This is probably my favorite recap post to write, and also the hardest. Looking at all this food makes me want to get back there as quickly as possible and never leave.
When we're in Italy visiting my husband's family, we pretty much never eat out. We try to do it occasionally, but we usually get in trouble. They yell at us and say we should have eaten at home. We usually have most of our meals with my husband's aunt, uncle and adult cousin, who live in the house where we stay. But we also usually have at least one dinner with each of two other cousins, plus their families, and one dinner with our best friends there.
This was lunch on the day we arrived, simple, delicious:
This was the secondo, some kind of baked eggplant dish that they made especially for me, but somehow they missed the fact that including pork meant that it actually isn't vegetarian and not something I'd ordinarily eat. I tried to kind of pick around the meat, the eggplant part was delicious!
A very basic dinner (lunch is the main meal), greens with potatoes as a primo, and various meat cutlets as a secondo (which I skipped), plus bread, cheese, olives, and then fruit for dessert:
Another pasta dish one day:
Hubby's aunt and one of his cousin's daughters with roasted meat and potatoes for secondo/contorno one day:
Hubby would probably say this was one of his favorites -- tuna and tomatoes, which he eats all the time at home, but I don't think it's quite the same as it is in Italy. As an aside, I HATE raw tomatoes. If they are really chopped up like in a salsa, I will eat them occasionally, but I don't like pico de gallo, or anything else with tomato chunks. On our first trip to Italy, he convinced me to try a tomato there. It was so horrible! It tasted EVEN MORE like a tomato than what I'd had in the US -- at least in the US, sometimes they're somewhat flavorless. In Italy, very tomatoey.
I loved this preserved eggplant, peppers and artichokes:
Which I ate with bread and cheese:
So much cheese!
We went out for breakfast on our own one day, on the main street in town:
A pasta carbonara type lunch one day:
For me and my husband's aunt, a totally vegetarian primo!
Followed by all kinds of stuff:
More bread, peppers, eggplant for me:
Husband's cousin cutting a melon up for dessert:
Our typical breakfast at home, bread, jam (Nutella for my husband), coffee, and sometimes cereal.
One day we headed up toward Platania with my husband's cousin to go pick mushrooms. Despite him showing us what kind we wanted, I basically had no luck. I found tons of others. I think we were looking for chantarelles? It's funny because I cook with them sometimes at home and my husband complains because he spends about $20 on them for a single recipe. Ever since this mushroom hunting experience, I remind him how many hours of work go into finding just one!
Hours of work with this yield:
Stopping for bread (his family usually bakes their own, but there was something in particular that we were getting here):
A restaurant meal! We were actually in Pizzo for the day, so we went for pizza (and fries and beer and salad and gelato...):
The salad was a little bland:
Oh my it was potent! But very good:
Dinner at another cousin's house, who completely and 100% understood what I meant in saying that I didn't eat meat. Perhaps the only non-cheese protein I had in Lamezia?
Some kind of breaded meat that husband ate:
Dessert was a cookie assortment:
So, obviously the food looks DELICIOUS. But, really what I wanted to comment on is your husband's cousin's daughter's (did I get that right?) HAIR!!!! Beautiful!
ReplyDeleteHer dad owns a T&G salon there, where her mom and sister also work, she's the only non-hairstylist in her immediate family. I had her dad do my hair for my wedding (and my mom, my two now sisters-in-law and my bridesmaids).
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