How about cooking a whole Mother’s Day lunch with Italian food? If your mum loves Italian food as much as we do, it will be an easy hit! This menu is also suitable for vegetarians with small replacements.

Start with easy antipasti ideas, including salami on an antipasti board. Among our favourite primi dishes, we have chosen a tasty and rich pasta alla norma. Italian dishes for main course include Italian sausages with polenta, roasted chicken and meatballs, but we have opted for gourmet platter of cheese. And to respect Italian traditions, our Mother’s Day menu finishes with a perfect Italian pairing: fab Italian coffee with Amaretto biscuits.

Antipasti

• Salsiccias salami - two types of cured pork sausage, with different flavourings and spices. Made on a small farm in Matera, Southern Italy (location is near the ’instep’ of the ‘boot’) from only his pork meat by an artisan farmer.
• Crostino with Italian Black Truffle sauce - Sourdough crackers with a sauce made from black truffles (a highly prized wild fungus found buried in the ground, in certain types of woodlands of central Italy) and porcini mushrooms.
• Tarallini - a ring shaped Italian snack foods, common all over the southern half of the Italian Peninsula. Similar to bagels, they are briefly boiled before being baked, which gives them a very interesting texture and contain white wine in the dough.
• Olives - Sicilian marinated olives, grown on the slopes of Mount Etna in Sicily

Main

Pasta

• Pasta alla norma – this is a typical Sicilian pasta dish with deep fried aubergines and tomato sauce, usually combined with rigatoni or penne. It’s excellent with grated smoked ricotta on the top.

Italian cheeses

• Parmigiano Reggiano with Balsamic Vinegar. A 36 month matured Parmesan from the Emilia Romagna region. Italy’s most famous hard cheese is commonly known in Britain but maybe you don’t know that in Italy it is eaten by the sliver with a few drops of the traditional 3 year matured syrupy Balsamic Vinegar to bring out the full flavour and transported to sublime new heights. Wheels of Parmigiano are highly valued in Italy, frequently held safe in large storage facilities and traded in much the same way as fine wines.
• Pecorino - A medium mature sheep cheese produced using Emilian sheep milk picked from April to June, when milk is at its best. It has an intense and tasty flavour.
• Truffle cheese - This very special cheese is flecked with pieces of shaved summer truffle giving it an earthy, heady flavour and aroma. Enjoy it as part of a cheeseboard dish.

Dessert

• Italian coffee and Amaretti Morbidi biscuits. You may be familiar with Amaretti biscuits of the hard variety, these are different. They are morbidi - meaning “soft” in Italian. And these almond-and-egg-white cookies are just that: soft. Nothing like the crunchy little cookies we typically think of as amaretti. Most commonly associated with the Tuscany region of Italy. Our Italian coffee is rich, smooth and rounded. Produced near Venice, where the coffee rituals are meant to be born in the 16th century, it’s a premium coffee branded Manuel Caffè.