A tart, a heatwave, and a missing website

A few good things from a complicated summer in Tuscany

I first noticed that something strange had happened while searching for one of my recipes on Google.

During cooking classes, I often refer to classic Tuscan recipes and old favourites from my blog, and I have always found it quicker to search for them on Google than to navigate the archive directly. Then, one day, I could no longer find my recipes.

There might be a link to an Instagram post, or a pin on Pinterest, but my blog was nowhere to be seen.

Around the same time, I also realised that enquiries for cooking classes had slowed down noticeably, more than they usually do during the summer, when people are already on holiday and have not yet begun planning their activities for the following year.

Since I have been focusing mainly on this newsletter for the past five years, I was slow to notice that something had changed.

To cut a long story short—and spare you the full account of one of my meltdowns—we discovered that, since April, our blog, in both Italian and English, has effectively disappeared from Google, and therefore from almost every online search for recipes and cooking classes.

“Crawled - currently not indexed. These pages aren’t indexed or served on Google”. Any clues on how to solve it??

All the pages are still there: almost eighteen years of work, more than 600 tested recipes, thousands of photographs, and what has gradually become an online archive of my life. You can still access everything by typing www.julskitchen.com directly into your browser. But you need to know that it exists. You need to know what to look for. Otherwise, I have vanished into online oblivion (allow me to be a little dramatic here). Any clues on how to solve it??

It is every blogger’s nightmare, but, more importantly, it is also a small business catastrophe.

Our cooking classes are now much harder to find through Google. After almost eighteen years of publishing online, we often appeared organically on the first page of search results, without advertising or paying for visibility.

We are now trying to understand what happened and how to fix it. Should we fail to find a solution, we may have to build a new website from scratch, at least to promote our cooking classes.

I am hopeful that we will solve it, but, at the back of my mind, I am also slightly panicking at the thought that we might have a difficult year ahead.

We have always relied primarily on the blog to promote our cooking classes; only a small proportion of our bookings comes through tour operators and travel agencies. Most guests have found us independently, often after reading a recipe or following the blog for years (and I love nothing more than building a relationship with them via email before meeting in person).

The food we cook during our cooking classes

Come September, we will announce our new calendar of classes for 2027, which gives us about a month to solve this puzzle. In the meantime, may I ask for your help?

Please share our cooking classes with anyone planning a trip to Tuscany this autumn—we still have a few places available—and, even more importantly, with anyone who might be visiting next year. For the moment, word of mouth may be the best search engine we have.

…and one last thing, if you are dreaming of Tuscany. We partnered with The Genuine Experience to design a seven-day experience in Tuscany (April 6-12, 2027): expect market mornings, hands-on cooking, Tuscan hill towns, and slow days spent between countryside, coast, and the Italian table. Learn more about our Tuscany at the Table experience here.

That was the catastrophic note on which we closed out July, while making our way through the fourth heatwave since the beginning of summer.

This is what summer in Italy looks like these days: scorching days, sticky, sweaty and sleepless nights, and mosquitoes. The heat leaves me constantly exhausted, and I hate turning into the sort of boring curmudgeon who checks the weather app every time she picks up her phone, desperately searching for the promise of a storm (preferably not a catastrophic one) or even a slightly cooler night.

What unsettles me most is knowing that this is not an exception, but increasingly our new reality. So I will keep planting fruit trees, eating a more vegetable-forward diet, and doing whatever small, imperfect things are within my reach.

My original plan was to finally share the recipe for the green bean and ricotta tart that I promised you two weeks ago. But after beginning this newsletter on a rather anxious note–sorry–, I felt we could all use a change of mood.

So, before getting to the recipe, I gathered together a few good things, favourites, and recent discoveries that are making this summer more enjoyable.

Star gazing at night

School is out, and summer camp follows a more flexible schedule. So every night, after dinner, we spend half an hour in the garden, stretched out on faded blue deck chairs with our faces turned towards the sky, searching for planets and constellations. One evening, we even watched the ISS pass directly above us as we talked with Livia about space and astronauts. Feeling so small, and so full of wonder beneath an infinite sky, helps put everyday worries back into perspective.

My zinnias

Even though I thought I had chosen the wrong flowers for the bed in front of the studio, I have been rewarded with an abundant, colourful display of zinnias and several other plants I honestly cannot identify. A note for next year: lavender and helichrysum on the right, where the afternoon sun beats down relentlessly, and generous handfuls of zinnia seeds on the left, sheltered by the shade of a holly tree.

Summer vegetables (obviously)

I have to mention summer vegetables once again. Especially the white eggplants, with very few seeds, sweet and meltingly tender when roasted; the sweetest date tomatoes, which I usually cook down in a pan with garlic and a handful of fresh basil leaves until they become a chunky sauce for pasta, for sautéing Swiss chard, for poaching an egg in, or simply for eating by the spoonful.

Then there are silky roasted red peppers with a faint smoky aftertaste, often finely chopped and spooned onto a slice of bread with mayonnaise, following my nonna’s recipe; and green beans, slowly cooked with onions and tomatoes, as in the recipe on page 51 of Vegetables the Italian Way.

Summer vegetables are abundant and more affordable now. They bring freshness, nourishment and much-needed hydration to the table, giving us exactly what we need.

A day at the beach

We packed the car as though we were leaving for a quiet month-long holiday by the sea, when in fact we were only heading to Carbonifera, a beach near Follonica, about an hour and a half from home.

I had always assumed I was not cut out for day trips to the beach. The sand, the heat, the logistics. Where would we eat? Wouldn’t the early afternoon be unbearably hot? And yet, throughout the day, I kept hearing myself say: I’m having such a good time. I love it here.

There was a cool, shady pine grove, a large car park close to the shore, a campsite café just a few steps away, and a quiet stretch of free beach with crystal-clear water. Add a packed lunch waiting in the cooler (with that green bean and ricotta tart!), and it all made for a wonderfully easy, relaxing day. There will definitely be more day trips to the beach during these last five weeks of Livia’s summer holidays, before school starts again in mid-September.

Old-fashioned ceramic bowls

While clearing out my nonna’s house before giving it a fresh coat of paint and renovating her apartment for next season, I went through all her kitchen tools and possessions. Alongside Bavarian dessert plates, Chinese teacups, and a Japanese serving platter (I am still wondering how they all found their way into this Tuscan country house), I found a pair of chipped ceramic bowls, their colours softened slightly with age.

They are reliable old workhorses, and I will be bringing them into my own kitchen to serve pasta and big salads. They must be at least fifty years old and are humble, everyday pieces, but they have a tactile quality that makes them deeply appealing, the kind of bowls that make even tossing a salad feel pleasurable.

And, provided we manage to solve our website problems, we will soon begin sharing more about this small, cosy apartment too, which we are restoring in time for next season.

And now, as promised, here is the recipe I have been testing for the past three weeks: something halfway between a savoury tart and a flan, made with green beans, ricotta, and sun-dried tomatoes.

It is perfect for packing for a day trip to the beach, or for baking in advance and leaving at home for your return in the evening, with sand between your toes and showers still to be taken by the whole family. Reheat it briefly, slice a tomato, and dinner is ready.

Paid subscribers can find the full recipe below, along with a downloadable PDF to save, print, and keep in the kitchen.