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. Instead, it made me feel so much better from the start that I decided to stick to it.

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, hazelnut, lupin) 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.

The big and unexpected discovery was how changing my nutrition positively affected my whole day. I started sleeping better at night. This led to me waking up in the morning feeling more rested and energized which, in turn, gave me more motivation to exercise early in the morning. Also, I would normally feel sleepy after lunch, which would slow down my rhythm at work. Well, that doesn’t happen anymore! Overall, it felt like my whole day had gotten much better, and that’s way I decided to continue with a low carb nutrition to this day.

After finding myself sharing my mom’s recipes both in their original form and in their low carb version with friends over and over, I decided to put together this blog. I hope you’ll enjoy these flavors as much as I do:)