This shoot is embedded in my mind because it was our first day on location for the series. My first impression was how beautiful the Pacialeo house is. As I was walking up that gravelled drive I felt like I could have been walking up to a mountain house in Calabria. I arrived at this white washed villa with rickety window shutters, and when I walked in to Josephine and Vincenzo’s house, I could see all the hard work they had put into it, giving it these Roman columns and detailed plaster work on the ceilings. It was just a really beautiful house.

My favourite lady to cook with was Angela who taught me how to make the eggplant fritters. She was cool, such a nice lady. She’d just got a job cooking for the Bishop of Sydney and I remember thinking I can’t believe how lucky he is to have a cook like that. I think he’s lived in Rome for a few years and now he has Angela to cook for him. Lucky guy.

Josephine was great as well. Her pastasciutta is a dish that I’m going to cook for my own family and I’m going to make it part of my repertoire to pass down to my kids. Antonio the great uncle was great to hang out with. I think he’s about 87? He’s a little bit younger than my grandfather (who’s 95), but he reminded me of him and I felt really honoured to be able to hang with him for the day. He made me really welcome, and I felt like part of the family.

His nephews and Vincenzo’s two brothers – Joe and Tony – were the comedians of the family and kept the jokes going all day while we were bottling the tomatoes. They kept trying to get me involved in the sauce making and were amazed that I hadn’t got a single speck of sauce on my shirt all day. I told them it was because I was an expert sauce dodger from way back. This joking around went on for most of the day. Then in the last 20 minutes when we sat down to have dinner I dropped a big meatball on to my shirt and everyone burst out laughing. I had christened my shirt!

I’ve heard about the annual tomato sauce bottling days before but I’ve never been invited to experience it.  I was so impressed by how systematic it was and how each person in the family had their little job to do that seemed to have been their job for many years. And I loved the fact that they worked so well as a team. It was almost like a co-op, the way they buy the tomatoes from the market, cook them, bottle them, then share in the spoils.

There are 3 families that all pitch in and I think they take about 50 bottles of sauce home each at the end of the weekend. It seemed like a lot of sauce, but I suppose in an Italian family, one bottle a week isn’t that many. They told me that sometimes they have just enough sauce to see them through the year, and sometimes they end up with extra. They don’t seem to ever run out, there is always just enough until the next year.