I am here in front of the computer and I have already deleted what i want to write 3 times because what I am doing is so important to me that I would not want to go wrong. I don’t want to seem too basic but not too complicated, I don’t want to be too sentimental but not too cold either; I simply want to be me … and this is where the difficulty comes … being me. How many people can say that they are always themselves in every circumstance and in every moment, I sincerely think that we all have a different way of being, depending on the situation in which we find ourselves or at least a different attitude in which we face the different events of life. I personally have 4 daughters and with each of them I have a different way of relating, but mind you, I’m not talking about love because that is distributed equally and infinitely between all of them but my way of dealing with the problems of each it’s different because they’re different. And so it is also in my everyday life and in relationships with other people. There is only one place where I can truly say that I am always the same and that is my kitchen. I have been a cook for several years and I have also come to hate my job in professional kitchens: too much hierarchy, too much stress, too many bad words, too much presumption and this made me decide that I would never work for someone again and therefore I am looking for to build my own little happy space where I can work as I like. I realized that cooking did me good and bad at the same time depending on where I did it. When I cooked in restaurant kitchens, I no longer liked it, but when I cooked at home in the quiet of my kitchen and with my times everything was more beautiful and relaxing. So comes my decision to no longer allow anyone to destroy the love for my job. There is only one life and we have a moral duty towards ourselves to make it as “livable” as possible. It is no coincidence that Confucius said: love your job and you will never work a day in your life. This is my model of life. I cook for the pleasure of making people happy, I cook to share my love for food with others, I cook to let the world know how beautiful my country is through the recipes that have always accompanied me. And it is with this spirit that the idea of this blog was born. Each recipe is linked to a memory, to an event in my life because my life revolves a lot around food. This job of mine as beautiful as it is difficult has taken me to many places, has introduced me to realities of which I had not even the slightest idea, has introduced me to people, beautiful and ugly, has put me face to face with wickedness, falsehood but at the same time it introduced me to humble, sincere people, dedicated to sacrifice and who even if they were meteors in my life, for what little they were there, they loved me and made me feel at home even if kilometers that separated me from my loved ones were thousands. In one of my most recent work experiences abroad, I remember that it was late night and my husband and I were returning home, after an impossible day, by bicycle and in the silence of the night I was thinking about how many lives you can live in one life and I asked myself: how many lives have I lived in recent years? And I realized that I was tired of not having roots, of not having a place of my own to be myself, where I decide what to cook and not the presumptuous on duty who maybe even a little bastardized in the name of God money. My greatest desire is to make my kitchen known to as many people as possible, to make sure that they can fall in love with my country even more and that they really know the dishes that are cooked in families when they gather around at the table and share the events of the day between one bite and another. In Italy at the table we don’t just eat but talk, laugh, cry, fight, tell each other the truths; the table for Italians, who still they have a bit of tradition is a sacred place and the altar of the house. I remember my mother hated having discussions at the table and I don’t like it either. For me, being together at the table is more than eating, it is sharing an experience and when I invite some friends to my table it is because I really care for them and feel them as part of my family. In this blog there will be many recipes of the Campania tradition, because that’s where I come from, a small town in the Agro Nocerino Sarnese, which is called Pagani and is in the province of Salerno a few kilometers from Naples. I was practically born and raised in the homeland of the tomato and I am passionate about it. In a week in my house we have tomato 5 days a week in the form of a sauce to accompany pasta, fresh in salads, on pizza … and in the blog you will find lots of recipes with tomato, from the simple salad to the more elaborate Lasagna alla Bolognese. You will find recipes of dishes that I have known during my travels such as Reuben, a very tasty sandwich that I have slightly revised in my own way. So in the end you will be able to understand who I am from the recipes in this blog, many belong to tradition and I faithfully reproduce the recipe, others are mine and come from ingredients that at that moment I had available either from what attracted me to the greengrocer’s, or the fishmonger’s, the butcher’s or the dairy’s counter. I am very excited for this blog that i dream it could became a book in the future, I don’t know how it will go but I have decided to enjoy the journey, without thinking too much about what it will be, I want to enjoy the fact of writing it. In the coming months I will be my blog, I will take care of him like a baby in the womb and when each article will be read by everyone, I will be like the most proud of mothers who brings her masterpiece to light. Philly D’Uva
