For the past ten years I have been schlepping from my heart throb concrete jungle home to my body achingly beautiful hills of Umbria and Tuscany and lately to the Baby Let me Live Here Forever Loire Valley to teach all kinds of I Will Never Forget People how to cook. Or the truth is, they already knew how to cook, I just got them to fall a little deeper.

But I am about to make a change. I have my eyes on a bruised brick shell.
Jonathan walked me over in the absolutely freezing cold and said,

“now I want you take a look at this and think about what it could be.” Do you remember when I told you that in Italian there is more than one way to say I love you? This old shifty shack looked straight at me, past whole sections of dirt floor and boarded up windows and said “Ti amo lady.” I knew right there and then I was going to make it mine.

And so it is that Jonathan and I will elbow our way in to the restaurant business.

Already I miss the mist in the morning and starting a fire to warm my love bugs into a day of eating and drinking and cooking and laughing and staying up way too late and getting lost on roads too tight for a mule on a grapefruit diet. And all my Italian family, the Scarpaccini and the Bonci. How do I live without them? I don’t know that yet. I can’t think about it because it hurts too much.

I will carry the love of everyone who ever came to cook with me in those tiny towns, in every cell of me to keep me cooking with the same no measure no worry sure that with everything we are throwing in there from our insides out, it can only be good.

I have four more weeks planned. And I can’t wait.
Tonight I’m going to make a soup from a tomato that I crush up with my own two hands, a spill of cream, a sprig of rosemary and one of sage with a side of olive oil rubbed into warm and crusty bread rubbed with garlic and heaped w/parmesan.