbs and spices. More sparingly: eggs, oily fish (Italian classification), lean white fish and some types of shellfish.
I try to limit:
- saturated fats, including plant-based ones such as coconut oil and palm oil. Being plant-based does not make them better: they are still very high in saturated fat (coconut oil is about 82% saturated fat, more than butter) and should be treated like any saturated fat. The main international guidelines recommend keeping saturated fat to about 10% of daily calories (that is, about 22 g a day for a 2000 kcal diet), favouring unsaturated fats;
- simple sugars, that is added sugars (white, cane, unrefined, coconut sugar and so on) and those in honey, syrups and fruit juices. Here the recommendation is to stay below 10% of daily calories, ideally below 5% (about 25 grams a day for an average adult). The sugar naturally present in whole fruit and milk does not fall under this limit;
- salt, to keep below 5 grams a day (about one teaspoon), equal to less than 2 grams of sodium.
Desserts are a different story. However much I always look for a compromise between tasty and healthy, desserts are by definition a course you eat not out of hunger but for pleasure, and they are generally rich in simple sugars and fats, saturated ones above all. I find it hard, and in some ways counterproductive, to ban desserts outright for children and teenagers: if they want them, they will find a way :). That is why my philosophy is to find an acceptable balance, to limit them to occasional consumption, and in any case to stay aware of what goes on the table. As a chemist friend once told me, “the dose makes the poison”. So: be aware of your food choices, because the evidence and recommendations on sugars and fats hold for desserts too.
Recipes
This site exists to share recipes, yes, but not only. Knowing the technique behind a recipe lets you interpret it and understand why the various steps are done: what is essential, what is optional, what can be substituted or varied and how, while being aware of how each change affects the final product.
Understanding this is what lets you cook better, not just repeat the steps blindly.
References
The nutritional guidance cited on this page is based on institutional and scientific sources:
- World Health Organization (WHO), Guideline: Sugars intake for adults and children (2015): who.int
- WHO, Saturated fatty acid and trans-fatty acid intake (2023 guideline update): who.int
- WHO, Sodium reduction (fact sheet): who.int
- EFSA (European Food Safety Authority), Added and free sugars should be as low as possible (2022): efsa.europa.eu
- American Heart Association, Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease (Presidential Advisory, Circulation, 2017): ahajournals.org
- WHO, Carbohydrate intake for adults and children (2023 guideline: carbohydrates mainly from whole grains, vegetables, fruit and legumes; at least 400 g/day of fruit and vegetables): who.int
- D. Aune et al., Whole grain consumption and risk of cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all cause mortality (meta-analysis, BMJ 2016): pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- American Heart Association, Fish and Omega-3 Fatty Acids: heart.org
- Three decades of the Mediterranean diet pyramid (review, 2025): pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov