Food :)

If American breakfasts were anything like Italian breakfasts, I would actually eat it every morning back home. In Italy, breakfast consists of two key ingredients.. cookies and milk. I'm not even joking, every morning I go in to the kitchen, sit down, and help myself to a few yummy little sugar cookies dipped in milk :) I don't even want to imagine how fat I'm going to be by the end of this trip.. But I'm going to just keep blaming it all on "being polite" and "getting to know the culture" like I'm supposed to be doing. It isn't my fault!

So far I've had some good really meals.. and some bad ones. My host family makes their own meals; we haven't eaten out once. It's kind of fun to watch them cook it, but it's also really different. They have a giant blender-like thing that they put all of the ingredients to be mixed in to. What's weird about it is that they don't measure the ingredients based on cups, teaspoons, etc. They watch the numbers go up on the blender that show how much all of the ingredients weigh so far and determine when to stop adding based on that.. Or maybe it's the volume or something? I don't even know, but it's so strange!

My first night here we had spaghetti. I thought that was really funny because one of the first things we were told at orientation was that the typical Italian stereotype of having spaghetti all the time wasn't true, and we weren't likely to have any very often. Anyways, it was very good. It was pretty similar to American spaghetti (noodles and tomato sauce), but the sauce was a lot thinner and they don't put as much sauce on as Americans do. They also don't serve it with meat in it at all.

The next day, my family made me some delicious pizza :) I took pictures which are up on facebook (I'll put the link to my facebook at the end). The pizza that my family made had chunks of tomato on top and wasn't covered in cheese like American pizza. It actually just had little spots of cheese melted on top. The sauce was very yummy though. I have no idea if they made it or bought it, but I'll find out :)

One day for lunch we had lasagna! It was really good. Again, it was very similar to American lasagna, but it tasted different and did have some distinct differences in how it was made. One difference was that it was a lot thinner. There weren't a ton of veggies and meat inside it, which actually surprised me. It did have meat though, but the main ingredient was just cheese. It was also covered in a lot of sauce and it had a... sweeter taste than the lasagna in America.

Some other good Italian foods I've had are:
Besciamella - a really yummy pasta :) It was just noodles with a white sauce that Monica made in her funky blender.
Gelato! - lives up to it's reputation! So yummy, mine was chocolate.
Bruscetta - Bread, tomatoes, olive oil, and maybe a few other flavorings? It is so good, and we have it almost every night :)
Veggies - they really like olive oil here.. One night they took some weird vegetable, sliced it up, grilled the slices in something like those mini portable grills, and then put it in a container. Each layer in the container was then drenched in olive oil. It tasted really weird.. I wasn't a huge fan. But I politely ate a little of it.

So as you can see, I'm probably going to be 20-30 pounds heavier when I come home.. Okay hopefully not because I'm planning on starting to run again but still, all of these fatty foods are deffinitely going to take their toll on me. They really are delicious though. It's hard to keep saying "no, grazie" every time they ask me if I want more or something else to eat. Plus, just when you think the meal is finally over, they have another dish out! And fruit is considered dessert here, so I'm always offered some "frutta" after the meal.. Although I usually decline.

Well, I guess this is the end of blog number two :) Hopefully I'll be back again in a day or two!

-Zoë

PS: here is my facebook if you want to add me: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/profile.php?id=1503379275&ref=profile. I have two, so don't just search for it. My other one is for my... younger generation of friends.. :) Plus this one is mostly just about Italy, so feel free to add it. It was originally just my "family facebook" but anyone over the age of 20 can add me. Let me know if that link doesn't work!