home cooking.

Some of our best eating in Sardinia was at home. This makes a certain bit of sense: four accomplished cooks living on a farm surrounded by the best raw materials imaginable, and you can hardly go wrong can you.

Unfortunately for you all, our home-cooked meals were documented by some of the most stomach-wrenchingly ugly food photography I have ever seen. I seem to remember someone emitting a blood-curdling scream of horror when this picture of Valentina's beautiful and delicious spaghetti alla vongole e cozze flashed on the screen:

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It all boils down to lighting. It was hot there, so the windows were open. There were huge flying insects and rodents outside, so the kitchen lights were off. Most nights we ate dinner at around 10pm, out on the patio with very little light.

The best we could hope for in terms of picture quality seemed to be "moderately appealing but uninformative", as in the top photo above. It doesn't look revolting, but you'd have no idea that you were looking at two roasted chickens with rosemary and myrtle; roasted red and yellow bell peppers in agrodolce; a nectarine and basil salad with basil from Remo's garden, and a cold pasta salad of trofie with oil-packed tuna, salt-preserved capers, and wind-dried tomatoes.

When we tried turning the kitchen light on, things were not any better:

This toxic-looking sludge is actually my extremely good version of mussels in an orange-chile broth. Imagine it with blood oranges and myrtle-smoked pancetta affumicata. Now look at the picture. Not good.

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