Right so this is a post about food and food related things. I’m in Italy so what better place to start than with pasta? I’ve eaten A LOT of pasta. When I first arrived Gabri declared that 30 hours of travel was entirely too long but before I was allowed to sleep I had to shower and eat. Giu was translating a list of foods that Gabri was offering me but my brain was halfway between language input overload and tiredness fog so I went with pasta because a) I knew what to expect, b) I like pasta and c) it was first on the list. I had very tasty pasta with sugo (sauce) made by Nonna Scaletti. Gabri has also made tiramisu which she declared to be solely mine. Since that first day I can think of all of about 3 days where I haven’t eaten pasta, and I think of two of those three I ate copious amounts of pizza to compensate for the lack of wheat I would otherwise have consumed that day.
Now I’m sure the majority of family/close friends reading this will be aware of the fact that I don’t generally eat much wheat or diary products. For those of you who don’t know; since around the time we moved from Geraldton to Perth (2003ish) mum has had me and Tibs on diets of varying strictness to determine which things were were allergic/intolerant to. Now that we're older it's generally up to us to decide what we eat but we rarely have proper milk in the house and we only use wheat flour in baking, sticking to gluten free pasta and soy milk to rest of the time. As you can imagine going from eating virtually no gluten to consuming copious amounts of it ogni gorni (every day) is something my system isn’t really a big fan of. After the first few days I had managed to piss my digestive system off enough such that with in 20mins of eating pasta it would retaliate with stabbing pain. Pasta is tasty and I wasn’t going to let my stomach win without a fight so I decided I was just going to put up with it being painful for a while and see if it was going to get over it. It took a week or two but I’m still eating pasta and my stomach doesn’t generally retaliate. I’m hoping that if I inundate it with enough gluten it will miraculously start producing the enzyme/enzymes that help with digestion, either that or I’ll develop coeliac disease, I’m not sure if you can even develop it like that but I’ll get back to you.
Now, in Australia, when you go to a supermarket there isn’t a whole lot of choice of shapes of pasta, (granted we get our pasta from the health food isle where the choice is spaghetti, curls or penne, but) as far as I’m aware in the normal pasta isle you get varying diameters of spaghetti/tagliatelle/fettucini, spirals, penne and bowties of different sizes and colours, maybe some shells or elbows and then if you are lucky a very limited range of soup pastas. Well here there is a MASSIVE range of pasta (as you would expect). I love all the different shapes, they all hold sugo/panna differently, take different lengths of time to cook, cook differently and plus, its just fun trying to work out how on earth a machine produced something that looks like that! My two favourites so far are; ones that start looking like a curl of pasta and then unroll as they cook and these strange ones that look like... I’ve got no way to explain it other than nudibranch sea slugs... they don’t sound very appetising but they are really tasty, I’ve eaten them all so I cant get pictures but I will take some next time we've got them.
And now to go with the large range of pasta shapes you've got to have a range of ways of eating them. I’ve had pasta with Nonna Scaletti's sugo, panna (cream), panna di salve (sage cream), burro (butter), burro di salve (sage butter), olio (oil), ricotta, piselli e procutto (peas and bacon), panna e uova (carbonara) and Simona's sugo di pesce (marinara). I was going to tell you which one was my favourite but I really cant decide... they are all really nice, however I think that both panna di salve and burro di salve are (separately) very nice on fresh tortilini. I suggest you try it sometime, it appears that sage can be kept in the freezer which is interesting, all you do is pull some out, put it in a small saucepan with either cream or butter and bring slowly to a simmer while stirring to stop stickage...
so now that I’ve written a whole page just about pasta I’m going to move on to something else food related (however if you want to know anything else about the pasta I’ve been eating just ask and I’ll put it in my AOD). We went out to a pizzeria for dinner with Gabri's sister in law and her two daughters one weekend. After eating pizza (I had funghi (mushroom) which is really tasty) most of us orders dolce. I chose panna cotta along with a couple of others. When it came out it was the wibbleyest panna cotta I have ever seen, it made me want to sing 'jelly on a plate'. It was extremely delicious very creaming and smooth, I have now decided to make it my mission to, at somepoint, make uber nommy panna cotta, anyone interested in helping?
While we're talking about soft squishy foods that are tasty; one weekend Gabri brought back from the mountains (where she'd been skiing) AMAZING ricotta cheese (in actual fact she brought back a bunch of things but this was the best). It was sooooo tasty. It was the consistency of lightly whipped cream and was soo soft and tasty... mmmm nomnomnomnomnom.... I ate quite a bit just by its self and then I was told that I must have it on my pasta... it was fantastic...
In Australia, in my family, for as long as I can remember (with the exception of the first few years we were in Perth) we've eaten fish (or seafood) for dinner on Friday. I love seafood, and growing up in Geraldton shelling crayfish and eating occy I don't know how I couldn't. Since being in Italy I’ve eaten seafood twice. It was nice, but was missing the whole family element. Simona, Gabri's sister, made sugo di pesce both times. It was nice but the main point of me writing about this is that it had stange little crustacea in it. They looked like uber mini crayfish. I didn’t initially realise that they weren’t small prawns (there were also prawns in it) because the ones that I had were missing their claws. But when I got to shelling their tails I was halfway though before I realised that they had the arched shaped tail with a flat underside like a cray as opposed to a prawn tail. If anyone’s got an idea as to what they are, let me know!
One last interesting thing that I’ve eaten; coniglio (rabbit). I’ve actually had it three times; twice from Nonna Scaletti and once from Zia Pina (I’m sure that's spelt wrong but that's how I’ll be spelling it). It's quite tasty but nothing extremely special, it's been in a stewish thing every time. Gabri always gets annoyed when I eat rabbit; I attempt to eat it with a knife and fork but she always motions for me to just pick it up, rabbit is quite small so it is actually easier to eat with your fingers. Coniglio ribcage is rather fun to eat; you can pull the ribs apart and eat each individual intercostal muscle separately (no don’t be freaked out, its just like eating pork spareribs only tinier). I got taught an Italian word through eating coniglio; scarpetta where you get use a piece of bread to clean your plate and/or the pan the rabbit was cooking it. Now when ever we get to the end of a meal that was cooked in a pan with some form of sauce Gabri will push the pan over to me with a 'Bre, scarpetta' its very cute.
Out of the vast range of things I’ve eaten there has been only two things that I don’t like. Gorganzola cheese; in my opinion it tastes like the smell of vodka. Apart from the obvious fact that is a blue cheese and I’m not a fan of blue cheeses its very strong, I can cope with a little bit of it on grisini or if its in cooking but even the thought of eating a chunk of it like Gabri and Giu do makes me cringe. The other thing was this raw meat looking sausage thing. Nonna Scaletti brought it for Tuesday night dinner probably my second or third week here. Yeah... it wasn't particularly appetising. And while we're on the topic of raw meat I ate something recently that I though would be rather gross but actually wasn’t. 1.5mm slices of raw meat that you put oil, salt, pepper and lemon juice on. I was rather sceptical about the whole raw meat thing but once you put lemon juice on it some crazy enzyme thing happens which is enough to ensure me I’m not going to die (oh yeah and also everyone else was eating it). The texture is a little strange but if you leave it in lemon juice longer it gets less strange as more cool enzymie things happen.
Right so I wrote most of this yesterday with the intent of finishing it an posting it after dinner however when we finished I was really tired and decided to go to bed despite the fact it was 8.45. This morning, however, I discovered why Gabri and Giu didn’t find this time stupid; we'd just started daylight savings. No one told me this so I had no idea that they started this early in the year so this morning I had Giu come into my room at 7.30 declaring that that was the time. School starts at 8 and I normally get up at 6.45 so as to have time to reply to emails, get dressed, eat breakfast, walk Cleo and wait for Giu (each taking 15min). So when I get told that there's 30mins until school starts my flow chart gets messed up, in the end I ate what we normally take to school for a snack for breakfast, getting dressed and walking Cleo in 20mins in time to be back and hovering for my ritual 10mins as Giu finished getting ready.
Anyway the point of me saying that I wrote most of this yesterday was to add the fact that yesterday was my forth pasta free day. However to make up for it I had a toasted sandwich for lunch and bread with dinner which was uber delicious fughi risotto that Gabri made. It was very tasty and wafted the lovely smell of mushrooms around the house for a while, something that my mum would absolutely have hated!
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