Italian summer days are too hot and beautiful to spend leaning over simmering pots. For this reason, Tuscan Resident cookery writer Lori de Mori and her fiance, one of Britain's best food photographers, Jason Lowe, have become fast-food experts. If you're not making pasta from scratch, Italian feasts can be thrown together in minutes. The key is in the quality of the ingredients available there.
Lori, who moved from LA to a farmhouse in the Tuscan hills in 1999, has done her fair share of complicated cooking, but she feels most comfortable with the Italian approach to entertaining.
'In America,' Lori explains, 'when people invite guests over, they have it planned way in advance. They are super-uptight, while, at the same time, they try to make the meal look carefree. In Italy when people come for tea and there's nothing in the refrigerator, you invent something, pull up a crate if there are no spare chairs and let the evening takes its course. Sharing food, rather than worrying over it, is integral to this culture.'
Lori's anxious American habits took a while to leave her. She found the ease with which her Italian friends pulled together a meal from nothing at once intimidating and inspiring. Her former life as a lawyer in LA had done nothing to prepare her for this lifestyle. In fact, it had done very little for her at all: 'I was a lawyer for three-and-a-half years and as soon as I started practising I realised I'd made a dreadful mistake. The last night I worked until six, then I went into labour, and never went back.'
On her first visit to Italy, aged 19, she fell in love with a Florentine restaurateur. They married a few years later, and he moved to LA and started a restaurant in Malibu. When their first child, Julian, was five months old, Lori received a call from her architect friend Andre. He described a beautiful decrepit farmhouse in the Tuscan hills that, he proposed, they should buy and renovate. Lori, who had fallen for the country, as well as the man, couldn't resist.
The farmhouse was redesigned by Andre, who restored all the original features - and, most importantly for Lori, a huge, open fireplace in the kitchen to cook on. Lori has the farmhouse, and Andre's home is carved out of a formidable converted stable in the grounds. They planted an organic vegetable garden and rescued the orchard.
Lori first stayed in the restored house for a few months. The next time it took her longer to leave, until she found herself staying for two years and deciding she couldn't return to live in LA. 'At some point you can't live in two places.' Lori says. 'It didn't mean I hated LA, but the Tuscan countryside was a much better environment in which to raise the kids.'
After a few years Lori separated from her husband. He stayed in Malibu while she continued her life in Italy with their two children: 'I never envisioned staying, especially staying without my Italian husband, who was originally my anchor.'
Lori was often invaded by a host of visiting friends from around the world, hungry for Tuscan fare. As the call to entertain grew, so her approach to entertaining began to soften and gain a note of Tuscan simplicity.
Today is typical. It's a warm June morning and, on her daily stroll through the local market, this evening's menu begins to take shape in Lori's mind. Dinner will be based around whatever looks most ripe and appealing on the stalls that day. The fresh white cannellini beans look dazzling piled up in the sun. They are in season and at their prime.
Lori and Jason, who met while working on a book together, are expecting a group of close friends: locals Simonetta and Marcello, Andre and his wife Bea, and Lori's son, Julian, who has brought three friends who help with the little preparation there is to do. That is, sliding the soft shells from a huge bowl of cannellini beans.
As the day's sunshine falls into an evening lit up by hundreds of fireies, Bea, who owns a vineyard, opens a bottle of her wine, Capezzana Vin Ruspo. It is served along with the antipasta, prosciutto e melone. Lori prefers the salty toscano prosciutto ham to the milder prosciutto di parma for this dish, which is served with insalata caprese (sliced tomatoes, mozzarella and basil). This course is followed by panzanella, a dish that, Lori explains, 'weds thrift with abundance', adding, 'this cuisine is based on frugality, but stingy it is not'.
The recipe uses local unsalted bread, which Lori describes as, 'having the ability to go rock hard without ever turning mouldy'. It's soaked in a mixture of wine and water, and simply squeezed and tossed with chopped tomatoes, cucumber, onion, basil and olive oil.
The only item that requires cooking inside is the cannellini beans. Luckily, their kitchen has large windows, and doors that lead onto the terrace, so whoever's cooking inside isn't out of the action. The beans are left to gently simmer with garlic, sage, olive oil and peppercorns while Jason attends to the main event.
In their neighbours' garden they have lit a contained bonfire on their industrial-sized barbecue and, as the embers mellow into a cracking glow, a pair of enormous steaks 'thick enough to sink your teeth into' are heaved onto the grill. Cooking outside is typical in Florence, and the dish, bistecca alla fiorentina, is a classic that requires little doing to it. Each steak is usually shared by two people, cut into strips and dressed with anything from trufe shavings to fresh rosemary. Tonight, Lori and Jason add handfuls of rocket and shaved Parmesan.
More of Bea's wine is opened, and the guests leisurely help themselves to second and third helpings. The evening slowly unfolds, without a hint of the anxiety that infected dinners in LA.
Lori may occasionally hanker after American potato chips and a strange onion dip she remembers from childhood, but nothing could persuade her to go back to her old life. 'My real feeling of living in Italy,' says Lori, 'is they've got it right. And, as far as food goes, they've got it brilliantly right.'
