Brook Nestor’s culinary apprenticeship is as Slow as it gets.  Starting in Italian home kitchens, it culminated thirty years later in a 6-month internship at Piccolo Lago Restaurant as the only journalist, non-food professional and woman on Chef Marco Sacco’s all-male staff. Her passion for preserving and promoting Italy’s food traditions and culture is the driving force of her professional and personal life.

When at home in California, she works as an interpreter for visiting chefs from Italy and as a consultant for recipe translation. Never passing up a chance to let food speak for itself, she conducts cooking classes in Italian for language students in her demonstration kitchen, the focal point of her home.

An invitation to lunch in Brook’s kitchen may include casoncelli (ravioli from Bergamo), home-made sausage flavored with wild fennel seeds and garlic (both harvested in her garden), a macedonia (fruit salad) made with frutti di bosco (wild…and tame…berries) and bits of her own candied blood orange peel and, if you’re lucky, vanilla ice cream from a local dairy drizzled with crema di limoncello (cream of lemon liqueur), a top secret recipe gleaned at great bartering cost from Silvestro Zanella (’Silver’ for his friends), the entremetier at Piccolo Lago.

In her spare time, she writes about Italian food and culture. Check out The Kitchenary, her bilingual dictionary of cooking terms and Italian food culture.