Life, Love & Recipes from My Tuscan Kitchen | September 2026 🇮🇹

I’m in full swing again. After a very hot August, when I spent much of the month working as a private chef, it feels so good to be teaching again.

As much as I love cooking, I’ve realized once again how different it feels when I do it together with other people. Instead of being alone in the kitchen, there are hands everywhere, questions, chatting and lots of laughing.

Cooking together simply has a different flavor.

Although we’re officially in fall, here on the Tuscan coast summer never disappears all at once.

We’re still going to the beach, and after the heat of July and August we’ve started riding our bikes with our friends again. At this time of year, the roads are quieter, the air is cooler and the countryside is beginning to change. Perfect for cycling.

And it certainly isn’t quiet in another sense! September is one of the busiest months in the countryside. You hear tractors everywhere and people calling to each other through the vineyards. Around Bolgheri, everyone is busy with the vendemmia.

At home, we’re already looking toward the next harvest too: our olives, which we’ll press to make our extra virgin olive oil. We’ll start picking on October 4, and if you happen to be nearby, you’re very welcome to come and help! There will be plenty of work for everyone.

My cooking classes start in the kitchen. We put on our red aprons and get our hands into the food: making gnocchi, mixing fresh pasta dough, rolling it through the pasta machine and turning it into long sheets of pasta. There’s always lots of chatting and laughing while we cook, and I love having all these voices in my kitchen!

Then we head out to the vegetable garden to see what’s in season and what we can bring back into the kitchen. At this time of year, there are still tomatoes, eggplants, and plenty of herbs, but the garden is slowly beginning to change.

And when the class is followed by dinner, we take everything we’ve made outside.

We set the table right in the middle of the vegetable garden. Arnaud works his magic with the lights. Our three big cypress trees stand tall against the night sky, the flowers become little patches of color in the darkness, and in the distance we can see the lights of Castagneto Carducci glowing on the hill.

And our ceiling is the sky.

It’s cooler now, but still warm enough to eat outside, and after the heat of summer these September evenings feel wonderful.

This month I also welcomed my dear friend Colleen, her husband Howard, and another Women’s Quest group. I’ve known Colleen for more than 25 years. She met my daughter Elsa when she was only three years old, so when Colleen comes back to Tuscany, it really does feel like seeing family again.

Our second Cooking Club class of the season was Handmade Cannelloni with Spinach & Ricotta, and once again, after the class, the pictures started arriving from kitchens everywhere.

We made everything together from scratch: the fresh pasta, the spinach and ricotta filling, and the béchamel. Then we rolled our cannelloni, covered them with sauce, and into the oven they went.

I always love seeing the finished dishes afterwards. We may be cooking together on Zoom from different parts of the world, but for an hour or two our kitchens are all connected, and then everyone sits down to their own homemade cannelloni.

Here are a few that came out of our kitchens this month.

I drop this letter into your inbox almost every month and tell you what has been happening in my kitchen and in our little corner of Tuscany.

But lately I’ve been thinking: I do a lot of talking!

I’m a curious person, and I’d really like to hear some of your stories too.

Maybe there’s a recipe in your family that has a special story behind it. Maybe you’ve cooked with me online or here in Tuscany and you remember how we first met. Or maybe you have a food tradition, a kitchen disaster, or simply something that always makes you think of home.

Leave a comment below or use the contact form and tell me.

You can send me a photo too. And if you’re happy for me to do so, I’d love to share some of your stories in future newsletters.

It might be nice to have a few more voices around our table instead of always mine.

Before I leave you this month, I have a very important Italian public service announcement:

Please salt your pasta water!

I made a short video to show you how I do it. Pasta absorbs some of the salted water while it cooks, which seasons it from the inside. Adding salt afterwards just isn’t the same.

I usually use coarse sea salt and start with about 10 grams of salt for every liter of water, using a little less when the sauce or other ingredients are particularly salty.

And as I always joke, if you don’t salt your pasta water, you may end up in pasta jail.

When I buy dried pasta, I also usually look for three things: durum wheat semolina, bronze-die extrusion, and 100% Italian wheat, when possible, organic.

Durum wheat gives dried pasta its characteristic firm texture and helps it stay al dente when cooked. Pasta made with soft wheat has a softer structure and can become mushy much more easily. Bronze dies create that slightly rough surface that helps the sauce cling to the pasta.

I choose Italian-grown wheat when I can because I like knowing where the wheat comes from and supporting the Italian agricultural chain behind one of the foods we eat almost every day. Also, in the EU, using glyphosate to dry crops before harvest is not permitted, which is another reason I feel good about choosing Italian-grown wheat.

​Watch my pasta water video​

So that’s all for now. I hope to hear from you!

Love from Tuscany,
Chicca