Jul 3, 2016 3 min read

NEW YORK – Debi Mazar and her brood spend at least a month in Tuscany each year, but if the “Younger” actress had her way, the region would be a far more permanent fixture in her life.

“If I didn’t have children in American schools, I would leave tomorrow,” the New Yorker says.

While the charms of the Italian region are obvious, it’s more personal for Mazar: It’s where she met her husband, chef Gabriele Corcos, the inspiration for the couple’s Brooklyn restaurant, Under the Tuscan Gun, and where they hope to open a culinary school and bed and breakfast.

She talked about cooking in a recent interview with the Associated Press.

AP: Do you like to use a lot of tech stuff in the kitchen?

Mazar: No, I don’t use any tech stuff in the kitchen. I know how to cook. But the difference is … I like to use tech stuff every place else. I have one good knife that I love. … I have a cutting board. I like to use my hands a lot. I also like to use cookbooks. I like to get inspired. … When I cook a recipe of Cuban Ropa Vieja, I feel like I’m going on vacation.

AP: “Extra Virgin” ran for six years. What’s next for you and your husband in front of the camera?

Mazar: We are in the middle of writing again, and we are about to go out and sell a new show. … We’re also trying to open up a bread and breakfast in Italy and a cooking school. … We have the property so we’re working on that, so we have a lot of irons in the fire. … We’re nurturing and just growing everything from the ground up. It’s very much the natural progression of our brand.

AP: How will the new cooking show be different?

Mazar: That I can’t tell you, because it’s not here yet, but it won’t be the same thing as before, and we’re still in the process of kind of figuring that out ourselves, but we have a couple of ideas. … I created the format for the Cooking Channel; it had never been done before, a docu-show. It wasn’t reality, it was completely scripted, completely created in the sense that you weren’t seeing my personal business. You were seeing parts of my life, but there were no fights, no meltdowns; the food was the star, not me.

AP: Did your daughters (Evelina, 14, and Giulia, 10) enjoy doing it?

Mazar: They were young when they started. I think it was really natural. … Giulia, she loves being on camera, the other one loves to be a food critic and taste.