happy turkey day!

we're in roma! and this is our thanksgiving feast...

lots of prep....potatoes, chicken (no turkey in italy!), and squash soup...and that's squash that you can't find in the U.S. (turned out to be the best squash ever and one of my favorite dishes!)

yummers

lots of spices and such

that's keith taste testing the mashed potatoes

did we get a caterer? no.....those are just my fancy aluminum dishes that came in handy.

keith bought flowers



the best squash soup, hands down. I don't mean to toot my own horn but this could have been at a fancy restaurant and I would have been dumbfounded and left with a gimpy-hand!
the squash looked like a pumpkin at the market and after roasting in the oven (with apple) it shredded like butternut squash. I added the squash and apple mash to a pan with butter, sauteed leeks and added homemade chicken/porcini mushroom stock and then some nutmeg, salt, pepper... whipped with my fancy immersion blender (see previous post) and added a splash of milk. presto!

drumsticks stewed/sauteed in wine, rosemary, olive oil, olives...

squash puree for keith and chicken off the bone

homemade stuffing - good ol' mom's recipee with the best crust top!

yams! let me tell you that yams are very hard to find in italy. I think they import them from america because the sign at the market said "america yammys"....and two giant yams cost just under $8!! but oh, so worth it. oh, yeah....and no brown sugar in italy...or maple syrup or molasses. so, I still roasted them in oil and then once cool, cut them up and roasted with a bit of chicken stock, orange juice and sprinkled with a litle sugar.

keith's favorite....mashed potatoes!...with no cheese! ahahahhahah



mmmm

keith's first finished plate!

keith doing the dishes...never have to ask...what a gentleman!

keith passing out after dinner

and a brief sidenote: we bought this fun fabric at a strange fabric store in rome because our sofa smelled a little funky. now we love it and want to ship the fabric home afterwards!

hope you have a great thanksgiving - and *thanks* for reading!

keith likes taking pictures

yet another left-over boboli post, but we leave tomorrow for rome so I wanted to take a second to show how much keith likes taking pictures....

it's sort of an inside joke because you would think that the ex-blogger, artist would be all about taking pictures while traveling but in some ways I hate it. ok, maybe not hate, but it is a combination of going out to art opening in detroit and taking pics for the blog and feeling like I missed out on the actual art because I was busy taking pictures. in that way I want to experience the places we see and not take pics...ok and also, I have a complex about people looking at me while taking pics in a foreign land....but anyways...thank goodness keith likes to take pics or we wouldn't have a lot of these good shots.
this day I was making fun with keith about him taking pictures and took many pictures of him taking pictures!...hahahaha..all in good fun!







so this brings me to keith's future....a tourist traveling with a tri-pod! well, not really, but there were many asians setting up tri-pods in the garden....very professional! I think keith was jealous. the illegal-goods street vendors sell tri-pods too...what is so illegal about tri-pods? they set up blankets with fake Gucci purses and then next to them are tri-pods??

ok, and this keith showing the vertical slope of the hill.

oh, love!

operation kitten calendar @ boboli

so there's this show that used to be on comedy central called Acceptable tv. The show was ok as a whole but had a few really fun skits. when I found myself at boboli gardens obsessively taking pictures of the cute kitties like all the other visitors I thought that it would make for a good show!
here watch this to get the idea! hahahahh!

firenze pt. 1

We've been enjoying our week in Florence - it's a small city without a lot of "cool" stuff to seek out and do, so we've really been relaxing. It's pretty much "here are the tourist-y things, here are the main parts of town" - and that's that. there might be a "cool kids" quadrant, but it hardly seems worth seeking out in a place this tiny. So restful has this time been, extended our time in the apartment until monday morning, at which point we will head to Rome for a week.

Down the street from our apartment is the Mercato Centrale. Downstairs houses butchers and cheese counters, upstairs has produce:


Ann's been buying amazing olives by the truckload (I've been casually converted into liking them ... casually). I've discovered dehydrated fruit, like these cherries:


I tend to eat far too many at once and then swear them off, only to return again hours later. it's a vicious, sugary cycle.

a major bonus of living as we have been - staying in "self-catering apartments" (that is, apartments with kitchens) and shopping at markets - is that we get to feast like royalty for comparably little money. Ann's cooking (it's an interest of hers. this isn't me going in some weird '50s husband direction - ann *likes* cooking. I like eating. it works out) is rapidly developing in light of our European dining. We eat out once or twice per town/week, and try to learn things from where/what we eat at those meals. Ann has been able to take that knowledge and then immediately apply it to, say, lunch the next day - cooked in our apartment, at little expense.


A great porcini mushroom and fresh parmigiano reggiano pasta, courtesy of Ann:


That said, she did spend a little extra this week ... on a hilariously ironic immersion blender (long story short: I once gave Ann an immersion blender as a present - she said she really wanted one! - and was *laughed at* for *months*. then she came to love it, eventually. and now, here we are in florence, italy and what does ann buy? an immersion blender! hahahahahahahaha!)


with said blender, Ann made this delicious cauliflower soup:



After which we, naturally, went out for gelato. since it was our third night in town, and the previous two nights we had gotten gelato at a place around the corner, we (via my desire) sought out a highly regarded (on the internet, anyway) gelato place 15 minutes walk from our apartment. it was a small place, praised for its relative lack of tourists and experimental flavors. lack tourists it did. serve amazing gelato it did not. oh well.


we've since returned to the corner place. ann favors chocolate and chocolate/vanilla combos. I've gone for chocolate, chocolate/after eight mint, and most recently something called "contessa" which involved chunks of wafer cookies, their chocolate filling and a fair deal of peanuts. *that* was amazing.

at some point early in the week, we headed to the other side of the Arno River and to the Boboli Gardens (home, Ann hoped, to the famed ready-made pizza dough manufacturers). the gardens are basically the fancy backyard to Florence's old ruling family's palace, dating back to the 1500s.








Ann made friends with some cats there.


I plan to use this shot in my portfolio when I apply to edit "Cat Fancy" magazine. Hot!


Ann has also taken to making/constantly talking about the focaccia-based sandwiches for which she gave the recipe in the prior post. Their excellence has caused Ann's focaccia-based ego to expand wildly, and any time we pass a focaccia sandwich-serving establishment, she quietly mock-shouts "Focaccia off!" I was at first perplexed by the meaning of this. Then Ann explained that it was her way of challenging the proprietors of these "inferior" focaccia sandwich makers to a culinary duel. Yep. Exactly.

Here's one of the better contenders:


Firenze pt. 2 tomorrow.

yummy easy recipe

if you miss us, here's a couple of things you can do:

rent Ratatouille the movie (the rat is me and the boy is keith...heheheheh)


and...


here's an easy pizza/sandwich recipe that I love right now:

handful of kalmata olives
handful of sicilian green olives (these are the olives that you find at good markets like whole foods...or the like)
roma tomatoes
small onion
ricotta cheese (sheeps milk is the best)
red pepper flakes
(salami slices optional)
focaccia loaf

slice focaccia loaf in half...not like slicing bread but like making a top and bottom
cut up olives/de-pit
add olives and a small amount of olive oil if olives are not coated in oil on bottom layer
cut up onion small and sprinkle on top
slice tomato (roma is best b/c not so watery) then top
add chili pepper flakes to taste
add salami slices if you want
spread ricotta on inside of top slice of bread and put on top of sandwich (ricotta side in of course!)

grill in panini pan or flip in grill pan

eat! yummers...it is like a fast pizza sandwich! the better the ingredients, the better the product - italy's food lesson. italian cuisine might seem simple but the ingredients are very planned. the wrong cheese or spice might make for a luke-warm dish. simplicity is easy and fast but takes smarts!

our place in florence

here's a quick post on our place in florence:

kitchen set-up

upstairs



downstairs