"I first met Melanie Russo when she attended kinder with my daughter Pam, so I have known her a long time. Melanie’s big, bold cooking smacks you in the mouth. My father started working for the Russo brothers, Joe and Jack (distant cousins to Mel’s family), in the early 1950s. Joe, Jack and Diego bought a farm in Tyabb called Cumbrae…"

"Keep the silverbeet stalks for a spring minestrone. Mum always said it was the stalks that were the secret to her minestrone, adding flavour without complicating the other vegetables…"

“There is nothing sweeter nor more life-affirming than the smell of spiced, roasting chicken. The chickpeas in this dish are like hundreds of golden beads edging in and around the chicken. When I was a child, Nonna Giuseppa and Mum called me Sango mio (my blood). Nonna and Mum may not have considered this dish traditional…”

In a world choking on food trends, we can almost hear you yawn at the mere mention of panforte. But panforte doesn’t care about going viral on The Tok – it’s so above all that noise. It’s as eternal as Siena’s cobbles and is never flashy, never out of date. Dense, chewy, spiced and totally delicious, we make batches for edible gifts at Christmas time because it’s way less hassle than…

“Being a travelling monk in sixteenth-century Sicily couldn’t have been easy. During Lent, the season of austerity preceding Easter, monks were expected to hike on foot day after day for forty days, ministering to the faithful across the land. Although they were able to stop at monasteries for sustenance, eating meat was prohibited…”

“If you’ve been to the Caffè Sicilia in Noto, it’s likely you’ve had your way with a warm brioche dipped into a bowl of slushy granita di mandorle made with freshly pressed almond milk. It’s a deliciously fragrant contrast of textures and temperatures. Although they call it a granita, it’s more like a cremolata. Unlike granita, where you want a bit of crunch…”

“There’s an excellent Sicilian pasticceria in my neighborhood in Brooklyn called Monteleone, owned by a man who was born and raised in Sicily. His pastries taste as authentic as any you’ll find in Sicily and, lucky for all of us, he makes cuccidati year-round, not just at Christmas time. (That’s when he makes a larger, ring-shaped version called buccellati, or bracelets.)…”

We love salami, big time, and if we ever need any justification to gorge on it (we don’t), we only have to look to the Italians. Anecdotally, they really seem to eat a ton of the stuff in Italy, along with other cured meats like mortadella, coppa, pancetta, bresaola, nduja, guanciale, lardo, and so on. The entire cured meat category, including salami, is referred to as salume...

Guilty as charged, Your Honour: there are a lot of ‘or to tastes’ going on here. While you might see these as a recipe-writing cop out, we see them as giving you the freedom to lavish lemon, parmesan, nutmeg, basil and whatnot on your pasta as you jolly well see fit. You might like things tarter, puckery-er, cheesier...

If you’re looking at this recipe and wondering why we just didn’t use chicken mince, it’s because we don’t like it. Like, we r-e-a-l-l-y don’t like it. That stuff you get from the supermarket? It’s mushy, pallid and has a really sloppy texture and who knows what sad part of the bird it actually comes from. So yeah, we chop our own…

Osso buco is a cut of veal and a traditional Lombardian meat stew; the word means ‘bone with a hole.” The osso buco we commonly see is beef and not veal, which is significantly more expensive and daintier than beef osso buco, which can be humungous…

If you’re going to make a meatloaf, you may as well make one with knobs on, no? That’s our philosophy anyway and the Sicilians, bless ‘em, agree; this dish is based on a homey Sicilian dish called polpettone. Which is simply Italian for ‘meatloaf’…

Here’s a cheese-heavy pasta dish that’s the kind of simple thing to make when you can’t be arsed to properly cook… which, if you’re anything like us, is maybe quite often.  All you do is cook some dried pasta (a tube-y one works great), then heave it into a large pan with some of the pasta cooking water, lemon, herbs, ricotta, a bit…

Lately, we’ve been making tomato sauce like there is no tomorrow; maybe there is no tomorrow? Existential crisis/neurosis aside, our freezers are full of the stuff. When it’s winter, and fresh tomatoes taste like shite, we’ll be ever so glad of a never-ending supply of sauce for pasta…