Dreaming In Italian

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.

As always I welcome your comments and your subscriptions! You can subscribe for email notifications of posts via an RSS feed for by email in the upper right – I prefer email when I subscribe to posts but welcome any new readers.

I arrived in Bologna on March 29^th and the adventures began. I went to the clinic where Paolo was working (he’s an orthodontist), left my bags there and walked to the center of town to buy a SIM. I chose Vodafone and within minutes my unlocked iPhone was working perfectly. I walked around a little bit more because I had a lot of time to kill and because it was really good to stretch my legs after 12 total hours in an airplane and two hours in the Frankfurt airport. When Paolo was finally ready to go it turns out that he had arrived on his scooter rather than by car so I needed to take another cab to his apartment. Almost immediately we left in his SUV for his house in the country a few kilometers outside of Imola. We had dinner at a nearby agritourismo with his lovely partner Cinzia and Paolo paid – that was a surprise because Paolo tends to be tight fisted.

The next day we returned to town and I started searching for a room. Paolo, a font of erroneous information had told me via email that it would be easy to find a room. There is a website roughly identical to craigslist called “bakeca” (in real Italian it is “bacheca” which means bulletin board). Yes, there are lots of rooms, but there are issues. Issue number one: most of those advertising rooms are students. I’m not really very interested in staying in an apartment with four bedrooms three of which are occupied by 20 year olds. So that narrows the availability down a LOT. Issue number 2, a lot of the apartments are either in cheap, undesirable areas or far out of the center of town. I think of the center as within the walls and that was my preference although just outside the walls would also be OK. The third issue is that most people wanting to share a room don’t want to rent it for a brief period – like the 8 weeks that I’ll be here. I will spare you all of the details but I wound up staying in a room at one of the apartments owned by the school (starting on Monday) which was quite nice (although considerable traffic noise) but I really wanted to stay with an Italian to improve my language skills.

So on Thursday I transferred to a lovely place with a sweetheart of a woman of “a certain age” in a very nice area of the city not far outside the walls. I’ll do a more complete post on the apartment later. The apartment does not have DSL (sigh) so I ran, well took the bus, into the center of town to acquire an internet key. This plugs into a PC and give internet access via the cell phone network. The speed is not bad – I measured 2-4 Mb download and 0.4 Mb upload so not too bad but not good enough for a video Skype connection unfortunately. Still I would die without internet so it’s good enough.

Today is Saturday the 7^th of April and the day before Pasqua (Easter). Cesarina has gone to Tuscany for 3 days so I have the place for myself. I went shopping and bought a fish, “orato”, that translates into “sea bream”. I’ve never seen it in the U.S. and it seems to be highly prized here and I decided I’d give it a try. I’ll let you know. I also bought a few other things including a small bottle of grappa that should be exceptional. Oh, yes, I also bought the book, Gomorrah. You may or may not have seen the movie which I thought was pretty good. Even most Italians need to watch it with subtitles since most of it is in the Neapolitan dialect – just the movie, not the book. Claudia, a friend, recommended it to me so I’m going to give it ago.

Once upon time my absolute favorite green vegetable was asparagus. I still love it but I’ve now lost my heart to fava beans. When my mother was still alive I wanted to give her a taste of fresh fava beans but I couldn’t find them anywhere in Santa Fe, New Mexico where she lived. So perhaps I’m just fortunate to live in the San Franciso Bay area, one of the foodie capitals of the U.S. While fresh favas are available here much of the year they are really the best at this time of year when the beans are still relatively small. As the season progresses, the farmers tend to let them grow much larger (after all they get paid by the pound) but the quality suffers as a result. Fresh favas are definitely not a cucina prigra option. They take a fair amount of work and being as lazy as I am I’d certainly not bother with them if they weren’t so damn good.

The start of the process is the beans in the pods as shown. This is 3 pounds of beans. So now you need to shell them. Sometimes the pods are very cooperatively and open up like fresh peas as those shown but more often there’s a lot of working with your thumbnail or whatever to open a bit at a time to extract the beans. Sometime you come across some very small ones. I just put those aside and pop them into my mouth as a reward for shelling all of the beans. So at the end of shelling the beans there were one pound of beans.

But we’re not done yet. The beans can be eaten unpeeled. In fact in some parts of Italy it is something of a ritual to eat the small new favas with young pecorino cheese. I’ve done that and it’s a pleasing ritual but the taste is really better if they are peeled. To peel them, you dump them into a pot of boiling water for about a minute. Then drain them and let them cool enough to touch. At this point the skin often looks a bit puckered. You just use you thumbnail to nip of the end (not the end that attaches to the pod) and squeeze the other end. They inner bean just pops right out.

Just to give you an idea of what a change these nice little beans go through I prepared a pasta first course for 5 hungry people. I started with 3 pounds of unshelled favas. After shelling that was down to just about a pound and after the beans were peeled it yielded 9 ounces. I used 10 ounces of dried orecchiette pasta for this which seemed just the right amount. I sauted some green onion tops diced into those nice little rounds along with the white parts of a couple of the onions – I used two bunches of tops but just 2 0r 3 onion white parts. I then cut two slices of prosciutto into little pieces. I saute the onions briefly, add the prosciutto briefly and then add the favas and cook just long enough to heat them up. These then go over the cooked pasta with a fairly generous sprinkling of freshly grated parmigiano on top. It’s VERY tasty. Not cucina pigra but I think that it’s worth the effort.

Unfortunately I don’t have a picture of the finished dish – we were all too anxious to just eat it. So you’ll just have to find out for yourself. I know that they are also very good mushed up a bit and put on crostini or even perhaps bruschetta. I hope that you’ll give them a try if you get a chance.

Spring is in the air here and in Bologna. I have my ticket bought and the school paid for. I’ve arranged for car storage and sublet my apartment. I am so looking forward to returning for another two months in Bologna. It’s interesting doing this. I’ve never before had an extended stay in a foreign place where I got to know the city, made friends and generally settled into a very different pace of life. I’m also curious about how it will all feel. When I returned from Bologna last November I was frankly depressed for awhile. Imagine that you have gone to a city with great food, friendly people, beauty everywhere, terrific public transportation only to return to a sketchy neighborhood in Oakland – or consider any other city that you are familiar with. Will I feel a sense of relief when I return? Will my relationships with people there seem as good as before and will I make new friends? Will I be as happy there as before and quite importantly, will my Italian improve a lot in 8 weeks?

Well, the photos above are not quite a fair comparison. The neighborhood where I lived wasn’t  as beautiful as the part of Bologna shown and much (really most) of Oakland is nicer than my neighborhood. Still, it’s really hard to find a neighborhood in Oakland that is even in the same league as Bologna. But let’s face it I am clearly biased. I think that you can see why it came as a shock to return home after 9 weeks in that lovely city.

Of course I will be blogging about both everyday life and adventures in Bologna as I did on my last trip to Italy. This time I will not be staying with a family but will be playing roommate roulette just the same. It’s kind of like when I first stayed in a college dorm and was randomly assigned a roommate. It can be a challenge. Stay tuned. I leave on March 29^th and arrive the next day after a plane change in Frankfurt.

Ciao