Okay, I cannot believe I'm saying this, but I am finally sick of pasta. It's not that I don't like pasta in general, but I'm sick of eating it at home. (I'm not yet sick of pizza, fortunately).
I've reported before about the "fun" of grocery shopping in Italy and how its something that you really need to do every day. Well, besides the time that it takes to actually do that, you've got to be a bit creative when cooking in another country. (Ingredients aren't always available, you can't always read the wrapper, etc). And I've come to conclude that despite the fact that I'd love to be a good cook that is very creative, I am not! Sure, I can follow a recipe well. But when I'm in the store I'm not good at picking out a bunch of ingredients I'm not familiar with and throwing them together into a tasty dish that my family will love. Oh, and that isn't too expensive.
So what happens is we end up cooking a lot of things with pasta since there is pasta everywhere. We have sausage with pasta, chicken with pasta, meatballs with pasta, etc. But beyond those dishes I have a hard time figuring out what to buy (not helped when I cannot translate the type/cut of the ambiguous looking meat). Yes, I buy lettuce and other ingredients for salad, but they don't do dressings except for olive oil and vinegar and after a point you are sick of that too. (I did try buying one creamy dressing and we concluded it was more of a paste consistency - much too think - than anything you would pour over a salad).
I'm definitely going to keep trying. But in the meantime ... any easy suggestions?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'll have to ask a friend who used to live in Rome what she did. When I was oversees I mainly survived on wine, clementines, bread, and nutella - probably not an ideal diet for the youngsters!
ReplyDeleteMaria....
ReplyDeleteI think the kids wish I would let them survive on that diet! (Wine excepted). We have a lot of the clementines, bread and nutella as you've seen. (In fact I'm getting requests for a peanut butter/nutella sandwich as we speak. Basically a big peanut butter cup in sandwich form. Mmmmm). I'm happy to report that since that posting I managed to make 2 chicken dishes that didn't involve any pasta. One was a mini thanksgiving type dinner - chicken, stuffing, carrots, and the other was a kind of fried chicken CJ found. But I haven't had luck with dishes outside of chicken. (I still haven't learned the cuts of red meat, and you can only get fish from the pecheria and I haven't ventured into one with the kids yet. Maybe that's a project for next week. I'd love any suggestions your friends has though. Take care!