Eat With Cecilia and Michele

We recently met Cecilia and Michele, two people passionate about sharing their love of food. So what is it like to eat with them?

They’ve opened up their kitchen door and are sharing their EatWith inspiration and a few culinary secrets. Prepare to feel hungry.

What inspired you to join EatWith and what can your guests expect?

We have always had a passion for food and for sharing it with other people. We like to search for the right ingredients and then experiment with new ways of cooking them.

At the same time we are internet professionals and strong supporters of the impact that social media and technology has brought in our lives.

EatWith simply put these two worlds together and allows us to challenge ourselves in a new culinary adventure.

We strive to offer our guests an honest dinner made of fresh, organic, unique ingredients we have selected especially for them, cooked with recipes that combine our Italian background with our wish to experiment and be influenced by other cultures.

Our specialty is fish. We love every kind of fruit that the sea offers and the infinite combinations you can create relatively easily.

What inspired us about EatWith is also the social element associated with the fact of hosting strangers at our table: we enjoy sharing these experiences and stories with other people.

As a Dutch friend once told me, “You Italians are the only ones that while having a meal, you are talking already about the next one!”

How have your Italian roots influenced your cooking?

The Italian kitchen is ultimately made of very simple ingredients prepared in what only look like easy recipes. This is our starting point and our belief.

It can also be very different from region to region.

Coming from different areas, and then living in Florence and Milan, put us in contact with lots of different people and food cultures.

That was the starting point of our personal research: trying to cook something we have not tasted before, reading old recipe books from granny’s bookshelf, using the internet as a source of ideas, discovering new tastes on our trips… all without ever forgetting the focaccia or the pesto from Genoa or the special lentils Michele’s grandma cultivates (a unique variety that grows only in Conca Casale and a few other places).

We have always done it for ourselves, as our hobby, trying to make every dinner something special – a new experience. And as every experiment you have to fail sometimes in order to learn.

From who or where do you like to buy your ingredients?

We love markets! Compatibly with our full time jobs we visit all the main markets in Amsterdam: Noordermarkt, Dappermarkt, Albert Cuypmarkt, the Pure Market…

There we search for fresh, local, organic, and in-season ingredients. We look at the eye of the fish, smell the melon, and use all of granny’s tips on how to make sure what we are buying is going to taste great as well.

There are ingredients you cannot buy though: our parents regularly ship boxes from Italy full of homemade tomato sauce (from home-cultivated tomatoes), jams, and more precious than everything else: their olive oil!

Both our families produce their own olive oil for their own consumption and we (and our guests) luckily benefit from their hard work.

If you had only 10 Euros to spend on food, where in the world would you spend it and on what?

That is easy: Côte d’Azur and oysters.

What is your favourite comfort food and when are you most likely to eat it?

We will have to adhere to the cliché here: being Italian, our comfort food is PASTA. Easy to cook and even if your kitchen is empty you can manage to prepare a nice sauce to combine with it. You can create a delicious meal in 10 minutes like spaghetti aglio, olio e peperoncino, or pasta al pomodoro e basilico.

And when the fridge is full you can be seriously creative!

In other words, there are thousands of possibilities and it is the first thing we cook when we come back from any long trip.

  Amsterdam, Cecilia and Michele, cooking, EatWith, Food, Italy, markets, pasta