I love to cook. This is ironic given that until a few years ago constructing a meal generally consisted of taste-free cut-price chicken and iceberg lettuce, washed down with a litre or two of cherryade.

Times have changed. I might even be something of a culinary snob these days – the aforementioned ingredients would no longer be acceptable in my kitchen. In recent years I’ve had some chronic health problems which, while distressing, have ended up affording a few unexpected silver linings. Ill-health provided the impetus to move to sunny Southern Italy, and it has left me with an enduring love of good food. Years of eating fast food and not much else was a big catalyst for my health problems. Accepting that I needed to entirely re-think my diet, I set out to prove that eating healthily can be a pleasurable experience, and discovered along the way a real passion for cooking.

Italy is famed for its wholesome, delicious food, so in moving here I relished the prospect of discovering some new ingredients to experiment with. Experimentation, to me, is the essence of cooking. What I love about being in the kitchen is creation and diversity. I tend to go through phases, during which I pick up a theme and run with it – a current favourite is Moroccan, involving lots of paprika, harissa, rosewater, and pear (which is absolutely delicious with yoghurt).

When we first arrived in Italy I went through an enthusiastic fish phase. Living on the coast we can pop to the local fish market and pick up fresh octopus, squid, clams, prawns, bream, bass, sardines… you name it! We had seafood risotto or mussels almost every other day. We went to restaurants and enjoyed seafood antipasti and the delicious pescatore soup for which the region is famed.

However, while local seafood fare is on the whole very nice, it is not particularly varied, and you can only eat frittura mista so many times in one week. It was this that inspired the subsequent experimentation with Moroccan, Japanese and Thai. So when people ask what kind of Italian influences I’ve been using in the kitchen the current response tends to be, ‘Well… not a lot.’

Because I seem to lean toward exotic cuisine and because my diet prohibits wheat (thus vetoing pizza, pasta and bread – pretty much all the Italian staples then) it does invite some cause for concern. Is it ok that we moved to Italy and eat Vietnamese pork balls while the neighbours are enjoying a hearty bowl of spaghetti? Is it normal to insist on scouring (with little success I might add) the local supermarket for soy sauce and seaweed when surrounding baskets are filled with breads, meats and cheeses? Will I ever assimilate properly into this country?

But as I think about what we’ve eaten in the past week, it occurs to me that perhaps I might not be such an un-Italian cook after all. The day before yesterday I made a nice osso buco and, ok… chips (for all my discoveries, there are some fast foods too tasty to part with). Tonight we’re having a fennel and pine-nut salad followed by chicken baked in tomato, basil and mozzarella – which are almost like the three colours of an Italian cookery flag! A simple, delicious combination that I’ve been using since moving here, without even registering that I’m borrowing from quintessential Italian gastronomy. Not bad for a person who once considered supernoodles on marmite-slathered bread a tasty and nutritionally adequate meal.

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