‘Truffles’ usually makes me think of bitter, fancy, round chocolate treats, or the sweetened milk chocolate versions sold for the undiscerning masses like me. However, in Italy, we explored a different kind of truffle: the mushroom. They come in either black or white varieties, with the latter being more expensive and having a shorter harvest.…
Here are 12 things which have surprised us about Italy so far: Even in bigger cities (like Bergamo or Milan), people often run into others they know on the street, and stop to kiss and chat for however long. B read online that people are generally on-time in Italy, but with this practice, I have no…
The Langhe is not a city. It’s a bit like a county in the ‘state’ of Piedmont – but a very large county, made up of countryside: vineyards, hazelnut trees, and small family farms. We visited several villages here, over three days: Neive: Most locals asked us if we had come here, suggesting that it’s…
I booked a tour of a hazelnut farm, based on a blog tip I read. After all, the region is known for its hazelnuts. Supposedly, Fererro Rocher only uses hazelnuts from the area for their famous chocolates. (Nutella, on the other hand, comes from their lesser hazelnut cousins.) Unfortunately, the tour was not quite what…
While B was being shorn, I needed to buy groceries for two dishes which I had promised to make for dinner with our hosts. They would prepare a few traditional Langhe dishes, and I would make a Russian and an American dish, to show them what we might eat at home. Back at the salon,…
The most persistent stereotype we’ve heard about Italians – especially from Americans, is that they’re lazy. They start work late, they take a long lunch, they leave early, they take a long dinner, and they chat or party into the night, right? Or do they work at all? Based on the Italians we’ve met, it…
We were in Cinque Terre (which is actually a grouping of 5 towns) for three days. Riomaggiore This is the town we stayed in, on the recommendation of a blog post by a woman who met her husband here. It turns out that a number of local boys had married women from outside Italy –…
Km 0: I would definitely recommend this place, which was a small local cafe. The name is an Italian reference to locally-sourced ingredients. I ordered the rice salad, which was a delicious cold rice and pickled vegetable salad. B had the anchovy sandwich (because the region is known for anchovies), which tasted like a lot of salt and a little butter…
Yesterday, we took a little tourist ferry from one town in the Cinque Terre to another. People said that the small villages looked different from the water than from land, so we opted to test the hype. (Mostly true.) We bought our tickets and headed to the boat dock, which was just a slab of…
Izumi Ristorante: We needed more pasta like we needed a hole in the head, so we headed to sushi. Like other European sushi places, it also served ‘Chinese food’ (read: noodles intended to resemble lo mein) and local food (read: risotto and spaghetti). We ordered a sushi sampler and one roll each, and the fish…