Tobie Puttock's love affair with Italian food began when he was an 18-year-old working in Melbourne's acclaimed Caffé e Cucina. The passion flourished as he cooked his way across Europe, working 18-hour days in Italian-speaking kitchens, taking time out for snowboarding excursions and the odd very long lunch in a mountainside trattoria. This simple, edgy, and energetic cookbook is the result of that experience. With beautifully illustrated photographs it rewrites some of the rules and ignores others. However far it pushes the boundaries of tradition, it sticks closely to the guiding principle of great Italian cuisine: that cooking is, if nothing else, an act of love.