When I became a mom, something shifted in how I thought about the meals I was making. Recipes I'd made a hundred times, the ones I knew by heart and never wrote down, suddenly felt fragile. What if I forgot one? What if she never got to make them herself, or never knew where they came from?

So I started writing them down. Not just the ingredients and steps, but the memory attached to each one, what we were celebrating, what she said while we cooked, what went wrong and how we laughed about it anyway. What began as a journal for my daughter slowly became La Vita Bianca.

Every recipe here ends the same way: a small note For My Daughter's Journal, a memory, a moment, sometimes just a single line, like "you dipped three pieces of bread into this sauce before dinner was even served." My hope is that as you cook from these pages, you start collecting a few pages of your own.

Recipes for my daughter's journal. Inspiration for yours.