trattoria len & ans

Every year our family rents a house somewhere and cooks for the whole group. This time it was Sicily: thirteen adults, three children, a wood-fired oven, a barbecue, and two cooks who had to agree on what was for dinner. Cookbooks assume four people and a kitchen you know. So I built the thing we actually needed.

It holds 114 Sicilian recipes, and every quantity scales to the group and then rounds to something you can really buy: not 1.4 kilos of aubergine but three kilos, because that’s how they come. The shopping list is grouped by the shop you walk into, from the fishmonger to the baker to the supermarket, and a test guarantees that nothing on it is out of season during the dates of the trip. A dish that needs swordfish says so, and tells you to take tuna instead.

The part I’m most pleased with is the fire plan. Tell it when you want to eat and it works backwards through the wood oven’s heat: ninety minutes to get up to pizza temperature, then the slow slide down through roasting heat to the residual warmth that bakes the dessert. Two cooks, two phones, one shared plan, synced through a house code so nobody needs an account. And a question button that knows which recipe you have open, for the things no recipe tells you, like how many aubergines three kilos actually is.

Built in two weeks alongside the trip itself, and used in a kitchen with fourteen people waiting, which is the only test that counts.