These days it’s often hard to know what exactly we’re eating, what with genetically modified crops, dangerous pesticides, and long wasteful shipping around the world. Keep things simple, help out the world and do your body a favor by eating local healthy foods that are easy to prepare! Here you can find some of the food items that I make regularly, both my own recipes as well as others that I’ve found from other sources. Yum yum!
Sewing is a super useful skill to have, but not only for making clothes or other fabric items. It can be used for other parts of life, for example gardening, because a very simple sewing technique can be incredibly useful for preserving your extra home-grown …
As an American expat living in Italy, I miss out all the specifically American holidays. I’ve been either vegetarian or nearly so for years, so missing out on Thanksgiving turkey doesn’t bother me. But pumpkin pie was another story! It’s usually impossible to find canned …
It’s cold and dark, rainy and snowy, stormy and windy. It’s winter, folks, which means that we all need some serious comfort food. And that means: hot soup. So today I’m sharing with you my all-time, most-loved winter comfort food that everyone- and I mean …
Everyone knows and loves eating fragrant basil pesto in the summer (and you can find my foolproof recipe for it here), but today I want to show you a variation on this classic recipe that my entire family LOVES eating: zucchini mint pesto.
We usually put it in pasta, but we also use it frequently on bruschette, crusty and crunchy grilled bread slices with flavorful toppings. My daughter loves it so much that she eats bowls of it plain with a spoon!
Do you have some garden-fresh zucchini that you want to try this recipe with? Well, let’s get started!
I live in southern Italy, aka the capital of Basil-land. Nearly every home has at least one basil plant and those plants can easily grow into thick masses of fragrant green leaves. I am no exception to the rule. Every year I have two or three pots with forests of basil and over the years I have come up with my own foolproof basil pesto recipe!
If you follow my tips on how to grow a flourishing basil plant, you too will soon have lots of this herb to use in all sorts of ways. And sooner or later, you will want to make pesto, one of the most delicious sauces ever created. It’s one of the few healthy green things that kids almost unanimously like to eat.
So I’ve decided not only to share my pesto recipe, but also to share 15 absolutely delicious ways you can use it for meals that the entire family will love!
Ready to get picking, mixing and cooking? Let’s start!
As you know, Easter was this past weekend. And, if you have kids (or perhaps even if you don’t), you probably have ridiculous amounts of chocolate sitting around in your kitchen. And dining room. And living room. Hopefully not in your bathroom.
And if you’re in the northern hemisphere, it will start getting pretty warm soon, meaning all that excess chocolate will start getting melty and gross. So how do you use up leftover Easter chocolate without getting a stomachche? One good way is to make one of my family’s favorite things with some extra chocolatey goodness: banana bread!
Oh, we LOVE banana bread! We’re a family of swimmers, so we try to eat a lot of bananas to avoid leg cramps. However we inevitably end up every so often with some pretty yucky-looking brown bananas that nobody wants to eat. When I have just one mushy banana, I mash it into pancakes (find my pancake in a jar recipe here). When I have two mushy bananas, I make a double recipe of these two-ingredient pancakes (which are considerably different from classic pancakes, but a very fast and interesting alternative every so often). And when I have three mushy bananas, I make banana bread.
And when we have lots of extra Easter chocolate hanging around (thanks to overly-generous friends and family), I just add some chocolate in to the mix! Super easy and also a great way to involve kids in baking! How? I’ll show you in a minute!
But first, let me show you some mouthwatering pictures of delicious banana bread with bits of melty chocolate and zings of tangy citrus!
I might have to go get myself another slice right now!
So, want to find out how to use up leftover Easter chocolate for this super easy and yummy recipe? Let’s get started!
Christmas is really close at hand, but let’s face it: most of us need last minute gifts throughout the year. So today I’m going to show you one of my absolute favorites which everyone loves getting: homemade pancake mix in a jar! Let me give …
And what else? I’ve been drinking loads and loads of homemade lemonade.
We’re lucky enough to live in an area where lemons grow abundantly, so we have no shortage of organic local lemons. And, because vitamin C helps the body absorb iron, I’ve been ingesting lemon in every possible way to help my body in its very slow recovery from the extreme blood loss that led to a 4-night hospital stay last month. So besides squeezing lemon juice on every vegetable known to man, I’ve been drinking glass after glass of delicious homemade lemonade!
And besides its health benefits, how incredibly refreshing lemonade is on hot, humid summer days! You know, those days when you can barely move because of the suffocating heat? And I’ve also come up with a recipe without sugar so it’s a 100% guilt-free pleasure for the whole family!
I make up two or three batches of lemonade at a time so that we’re sure to always have plenty of it in the fridge. And it’s perfect for offering to guests or bringing to an outdoor summer party! Remember, fellow US peeps, July 4th is coming up, and this stuff is perfect for your holiday cookout!
So, are you ready to find out the secret to making this incredibly healthy, delicious and refreshing summer drink? Read on for the Cucicucicoo sugar-free lemonade recipe!
When I was little, I was super thin, and as a young adult, I could eat anything and never gain weight. But not all of my pregnancy weight went away on its own, and I am now 8.5 kg (18 lbs) heavier than my ideal weight. Sure, it’s not the end of the world, but I don’t feel good and so I’ve decided to do something about it.
It’s not that I eat badly, but I do eat too much. I love eating. I love tasting flavors and combining ingredients. I don’t eat any meat and I love vegetables, and absolutely adore leafy greens.
We also get a lot of stinging nettle weeds where I live in southern Italy and my balcony garden gets totally overrun by it. I’d always considered it a huge inconvenience… until I realized that those weeds were like my own personal crop of free organic leafy greens.
Did you know that stinging nettle is super healthy, and tasty too? I wrote a couple of years ago about how to harvest and cook stinging nettle in soups and stews, and that’s still my favorite way to eat it, but I recently started wondering how I could get all the healthy goodness of nettle without having to cook it. And what I came up with was this: homemade nettle powder!
Your first instinct might be to turn up your nose at the idea of eating your weeds, but trust me, if you try nettle, you’ll start being happy to see weeds in your garden! Read on to learn how!
I’m not always a big fan of cooking, at least not the regular day-to-day cooking necessary for survival. I like to cook special things when I actually want to, not just because my stomach’s growling. And when I do cook, I usually can’t get too elaborate, otherwise the other people in our home won’t eat it. This is why I’m sort of obsessed with preparing flavored salts and powders that I can add to the food in my plate without bothering anyone else. (Click on the links to read my posts about garlic salt, chili pepper powder, lemon-rosemary salt, dried citrus powder, and lemon salt from salt-preserved lemons.)
I’d always used minced fresh cloves of garlic in my powder recipes with garlic, but the powder sometimes starts to clump together because of the dampness in the garlic. I realized that I should dry out the garlic, too, but I wasn’t so sure of how it would turn out. Then it finally occurred to me that that’s what the garlic powder that you buy in the supermarket is: dried and pulverized garlic.
When I gave it a go, the result was amazing, and much more flavorful than industrial garlic powder! And it’s ridiculously easy, so now I’m hooked! Want to find out how to make homemade garlic powder? Then just keep on reading!
In the past, I’ve always reused the extra salt left over after we’d finished all the lemons in a jar to salt the water we cook pasta and rice in. But at one point it occurred to me that it was a shame to waste the amazing lemon scent absorbed by the salt.
Last week, as part of the Beat the summer heat series, I started talking about one of our favorite – and most delicious – ways to cool off during the summer: making homemade popsicles! The wonderful thing is that you can make them just as …
These are one of our absolute favorite things to do in the summer because you can get super creative with what you make them with, even mixing up ingredients for really unique flavors and textures. And the great thing is that, unlike store-bought popsicles, which are filled with artificial colors and flavors, not to mention way too much sugar, you know exactly what goes inside your pops, so they can be just as healthy as you want!
If you have any experience with homemade popsicles, you are probably wondering what I can fill a whole blog post about about them. Well, I actually am going to fill up TWO whole blog posts with the different ways we make popsicles! In this first one, I’m going to show you different types of popsicle molds, including a non-plastic version, and give you some ideas on popsicle ingredients. In the next post, I’ll show three more fancy varieties that I like to make. So, want to make some healthy DIY popsicles? Let’s get started!
Don’t you just hate it when your bread gets stale long before you’ve had time to finish the loaf? Luckily there are ways to use stale bread, such as making meatballs or meatloaf, or the classic Tuscan bread salad panzanella. Only thing is, I don’t eat meat and I tend to be a little too lazy to prepare panzanella, so we always end up with piles of old bread. But luckily, there’s a way to use stale bread that can be stored for a pretty long time: bread crumbs!
Until a few years ago, I, like a lot of people, had never really considered how bread crumbs are made. All I knew is that you buy them in little bags in the supermarket. But every once in a while I’d hear about something nasty that someone would find in industrial bread crumbs or some strange ingredient added to them. Really, though, what are bread crumbs if not… crumbs… of bread? I discovered that you can grind up stale bread in a blender to make the stuff. In my experience, this method tends to make very fine, powdery bread crumbs and is a bit rough on blenders, too. Then my father-in-law revealed how he made his amazing chunkier bread crumbs: with an old-fashioned iron meat grinder!
Want to find out how to make homemade bread crumbs? Then read on!
Something I love about living in a different country, language and culture is knowing a food or animal in my second language, years later finally looking it up in the dictionary to find out what to call it in my native language, and discovering that it’s a word I’ve always known without actually knowing what it was. So it made me laugh out loud when I eventually discovered that the Italian fico d’india (Indian fig), the fruit growing from the Opuntia cactus, is none other than a prickly pear! There are certainly no prickly pears in northeastern United States, where I lived until moving to southern Italy, so my knowledge of this fruit was limited to Baloo’s “Bare Necessities” in The Jungle Book. (The same thing has happened to me with mulberries, persimmons and turtledoves, among other things.)
Now, a prickly pear at first glance doesn’t actually look that prickly, in that there aren’t big thorns on it, or anything, and the cactus it grows from isn’t particularly dense in thorns either. The skin of the fruit, however, is covered in tiny needles. They’re so thin that you don’t even feel them when they enter your skin. The problem is that they sting like crazy when you touch that area of the skin and are nearly impossible to find and pick out. They are also invisible if they fall onto the floor, counter or dish towel, so you can uknowingly get stuck even if you’re nowhere near a prickly pear. For this reason, my husband despises them. But I just can’t get enough of these things. I love the taste, the crunchy seeds, the thirst-quenching juice… And they grow all over the place where I live, so I can generally get loads of them for free!
Luckily last year my father-in-law taught me how to peel prickly pears so that you don’t get stuck at all with those awful little needles and they get disposed of properly. So now, when prickly pear season rolls around at the end of August, I’m all ready for it! Would you like to learn how to enjoy this fruit without the pain of the prickles? Well then, read on!
Living in Southern Italy, I have access to lemons. A LOT of lemons. And luckily most of them are organic, so I make sure to take advantage of the fragrant peels. One of the things I love to do with them is to dry them …
On Sunday a friend took us on a quick trip to her family’s olive grove to go foraging for St. John’s Wort. (You might have seen the picture on Instagram.) She dries this wild flower for making herbal infusions to drink and for making infused …
I know we here in the northern hemisphere are thrilled that winter is on its way out, but before it’s completely gone, let’s use the last of this season’s lemons. Last month I wrote about how to make salt-preserved lemons, which is a great way …
It’s citrus season for those of us living in southern Italy. While it’s great to get loads of organic lemons, oranges, mandarin oranges, clementines, grapefruit and citron from our tree-owning friends, we tend to get so many that we don’t know what to do with …
Living in a place with a different language than the one you grew up with can be funny. I’d heard of the fruit quince before, but never knew what it was. In Italy I heard of the fruit mela cotogna (mela means apple), then finally …
Hey! I'm Lisa! Welcome to Cucicucicoo, where you can find the best sewing and crafting tutorials, patterns and all sorts of other FREE creative resources! Click "Blog" above for tutorials that'll bring out the best creativity in you, or "Shop" for eco-friendly sewing patterns!
