Food

Food has become kind of the main event here at L’Aperegina. Our hosts are fantastic cooks, and they over-feed us like crazy.

Every day goes like this: For breakfast we eat bread and homemade jam, for lunch we have pasta, and for dinner we have a meat dish plus pasta and a dessert if there are guests. Marino is almost always hungry, so sometimes we have a brunch in addition to the other three hardy meals per day. That’s usually bread, olive oil, and tomatoes. Bread is served at every meal, with the purpose of soaking up the sauce, meat juice, or olive oil. Other table staples are MORE olive oil and both red and white wine. Sometimes Marino mixes the wines together or waters them down. It’s not something I expected from an Italian!

Porchetta sandwich for brunch

Mmm, fresh mozzarella straight from the dairy

Elide’s homemade pasta, drying

Noodle & bean soup (with a really long Italian name) made from the noodles above 

Marino grilling homemade sausage in the fire place. We think it tastes kind of like German sausage links. “Everything on the embers is good,” according to Marino, so he BBQs indoor almost every night.

Grilled fish

Elide with her crostatta. One side of the ying yang is pumpkin jam and the other is grape jam.

I have been surprised by a few things here, food-wise. First of all, the pasta sauces are rarely bursting with flavor. They’re delicious, of course, but the noodles are the star of the dish, so the sauce is usually olive oil and a little spice (often chili pepper). I still love tomato-based sauces. My favorite that we’ve been served here is primavera, which consists of our hosts’ homemade tomato sauce with lots of vegetables, like carrots and zucchini.

Pasta primavera

Vegetables are another surprise in that they are really not served at all! We do eat tomatoes. Every once in a while Elide tells me that we’ll have a salad for dinner, and it ends up being a bowl of diced tomatoes from her garden. And as I mentioned above, every once in a while veggies are cut up into sauces. Other favorite vegetable dishes from here are capsicum and regular ol’ sautéed onions. We have also eaten cooked stinging nettle. But it’s not unusual to go a few days without seeing any fruits or vegetables.

Once we were served Venetian-style liver. That was the only dinner I’ve walked away from feeling a bit queasy. They think it’s weird that American’s don’t love liver. It’s considered to be a special part of the animal here. Another day Marino asked us, “Do you eat chicken?” Considering that we’d just eaten liver we thought was a bizarre question, especially because it was followed by, “Tonight we will eat chicken and rabbit.” OK, rabbit. THAT we don’t regularly eat. But we did, and to me it tasted like liver. I stuck with the chicken.

Oh, yes. Every time we go down from the mountain we eat gelato like crazy.

I hope that this satiates Matt H.’s request for food pictures and changes Emily’s opinion that we’re only eating gross stuff here. At this rate, our stomachs are going to be really prepared to handle the Christmas season when we get back in a couple of months.