Welcome to Tartufo!
Tartufo (tärˈto͞ofō/) noun; Italian. A culinary delicacy, the tartufo (or truffle, in English) is a pungent fungus which grows underground. The tartufo can only be sniffed out and unearthed from its hiding place with the assistance of highly trained pigs.
If you were at my wedding, you might remember that I vowed I would learn how to cook. And even then, it didn’t happen until a few years later, under the duress of being laid off and the realization that it would be highly inappropriate to still expect my husband to cook me dinner after a long day in the office.
With my dubious beginnings in the world of what I call, “cooking for survival”, one might wonder why I am starting a food blog. I cannot claim to be the end all be all of food preparation and execution. After all, I am still a baker at heart, with a healthy respect for recipes and gastronomic rules. I feel like a total renegade and culinary badass when I add cayenne pepper to a recipe that didn’t call for it. Nothing says living on the edge like going rogue with your spices.
But what I can tell you, and what I think you will find in the posts that follow, is that I love the experience of food. I love that through food we can cross cultural lines. Or travel through time, learning how war, taxes and dictators have shaped what we eat today. What’s more, food gives us an opportunity to slow down, and experience a moment with all of our senses. I call these moments, both big and small, food adventures. And I have realized that I am at my happiest when I am on a food adventure.
Tartufo is about those adventures - in the kitchen, at the table, or at the random roadside stand. Along with my own stories, I’ll share recipes that I love, restaurants I've visited or cool kitchen gadgets that I can’t live without. And I am doing so with the hopes of encouraging you to go and seek out your own food adventure. Some will be planned and eagerly sought after. Some will come at random, attributed to life’s little surprises. Some will come from trying to a new recipe and failing miserably. The point is that the fun is in the journey and if you keep looking, smelling and tasting, you will find your own food adventure, your own tartufo. No highly trained pigs required.