Cooking My Way Through Sicily's Autumn

I collect cookbooks. Hoard them, really. The ones that earn a permanent spot in my kitchen aren't just the ones with good recipes — they're the ones that tell a beautiful story, that carry a true sense of place. Somewhere between the onions and the olive oil, you end up connected to someone in a kitchen thousands of miles away.

This is one of those books. Coming Home to Sicily, by Fabrizia Lanza — her mother's estate, Case Vecchie, and every season written the way she actually lived it. This fall, I'm cooking my way through the entire Fall chapter. Thirty-ish recipes, one at a time, September through early November.

In a lot of ways, Sicily's countryside reminds me of my own rural living here in Oregon's Willamette Valley. "Coming home" is just that, wherever you are — the place where stories get woven in and hearts stay full. We remember.

The chapter opens in September with the grape harvest and the making of vino cotto. It's the same story here — the valley and the vineyards around me are in the middle of their own harvest right now. I have plans to visit my family's old farmstead and pick grapes to make my own vino cotto. Which had me down a research hole: how do you actually make vino cotto? Could bottled pinot noir work instead of pressing my own grapes? It's not the same thing, obviously. But it might be fun to find out.

That's the shape of this series — not a polished, staged version of Sicily, but the real process: cooking recipes that aren't mine, in a kitchen that isn't Fabrizia's, figuring out where my own countryside and hers actually meet.

Follow along. I'll post the wins, the substitutions, and everything I learn along the way.

This post kicks off a season-long series cooking through the Fall chapter of Fabrizia Lanza's Coming Home to Sicily — new posts through early November.