Eating my way through Italy

Prior to traveling to Italy I knew in my heart that one of the things I was most looking forward to was enjoying the food. And now that we are back I feel comfortable that we did a good job of balancing the enjoyment of eating delicious foods we could not easily get here at home with not over-doing it. We didn't go crazy, yet we indulged a bit as one should do when on vacation. And of course it helped that we could eat as leisurely and whenever we wanted (sans kids!) since grandma so easily held down the fort back at home with Amelia and John. (THANKS mom!)

We always ate breakfast in our hotel, where a complimentary breakfast buffet was included with the price of the room. Though the offerings differed a bit between our hotels in Venice and Rome, the basics were similar. Hot offerings were scrambled eggs with bacon (not American bacon, but some sort of Candaian bacon or prosciutto). Cold offerings included fruit (fresh and canned), assorted breads and pastries with accompaniments (jelly, that AWESOME Eurpoean butter that tastes 100% richer than the butter we have in the U.S., honey, etc.), yogurt (why does yogurt taste so much richer over there?), coffee (DELICIOUS Italilan roasts), freshly sliced salami, prosciutto, and cheese, and assorted cereals. While I am not normally interested in food buffets in general, I loved how fresh the food was and it was fun to have the ability to try whatever we wanted without ordering huge plates of a specific food.

Lunch was typically a pinini or small lunch plate, often consumed in a small cafe or on the go (as when we got sandwiches from a local coffee bar to take with us on the train from Venice to Rome). With exquisite bread and natural fillers for the paninis (fresh grilled vegetables, freshly sliced meats and cheeses, etc.), the paninis were simple yet awesome. Even paleo boy was OK with a panini for lunch.

The only meals I took pictures of were in the evenings so that is what you see here. Happily, most of our dinners started like this.

The photo above was taken on our first night in Italy, about an hour after arriving at our hotel in Venice. After traveling for over 24 hours and flying from Dallas to Chicago, Chicago to Rome, trekking through the train stations in Rome and taking the train for four hours to Venice, all I wanted was a leisurely evening that started with ice cold beer. And we got it, and it may have been the best tasting beer I have ever had. We repeated a similar scenario nearly every night we were in Italy and I was in a state of heavenly bliss.

Dinner a few nights later was at a little pizzeria recommended by the man staffing the front desk of our Venice hotel. I requested good Italian pizza, and paleo boy (Scott) agreed to set his paleo preferences aside for the evening and enjoy Italian cuisine at its finest. This wasn't exactly a dive restaurant, but we may have been the only English-speaking tourists in the place that evening (though they did eventually bring us an English menu, which means they expect to have tourists in their restaurant from time to time).

My pizza was prosciutto and mushroom and Scott selected salami, Italian sausage, and frankfurter. Yes, Scott selected to have hot dogs on his pizza, but he said it was awesome (I took his word for it).
We adored this pizza, and decided that perhaps why the pizza was so good is because the ingredients were simple and fresh. The flavors of the tomatoes and cheese were fresh, simple and sweet, on a thinly-crisped crust, and cooked to perfection. Simply awesome.

Don't you love the superheroes on the placemats at the pizzeria? The restaurant was called "Ae Oche" and the hero was "Superoca". Love it! Each placemat that we saw within the restaurant incorporated a different superhero. John would have loved this.

Later in Rome we encountered a different pre-dinner tradition than what we had enjoyed in Venice. The "aperitivo" experience - see below.

Scott had educated himself about the "aperitivo" idea (after watching an episode of Andrew Zimmerman's show on T.V.) and I am glad we got to experience it on our last night in Rome. The way we undersood it is that a restaurant or bar will have a happy hour of sorts, where the bar charges a flat fee for a drink and the fee includes unlimited visits to a buffet of appetizers. We had wanted to try this and came across a nice place offering a 10 Euro (about $15 U.S. dollars) aperitivo. This was actually a pretty good deal (a beer at a local cafe was $6-7 without food) and we were hungry so we went for it.

Above you see our two beverages with a plate of mini hot dogs, fried onion rings, a potato wedge, and (my favorite!) mushroom bruschetta. We actually had a second plate with our one drink each, so we enjoyed two drinks and two plates of appetizers for about $30, which was a good deal for Rome. Plus it was fun to watch the seemingly young and professional Italians out and about on a Friday night after work. Scott and I concluded that this is a much better idea than the way we do "happy hour" in the U.S., where the idea is to drink (without food), whereas the Italians seemed to appreciate the social experience of food with company and drink more than just the drinking (i.e., less of an emphasis on just drinking).

One more meal photographed on a different night in Rome. My plate is first - papardelle with porcini mushrooms. This was outstanding (!) and the type of pasta dish I was looking for in Italy. I do not follow the Paleo diet and I am OK with this.

Scott proclaimed this one of his favorite dishes from his week in Italy. Freshly grilled squid on a bed of arugula with cherry tomatoes and lemon with olive oil. Totally paleo, and it was exquisite in terms of flavor and texture.

I tried Scott's dish and I agree that it was definitely tasty, but I'll take the very rich pasta with mushrooms any day.

We ate well in Italy, and my pants felt a bit tighter for it last week. However, now that we are back at home and are back to our normal routines, I feel more comfortable and am SO GLAD that I indulged a bit while away. All I can hope for now is to recreate some of the magic we found abroad in my own kitchen, if that is possible.

I wonder where I could find a fresh piece of squid to grill in Dallas. ???