Obviously if you are visiting “The Art of Cookery” you are a fan of Italian food, and more specifically, Tuscan food. Moreover, methinks you like to cook and to eat, and want to cook and eat more. So how does one go about separating the wheat from the chafe when it comes to finding the recipes on the internet that are actually worth spending the time to try?

Fortunately or unfortunately there is an overabundance of recipes for Italian food on the internet. How can this be unfortunate? In the same way that an overabundance of anything can be, abundance does not necessarily correspond to quality. When you have a discriminating palate combined with limited time, you want to make the best use of the time you spend in the kitchen. You also don’t want to go to a lot of effort and then be disappointed with the results, especially if you have guests.

While Italy has had its own diaspora and you can find Italians and Italian food in just about every corner of the globe, you can also find poor imitations and renditions of Italian food in just about every corner of the globe. We will make an effort, in addition to having recipes here that are tried and tested, to find other websites that will provide true, authentic and tasty recipes for you to try.

The first suggestion is www.piattitoscani.it. This is a site for a company that sells Italian food online. The recipes are all authentic and those that I tried were GOOD. The Sausage and Beans, similar in flavor combination to the Tuscan Bean Soup, was fabulous and the Roast Pork was great as well. Since it was Vino Novello time we paired the Sausage and Beans with that and stuck with a Chianti Classico for the Roast Pork. The site includes recipes for all of the most standard Tuscan recipes and until you get to the ninth page of the site you don’t see that they are vendors. This, to me, speaks volumes about the recipes; they really appear to be a priority.

It does look as if they are still flushing out the site. So, further cooking, eating, wine pairing and reevaluating will happily need to be done.