Search Results for: travel writing

L’appetito vien mangiando! – Appetite comes while you are eating.

Vicky arrives in Tuscany to study the language and culture of Italy, but soon falls in love with charismatic chef Gianfranco and starts to learn the art of Italian cooking in his trattoria. On Sunday nights, after benches are stacked on tables, they explore the countryside by car, passing glassy lakes and ancient hill towns.

This colourful and intoxicating gastro-memoir takes you behind the scenes of romantic restaurants and bars in Tuscany, Umbria, Elba and Perugia. Interspersed with recipes, humour and heartbreak, it will leave you entranced and with a hankering for tagliatelle and truffles.

When Elizabeth Bard followed a handsome Frenchman up the spiral staircase to a love nest in the heart of Paris, they thought they had found their perfect home.
But life had other ideas. Falling in love with a quirky house full of history on a last romantic jaunt before the birth of their first child, Elizabeth and Gwendal decide to move – lock, stock and Le Creuset – to the French countryside; a land of blue skies, lavender fields and peaches that taste like sunshine.
Part memoir, part chocolate-smudged family cookbook, Picnic in Provence is about everything that happens after the happily ever after, and reminds us that life, in and out of the kitchen, is a rendezvous with the unexpected.

We buy food we can point to. We stalk the streets until rush hour and wait for the little hatches to open in the sides of restaurants. From the steamy openings, cooks in overalls sell jiaozi (dumplings) and bowls of thick, sticky, white congee – an unholy cross between soup and porridge. Baozi, steamed white buns, are light as air. I buy them filled with water spinach and nettle – delicious dipped in sharp, black Chinese vinegar.

In 2008, Miranda and her partner set off for one last big adventure before settling down. They chose to travel through South-East Asia. All did not go to plan: Asian flu, falling off boats and the general chaos of a life abroad challenged them at every step, and yet, in the midst of it all, they fell in love with the culture and culinary delights of China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia.

Has a meal ever changed your life? Part love story, part wine-splattered cookbook, Lunch in Paris is a deliciously tart, forthright and funny story of falling in love with a Frenchman and moving to the world’s most romantic city – not the Hollywood version, but the real Paris, a heady mix of blood sausage, pains aux chocolats and irregular verbs. From gutting her first fish (with a little help from Jane Austen) to discovering the French version of Death by Chocolate, Elizabeth Bard finds that learning to cook and building a new life have a lot in common. Peppered with recipes, this mouth-watering love story is the perfect treat for anyone who has ever suspected that lunch in Paris could change their life.