My 10 Favorite Italian Foods

It's Monday Listicles time again and this week, Stasha over at The Good Life wants to know about 10 foods. Foods we like, foods we don't like, foods that make us happy . . . or not. Anything about food is fair game.

I thought I'd write about 10 Italian foods/drinks that come to mind.
Some are specifically foods from Puglia, the region of southern Italy I live in, others not.
Some I like, others NOT.

1. Espresso coffee

Like, like, very big like! I do not like any other coffee in the world, only Italian espresso.

2. Fioroni

Love, love, love! I love these so much I even wrote an article about them, called Fioroni, Fruit of the Gods.

3. Orecchiette con Cime di Rape

This ear-shaped pasta served with rabe broccoli is divine. This dish is a love for me, but I can't eat it because of the gluten in the pasta . . .

4. Gelato

Italian ice-cream is so scrumptious. I'm not sure how it differs from regular old ice-cream, but it differs, it differs! I had been unable to eat gelato since finding out I am lactose-intolerant, but just last week I discovered a gelateria (ice-cream shop) that sells a wide selection of flavors that are both gluten and lactose-free. Halleluiah!

5. Focaccia

Kinda like a pizza, but with a thicker dough and no mozzarella on top. Heavenly, but a no-no for me because of the gluten.

6. Martini Bianco

My favorite brand of vermouth. I strongly associate it with hanging out at the cafè with friends and enjoying an aperitvo (see number 7).

7. Aperitivo

An aperitivo is a before-lunch snack you order at a cafè. Ideally it's a few peanuts, olives and potato chips to nibble on with a soda or an alcoholic drink, as you prefer. However, at many cafès the aperitivo has become so elaborate, including tartines, mini-sandwiches and more, that you forget all about lunch. 

This is a like, a definite like!

8. Raw Mollusks

These are absolutely the favorite food of most people I know here. The mollusks are locally fished, so you know they are fresh, and include mussels, clams, hedgehog sea urchins, date mussels (the long, thin ones - which it is illegal and an ecological disaster to fish...I googled for this photo, so don't sue me!), and those scary-looking red things that look like a tongue and move around on your plate before and while you are eating them because they are alive . . . they are all alive, you know?

This is a big no thank you for me. I know they're fresh, I know they are aphrodisiacal, I know "everyone" likes them, but not me!

9. Taralli

These are a popular local snack food. They are hard like a pretzel, but not quite that hard and not salted. Hard to describe, but good . . . best enjoyed with a nice red wine before your meal. 

10. Olive Oil

I can't leave out olive oil. It's not really a food on its own, but it flavors all Puglian savory dishes. We make our own from the olives grown on the trees out in my yard. Were you wondering why this blog is called "Amid the Olive Trees"?

To read more fun food lists, or to add your own list, head on over to The Good Life.

The Panini Sandwich

"Panini," in Italian, means "sandwiches." Plural form. More than one. 

Imagine how tickled I was when my mother told me she had seen menus in the US offering a: 

"Panini Sandwich"! 

A sandwiches sandwich? My favorite kind!

My husband bought three long baguettes at the bakery 

- yes, we bought French bread in Italy, we are just SO international, aren't we? - 

and decided to make sandwiches for himself and the boys.

Let's see, what do we have in the refridgerator? 

A few tomatoes, a little mayo, a layer of ham . . .

Add on some sliced provolone . . .

Some more mayo and a few pickles for a finishing touch . . .

. . . and, presto, lunch is served!

'Tis the Season

I have to share a secret with you . . . shhh, don't tell anyone, it's actually quite embarrassing . . . but when I first arrived in Italy, I had no idea that vegetables had a season. I know, pretty pitiful. And, I was an adult when I moved here. Like 28. Not a clueless little child or an irresponsible teen, but a grownup who had been cooking for herself for years. 

So, what was wrong with me? Obviously, a large part of it was that I wasn't paying any attention whatsoever to the natural rhythms of the earth . . . and all that. I have always been a city girl. The kind who thinks milk creates itself spontaneously in a cartoon and that eggs come from the egg factory.

Well, not really that bad, but almost.

The fact of the matter is that having grown up in the US, I was accustomed to going to the supermarket and buying just about whatever fruits or vegetables my heart desired at whatever time of the year that urge hit me. If it wasn't in season in my area, it was surely in season somewhere else in the world and had been shipped in for my convenience.

When I first arrived in this small provincial city in southern Italy some 20 years ago, there were no large supermarkets. At all. None. Oh, they had places they called "supermarkets," but there was very little "super" about them. They were tiny little claustrophobic spaces with three, maybe four, overcrowded lanes you could barely push your child's toy of a cart through . . . and a very limited selection of produce.

The place to buy your veggies here is at the fruttivendola, your greengrocer. These can range from a smallish hole in the wall to a chair outside someone's front door on which they have set the offerings from their plot of land out in the countryside.

No genetically modified food here!

When you see a set-up like this, you know that food is fresh! Fresh, yes, but it's a rather limited selection. If your heart's desire is asparagus, but asparagus season has passed, you're just out of luck, aren't you?

That's why I have learned to cook with what's in season. It makes more sense to eat what's locally available, freshly picked from the fields, anyway. Better for you, too, I'm sure.

So, what's in season here in Puglia right now? Green beans! I've got a fast and easy pasta recipe for you over on Charming Italy. All you need to do is throw some green beans, cherry tomatoes and seasoned ricotta onto your spaghetti and you'll have yourself a fresh, light and delicious Italian meal.

Try it and let me know what you think, ok?

Dinner is Served

This morning on the radio the dj was talking about a survey that claims Italians no longer sit down to a full multiple course meal daily. Is this possible? Are we talking about Italy?

The basic traditional meal is typically at least this:

1. First course (pasta, rice or soup)

2. Second course (meat or cheese)

3. Side dish (salad, cooked or raw vegetables)

On special occasions (like Sunday lunch, a birthday or a holiday) you would add an appetizer, possibly a cheese course, fruit and dessert. Here in Puglia you wouldn't want to forget to start off the whole meal with a course of locally fished raw mollusks: mussels, oysters, clams, limpets, etc.

I am surprised to hear that this tradition is fading away and have to wonder where the people who were surveyed live. Not in Puglia, not in the Puglia I know, anyway. Here, eating is a tradition, the number one way of socializing, and almost a competitive sport. Yes, competitive.

The women, but not only, lots of men I know love to cook, try to outdo each other with their version of traditional recipes. When eating with friends, more is always better. People bring so much food that you would think a small army was being provisioned. And yet, somehow, at the end of lunch, it's always all gone...

People who don't eat everything, like me, are viewed with suspicion. What do you mean you don't want any more? What? You didn't like it? What do you mean you're full? There's always room for more. Even the quantity of consumption becomes competitive.

My husband and sons and I eat lunch together every day. Lunch for us is of the basic three course variety: first course, second course and side dish. If one of these elements is missing, my older son in particular gets rather upset...well, he is a growing 14 year old. He has a fair excuse. 

All the people I know eat this way. Together, sitting down at the table, set with a tablecloth. Seems like a pity to lose such a pleasant tradition.

The Shawna Diet

Another key aspect of Shawna Kaminski's 21 Day Rapid Fat Loss program is . . . The Diet. An integral part of the program is a 21-day diet which details exactly what you should eat, morning, noon and night. And mid-morning and mid-afternoon, since two daily snacks are included.

The food is all very healthy and simple and you truly never feel hungry. It isn't really a weight loss diet, but is specifically about FAT loss, so each day you consume anywhere between 1400-1600 calories. The idea is to consume the right calories to help you get strong, increase energy and feed the muscles you are building in the workouts. A typical day will have you eating eggs, chicken or turkey breast and perhaps some salmon. These proteins are always combined with fresh veggies and some carbohydrates.

My experience in following the diet has been somewhat like riding an emotional roller-coaster. Since weight loss has never been a goal of mine, I had never actually seen this kind of prescribed diet. Being gluten and lactose intolerant, I have a different diet (in the sense of what I eat) from the rest of my family (it sometimes feels different from the rest of all humanity!). But I've never had a sheet of paper that outlined exactly how much of which type of food I had to eat at what time each day. 

The first week was exhilarating! It seemed like a fun game to check my list and see what foods were coming up next. I noticed immediate physical results. I dropped a kilo (2.2 pounds) in no time at all and become much more, how can I say this delicately . . . much more regular! The food was delicious and I was loving it.

Around about the middle of Week Two I sort of realised that there was no sugar in this diet. Huh. I really started craving chocolate! And then I realised there was no alcohol either, perhaps because it's kind of like liquid sugar. There wasn't even any fruit juice. This was a difficult phase in which the fun started to wear off and I started fantasizing about chocolate cake and mojitos. I didn't break down and eat a cake - though I know how to make some killer gluten/lactose free chocolate cakes - but I did, upon Shawna's recommendation, eat a small square of dark chocolate. It was good, but not great, not perfect, not as rewarding as I thought it was going to be. 

. . . sigh . . .

Each week you get one "Sweet Treat" day. This is one day in the week when you are allowed to eat a normal meal, something you would have eaten normally before going on the diet. This day serves to give you a mental break from following a rigid food plan, and is something to look forward to. It also helps keep your leptin levels high. Leptin is a hormone that helps you feel full and satisfied. Strict dieting can lower these levels, thus lowering your metabolism. Not good since this whole exercise/diet regime is aimed at kick-starting your metabolism. But, apparently one higher calorie meal is all it takes to get the leptin back up where it should be.

I am near the end of Week Three now. This week I realised that there was no rice in this diet. I don't know, maybe I'm a little slow on the draw, but it just hadn't occured to me before. I used to eat rice just about every day, as a substitute for the ever-present pasta on the Italian menu. But rice is rather high on the glycemic index - a numerical scale used to indicate how fast and how high a particular food can raise your blood sugar (or glucose) level. The presence of glucose in the bloodstream usually triggers the production of insulin, a hormone that helps glucose get into cells where it can be used for energy. This process is vital to fueling the body. However, too much insulin secretion over long periods of time can cause problems with high cholesterol and obesity.

Where's the rice?

I feel like I am learning so much about the science of eating. Before starting this diet I thought that I ate just about as healthy a diet as could be possible, no gluten and no lactose means very few prepackaged foods work for me and junk food is out of the picture. But being a very resourceful sugar addict, I have ferreted out a lot of baked treats that I can make with alternative flours. I didn't realise how much sugar I was consuming a day and how many of the "healthy" foods I was eating were actually working against me feeling and looking my best.

Shawna says "you can not out train poor nutrition." Before starting this diet I was trying to do just that. I thought that if I worked out at the gym, I could then eat all the sugar and fats I wanted to. This diet has really opened my eyes.

Coming soon . . . was it worth it? 

Dandelion Greens

If someone had told me, almost 20 years ago when I first moved to southern Italy, that you could just walk along the side of the road gathering the weeds that grow there . . . and then take them home and eat them, I never would have believed them. I'm a city girl, you see, the kind who thinks of going to the supermarket for food rather than going directly to the source.

My mother-in-law Eva, who is now practically bed-ridden, never went anywhere without a plastic bag and a small knife in her pocket. Just in case she sighted some good-looking plants along the side of the road. She would cry out, "Oh, look, some nice dandelion greens!" and get busy choosing the good ones, discarding the bad, and filling up her bag with her treasures.

I thought she was nuts. I'd never seen anyone do anything like that before!

But, she is from a different world than me, completely. She was born in 1923. People in southern Italy still travelled in horse-drawn carriages for the entirety of her youth. She was a young woman when her town was occupied first by the Germans and then by the Americans during World War II. Her family were large-scale farm owners and over her lifetime she has been both relatively rich and relatively poor. She is accustomed to southern Italian rural logic, often rooted in ignorance and superstition, but also based on solid values like waste not, want not.

Eva - circa 1943

We can no longer take those walks in the country with her like we used to, but sometimes we go out into the countryside behind my house with our plastic bags and little knives to look for dandelion greens. I know it makes my husband happy to be doing something that he used to do with his mother, and my sons enjoy having that connection, too.

I'm still hopeless at identifying the weeds from the edible greens, but our sons seem to have inherited her eye for it.

Sun Therapy

Yesterday was a gorgeous sunny and relatively warm day. We took full advantage of it by inviting friends to lunch and eating outside in the backyard. Our first outdoor meal of 2011! Even Piedina, the dog, had a smile on her face.

We have all been facing various troubles recently: minor health complaints, family issues, you know, that other stuff life is also made of, although we try our best to forget. A few hours of chatting, eating good food and drinking some fine local red wine was just what the doctor ordered.

As you can see, there was a lot to eat and drink, but we had no problem making short work of it.

Piedina was happy to be cuddled and snooze in the sun.

I took the opportunity to try to figure out the camera option on my new smartphone. I'm afraid the phone is much smarter than me. I just keep poking at it, though, to see what will happen. Am I the only one who finds today's instruction manuals somewhat less than helpful? I guess I've just got to get my intuitive skills up to speed. My kids have no problems with new technology, put anything in their hands and five minutes later they know how to use it to send guided missiles to bomb the school or write them electronic notes excusing them from not doing their homework...

did you notice that boy is barefoot?!

At last, time for a nap...oops, spoke too soon...dive-bombed by a blood-thirsty 11-year-old wanna-be vampire!

Happy 2011

I spent New Year's eve at home with family and friends...a lovely evening that almost didn't happen!

We have all been sick for more or less for the past week with a nasty intestinal flu that left most of us with little or no desire to eat or drink...and what is an Italian celebration if not a celebration of food and drink? My husband and I dragged ourselves out and about to do the shopping, moaning and groaning all the while about how we felt and about what a pity it was that we were not going to enjoy the evening's feast.

Call it off you suggest? No way, that would be a solution for lesser mortals. And besides, we had invited a whole bunch of people over...it wouldn't have been right to leave them in the lurch on New Year's Eve.

Here I am with about 3 inches of makeup shoveled on to make myself presentable. One "good" thing...I lost three kilos in 3 days of stomach flu! Hee hee, but really, that's no way to lose weight!

in order of height...

Our meal was fish-based, but we combined the traditions of the Italians, Americans and Russians present.

An array of international appetizers

Broiled bass on a bed of creamed peas

I survived the evening and even managed to eat a few bites of this and that and toasted the new year with half a sip of Prosecco! I'm planning to leave all traces of that flu way back in 2010.

Let's hope 2011 is a good year for you, me and everyone! Happy New Year!

Dried Oregano

Every so often, Lina gives us some food item. 

(If you want to know who Lina is, read here).

This time it was a giant bag of fresh dried oregano.

This morning I started cleaning it, separating the leaves and flowers from the stems.

It took me over half an hour to clean this small jar-full. But I think having the fresh herb for cooking is worth the trouble. Actually, I think I'll give this jar to a friend . . . I like to share unexpected abundance!

Lunch at the Beach

What says summer better than a long day at the beach? My kids love it when our usual mornings at the beach extend through and beyond lunchtime.

Even better if Papà and your best friend are there.

Nothing fancy, just a bit of focaccia.

Some salami, tomatoes from the backyard garden.

Some cozze (raw mussels) on ice with lemon.

Good food, good company.

Life's simple pleasures...

A Cucumber by Any Other Name...

Another summertime pleasure of mine is the "Scopatizzo Barese" cucumber, native to the area of southern Italy I live in. It's kind of like a cucumber and kind of like a melon. In fact, its scientific name is Cucumis Melo, or cucumber melon. Imagine a cucumber, but slightly sweeter, more compact and crunchier.

It has a furry skin that you can peel off, but many people just wash it to minimize the fuzz and then eat the whole thing. I don't mind eating the skin, but I draw the line at the seeds. There are more of them and they are larger than your average cucumber seed.

Prepare it the same way you would a cucumber. It is so cool and refreshing that I think cooking it would be a pity. My favorite recipe is to simply eliminate the seeds, peel and chop it and serve either alone or with fresh, chopped tomatoes, dressed with a pinch of salt and some extra-virgin olive oil.
The taste of summer!

Food Happens

Now, I know I started this blog by boldly stately that it would NOT be a food blog because I am NOT a food person, etc., etc. And Yet...somehow I keep posting about food...why is this? I've decided that it's just inevitable...FOOD HAPPENS!

And if it's good food, why not take a picture of it and share the recipe on your blog, eh? Well, why not?

So, here we are with another food post...this time it's:

ROBERTA'S JAM TORTE

or

Crostata di Marmellata di Roberta

Crust:

250 grams flour

100 grams sugar

100 grams margarine (or softened butter!)

1 packet of Pan degli Angeli yeast (or 1/2 tbsp. baking soda)

1 egg

Mix all your ingredients together. I start mixing with a wooden spoon, but end up working the dough with my hands. It's a rather crumbly dough so keep working it until it all sticks together. Set aside a bit more than a third of the dough. The larger portion of dough is your bottom crust and you should push it around with your fingers until it covers the bottom of your torte dish. Spread a layer of your favorite jam over the bottom crust, taking care to leave the edges un-jammed! Roll out the remaining portion of dough and cut strips to crisscross across the jam. Bake at 180° C (or 375° F) until lightly browned.

Buon appetito!