Two weeks in Italy means a lot of eating. In fact, we really got off to a running start with the eating fest as soon as we arrived, because we spent those first two days with the host families. And I did not whip out my camera when dining in mixed company, so you’ll just have to hear about how crazy-ginormous those first meals were.
J started her exchange in Italy by staying with one family from September through the end of January, a bit longer than planned due to logistics, and they bonded deeply. When we visited, she was staying with her second host family, and she had only met her then-future third host family for a few minutes once or twice. Her second/current host family very graciously held a dinner party for all three sets of host parents as well as our family. It was wonderful to meet everyone, and it was all a little awkward because many of us were strangers and Cute W and I spoke Duolingo-Italian and M had picked up a few phrases, while the Italians ranged from fluent to no English. There was a lot of smiling and laughing and repeating ourselves. For that first meal with everyone, we ate:
- Gnocchi a la Romano – This was called gnocchi, but it looked more like polenta. This was delicious and I had seconds — rookie mistake! Never have seconds when an Italian family is hosting you for dinner. There is always So. Much. More. to come!
- Thin-sliced veal with a mayonnaise and tuna puree topped with capers – I can be fussy about tuna, but luckily this was tasty. I’m not sure if M actually ate any — she’s been off beef and pork — but luckily she was at the other end of the table, far from the hosts.
- Thin-sliced cabbage – This is apparently one of J’s favorite dishes in Italy, and it was a lovely health breather.
- Greens – This was a salad of fresh greens. I’m trying to remember if they dressed it with oil and vinegar or just had it on the table? Well, whatever, the point is, there’s always room for some healthy greens!
- Stracciatella cheese – Apparently this was homemade by someone? It got lost in translation, but basically, stracciatella cheese is kind of like fresh mozzarella with more cream. If you’ve ever had a burrata ball of fresh mozzarella, the soft gooey inside is stracciatella. This was magnificent and if I hadn’t already gorged myself, I would have eaten more. If I had had a Tupperware and some time alone with it, I would have taken it away with me for later.
- Cake & Strudel – Wait, dessert? Are we sure? Also: you know how in the US, the hosts will say, “Which would you like?” and half the guests will say “No thanks” or “Just a little sliver”? They just started filling plates with a generous portion of each dessert. And since it wasn’t entirely clear to us which dishes may have been offered up by a family as their Special Thing, the only polite thing to do was to just keep eating.
- Macedonia – This was a lovely fruit salad of bananas and strawberries. In fact, it could have been a magnificent dessert. Instead, for those who are counting, it was the third dessert.
By the end of dinner we were entirely exhausted — this was on our first day, so the jet lag was fierce, and cheese, cake and strudel don’t exactly add pep to your step. We’d originally planned to walk home, but J’s host family took pity on us and sent their son to drive us home. If you have heard that Italians drive fast, imagine a teenage boy in twisty, narrow roads at night. We got out and M said, “That was lowkey terrifying,” and J said she hadn’t even noticed. She is fully acclimated to Italy.
We were spending the second day in Mezzocorona, where J had stayed with her first host family, and we’d suggested that they choose a restaurant and tell us what to order so that we could treat them to lunch. During that lunch, they wanted to make sure we tried all the local foods, so we had both beef and speck canaederli, which is a kind of bread dumpling that’s a specialty of the region; pancetta, salami, and speck, all variations on Italian pork; a house-made cheese; marinated trout with vegetables and onions; both gnocchi and polenta; ravioli with spinach and ricotta; beef, both raw and cooked with fennel; and pinto beans seasoned with salt & pepper and oil & vinegar. The restaurant that we were in was not someplace we would have found on our own: it looked like someone’s private home until you went in. And we got the impression that J’s parents are local bigwigs, which we’d sensed before, but it was more clear as we met other villagers.
After this massive lunch, we took a walk: why yes, we needed it! We walked up a long hill (you don’t get a sense of how steep it was from this, but here’s a picture, anyway):
At the top of the hill, there was a cable car to go waaaay up a mountain. Here are the tops of the girls’ heads with the yellow cable car we rode to get up and down the mountain behind them.
After exploring the top of the mountain, J pointed out that one of her favorite gelato places was at the base of the cable car. And so, in spite of the ginormous dinner we’d eaten the night before and the hours-long odyssey of eating that had been our lunch just a couple short hours ago, we sampled some gelato. Because when you are in Italy, it is required. And then, thankfully, we took a nap.
We had to set our alarms, though, because we had an appointment for — you guessed it! — more eating. J’s lovely first set of host parents were not satisfied with only allowing us to get them lunch, and so they prepared a magnificent dinner for us.
Before we even moved into the dining room, we started with fantastic little mini pizzas with Hauser prosciutto (this is the host family’s company, and yes, their prosciutto is superior) along with other mini pizzas made with zucchini and pepper and mushrooms because they knew that M was not feeling the pork. They also served us Spumante from Trento. If this makes you think of old commercials for Martini and Rossi Asti Spumante, it is not that. As J’s family explained, it is far superior to the prosecco that is exported to us Americans. The Italians like to save it for themselves. They are foodies and were generally of the opinion that we should cast aside prosecco for good in favor of spumante from Trento, but as mere Americans with a comfortable but not outlandish income, we must satisfy ourselves with prosecco.
Then it was risotto al parmesano made by J’s host dad, his 6-hour recipe. Well worth his time and unbelievably delicious. J is actually trying to learn this recipe from him so that she can do her best to replicate it when she gets home. She has helped with various steps of the process, but hasn’t done a 6-hour straight tutorial. After tasting it, we all urged her to make time to get this technique down, because we want this particular risotto recipe to be part of our lives forever.
Then they made a bunch of J’s favorites that she’d acquired over the months of living with the family: a chicory salad, potatoes with red pickled onions, and oven roasted soft sweet onions. These were served alongside pork medallions with a sauce. Then for dessert, three different kinds of gelato followed by macedonia and coffee.
At the end of the meal, we were once again exhausted and stuffed, but we had a gift to present to the first family. Ack, which reminds me, trying to figure out host family gifts was tough! There was the first family, with whom J was very close; the second family, who were her current hosts although they’d known each other for only a short amount of time and who had sons at home; and the third family, whom we didn’t expect to see. We’d been most concerned about thanking the first family, whom we’d heard a lot about, and it was a huge stumper, because they are terribly posh foodies who live in the Dolomites. Food? Theirs is better. Book about the Adirondacks? Their mountains are beautiful. Wall art? Their house is like a museum already. We finally settled on focusing on the one thing we could provide that we thought they’d value: more of our shared favorite, J. We made a photo book with baby photos, pictures of her house and neighborhood, pictures of J in Halloween costumes and doing gymnastics and volleyball and dressed up for prom, and finally pictures of J with them in Italy. Originally, we thought we could adapt this book for all three families, but J was like, “Umm, I’ve barely met the third family and I’m not sure if the second family likes me enough to appreciate that.” Hmm. Well, we think she’s fantastic, but fair enough. At J’s suggestion, we made a little cookbook of American/family sweets that J translated into Italian, and then, because I was concerned that the booklet wasn’t enough, we prepared a little package of grits, cheddar cheese, and Tabasco sauce with information about the history of grits and my family’s shrimp and grits recipe as well as US soccer swag for the kids at J’s current house. So we’d passed around the food items to everyone at the first night’s meal. And then we saved the J book for dinner with her first host family. Which they must have really appreciated, because next thing we knew, they’d decided to open up a 30-year-old bottle of grappa. (Fun fact: grappa is the drink that they make with the grape skins after the grapes have already been pressed for wine.) We kept saying no, it wasn’t necessary, because we were not sophisticated enough to appreciate the 30-year-old grappa over the 2-year-old grappa, and we were up to our gills in spumante and red wine already, but it was so kind of them that of course the only thing to do was to smile and make another toast.
Okay! I’d had this plan to share a bunch of pictures of food from some of our favorite restaurant meals, but I haven’t even made it to that part yet. So I’ll save it for the next post.
