Oh, how I love to eat here in Italy. What is it that makes it all so delicious? Unlike the misconceptions, “Italian food” is NOT all “pizza and pasta”. There’s so very much more!
The freshness of the ingredients is a big part. Also, the regional traditions and specialties, changing every 50 kilometers, makes exploration so tantalizing.
And, my trust in the food origin and quality makes a huge difference (…but perhaps I’m naive and mistaken?). I can’t remember the last time I’ve eaten raw beef in the U.S. I wouldn’t trust it! But it was absolutely delicious yesterday, and I had no hesitation. The provenance of the meat is important and known here. I don’t find that in the U.S. except in very refined restaurants or meat sources.
Part of my reason for posting images of what I’m eating is to inform about the very broad world of what constitutes “Italian Food”. If you come to Italy, I encourage you to order the regional specialties… order something even though you don’t know what it is. It’s a great, wonderful, edible world here.
After you’ve devoured the images below, here are a few additional food smorgasbords to drool over:
In this neighborhood, Saturday is market day. A string of city blocks nearby is blocked off and filled to the brim with produce, fish, cheese, flowers, housewares, clothing… and people. It seems to be when everyone does their big marketing for the week, going home and filling their tiny fridges and cupboards with Italian veggies, fruits and cheese, mediterranean fish, and cheap sundries.
When I was first living here in 2009, it took me a few times to figure out “the system” for buying from the vendors, and then overcome my timidity with my then more-limited Italian. I know the protocol now for waiting in line off to the side, but I still get mixed up over exactly how many green beans come in a kilo… quite a few! Requesting my food in metric amounts is still a guessing game for me.
Then there’s the foxy game the vendors play to upsell a little each time. I ask for 2, they put 3 in my bag. I ask for a half kilo, I go home with somewhere between half and a whole kilo, even though they weigh each order.
And I have yet to find a produce vendor that handles the goods with a gentle touch. It matters with tomatoes, apricots, nespole, plums, figs and others! They use the open produce bag for target practice, flinging each tender fruit toward the bag’s gaping entrance. (Sometimes I’ll observe a vendor for a while and decide not to buy from one that throws the fruit around. It doesn’t leave me many options though.) By the time I walk home with my day’s purchases, I’ve got spoilage already.
All that said, the array not only offers edible delights but a visual one as well. I enjoyed shooting panoramas today to give a sense of the surroundings (those these don’t show the throng of people, nor the clothes and sundries.)
(Click on the photos to see them enlarged.)
Lovely fruits and vegetables.
All sorts of seafood, much of which I’d never seen until I came here.
Olives, canned tuna, pickled foods.
Produce galore.
Breads and rolls.
We need more olives.
Yet more produce.
Olives, pickles foods, dried fruits.
Nuts and olives.
Salted cod, olives, dried foods and others.
More produce, lots of greens.
Many different cheeses and meats.
A meat and cheese vendor.
Today I brought home erbette, rucola, lattuga, fagiolini, pomodori, olive, cipolle, cima di rapa. (leafy greens, arugula, bibb lettuce, green beans, tomatoes, olives, pickled onions, broccoli tops.)
It’s no joke that I’m in the “presidential suite” at the Palace Hotel, in the region of Calabria, the town of Catanzaro Lido. The waves of the Ionian Sea are rolling in just off my private balcony. I could throw a stone (hard) and it would land in the water, on the other side of the Via Lungomare – the road along the sea. I will sleep with the sound of incoming saltwater tonight.
When one “leaves their options open” or “plays it by ear” sometimes there aren’t many options left, thus, the Presidential Suite, with it’s brocade-clad, padded walls. But after the raucous three nights in Cefalu and Taormina Sicilia, I needed some quiet and something unlike Disneyland.
Last night I slept a much-needed, holy sleep. Today I amused myself with exploration. First thing, I went to the little travel agency next to my hotel to buy my ticket for a long train ride tomorrow. At the agency, I met Valentina and Aurelia, and a man they know from Naples. We all laughed and talked for half an hour and it was the kind of personal connection I needed. (When I returned to my room tonight, Aurelia dropped by a beautifully packaged gift of some homemade soppressata. How dear! I happened to have brought some “Seattle Spices” along with me in case I needed a gift, plus some personal note cards, so I wrote out some notes to the two women and stopped over to drop them off.)
Aurelia’s Soppressata is delicious, with a slight smokey flavor:
After the travel agency, I hit the road… and then stood there. I found the newsstand where I could buy a city bus ticket, then I found the bus stop and asked a young guy if I was in the right place to go to the city of Catanzaro (the part up on the hill). I was at the right stop and the bus was “10 minutes away”. Hopeful and anxious passengers started gathering, and waiting, and complaining. Congested traffic on narrow streets in Catanzaro Lido was almost comic. (Imagine two cement mixers passing each other! They did so in the extra width of an intersection, likely well-practiced.)
As I waited with everyone else, I was pleased that I was having a snippet of REAL daily life of a Catanzaro citizen. (There wasn’t a tour group in sight.) An hour after waiting, I got on the bus with just a small, general map of the two Catanzaros, and absolutely NO idea where I was going, what I would see or when I would get off. How lost could I get? I could always get a cab if it came to that.
I marvel at the systematic chaos that is traffic in Italy, and especially here in the south. It all seems to work, but slowly. There are very few stop lights and much bravado, and it took forever for the full-size city bus to make it through Catanzaro Lido. We stopped at the train station, then through little pocket towns like beads on a string that seem to comprise greater Catanzaro.
We kept winding up toward the hill top. What was I looking for? People. Curious sights and signs. Something to catch my eye. History. I could find the duomo – cathedral – on my little map, but couldn’t determine where we were in relation to each other.
I rode until the near-northernmost point of the city and got out at lunchtime. In a little grocery, I bought toothpaste, shampoo, 50 grams of mortadella and a sliver wedge of some lovely blue cheese. At the neighboring baker’s, I bought a square of focaccia with tomato sauce, which they heated for me. I carried my stash through the city amidst 10-story apartment buildings and scrawny, stray cats, and found a little park bench in a windy spot. I lay the meat and cheese onto my focaccia, folded the whole thing in half and had an amazing sandwich, washed down with San Pellegrino.
Since it had taken nearly 2 hours to get UP to the top, by 3:00 I figured I’d better start heading back down to the hotel. It was a quicker journey somehow, and I got off at the west end of town to walk, look, shoot and shop for dinner and my train lunch tomorrow. It’ll be a 7-hour journey tomorrow, with one shuttle ride, three coarse, regional trains and two quick train transfers. There’ll be no time or place to buy food, so this afternoon I stopped at the bakery for a couple of fresh rolls, at the meat shop for fresh buffalo mozzarella, at the produce vendor for fresh peas in-the-shell, datterini tomatoes, two mandarins and a pear, and the pastry shop for a couple of biscotti. That ought to be a lovely train lunch!
How did I pick Catanzaro in the first place? I was in Sicilia and just had to get out of Taormina. I was heading east to Puglia and Catanzaro was in between. It’s also the hometown of my first Italian “professoressa”, Enza. And… quite simply, I was able to find a hotel room available.
Tomorrow, from the ball-of-the-foot here in Calabria, to the heel in Puglia.
Seattle’s chilly summertime is winding down with scattered sunshine following cloudy mornings. Warm evenings are rare, but, once again, the waterside neighbors initiated a dinnertime potluck along the shoreline last Friday, the start of a holiday weekend. I vowed to bring “something Italianesque”, and told them I likely wouldn’t know what it would be until mere hours before I headed out my back door to cross the street.
I wanted to try my hand at making homemade pasta. Regrettably, over the course of more than a year in Italy, I never took a cooking class! No one ever took me aside to show me how to whisk an egg into a well of flour, bring it up into a dough, knead it sufficiently, roll it out and slice it into handcut noodles.
Feeling intrepid, I located “Uncle Bill’s” web site offering an ingredient list and method for “Homemades” (noodles), and found a YouTube video showing a quicker process, “How to Make Pasta from Scratch in 5 Minutes“ (using a food processor instead of the time-honored flour well). I then called my friend, Sally, and asked to “steal” her hand-crank Marcato Atlas 150 Pasta Maker.
It really did only take 5 minutes to mix up my first ever pasta dough and handcut a bundle of tagliatelle.
Thinking about our neighborhood dinner, I conjured a “Farmers Market Lasagna“? The day before, umbrellaed market stalls had filled the street at Burien’s Town Square and I browsed for a tasty collection of veggies to nestle between wide sheets of fresh pasta. I scouted the best of each vegetable, added them to my shopping bag, then went home to cut, grill, simmer and prepare the following:
Grilled eggplant
Roasted, thick-walled, red peppers
Roma & beefsteak tomatoes, peeled, seeded and cooked down to a chunky sauce
Caramelized Walla Walla sweet onions
Freshly-made pesto Genovese of basil, pine nuts, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, salt and some grana padano cheese that I brought back from Milano
Fresh mozzarella and ricotta
Fresh pesto is vivid green and always scents the kitchen (and the cook’s hands) with the smell of a summer garden. Making a batch, you might as well make enough for friends and the freezer! (Clean the interior surface of the jar after you’ve dished it out, then cover the pesto with a skiff of olive oil. This keeps the pesto from oxidizing and turning black, and from getting moldy. Store it for a week or so in the fridge; for longer storage, keep it in the freezer.)
Not quite jam, pesto is still good when smeared lightly on a slice of Tuscan-style bread!
Look at the silky smooth, beautiful ribbon of pasta, just waiting to be laid down into the lasagne dish! Just a couple more turns through the finer settings on the Atlas and it was ready to go. The Milanese “Amaretti di Saronno” tin has been my flour can for close to 30 years. Prescient.
My maiden noodles were set out to dry a bit while I finished rolling and cutting. I don’t have noodle drying racks, so occasional flipping on the cookie sheets was going to have to suffice. (I love the big mess of a fully-involved kitchen!)
I cooked my pasta sheets in salted, boiling water for only about 2 minutes, drained them, oiled them a bit to prevent their sticking, then started the layering of vegetables and cheeses. (The smaller lasagna went into my freezer for another day. Mmm.)
Since everything was already cooked before it went into the pan, the Farmers Market Lasagna only needed enough heat to melt the cheeses and blend the flavors. When it came out of the oven, I wrapped the dish in my apron, and carried it over to the neighbors. Eight of us enjoyed appetizers in the upper yard before winding down the wooded trail to the bulkhead beach and the rest of our dinner.
Over the course of the evening, we enjoyed an outstanding selection of Italian wines, including a Chianti Classico Riserva, Brunello di Montalcino and a Barolo! The sunset couldn’t have been much prettier.
There’s nothing like a bunch of “grown-ups” sitting around a fire singing camp songs and old hymns. Barbara tried to get us headed in the right direction when singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” as a round.
I’ve talked to many people around Seattle that don’t even know their neighbors (let alone eat and sing camp songs with them)! Returning to my neighborhood, and the friends around me here, has been one of the big joys of my homecoming.
What have I been having a hankerin’ for while I’ve been away?
What didn’t I find a substitute for to satisfy my yen?
White, sweet corn on the cob.
Salsa, avocado and cilantro.
Rosemary bread.
Convection-roasted, whole chicken.
Sea-salt pita chips.
Hummus.
Guess what I bought at the grocery store in the first couple of trips!
– – –
August 4 Update
For breakfast this morning, I had cajun scrambled eggs on rosemary toast with habanero mustard and American Mozzarella* cheese. Flavors I hadn’t had in a year.
*In my year-plus in Italy, I never saw the “mozzarella” I grew up with: that rubbery, dry, cream-colored cheese that Americans buy shrink-wrapped in a ball. Mozzarella in Italy is white, made of cow or buffalo milk, packaged floating in water, and bleeds fresh milk when it’s cut. Completely different foods!
One week from today, at this time, I will have schlepped my bags by taxi and train to Milano Malpensa airport; checked in, with machine gun carrying guards in the mezzanine above me; gone through security; waited; flown over the Alps to London two hours north; gone through security again; eaten an airport meal; wound my way through Heathrow; boarded, gotten settled and begun my 9 hour flight back to Seattle.
I just went grocery shopping. What favorite foods do I want to eat again (and again) before I go? I bought bresaola, and mortadella with pistachios, buffalo milk fresh mozzarella, fresh figs and sicilian tomatoes. One (or two) more meals of octopus? Who do I want to see and say goodbye to? How many more last hurrahs with my girlfriends? Where do I want to go? What will wish I had photographed?
As I buy groceries and supplies this week, I have to calculate how much I can use in six days. As I go for a bike ride, or subway ride, I have to realize it may be the last one (for a long while).
From a journal entry today:
“I have grown a sweet affection for this country. It’s not the starry-eyed, naive enthusiasm of a tourist’s love of the sights. But it’s a complex recognition of the quirks, an all-too-recent connection with individuals along my path, the creation for myself of a way of being, and as yet, merely a hint of who these people are. How can I stay away for long? I am leaving a part of myself here, and have lodged a part of Italy in my heart, to carry with me. Under what circumstances will I return, and for how long?”
Octopus as tender as a dream, served warm and simply, with potatoes, olives and olive oil. Fish and pasta prepared and presented with an expert hand. Warm-hearted hosts, all family, welcome their guests into an easy, comfortable dining room in their restaurant alongside the Naviglio Pavese canal: Carlotta Café Bar & Restaurant. If you want to eat at all in Milano, EAT HERE.
During my year here, I have eaten at the Carlotta Café 5 times, and each time I have swooned and savored my meal. The fish could not be fresher. The light seasonings could not be more perfected. The preparation of every dish has never been pretentiously grand; it is simple, pure and complete. It’s no wonder I keep going back.
Carlotta Café owners, Ninni and Agnese, have had the restaurant for 13 years.
Siblings, Carlotta (after whom the restaurant is named) and Erik, work with their Mother in serving the café patrons. Erik is as attentive and welcoming as one could wish for when out for a nice meal.
Here are a few of the dishes I’ve enjoyed in my times at the restaurant.
(The photos were taken in varying lighting conditions, evening and daytime.)
Pane Carasau, also called “Paper Music”, is a wispy-thin cracker served hot, generously drizzled with a flavorful olive oil and brightened with salt. This bread starts the meal and wakes up the mouth.
The dish that keeps bringing me back for more: Piovra con Patate – Octopus with Potatoes.
I can’t even descibe how delicious it is.
Gamberi Rossi Crudi della Mediterranea – Mediterranean Red Shrimp, served raw – are a delicacy and a gift to the palate.
This shrimp will be splashed with lime and relished.
Spaghetti con Vongole e Bottarga – Spaghetti with clams and grated, dried fish roe. Bottarga is a southern Italian gourmet specialty.
Branzino Vernaccia con Olive – Baked seabass with olives and olive oil.
Look at how beautiful those filets are. Ninni knows how to handle fish!
Carpaccio di Spada – Thinly sliced, raw swordfish, served with rucola – arugula – and tomato.
Paccheri all’Isolana – Paccheri pasta with tuna, basil and tomato.
Gnocchi con Speck e Rucola – Potato Gnocchi with lightly smoked speck (cured meat somewhat similar to prosciutto), arugula and a creamy sauce.
The Carlotta Café offers a full bar, wine list and caffé. Order an ice-cold bottle of Mirto, a Sardegnan specialty from myrtle leaves and berries, as a digestif to sip after your meal.
The Red Room is the quiet, more intimate room set off from the bar and main dining area.
There’s also a north-facing Terrazo Room with it’s pleasant light.
The café is not in the central hub-bub of town, and unlikely to be found by tourists. It’s not close to a subway stop and, for me without a car or scooter, it would be a long walk on a hot day. So I gladly take a quick cab ride to the restaurant and it is oh-so worth it.
Ninni and Agnese offer a “Cena a Base di Pesce“, dinner based on fish, at an incredibly reasonable price. Make it simple for yourself: order this special dinner and a nice bottle of wine then sit back and enjoy the steady stream of expertly prepared foods that arrive at your table. You will go home happily satisfied. And you, too, will dream about the octopus. (Tell them “Maureen” sent you.)
(Check with them on their current pricing, since it may change.)
Carlotta Café Bar & Restaurant
Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, 274
20142 Milano, Italia
TEL: 02.89546028
E-MAIL: carlottacafe@gmail.com
Last Friday, after my whirlwind morning in Genova, I continued on to Sanremo for what was likely my last visit with my “landlady” Sandra and her husband, Mauro, before my departure from Milano. I had visited them a couple of times in winter and at my departure then it felt as if longtime friends were bidding “arrivederci“.
It was hot even in Sanremo, which is usually milder than the inland. Sandra and I sat in the cool of the house, and later on the porch swing, covering every topic from food and family, to health, spirituality, friendship and life approach. (Not bad considering it was all in Italian.)
Mid-afternoon, it was time to start dinner: homemade Sardenara and Focaccia, carpaccio of Tuna (thin slices of raw tuna), and insalata di gamberi e rucola (salad of shrimp and arugula).
Sardenara is specific to Liguria, the part of Italy up north and west along the Riviera, approaching France. You can’t quite call Sardenara “pizza”, but rather a focaccia pan bread with very specific ingredients. Sandra made a dough of a specific semolina flour purchased especially for this recipe. A friend, Angelo, had shown her how to make this.
She rolled and formed the dough into the square baking pans, then set them aside to rise.
After the dough had risen, Sandra selected one pan for a simple focaccia with coarse salt and olive oil. The finger indentations in the dough, and more than a splash of water (!) poured on top before going into the oven, were two secrets important to the recipe.
Next came the very simple, yet specific, Sardenara preparation: a base of peeled, cooked tomatoes; taggiasche olives, local to the region; salted anchovies; garlic cloves, olive oil, oregano, coarse salt, water.
The Sardenara cooked up to a half-inch thick bread with a wisp of tomato and the pungency of olive and anchovy. It began our dinner.
Mauro, Sandra’s husband, was hungry and ready for dinner.
A perfect summer meal, begun with fresh Sardenara, and followed with a simple salad of arugula and shrimp, and tuna carpaccio. All light and delicious for a hot day.
Sandra and Mauro’s friend, Sandro, joined us for the meal. We had all spent time together in the wintertime, (including our trip to Monaco and a meal of Sandro’s special pureéd rabbit liver sauce over freshly-made pasta). He dished up the tuna carpaccio, which had been doused with fresh-squeezed lemon juice and olive oil. It was fantastic!
The salad was dressed simply with lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper.
Dinner was a lovely time with my new “old friends”. And the making of it was as much a part of the pleasure, as was the conversation throughout it all.
How do you give a 13-year-old a whirlwind overview of Milano and other spots in Italy?
I had grown up picking rocks off of Earl’s parents’ waterfront on Three Tree Point, just down from the house I have in Seattle now. (In other words, he’s known me since I was born.) So when Earl decided to take his grandson, Matthew, on a tour of Italy, and knowing that I’m here in Milano, he got in touch with me and we started planning the whirlwind. By the time the trip was only a week away, Earl wrote to say they were “counting the hours”.
The two travelers arrived at Milano Malpensa Airport, jet-lagged but excited. We caught the train into the city, with one minute to spare.
Like Hannah and Zibby two days before, Earl and Matthew’s first stop, with mere 21-pound packs still on their backs, was the Spezia Milano Pasticceria. They needed a little something to take to their hotel room and picked out a dozen sweet treats. (The best in town.)
The guys needed a break after their long travels, and a little freshening up. We met up a couple of hours later when they came over to my apartment just 2 blocks away to “skype” family back home. Then we walked up the canal, Naviglio Pavese, to a pizza restaurant with a wood-fired oven. I don’t know what was so funny, but Matthew enjoyed his 5 cheese pizza. Much of it was packed home though, and ended up in my frigo (and made a high-fat breakfast for me the next day).
Earl and I shared an antipasta plate of mixed cheeses and meats, then a pizza of prosciutto, mushrooms and artichoke hearts.
Still recovering from the trip, “The Boys” called it a night early without the evening stroll along the canal (to the gelato shop), and headed back to their hotel for a good, long night’s sleep.
In the morning, having missed the breakfast part of the “bed & breakfast”, they came to my apartment for made-to-order, prosciutto/grana/peperoni/cipolla omelettes with bread, jam, blood orange juice and strong coffee. Once they had been fueled for the day, we headed for the subway.
It was a day to scout for Leonardo around town; he had lived in Milano for 20 years as a young man and left his mark across the city. Our first stop was the Castello Sforzesco, an impressive moat-encircled castle in the center of town. From there we moved on to The Museum of Science and Technology and its Leonardo da Vinci exhibit.
We saw some incredible models representing the ideas in Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus!
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We had 3:30 tickets for The Last Supper and needed to check in a half hour beforehand. Their tours are very precise in their beginnings and endings so that they can best control the atmosphere within the chamber that hosts the fragile mural. To actually SEE the original painting, the inspiration for so many reproductions and college lectures, is an experience to add to a lifetime.
Earl and Matthew were both spent after our sightseeing. We each wolfed down a panino of prosciutto, brie and “red mayonnaise” then headed back to the subway. I was heading north to buy our train tickets for the next day, and they were going to test their navigational skills and get themselves back to their hotel. (Matthew had great fun later trying to convince me that they had gotten lost and had been wandering around for hours.)
We regrouped later for evening skype sessions with the folks back home. (At 6:00 pm here, it’s 9:00 am on the U.S. West Coast.)
The big question was “where shall we go for dinner?” With so many options, I wavered in my recommendation, but kept thinking about octopus and potatoes at the Carlotta Café south along the canal. I wasn’t sure how adventurous Matthew would be, but we went anyway, and took a cab since neither the subway nor our feet would get us there easily.
Dinner was DIVINE. If you ever want a good meal in Milano, head to the Carlotta Café! Matthew ordered gnocchi with speck, (like a lightly smoked prosciutto) and rucola (arugula) in a fabulous, creamy sauce.
Apparently, Matthew really liked the sauce! (Matthew! I can’t believe you did that!)
Earl and I ordered the evening special, a 7-course, fish-based meal that kept the food coming all night. At our first urging, Matthew took a little taste of the fresh-caught anchovies and he was hooked from then on. He quickly swooped in on a half dozen of the slim, silvery filets, then scooped up a portion of the much-anticipated octopus and potatoes. I was pleased by his willingness to sample the seafood variety.
Our 29 Euro-per-person meal included:
– “Paper Music” bread, hot, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt
– Piovra tiepida con patate e olive (Octopus with potatoes, olives and olive oil)
– Alici marinate (Fresh anchovies on a bed of rucola)
– Carpacciodi spada (thin slices of raw swordfish)
– Ostriche (Raw oysters)
– Paccheri all’isolana (pasta, tomato, tuna, basil)
– Spaghetti con bottarga (spaghetti with grated, dried tuna roe)
– Branzino vernaccia (Roasted branzino fish with olives)
– Mirto (an after-dinner liqueur from myrtle leaves and berries)
– Pardule (a star-shaped, pastry desert from Sardegna)
We ordered a nice, chilled bottle of Vermentino di Sardegna vino bianco to go with our seafood.
By the end of the evening we were having quite the time chatting with Erik, our wonderful waiter. When other restaurant patrons ordered a roasted, suckling pig, Erik brought it by to show us. And when it was time to leave, we met the chef/owners and the others in the kitchen, complimenting them on our fantastic meal.
Carlotta Café
Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, 274
20142 Milano
Tel: 02-89546028
The next day we hopped the train northeast, to the town of Varenna, along the eastern shore of Lago di Como (Lake Como). Earl and Matthew were scheduled to meet with a travel group at 5:00 that evening to continue their whirlwind tour. Since I hadn’t seen Varenna before, I accompanied them on the train trip and to their steep hillside room-with-a-view. From their balcony, they looked almost due west to Bellagio (hidden by the 3 tall cypress trees), and north to the town of Varenna.
We had a little wander around the town and a lunch by the lake shore.
After lunch, we walked just around the bend for a treat of pistacchio, coconut and vanilla gelati, which we ate while leaning on the railing looking out over the water. We said our goodbyes, gave each other hugs, and then went our separate ways for our own exploration.
We had two very full, delicious and beautiful days! What an introduction for Matthew – nicknamed “Mateo” – to the sights and food of Italy. I’ll be curious to know what his highlights are.
