I grew up with authentic Italian food cooked by my mother Novella. Her name in Italian means story or tale. My friend started calling her The good tale (la buona Novella), after the many (MANY) dinners she hosted during my school years. Like my mom’s recipes, I’ve always been fairly traditional with my Italian cooking, until a couple of years ago, when a project at work inspired me to push my boundaries.

One of my projects involved building a service to help people manage type 2 diabetes. Nutrition is an important part of a healthy lifestyle when you have diabetes, especially one with low carbohydrates. To build empathy with our members I decided to experiment with a low carb diet myself. My idea was mainly to get a feel for time commitment and cost, to understand how such a diet could fit into someone’s life. Interestingly, it also let to some unexpected discoveries.

To answer my original questions, the cost of my grocery shopping did go up and the beginning was quite time consuming. Low carb flours (e.g., almond and hazelnut) are more expensive than traditional flours and I started replacing pasta and rice with vegetables (e.g., riced cauliflower or zucchini noodles). As for time commitment, exploring new dishes and making my own recipes more carb friendly took a good chunk of my weekends at the beginning (granted, I am a scientist by training and I have legitimate fun researching things). However, now that I have learned how to navigate the low-carb world my meal prep time is back to normal.

On a personal level, this dietary experiment let to two big and unexpected discoveries:

1. Changing my nutrition positively affected my whole day. I started sleeping better at night, which made me wake up in the morning feeling more rested and energized. This, in turn, gave me more motivation to exercise early in the morning. Also, I would normally feel sleepy after lunch and that doesn’t happen anymore. Overall, it felt like my whole day had gotten much better (and that’s why I decided to continue with a low carb nutrition to this day).

2. I LOVE COOKING! The kitchen is one of my happiest places. It’s the part of my life where I can experiment with things and, yet, life feels somewhat under control. I love cooking for my family and, pandemic-permitting, I love cooking for my friends.

Having family and friends with food allergies and sensitivities, I had to start navigating the realm of allergen-free foods. Quickly I realized that, while finding recipes online that are marketed as allergen free is relatively easy, digging deeper shows the contrary. Often, ingredient lists do not give specific information about the brands used (and related allergy info), or they link to brands that might contain allergens when the labels are read carefully.

After many nights and weekends spent researching the right ingredients for common food allergies, in December 2020 I decided to start this website to share my results, hoping that it will make the life of everyone out there with food allergies, sensitivities, and dietary restrictions a little easier.

While of course there are exceptions, my recipes are relatively quick, easy, and with few ingredients. I was always fortunate enough to have a full time job and the time I can spend cooking on weekdays is limited.

For any feedback on content and navigability, feel free to reach out at lacucinadellafra@gmail.com

I hope you’ll find my website helpful and enjoy my recipes!

❤️+ ☀️
Dalla Fra, con amore