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(From Christina: It’s no secret that I have great admiration for Arnold Schwarzenegger and that I train to his amazing app four days each week (I am obsessed with it). I read his daily newsletter for information on nutrition and fitness and I admire his philanthropy. I read this piece by him and it hit…

I think a lot about suffering these days, as I am sure many of us do. I read news and see article after article about conflict, war, loss, grief, anger, rage and intense pain. And then I read articles about people standing up and showing the best of humanity. Often around food. People delivering meals…

I seem to think a lot about compassion these days. Perhaps it’s the desperate need for empathy that I see all around me. Perhaps it’s the apparent loss of it by so many who see kindness as a weakness, not a virtue. We see cruelty each and every day in so many ways and yet, we…

I’m in my beloved Italy as I write this, working with yet another spectacular group of happy tourists looking to immerse themselves in their own personal La Dolce Vita. When I am here, even in high season, throngs of tourists filling the streets, I feel that I operate at my best, which got me to…

Food delights us in every way. The taste is central to the enjoyment, but let’s not forget the enticing aromas, the texture of various foods in your mouth, the sexy sizzle of ingredients cooking in hot oil, or the magnificent colors of Mother Nature when we see the perfectly cooked vegetables on a plate. Eating…

People say that no one will contribute to or invest in a television show. People say that it’s a vanity project and you can’t expect people to contribute their hard-earned dollars to my ego. The truth is that those statements couldn’t be further from the truth. We are all worried for the future; for our…

There’s a lot of talk about self-care these days and here’s how I see it. There is only one you in this world, so make sure you take care of yourself! With all of the craziness going on around us right now I cannot stress the importance of self-care enough. What is self-care though? It…

My Italian grandfather use to say that it takes your whole life to appreciate doing things simply. That’s true of so many things in our world but it’s absolutely true of cooking, where an efficiency of preparation, ingredients and technique comes only after hours and years spent doing the same tasks in the kitchen over…

My family heritage is half Irish and half Southern Italian; Neapolitan to be exact; from Castellamare di Stabia to be precise. My Irish side has its…quirks, but nothing…and I mean nothing, beats the Italian superstitions that came from my mother’s side of the family. I was just in Italy working for two glorious months, from…

As I write this, my time in the gorgeous country of Italy is winding down. I have been here, working and playing for nearly two months. I wanted to share some of my adventures with you. We started in Rome with a few days off after filming our 2023 season in the US and before…

We work harder now to find beauty, pleasure and even satisfaction in food, cooking and in life in general. I am tired of hearing about pandemics, past, present and what might come; Russia is still actively decimating its neighbor Ukraine while the world watches the heartbreak, suffering and literal murder in real time. We see…

During the global pandemic, I couldn’t imagine life getting more challenging or for there to be more misery in the world. Loss of life at epic proportions with grief to match was as tough as it could get. I was wrong. As long as there is evil in people’s hearts, things can always get worse…