Meals in Italy

Here I’m only going to talk about the meals that I have made myself since I’ve been here, at least in the last 24 hours. Like I mentioned in the previous post I bought an orata, a fish local to the Mediterranean. I asked the fish monger at the pescheria (fish store) how to cook it and he said in a frying pan with garlic and oil. I searched for a recipe on Google and found one that was a little more detailed. As an aside, the only Google that I can get here is Google.it – meaning Google Italy. If I try to go to Google.com, the American one, I get redirected to Google.it. Actually it’s good for my Italian practice. So back to the subject at hand. This recipe said to put some oil, olive of course, inside the fish along with the garlic, some salt and a sprig of rosemary. Add the fish to the pan that is already well oiled and add a cup of white wine and some more garlic slice thin along with some grinding of pepper. When it starts to sizzle (at least that the translation that I found for for the word…..,), cover the pan, reduce the heat and cook for ten minutes. Then carefully turn the fish over, so as not to break the skin, and cook for another ten minutes. The wine along with the flavors of the garlic and fish reduce to make a fabulous sauce that you then pour over the fish. Asparagus is also in season so I steamed some of that and sprinkled it with a little salt and a drizzle of olive oil. While I was out I also stopped at a pasticeria (pastry shop) and bought two cannoli, which I love and had one for desert followed by a little of the terrific grappa that I bought yesterday. By the way you can see that the poor fish lost it’s tail since it would otherwise not fit in the biggest pan that I could find.

For lunch today I had just some mortadella, mozzarella and tomatoes. The mortadella wasn’t the best since I bought it at a supermarket. By the way, the food at the supermarket is not great quality. It’s better buy from one of the specialty stores. The mozzarella was fresh, in fact  I’ve never seen the kind of industrial mozzarella here that is common in the states. It’s all fresh and of course the best is the mozzarella di bufalo which you can even buy at any supermarket but today it was just the cow’s milk version. I also have some strawberries which must be in season here because they are incredible. I have very rarely had such juicy, sweet strawberries in the U.S. In fact I had prepared too much so I think that I’ll have some strawberries as a snack (spuntino) and also have some on my cereal tomorrow morning.

Oh, one more thing. I forgot one of my first acquisitions when I arrived in Bologna: a moka. Most Italians only have a little cup of espresso and then maybe another one on the way to work as much to chat with people at their favorite bar as anything else. I, on the other hand, am used to a bigger jolt to get my motor running in the morning. Besides that I have a little collection of them at home. You can see them here if you’re interested. So I bought a great on when I arrived on the 30^th of March.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2012 at 5:50 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.