About me

 

My name is Lisa Casali and I live in Milan, in Italy. Cooking and the environment are quite literally my daily bread – they represent my two greatest interests as well as how I make a living! I devote myself every day to the environment (specifically, to the challenges we face regarding pollution) and it really was a spontaneous and natural evolution to combine this with my love of cooking, blending the two ingredients together, just as if I were creating a new dish.

And so it came to be that, roughly 7 years ago, I began experimenting in the kitchen. I was fed up with being a passive consumer and I wanted to know more about the products I brought into my home. I wanted to get rid of all the useless packaging and ‘marketing puff’ but, most of all, I asked myself: Is it really necessary to throw away so much? Are all those ‘bits and bobs’ that the recipe books tell us to throw away really inedible or just more difficult to prepare?

 I began trying out different things, as well as going around and chatting to nutrition experts, chefs and friends and – guess what? – I discovered that not only are traditional ‘food scraps’ edible, there is nothing to stop them being as precious as the parts we normally eat! It was then that I decided to dedicate a whole lot of energy into drilling down to the details and creating recipes that use….all the parts that the others tell us to throw away – and thus Ecocucina was born!

I don’t just mean the usual leftovers. I’m talking about food scraps, especially from vegetables, such as the outer leaves of artichokes, the stems of asparagus, as well as peels, pods, and cores – you name it!

I published 3 books about my philosophy and recipes with Gribaudo Editore. Unfortunately they are only in Italian but I am still looking for a foreign publisher.

My last book is “Ecocucina”, launched on june 2012.

I experiment every day new ways to reduce house hold food waste and the consumption of water and energy in the kitchen. The amount of the reduction depends on your habits and alimentation. In my case, mostly vegetarian alimentation, never use of food ready to eat I had a reduction of food waste about 25%. But this percentage is always increasing.

In this book you can find about 200 recipes and 14 menu for a really zero impact cuisine.

There are also 30 special recipes ideal as a gift for friends, an exemple is the Vegetable Stock Powder. This is one of my favorite recipes because the cost is zero, the taste is very good and is better than the industrial one.

Design Project: Leftloft

Photographer: Claudia Castaldi

Food Stylist: Roberta Deiana

Prop Stylist: Roberta Mantovani e Silvia Valassina

My second book is  “Cooking in the dishwasher”, published on 2011, a kind of operating manual to learn everything you have to know in order to cook in the dishwasher in a safe way and saving energy. The results are excellent because is a low temperature cooking (like in the high cuisine). Is important to close the  food in hermetically sealed jars or in vacuum plastic bags (specific for cooking). I counted 10 different benefits cooking in this way.

My first book is “Cooking with (almost) no environmental impact” dedicated to food scraps and the base method to use them in the best way saving money and reducing food wastes.

And so I continue to live my double, but symmetrical, life: by day, environmental risk expert and by night, eco-food blogger.

The further I go with this project, the more I test new ‘scraps’ and new ways of using them and I simply love sharing these recipes just as much as I love publishing the eco-recipes of whoever wants to contribute to this Laboratory.

Thanks for the contribution to this blog:

- Leftloft  (design project)

- Francesca Stignani (translation, editor)

 

To contact me, please write to info@ecocucina.org

To write to my press agency please write to ufficiostampa@exlibris.it