People are always asking me for trusted resources in the USA for buying the ingredients I recommend in my recipes. Things like pasta, olive oil, nuts and flour. It’s not always easy figuring out what is ‘real’ and worth the extra price to pay for high quality foods imported from Italy. I hope through my blog posts, books and videos that I convey the extreme hard work and effort that goes into making these products. But once convinced, where can you actually do some shopping?
One of my trusted resources in the states is the company Gustiamo. The owner, Beatrice, travels constantly up and down Italy searching out not just the best Italian ingredients, but those made sustainably and by people who are as passionate about the land and the food they produce as they are their business.
For the holidays Beatrice has let me choose a few of my favorite items and put them together in a gift box, along with a signed copy of my book, The Italian Table. It was hard to choose what to include (I want everything!) but I constrained myself. I decided to include a few ingredients that could help get you started on one of the most delicious menus in the book:
Lunch in a Renaissance Garden.
The Menu:Â
Bertolacce – Savory Crepes

Pasta with Ragu

Pork Fillet with Hazelnuts

Zucchini with Mint

Chocolate & Hazelnut Cookies
Your basket includes the following ingredients to help get you started:
•Maiorca Flour: A 1 kilo package of flour from one of my favorite mills in Sicily, Molini del Ponte. Their Maiorca flour is made from an ancient variety of Sicilian heritage wheat, and has no preservatives or additives. You can use it to make the crepes as well as the cookies.
•Sicilian Sea Salt: This is a pantry staple you probably take for granted, and is in every recipe in this meal. Sea Salt from Trapani is gathered on the northwest coast of Sicily and is not only nutritious and free of additives, but also produced in a sustainable way.
•2 bags of Spaghetti Faella: Even though my original lunch includes home made egg pasta, the ragu sauce is equally good atop by favorite brand of spaghetti, Faella, from Gragnano
•4 cans of Italian Plum Tomatoes: It’s not always easy to find high quality Italian plum tomatoes. This brand, Gustarosso, is one of the items I most often recommend to my readers, since it pairs high quality with a fair price. Not easy to find!
•Alta Langa Hazelnuts: Hazelnuts are featured in two of the recipes in this menu, the pork roast, as well as the delicious chocolate hazelnut cookies. These nuts are already peeled and toasted and ready to go into both recipes.
And finally, your basket includes a copy of my book The Italian Table: Creating Festive Meals for Families and Friends, with a signed bookplate.
This obviously makes the perfect holiday gift for someone you know, who loves to cook. While the box won’t magically transport you to the location photographed below where the lunch actually took place, I do see three valid reasons to gift this to friends and family:
- It will introduce them to ME! (the bigger the party the better!)
- It will introduce them to Gustiamo, which is one of my most trusted resources in the States for Italian products and helps support Italian food artisans here in Italy.
- The best possible outcome of this gift giving? Your friend or relative cooks a dinner party and invites you over to eat it!! So win/win.
To order your gift box click here: Italy’s Minchilli
If you’d just like to order the book, without the groceries (but why would you?) click here.
If you’d like to gift even more delicious Italian advice don’t forget my previous books Eating My Way Through Italy and Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City.
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