Food and culture. Food and identity. Food and sustainability. Food and love.

In the spring of 2011 I moved from my hometown Gouda in the Netherlands to a beautiful hilltop town in the Langhe area of Piemonte, Northern Italy. Surrounded by vineyards and hazelnut orchards I was going to study Food Culture and Communications and I would become an expert in eco-gastronomy. Unfortunately things did not turn out to be what I had expected, and for various reasons I decided to stop my study programme. Making this decision was not easy, but luckily I was not alone in my hilltop town. The Drover, my boyfriend, private chef, baker and limoncello maker, came all the way from Australia to experience the Italian food adventure with me. He showed me that studying and learning is not something that you can only do in schools and universities: self-education could be the most interesting path to follow.

“How do you know all this?” is a question I have asked the Drover very often, when he was telling me another story or when he was sharing another bit of his knowledge with me. The answer is always the same: by reading lots, by travelling, by asking questions, by actually doing things and not only talk or read about it. The Drover has a great interest in, and passion for food. Just like me. He never went to a cooking school, never studied a specific food related subject in university, never had a job in the world of food, but he is the most amazing amateur chef that always knows how to cheer me up with one of the lovely meals he makes for me. The Drover knows what he wants, and what he doesn’t want, and when he wants something he is fully dedicated to reach his goal. This year he wants to become just as good a baker as every average French boulangerie seems to have behind the scenes. So he reads and he practices, he makes a thousand mistakes, gets very frustrated, gives up and tries again, just as long as he gets the result that he is aiming for: a real French style loaf of bread, the best homemade pizza dough I have ever tasted, a chocolate tart to die for…

In the days, weeks, months after making the decision of not following the study programme in gastronomic sciences I have had a lot of ups and downs. I still want to specialise further in food and culture, food and identity, food and sustainability… But how am I going to do this? It is the Drover who inspired me (he might not even realise this!) to start a new project and to learn more by going out there myself, by reading, observing, travelling, asking and writing. That is why I started this blog: to share my stories, my observations, my discoveries, my trials of cooking and baking, my questions and my food adventures. To hopefully find out and show that it is true that by self-education I could possibly learn just as much, or even more, as by attending lectures in a classroom.

Food and love. That is what drives me to start a whole new adventure, which I will happily share here with you.

Oh, did you wonder why my blog is called pasta & potatoes? It is a link to my background, the Netherlands, a potato eating country (ever seen Van Gogh’s work ‘the potato eaters’?) and the pasta eating country that I now live in, Italy, which causes headaches every now and then but did contribute an amazing thing to this world… Food.