Cibo ~ o, lezione di cucina ~

So seeing as I've been here for ten weeks now, eating nothing but
Italian food, usually homemade, I feel pretty safe publishing my
analysis of Italian Italian food (to be more precise, Roman Italian
food, since food varies by region as well) as compared to ameican
Italian food. This isn't to say that American Italian food is BAD,
just that it's definitely different. And I'll probably never be able
to eat at the olive garden again (except the breadsticks. Those are
killer.)

1) number one is number one because it's the most noticeable and most
important difference: simplicity. Yes, there's a lot of food. Yes,
there are a lot of courses. But none of it is that hard to make.
Minestrone? Boil mixed veggies for a half hour in broth, add pasta and
beans, give it another few minutes, serve with Parmesan. Spaghetti a
cacio e pepe? Cook spaghetti, add grated cheese (pecorino duro,
Parmesan, etc), oil, black pepper, mix and serve. I asked Anna for
the quantities of ingredients in her pesto recipe, and she said "oh, I
just do it all by eye." none of the precise measurements an long
ingredient lists I'm used to.

2) lean cuisine. Ever wonder why you see lot of fat Americans at the
olive garden and none (except american tourists) in Italy? Dishes here
aren't smothered with cheese and butter and rich, cheesy, buttery
sauces: they're cooked in olive oil. Under the sink, Anna keeps a 1.5L
bottle of olive oil, which she refills from a 5L tin can when
necessary. That's how often we use olive oil- little half-liter
bottles have no use in Italian kitchen. Salad dressing? Olive oil and
vinegar (either balsamic or white wine). Nothing rich and creamy- no
ranch, French, or thousand island.

3) the mediterranean diet doesn't manifest itself over the course of a
meal, but over the corse of a week or two or ten, absolutely. Fish at
least twice a week, eggs once or twice a week (yes, fried eggs for
secondo at dinner, usually with mozzerella on top. But, naturally,
fried in olive oil.) surprisingly little poultry, but plenty of red
meets (beef, veal, pork, prosciutto, etc.) At every dinner, a primo
and secondo and at least one contorno. This usually manifests itself
as a plate of pasta that would suffice as dinner in the States,
secondo as already described, salad or steamed veggies, cheese and
fruit.

*~recipes~*

As I already alluded, so far I've had a couple cooking lessons, and
Anna wants to show me a couple more things before I leave... Most
notably how to make pasta sauce, since an Italian would never consider
buying jarred sauce. Martina did a cooking lesson with us, during
which we made spaghetti alla carbonara, cacio e pepe, and saltimbocca
alla romana. Anna has also showed me how she makes minestrone,
zucchini and eggplant (two different dishes but prepared the exact
same way). Recipes are as follows:

Carbonara:
Cook bacon. (we used pancetta... Same thing. ) don't really have a
precise amount... Whatever seems appropriate. Once bacon is cooked,
mix 2 eggs with 100 grams of grated cheese (pecorino, Parmesan, etc)
and some fresh grated black pepper. Cook spaghetti- the 2 eggs/100
grams of sauce will suffice for about 2 pounds of spaghetti. Drain
spaghetti, pour sauce over, add cooked bacon, mix it all, enjoy!

Saltimbocca alla romana-

These are really easy to make. Quantities totally flexible. Take a
chicken breast. Cut it in half hamburger style, so you have really
thin chicken fillets. Cut them into pieces roughly the size of a tea
saucer. Flour the chicken fillets, and sprinkle with a bit of salt.
Lay a piece of prosciutto crudo on top, and a sage leaf, and fold in
half to make a filled chicken breast. Stick it with a toothpick. Pan
fry in olive oil, serve hot.

Minestrone:

When Anna made it, she used a mix of vegetables from the market. Ours
was mostly various leafy vegetables- spinach, lettuce, etc, but also
with cauliflower, carrot... Doesn't really matter, as long as they're
cut/torn into really small (soup-sized) pieces. Toss into a big pot of
water with a pinch of salt and some bullion cubes- for our minestrone
for three, it was two bullion cubes in maybe 6 quarts of water....
Bring to a boil, simmer for a half hour, add pasta and/or beans/
lentils/etc and simmer another 8-10 minutes (as required by the pasta)
and serve.

Getting the gyst of these recipies though? Very approximate, very
simple. The idea behind it is that if you're using good ingredients,
you don't have to heavily doctor them with the cooking- simply cook
them up and serve!! This should make good Italian cooking easier and
more enjoyable for all!!

That's all for now... A preso!

Baci,
B

Treni

As I'm now officially in the last week of the program, (I cannot
believe it really is December already), I thought I'd reflect a bit on
my train voyages: vacation (which I won't spend too much time on since
I already wrote about it), Florence (yes, Jill, I did make it!),
Siena, and, believe it or not, ice skating.

Vacation was, well, a vacation. I can't think of anyone who would
complain about taking a week off from doing any sort of work to go
tour Italy. Got to take high speed trains around a lot of Northern
Italy, and see some cities that have almost nothing in common with
Rome. Keeping in mind that I haven't even "covered" half of this
country, I daresay Italy has almost as much variability as the U.S.,
crammed into the area of one US state. From Roma, full of ancient
ruins, tourists, and churches; to Venezia, crisscrossed by the canals
that everyone knows about and even more full of tourists, but also
with cobblestone back alleys that reveal a very different, tranquil,
untouristy side of the city; to Torino, home of Fiat, the 2096 winter
Olympics, and a hazelnutty chocolatey substance known as Gianduio, and
the first capital of unified Italy; to Milano, international city of
fashion, commercial and industrial capital of modern Italy, and a city
that quite frankly couldn't be bothered to give a damn about tourists
because it has more important things to worry about. This gave me a
remarkable perspective on my life in Rome- a lot of the things that
drive me nuts are unique to Rome, and I didn't experience them at all
in other parts of the country. You really can't stereotype all of
Italy- every region and city must be judged for it's own merits (and
shortcomings).

Next train trip after vacation was Florence. We really didn't leave
enough time for me to feel like I really got to know the city, but we
did get to do the big 3- duomo, Uffizi, and Accademia. While some of
the other students were climbing the tower at the duomo, I opted for a
back alley stroll and second half of breakfast (wasn't ready for much
when I left the house at 6:15 am, so had to get a supplemental coffee
and pastry at a Florentine bar.) on the way to finding breakfast, I
saw signs for dante's house, so I went to go see where 1200s Italy's
greatest poet lived. I'm not even going to describe the museums, since
it took all day to see both the Uffizi and Accademia, and I'm guessing
you don't want to spend an entire day reading about something that
really just has to be seen in person.

The day after Florence my family arrived, so I got to spend lots of
quality time with them in Rome, and play hookie on Wednesday to go to
Siena. This was definitely worth the playing catch-up when I got back-
the city (town? It was either the smallest city or the biggest town
i've been to) is gorgeous, it has an incredible duomo (Mom was right
on this one- worth the walkthrough), we had a fantastic trattoria
lunch (Luke and I got purple risotto! Gotta try making that. Chianti
and pecorino) and, of course, got to hang out with the Dosses all day.
It had all the charm of the medieval hill towns I visited in Umbria
(Assisi, Orvieto, Gubbio) with the added bonus of being big enough to
walk around all day and not get bored.

Final train trip was this past Sunday, with one of our hired Italian
friends (Martina, who will also come up in my "food" post soon), to go
ice skating. A half hour in train from Rome, past the Castelli Romani
(literally "Roman Castles" but practically just suburbs) in the town
of Marino, is a skating rink. It's not something most Romans do very
often, and you could tell. There was more walking-on-skates going on
than actual skating. That said, it was a blast, and it definitely made
me nostalgic for the good, cold, New England winter.

That's about the extent of my train voyages... It's pretty much my
only way of getting outside the city, so the extent if my knowledge of
extraroman Italy is pretty much limited to places reachable by train.
That's one reason I'm so glad that European trains are so much more
extensive than American trains- it's allowed me to move around as
often as I can make a big enough hole in my homework schedule! Train
trips have definitely been a major factor in getting to know aspects
of Italy other than urban Rome, which has in turn made me understand
the city itself better.

Baci, e a presto!

-Brian