Sauced & Found 2.0

You may have noticed that Sauced & Found has a new website. Thanks to a team of designers far more technologically savvy than me (Half & Twice Studio in Madrid), the website is now a professional repository of pithy information rather than the ramshackle out post of solipsistic musing and mourning it once was. Obviously, all of this is a good thing. We have a color palette and a logo now! Wow – caspita!

This likely comes as more of a shock to me than anyone who would ever stumble upon this fair site. To think that just three short years when I started Sauced & Found, I was withering away (intellectually, not nutritionally I feel the need to point out) in Grenoble, France with nothing to do and more importantly, nobody with whom to chat.

At heart, I am really just a yenta with a daily axe to grind, and that is in many ways why I started Sauced & Found. Grenoble was nearly constantly grey and boring. I tried desperately there to create some semblance of a routine. Some facsimile of normalcy. But it all just felt like a failed experiment in mid-life ex-patriotism.

If I managed to dislodge myself from the futon that doubled as our bed before noon, I would go running at the Park Paul Mistral. As I ran round and round the track, I listened to old house music I had once liked when I was pesky bar fly at the Eighteenth Street Lounge in Washington.

Kitsuné was a favorite in those Grenoble exercise days. The catchy Mediterranean beats often caused me to alternately loath and love my decision to move overseas to Europe. One moment, I was a jet set Amalfi Coast bound Pucci clad young women on the back of a pastel Vespa. Next moment, I was a sad French housewife who wore imitation Crocs and watched daytime television. I was a regular Walter fucking Mitty in those Kitsuné days.

And not much has changed. I still have a secret fantasy life that alternates between delusions of grandeur and private moments of horror when I think that certainly I am fated to become the Miss Havisham of the Vomero. (Only problem is I wonder if I can still fit into my wedding dress??) Thankfully I no longer listen to Kitsuné while bopping around a track and contemplating how I can make my life fabulous again.

Over time the expatriate experience just becomes life and at least in my case, I no longer feel the need to prove anything to anyone, not least of which myself. For a variety of reasons, many of them flawed, I made the decision to leave my home country and live in Italy. And now I am here, and that is just life.

Fortunately, thanks to many of you who read this blog and frequent this site, Sauced & Found has grown. In many meaningful ways it has enriched that ‘just life’ far beyond what I envisioned when I created the site back in France in 2014.

We have hosted dinners up and down the Amalfi Coast. We have organized culinary tours and pizza nights. We have shown visitors how to preserve San Marzano tomatoes and make limoncello. We have eaten a lot of mozzarella and drank a lot of Falanghina.

In short, in the past year Sauced & Found transitioned from a private existential rabbit hole that proffered occasional culinary advice into a legitimate business with amazing clients. I have many of you who read this blog to thank for that. Not once would I have allowed myself to even dare imagine that I could do what I love and in equal parts love what I do. Fortunately many of you begged to differ. So now, I get to cook and write and yes, still ever so occasionally jump down self-made existential rabbit holes in order to publically contemplate why I ever moved to this god-forsaken country called ITALY.

In the meantime, all of this has been just the best of FUN. And in that spirit, I hope to continue sharing the fun with you. Now queue that Kitsuné track……