CELEBRATE VALENTINE’S DAY ITALIAN STYLE!

My name is Morella a half Calabrean half Venezuelan living in the UK for the last 12 years.

Since I’ve been living here I always felt the need to cook really good Calabrean dishes so it reminds me of being at home.   Since then I’ve been searching in supermarkets, delis and specialised shops for truly Italian or Calabrean ingredients as those found at home, but, the hard search has never resulted in positive outcomes and only finding low quality, massive produced and what could we call lookalike Italian ingredients produced by non Italian producers or Italian industries.  Being sadden about the inability to find proper Italian ingredients I decided to create The Taste of Calabria so I could bring to the UK the true taste of Italian food, and as we say in our slogan “Bringing the South of Italy to your table….”

I know I’m not the only person in the country who feels the diminishing quality of Italian food, and there are those who will agree that the food available here never taste the same as the one eaten in Italy am I right? Well don’t worry if you think the same way you’re not crazy or had a negative effect from the overdose of sun you had or the few glasses of wine you sipped.  The reason for this is that great part of the sort called Italian food found in this country is industrially made! Meaning food factory produced which contain additives, regulators, flavourings, preservatives, etc so they provide a very long shelf life, are cheap to produce and ship over leaving producers with a very large mark up on the products.   Fortunately this is not the food that we Italians eat, more so in the South of Italy where anything containing other than the pure ingredients is completely rejected, making the difference in taste.

In Calabria we proud ourselves to only cook with the pure good quality ingredients continuously  prepare our dishes as done by our grandmothers and grand grandmothers so traditions are never lost.   For this reason our dishes, produce and products such as cured meats, cheeses, olive oils, spices, herbs, pastas, etc are considered as one of the bests in Italy.   Of course not leaving out our traditional peperoncino, which is one of the main cultural and culinary traditions of Calabria, taking us to be the chilli capital of Europe.

For all of these reason I decided to get together with my local small producers and bring our traditional foods to you, so you can not only remember that fantastic holiday you had in Italy, but also eat, taste, and enjoy our true traditions, flavours and culture in a healthy and natural way as its meant to be and as done by us.