I think if there's one thing that connects us all, it's food. Good food is a language that evokes passion, love, it can transform you to a special nostalgic place if done right.
What I like about Pauline & Pasqualino is that they cook together, share a passion for the noble art & somehow find time from their daily jobs that revolve around travelling, and are able to bring it to their easy yet stunning recipes.
I connect with Pauline with the way we think about healthy food. Same like her, I also feel that healthy food should not mean a lesson in pseudo-biology. It's about eating right, staying healthy and happy. If I were living in Italy or Belgium, I'd be hanging with Pauline almost everyday.
If you love hearty Italian food, along with Belgian, Dutch & Mediterranean influences follow her right away.
Da Noi (with us)
Why not sharing our passion for cooking with others? That is what we were wondering as well in the last months. “Da Noi”, which means “with us” in Italian, or “chez nous” in French, is for us the answer on this question. It is a foodblog where we share our passion for good and healthy food.
Our philosophy is that food has to be healthy, but “in a healthy way”. But what is healthy? I mean, nowadays we are so obsessed with ‘healthy’ food and ‘healthy’ ingredients, that we completely lost the essential of food and eating. It seems that the main purpose is to eat as less carbs as possible, as much proteins as possible, using as much ‘superfoods’ as possible and drink vegetable smoothies all day. Honestly? I don`t know anybody who really loves wheat grass, chlorella or dried goji berries...
For us, this has never been the basis for cooking. The basis for us is to use pure and good quality ingredients, preferably organicand/or from the local market. Based good ingredients we make a healthy meal, often with as less ingredients as possible. Have you ever tried a good self made pasta, with fresh pomodorini, a good olive oil and fresh basil? Just a couple of ingredients, but it rocks!
And YES, we cook with carbs and NO, we do not always cook with meat. We really have to be aware of how we treat our planet and animals. We are not vegetarians by the way, but we are convinced that the meat consumption in the world can be drastcally reduced. If we all contribute to that, it would already help a lot to save our planet and the animals.
In short, our vision on cooking is similar with our vision on life an society. Things that we do in life have to give us a certain level of satisfaction. You have to get some energy in return, otherwise you will experience it as ‘stress’. So for us, this is reflected in cooking as well. It is all about sharing love and passion for food with the ones we love. The success and perfection is not the goal, but the energy and feeling that we get back when you see all the happy ans smiling faces. Organizing lunches or dinners and sharing recipes, as we do now with our blog, is for us a way to achieve happiness. And it doesn`t have to be perfect, and the food doesn`t have to be geometrically presented on a plate and it doesn`t have to contain at least 5 superfood ingredients. “If it feels good, it can`t be wrong”. What is nicer on a warm summer evening than organizing a pizza party for the entire neighbourhood. We did this every year and made all the pizza`s ourselves in our ‘forno al legna’ (woodoven) with fresh ingredients and homemade dough. It was an enourmous work, but it was worth every minute!
We often get the question, why we are still ‘in shape’, while we are always cooking. :)
The answer is not that we are genetically blessed with skinny genes or something like that, no way! OK, we do a lot of sport, but this is only a part of the answer. The other part lies in the ingredients that we use and in our eating habits. When you make everything fresh, you know what you eat. Processed food contains a lot of ‘hidden sugar’, chemical stuff and salt. So good and fresh ingredients are the best to stay healthy. Furthermore, we hardly use any butter or cream. We are really convinced that when you need cream to make your dish tasty, there is something wrong with the ingredients or recipe that you use.
Another element is the eating habits. It is a matter of listening to your body and common sense. A lot of people have the tendency to eat a lot of bread before or during the meal, preferably with a lot of butter. This is a meal as such! Another example is the strange feeling that a meal is not complete without a sauce?!?! Again, when you use fresh and pure ingredients, it is not necessary to drown your meat or pasta in a sauce. I can go on with many other examples, but the message is that we hardly realize what we are eating and how we are eating.
Why not be a little bit more mindful in what we eat and how we eat and also why we eat? For us, this is the best recipe for a healty lifestyle.
Live, love, cook
Meravigliosi! Bellissimo articolo!