SEMPLICEMENTE

Cooking good food may seem simple, but it’s not. It takes passion, skills and good ingredients. It takes time, a lot of time. In pastry you also need a lot of precision.

I often dabble in the kitchen, but I know my limit. My general philosophy is to cook as much as possible by myself, buying only excellent ingredients and avoiding ready-made foods. When I buy something someone else prepared, the reason is always the same one: I consider that product to be really good and better than what I could do. There is a meritocracy in my kitchen… it is a utopia in life, but fortunately I am the one who decides here! Everybody knows time is a tyrant and it would be easier to give in to temptation, letting others cook for you, but for me it would be a failure to feed my family and friends with something that I could have done better, controlling the ingredients in the meanwhile.

When some food created by others enters my kitchen, it means that it has fully met my expectations and those who know me know it.

There is a small place in Pilastro di Langhirano (PR), where quality takes over. The owner often tries to delight us with puns (English humor ones), but he is much better at creating fabulous sweets, which taste of passion with an aftertaste of great skills in fine confectionery art (not to take anything away from his congeniality). It is a small pastry shop, whose name I think is the result of one of his many jokes:”Semplicemente” doesn’t hide anything simple behind the scenes, except the fact that each of its products reminds us that to obtain excellent results you “simply” (“semplicemente” means “simply” in Italian”) need a lot of care, a lot of skills and ability in the choice of raw materials.

In the photo one of the few survivors of the Great Christmas Binge, which unfortunately will not be able to survive long (I think we will finish it in 24 hours)! I’m just sorry I could not photograph the two previous panettoni, which in addition to being superlative as a taste, were splendid visually. I believe I will remember them for a long time (or at least until my memory leaves me), like all the delicacies that have entered my personal Good Food Olympus.