Preparing Great Food: It's easier than you think!

This section is dedicated to how to prepare simple, yet tasty, nutritious and gratifying dishes easily, while spending little money, and using the ingredients that are available.

First of all, it is important to buy good, healthful ingredients when grocery shopping, as this would obviously make it easy to prepare good tasting, pleasing meals. In any case, with a little fantasy and culinary creativity one can find enough ingredients to put together a tasty repast for four to six people at any given time, in almost any US household.

I am building this site day by day, adding recipes as we prepare salads and pastas, soups and seafood entrees. This is an ongoing culinary research project, so I will be posting often, daily whenever possible, for at least one year.

How It Started

Loris Scagliarini,
WineCountry.IT, LLC President

A couple of years ago, after having gained some 20+ pounds little by little over time, I found I weighed 160 pounds. At 5 feet 5 inches, and having been on the lean side most of my life, this was too much, so I decided to turn the trend around and lose weight. But how was I going to do it?

At home in Italy and the US, we have always eaten tasty, nutritious, healthful food in moderate quantities. I met Brigit, my wife, 17 years ago, and the first time we went out for dinner she told me about her 80%-20% theory, that is, eat healthful food 80% of the time and enjoy yourself, indulging in whatever your crave for the remaining 20% of the time. We have lived according to this belief since.

I could have started exercising to burn the extra calories, as I usually spend from 8 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, and about six hours on Sundays, seated in front of computer screens. But unfortunately I did not then, nor do I have now, the option of changing my schedule for the foreseeable future.

So, I started skipping breakfast and drinking Yerba Mate instead and, after a while, I did start losing weight. In addition, I did not even gain back the extra pounds the few times we traveled to Italy to taste wine and foods, for business. In fact, despite the fact that when I am in Italy I actually eat more, I tend to move around much more thus burning the extra calories that I take in. On the other hand, when we travel to Italy Brigit has to be more careful, as she moves around less than she usually does while teaching English as a Second Language at Dominican University of San Rafael, California.

For some months now, I have started to eat breakfast again, though my weight still ranges from 138.5 to 142.5 pounds, or 62.8 to 64.5 kilos. (I monitor myself at least a couple of times a day, morning and evening.) That got me thinking.

Whenever we have people over, Brigit and I usually share the cooking and, without fail, our guests compliment us warmly and often ask us for the recipes. The fact is, that both Brigit and I rarely follow recipes, but manage somehow to assemble what we have available in the fridge into something from good to autrageous. This also got me thinking.

Finally, I noticed that we do not spend huge amounts of money in groceries, despite the fact that most of the time we, as well as our guests, tend to enjoy what we prepare and eat at home more than what we order out at restaurants. Please note that we live in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is well known for its quality cuisine. Here I have to highlight the fact that the only time that both Brigit and I truly looked forward to going out for dinner just for the pleasure of the food, rather than the pleasure of not having to do the dishes afterwards, was when we lived for a while in West Seattle. We loved most of the restaurants at Alki Beach, as well as the ones downtown, around the fish market. Definitely, The Seattle restaurant scene has no reason to envy the San Francisco Bay Area dining scene!

Reflecting on these three facts, some time ago I decided to keep track of what I eat, record my daily weight, write the recipes of what I/we prepare, take pictures of the food, and post most of it online.

The main focus of the project, of course, is on food or, to be more precise, on how to eat flavorful, abundant, nutritious, pleasing meals with little effort and money.

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