Vancouver, Day 4, 9/18/2010

Our day began with delicious croissants at Coco et Olive, with crunchy outsides and perfectly flaky insides. Eventually we made it to the University of British Columbia campus to go to the Museum of Anthropology, but by this time we were hungry and needed lunch. We weren't in a very good area for this, but we eventually found the Boulevard Coffee Roasting Co., which had some decent-looking sandwiches in the display case. I got one with scrambled egg, sun-dried tomatoes, some sort of cheese, and some sort of red pepper spread. Lindsay got one with brie and pear and walnuts. They heated the sandwiches up a bit so the cheese got a bit melty.

At the UBC Museum of Anthropology we met Sasha, who just got his PhD and a job at UBC, and his girlfriend Sheila. We apologized for how late we were and a had a good time chatting. Then we toured the museum, which had a huge collection of native art and artifacts.

After this we went to Yaletown, the trendiest part of downtown Vancouver, sort of Soho-esque in feel. Most of the streets are laid out with one side of the sidewalk about five steps up from the street. This elevated strip is filled with outdoor restaurant seating. We wandered around looking for a sushi place called Honjin our hosts had recommended. After we methodically walked back and forth down trying to cover every block in turn (which is actually fun!), we found a large map with a list of restaurants and went straight there. We had tiny dishes of spinach with with a sesame sauce, squid with a sweet soy sauce, and pickles. The spinach was good though I found the sauce a bit too peanut buttery. I liked the squid a lot: it turned out to be raw, and after a bit of chewing it would give in and feel rich and tender. The pickles were great. We also had sockeye salmon sashimi, two pieces of mackerel sushi, and a roll with some pickles vegetable inside. We had a hard time ordering because we barely know anything about Japanese food and most of the sushi was listed only with Japanese names. So, we didn't get much food at all. Also, none of the beer looked exciting, and we wanted to go somewhere else and get some, maybe with french fries. And that's what we did, at the Yaletown Brewing Co., which according to an article I read in one of those free city papers was a craft-brewing pioneer in Vancouver. The brewpub had a corporate, touristy feel, but the fries and beer were excellent. I had an IPA, and Lindsay had the seasonal Belgian Wit, and I couldn't say which was better. (Lindsay says hers!) We had a beautiful walk back over the Cambie St. bridge to get back.

Vancouver, Day 3, 9/17/2010

After a leisurely morning in which we caught up on a summer's worth of sleep, we borrowed our hosts' bikes and went to Kitsilano, another district south of downtown. We parked our bikes, checked out a beach, and got some Indian food at Rangoli, the cheaper version of a fancy restaurant called Vij's. We had black chickpea fritters with tomatoes and a rice pilaf and a slaw-like cabbage salad, and blackened eggplant with curried chickpeas. The fritters were amazing, with a texture like a meatball and a perfectly spiced sauce. No spices I cook with ever taste that good and clear. The eggplant's skin was really burnt to a crisp--I never would have had the nerve to cook it like that--and it was wonderfully smokey. The chickpeas were in a sweet tomato sauce, again spiced in a way that I can't approximate. It also came with an intensely cucumbery rajta and a thin flatbread that was slightly tough but slightly buttery.

We left and wanted to read--relaxing was a big priority for us on this trip--so we stopped in a café. At first I thought they only had espresso-based drinks, but it turned out their drip coffee was just listed as "java" on the menu. Every once in a while Canada does seem like a foreign country!

We biked over a bridge and then followed signs to the seawall, a path that goes all the way around Vancouver's downtown through Stanley Park. We rode on this pretty path and eventually turned to head back to a bridge to take us home, riding through a residential neighborhood made up of high-rise apartment buildings. What should have been overwhelming somehow wasn't. For whatever reason--architects and urban planners, please explain--instead of towering above me, the buildings just felt like they happened to go up for a while.

View from the Burrard St. bridge.

Despite Vancouver's excellent bike infrastructure, the ride to the Cambie St. bridge was a little bit scary. Biking unfamiliar routes in traffic is just never pleasant. One thing that made me feel better was a biker who merged in front of me and then biked all the way to the bridge with no hands, while I nervously gripped my bike's brakes. At one point he started waving his hands around like he was doing very relaxed calisthenics. It was weird.

Once we were back, we looked up some bus schedules and headed back to Granville Island to see a Fringe Festival play and meet our friends Tom and Megan who just moved around here. The buses were great: they had a dedicated lane, the seats are placed so that people can get on and off quickly, an LED display gives the next stop, and they seem to run often. We are beginning to annoy ourselves with all our talk about how great Vancouver is compared to Seattle.

We went walking around with Tom and Megan after the show looking for a place to get a snack. Nothing looked appropriate, and eventually we walked into a fancy supermarket called Capers that also sold prepared food and had a place to sit. After we went in we discovered it was a disguised Whole Foods! (Actual comment from the Yelp page of Capers: "Yup, I was a bit sad when the Canadian version of Whole Foods actually got taken over by Whole Foods...") Nevertheless we bought a loaf of bread, a piece of hard goat cheese, and some Concord grapes (which were seedless--I didn't know such a thing existed). We had a nice dinner of this, discussed the saga of Tom and Megan's pet snake that was refused entrance to Canada (it will be able to join them in a few weeks), and took the bus back to the house. Tom and Megan stayed on the bus and caught the SkyTrain back to where they live outside of Vancouver.

Vancouver, Day 2, 9/16/2010

We're staying in a house south of downtown. The owners are a couple who sometimes rent out their extra bedroom on airbnb.com. They're wonderful people, and they picked us up from the train station when we arrived yesterday. Their house is full of art and books and two cats who we tried and failed to photograph. One of them hides, and the other never stops moving.

The house we stayed at.

In the morning we walked over a bridge to get downtown. Along the way we saw a lot of bike infrastructure.

Bikes going the wrong way, legally.

We walked around the center of downtown, which like most downtowns is full of skyscrapers and expensive shopping. Unlike downtown Seattle, it's also full of people.

By lunchtime we had made it to the outskirts of Gastown and Chinatown. We had lunch at a place called Medina, where we ate delicious open face sandwiches. Mine were two variations of smoked salmon with herbed cream cheese: the first was topped with lightly dressed arugula and sweet cherry tomatoes, and the second with slices of avocado and a fried egg, sunny side up. Lindsay's dish was four (four!) different little open faced sandwiches: Moroccan carrots with raisins, grilled haloumi cheese (some sort of soft cheese that can be cooked without melting completely), tabouleh, and beets.

In the afternoon we took a terrible route over a long and ugly bridge to Granville Island to go the farmers market and the public market, a Pike Place Market-esque collection of food vendors. I made a mental note to return for smoked fish. We sat around reading and watching seagulls make funny noises before taking an exhausting walk back to the house.

After some rest, we went to a nearby restaurant called the Cascade Room. From the extraordinarily dim lighting we could tell it was a hip spot. I had a Main St. Pilsner that was great; very clean and toasty. I also had duck breast with shiitake mushrooms and gai lan, which is the same as Chinese broccoli. I mostly had pieces of stem, which were like massive asparagus stalks with leaves. Duck breast as usual was great. Lindsay had wonderful mushroom and paneer strudel on a pile of curried lentils. For dessert we shared cinnamon and chile crème brûlée. Then we went back to the house and ate a tiny melon we had bought at the farmers market earlier that day.

Mathless Days

It's been a full two days since my last final. Two entire days without any mathematical obligations! In another week I'll start studying for my three preliminary exams in real analysis, algebra, and topology/differential geometry, and I'll start doing some reading about Coxeter groups (I can't tell you what those are until I've read about them).

This week, I'll explore Seattle and its surroundings and eat the best food I can find. I started by crossing N. 145th St., leaving the friendly confines of Seattle for the strikingly similar confines of Shoreline. Shoreline isn't known for much yet, but everyone should go there to enjoy the delicious Korean food at Haenam Kalbi & Calamari. Their logo is a smiling pig and squid. Based on this, we ordered a dish of pork and calamari in a chili sauce, which came with a gas burner and was cooked on our table. I spooned some onto my plate as soon as we got it, and as I took my first bite the waitress scurried over. She grabbed my plate, slid the food back onto the burner, and said, "Not ready yet." My bite of squid tasted fine--it wasn't quite raw--but the dish was better when it was nicely charred and the waitress gave us permission to eat it. We also got a bowl of buckwheat noodles with a sauce made from peanuts and chilis and other mysterious things and a boiled egg on top; the waitress came back with a pair of scissors to cut the noodles to a more manageable length. Our third dish was strips of beef atop a layer of onions on a sizzling cast iron plate. The onions were raw when they arrived and sweet and crunchy by the time we finished. Before any of this had even arrived, we were given about ten bowls of pickles, ranging from kimchi to miniature dried fish. It took the entire meal to even try everything. Most of the dishes cost eight to twelve dollars, and as you can tell you get plenty of food. I can't wait to go back.

Addresses:
Haenam Kalbi & Calamari
15001 Aurora Ave N
Shoreline, WA 98133

Bûche

The true meaning of Christmas is not presents, nor is it the birth of Jesus. It is bûche de noël.

A bûche de noël from Marquet Patisserie

Photo courtesy of my father.

Italy Addendum: Ordering Food in Italian Restaurants

I used to be confused about the structure of Italian meals. I had read some authoritative sentence that sounded like this: "In Italy, pasta is eaten not as a main course but rather as a small appetizer prior to it." Back when I read that my appetite was large enough that eating a meal of some appetizers, pasta, meat, and dessert didn't strike me as crazy. But a meal like that with restaurant-sized portions would be crazy. (And don't blame it on American portions: Italian dishes were about the same size as American ones.)

So, here's my bid at a new authoritative sentence on how to order at Italian restaurants: "In Italy, pasta is eaten in a separate course from meat and fish. You can have one course or the other or both, and you can share dishes in either course." I always like sharing, and apparently so do Italians. We had a representative meal in Ancona. Three of us had two antipasti, two pastas, and one thing from the fish menu, which was a good amount of food.

Italy, Day 15, 6/29/2008

• breakfast: typical
• lunch at Trattoria Tre Torri: eggplant "bruschetta"; casoncelli (pasta stuffed with a meaty paste); polenta cake
• dinner: airport sandwiches

Eggplant "bruschetta" was tomato, Parmesan cheese, and dried oregano on slices of grilled eggplant. (Incidentally, all the oregano I encountered on the trip was dried. All the other herbs were always fresh.) The casoncelli were small pasta stuffed with a pink paste that seemed to include prosciutto. They were served with a sauce of bacon and fried sage. The dish was terrific, especially the sage.

After lunch we bought one of the many small cakes sitting in a bakery window. It was made of polenta and had a thick layer of chocolate frosting, and as you'd expect from something made of coarse cornmeal and chocolate, it was delicious.

We ate some sandwiches at the airport. Even airport food is good in Italy!

Addresses:
Trattoria Tre Torri
Piazza Mercato Del Fieno, 7/A
24129 Bergamo (BG), Italy

Italy, Day 14, 6/28/2008

• breakfast: typical
• lunch: mozzarella, tomato, lettuce sandwich; torta di verdure
• dinner: polenta with cheese and mushrooms (antipasto); grilled pork tenderloin with rosemary and deep-fried squash flowers; vegetables with sesame seeds

Torta di verdure--vegetable cake--was a spinach pie with a thin, flaky crust. We ate it on our train journey to Bergamo, which suffered all sorts of delays (typical of all the trains we rode in Italy).

We finally got to Bergamo and walked around a bit. It's a nice town, especially for one that no Americans have heard of. It has an old town on a hill and a new town (still pretty old) below. I failed at finding a restaurant for dinner, and we ended up back at our bed and breakfast, which was also a restaurant.

The polenta with mushrooms was a traditional dish from Bergamo. The polenta had a much stronger corn flavor than it does when I make it. The pork was good but a little dry. The squash flowers mostly tasted like deep-fried batter, but it was very good batter. The vegetables were shockingly bad.

Italy, Day 13, 6/27/2008

• breakfast: the usual, plus a lemon granita from La Scogliera
• lunch from Focacceria Antonio: focaccia, walnut cake
• dinner from La Cantina de Mananan: mixed seafood antipasto; pasta with pesto; mozzarella with tomato, capers, olives, and oregano; fruit with gelato

I got a lemon granita at La Scogliera, and it was the best granita I had ever had. It was a refreshing, icy lemonade, like the Italian ice at Court Pastry but with a thinner consistency and a much stronger flavor.

We had made a reservation for dinner at La Cantina de Mananan. Giovanna was excited that when she gave her name, she didn't have to spell it. The restaurant had placemats advising us in English and German that Parmesan cheese doesn't go with seafood, that pesto doesn't go with pepper (who knew!), and that it is not appropriate to drink cappuccino after dinner. One frenzied man was the waiter for the entire restaurant. The antipasto had two delicious bits of smoked fish, two anchovies, some fish marinated in oil, capers, and lemon juice, and two shrimp with sweet, moist meat served in dark tomato sauce.

The pesto was exactly what pesto should be. The pasta was the weirdest shape I've ever seen (I forget its name, unfortunately). They were flat squares, about two-by-two inches, and one side was covered in little bubbles. They looked almost exactly like boiled pieces of pork skin (don't ask how I know that).

The gelato in our dessert wasn't vanilla but fior di latte--milk-flavored. It tasted like milk with no other flavor, and I think I liked it more than vanilla.

A roof with rocks and a satellite dish

Addresses:
La Scogliera
Via Fegina, 222
19016 Monterosso Al Mare (SP)

Focacceria Antonio
Via Fegina, 124
19016 Monterosso Al Mare (SP)

La Cantina de Mananan
Via Fieschi, 117
19010 Corniglia (SP)

Italy, Day 12, 6/26/2008

• breakfast: pastry with raisins
• lunch: roll with spinach; stromboli-like thing with tomato, mozzarella, and ham
• dinner: prosciutto and melon; trofie (worm-shaped pasta) with pesto and zucchini; ravioli with lobster

We bought breakfast at a trendy pastry shop in Bologna. Giovanna had a croissant stuffed with hazelnut cream, which was as good as it sounds.

We had an hour layover in Parma on our way to the Cinque Terre, five towns within walking distance of each other on the Mediterranean coast. We found a shop selling focaccia and other things resembling pizza. We got a roll that looked like a Chinese pork bun. It actually was kind of similar, but stuffed with spinach flavored with a tiny bit of balsamic vinegar.

We arrived in Corniglia, the middle town of the Cinque Terre, and we walked down the coast to two other towns. Things got more and more touristy, but it seemed appropriate for such a beautiful coast to be a little bit touristy. The restaurant we ate at was half good, in unexpected ways. In our prosciutto and melon, the melon was perfect, and a perfect melon is a surprise even in Italy. But the prosciutto was bad, which for Italy is an even bigger surprise. The ravioli with lobster were outstanding, though they were actually ricotta-spinach ravioli in tomato sauce with half of a little lobster on the side. On the other hand, the pesto dish was terrible. It had mushy strips of zucchini with the same texture as an overcooked potato and about as much flavor too.

The coast around the Cinque Terre

Italy, Day 11, 6/25/2008

• breakfast: bread, honey
• lunch: sandwich with prosciutto, sheep's cheese, and roasted eggplant and zucchini; peach granita
• dinner: pasta filled with potato with guanciale and chives; lasagna with little vegetables

Our afternoon in Bologna was taken up by a search for somewhere to stay. We had booked a room, but when we got to the listed address, there was no sign of any hotel. We went to a tourist office for help and someone there was friendly enough to walk down with us and ring some buzzers. She managed to find our (entirely unmarked) hotel, but the man on the other end of the buzzer said that he wasn't the owner and couldn't let us in. We had to call Giancarlo, the owner. We already had called him several times--his cell phone was turned off--and so we gave up and looked for something new (we hadn't paid a deposit or anything). We ended up with a cheap room in a hotel that looked exactly like a college dorm. It was incredibly hot, but it housed us for a night. Some time while we were wondering around with our bags taking care of this, I managed to get myself a peach granita. It seemed to be just pureed peach and ice, and was very refreshing, though not particularly intense.

At dinner we had small triangular pasta (bigger than tortellini, smaller than ravioli) stuffed with potato, kind of like pierogis. The sauce was chives, very crispy guanciale (cured pork cheek--similar to bacon), and lots of butter. The lasagna had little pieces of zucchini, carrots, and I tihnk some other vegetables, and lots of Béchamel sauce.

Italy, Day 10, 6/24/2008

• breakfast: bread, honey, jam, peanut butter
• lunch: prosciutto sandwich and gelato
• dinner at La Cantineta: cold fish antipasto; mussels and clams in tomato sauce antipasto; orecchiette with shrimp and cuttlefish; tagliole (long, thin pasta) with seafood; roasted seafood; lemon sorbet

We packed sandwiches and left in the morning for a beach in Sirolo, a small town on the Adriatic. After a day there, we got some gelato and came back to Ancona. Despite Italian food's superiority over Hungarian food, I preferred Hungarian ice cream. Gelato and fagylalt (i.e., Hungarian ice cream) are similar to each other; both are lighter and less creamy than American ice cream. I thought most gelato felt unnaturally (and unpleasantly) slick in my mouth. Giovanna did not agree.

The beach in Sirolo

Back in Ancona, Chiara took us to a seafood restaurant called La Cantineta. She took forever to translate the menu for us because she gave us a detailed description of every pasta shape. According to her (and perhaps to all Italians?) the shape of the pasta was as important as what was on it.

The cold fish antipasto had a lot of different things: a single shrimp with an intense flavor; a piece of smoked salmon; anchovies marinated in lemon juice; and arugula with what I think was cuttlefish. Our other antipasto, mussels and tiny clams in tomato sauce, was delicious.

Both pastas were great and achieved a miraculous chewiness. When I cook either dried or fresh pasta, it goes from uncooked to cooked without passing through such a chewy stage. (Apparently the intermediate value theorem does not apply to pasta.)

The seafood in the one secondo that we got consisted of a few mild white fish and some crayfish. All were covered in coarse breadcrumbs, including the crayfish, which needed to be shelled, rendering most of its breadcrumbs irrelevant. The different fishes were all good, and I have no idea what any of them were. After this I had lemon sorbet, which was essentially thick, icy lemonade, served with a straw. It was one of the best meals I had in Italy, and it made up for my year in landlocked Hungary with no seafood.

Addresses:
La Cantineta
Via A. Gramsci, 1/C
60121 Ancona (AN)

Italy, Day 9, 6/23/2008

• breakfast: bread and jam
• lunch at Ristorante Clemente: fried dough; farro salad; roasted eggplant; sun-dried tomatoes; cured meats; warm ricotta; mashed potatoes that were crunchy on top; gnocchi with zucchini, saffron, and salt cod; ravioli with ricotta, tomato sauce, and basil; sfalgione mousse; puff pastry with cream; warm apple cake
• dinner: pasta salad with pickled vegetables, asiago, and ham

We went with Fabrizio and Maria to Ristorante Clemente. We started with an enormous antipasto course and an excellent bottle of Montepulciano red wine from Abruzzo. The farro salad was made of cooked farro--like barley but not as chewy--with cherry tomatoes and basil. The mashed potatoes were put in a casserole dish, covered with breadcrumbs and baked to make a crunchy top. After this came the pasta dishes, one after another. They were flawless. Salt cod goes nicely with zucchini, livening it up. Dessert was great too, and it came with a glass of delicious, sweet white wine. I set the automatic Google translator on the restaurant's menu, with hilarious results.

Ovid's Square in Sulmona

In the afternoon we moved on to Ancona, a port town with lots of immigrants. We stayed with Chiara, who had been an exchange student living with Giovanna's family 18 years ago. She showed us how to make "cold pasta": cook the pasta less than usual; drain it and run cold water over it; add vegetables, ham, cheese, and olives if you want them; put the entire dish in the freezer for five minutes.

Addresses:
Ristorante Clemente
Vicolo Quercia, 5
67039 Sulmona (AQ)

Italy, Day 8, 6/22/2008

• breakfast: bread and jam
• lunch: fusilli with pesto; turkey cutlets with tomato sauce; salad; strawberries with sugar and lemon
• dinner: cured meat, cheese, marinated mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts; rosticini (grilled lamb skewers); cheese, roasted vegetables; cheesecake with strawberries, cheesecake with mosto cotto, tiramisù

We had lunch with Giovanna's family again. The turkey cutlets were coated with the thinnest layer of tomato sauce.

In the afternoon Fabrizio and his wife Maria got back from the U.S. Despite his jetlag, Fabrizio was full of manic energy and declared that he had to keep doing things or he'd fall asleep. So we all drove up to see the cave where Pope Celestine V--the only man to ever turn down the papacy--lived before he was pope. (After he was pope, he issued a papal decree declaring the pope's power to abdicate and then promptly abdicated, according to Wikipedia.) We also saw the house that was supposedly Ovid's.

Looking down on Sulmona

Next we drove back into town to go to a restaurant, but it turned out to be closed. So we drove to another restaurant--also closed--and then on to another and another. The problem? Italy was playing Spain in soccer, and since everyone would be home watching, almost no restaurants bothered to open. After an our of searching, we ended up at a place in the nearby town Raiano. (They stayed open because they had a television.) We had rosticini, little skewers of grilled lamb so thin that almost all of it was crisp and charred. Each skewer cost €0.50 and five of them made a good portion.

After dinner we went down the street to a bar specializing in rum, where we got cocktails and dessert. The cheesecakes were in the American style but a bit less dense than usual. One had an intense layer of strawberry gel, and the other had mosto cotto, grape must cooked down into a sweet, slightly bitter syrup. The crust tasted exactly like graham cracker crust, though it was actually traditional to the region and entirely homemade. Fabrizio, who makes his living as some sort of consultant on desserts--he used to own a gelateria--had a long conversation with the chef critiquing what we had eaten. I don't know what he said, but the desserts were good enough that it must have been hard to come up with any criticism.

Italy, Day 7, 6/21/2008

• breakfast: roll
• lunch: penne with tomato sauce; turkey cutlet fried in bread crumbs with red pepper jam; home-canned vegetables in a sweet and sour sauce; waffles with fig jam
• dinner: bruschetta with tomato and basil, with "truffle" spread, and with artichoke spread; pizza with mozzarella, tomato sauce, walnut cream, and arugula

We had lunch with Elisabetta and Lucia. The best part of the meal was the homemade red pepper jam. The vegetables were also delicious, crunchy and tasting slightly pickled (or maybe that was just the vinegar in their sauce). Must learn to can!

We went to a pizzeria for dinner with Elisabetta. There are many possible pizza flaws. Here are some of them, in case you ever want to make a pizza scorecard:

1. doughy crust
2. flavorless crust
3. soggy crust
4. bad tomato sauce
5. overly thick layer of low-quality cheese
6. low-quality toppings
7. poor taste in toppings

This list more or less describes Hungarian pizza, especially #7 (ketchup on pizza, anyone?). This pizza was guilty of #3, #5, and most egregiously, #6. It's shocking in Italy to get mushrooms as bad as the ones Giovanna got on her pizza. I think they were canned, and not in the good way like the vegetables at lunch. My pizza was a bit better. The walnut cream had a great flavor that went nicely with the arugula. And arugula on pizza is so great that U.S. pizzerias should adopt it. (Potential imitators: add the arugula after the pizza is cooked, so it only wilts a tiny bit.)

Before the pizza we had bruschette, which were soggy in the middle. I don't know what truffles taste like, but the truffle spread tasted like bad olives to me. I don't think its truffle content was very high.

A fountain in Sulmona

Italy, Day 6, 6/20/2008

Special guest post!

As Toby was suffering from his regular vacation illness (it first struck in New Orleans, then Prague and Munich, and now Italy), I faced our first homecooked Italian meal alone. We went to Sulmona to visit Fabrizio, a very distant cousin of mine, and arrived to find he was stuck in America. Even from America, though, he arranged our hotel room and generously footed the bill! Luckily there were other relatives to show us around. His sister Elisabetta invited us over for dinner cooked by their mother Lucia. Lucia is quite the cook (well, maybe just an average Italian one given my experience with the Italian cuisine).

Upon stepping foot in their apartment, I was reminded of the Italian custom of harassment (it’s at least a custom for the old Italian women I've met in Sulmona). They (mostly Lucia, and only in Italian) repeatedly harassed me for not knowing Italian (‘why hasn’t your mother taught you, even though you’ve been an ocean away struggling with the Hungarian language?’), for the ridiculousness of the English language (as it’s clearly my fault it’s written one way and spoken another), for my brother’s apparent lack of interest in Italy (which was evident to Lucia, though not to me, from the fact that he wasn’t traveling with me), and even for my father’s failure to master Italian. But I was most frequently harassed for not eating enough. Granted, it’s wonderful food, but there’s a limit to how much your body can take. So, while they pressured me to eat more, I tried to figure out how to avoid joining Toby on the sick bed.

Despite the ridicule, the meal was quite pleasant. We first had gato di patate (which is not ‘cat of potato’ as I first interpreted, but the French gateau, not that I’m familiar with that). It was like a fritatta, but, to my knowledge, eggless. It had a base of potatoes (of course), some kind of cheese (if Toby had been there you’d probably know what kind), prosciutto and mortadella. It was delicious, though quite creamy and filling. It was followed by one of my Italian favorites, prosciutto e melone. The homemade, natural meal was concluded by Magnum ice cream bars (a strange choice in my opinion in the country of gelato). My accomplishment for the evening was getting away with not finishing my ice cream bar.--Giovanna

Italy, Day 5, 6/19/2008

• breakfast: the usual
• lunch: cheese; sandwich with bresaola, eggplant, pecorino, eggplant, and arugula
• dinner at Hotel Pinguino: gnocchi with tomato sauce; roast beef; roasted potatoes; roasted peppers; crema Catalana

The owner of our hotel in Pescasseroli was a wonderful woman who helped us out with everything, despite barely speaking English. She drove us out into the Abruzzo National Park and picked us up there at the end of the day. In between, we hiked all over the park. We stopped in the town of Citadella at lunch for sandwiches and a plate with two types of cheese. The first was forgettable, but the other one was sharp and tangy and came slathered with honey.

We ate dinner at our hotel, where the friendly owner cooked for us and a huge group of children. The gnocchi were pleasantly pillowy, and the beef was juicy and tender.

Addresses:
Hotel Pinguino
via Collacchi, 2
67032 Pescasseroli (AQ)

Italy, Day 4, 6/18/2008

• breakfast: pastry, cappuccino, fruit
• lunch: bruschette with tapenade, roasted peppers, roasted pepper dip, sausage, and ham; olives; Campari and soda
• dinner: cheese plate; pasta alla chitarra; ravioli with eggplant in tomato sauce; broccoli; tiramisù

Our day's trip was from L'Aquila to Pescasseroli, and to get there we had to switch buses in Avezzano, a town that I'll always remember for its ugliness. (Ugliness stands out in Italy.) We found a bar for lunch while we waited for our bus. Behind the counter they had some nice-looking plates of toast, spreads, and focaccia. When I ordered one, the bartender said something about "un aperitivo" and when we shook our heads, she fetched an English speaker who thought about the translation for a second, looked confused, and then asked us if we wanted an aperitif. Apparently, the plate came with one, because he insisted that we have one. We brought the plate and my Campari and soda (it came in a pre-mixed bottle, like a soda) back to our table. Before we had sat down, the bartender brought us a bowl of olives. As we ate, more and more things were delivered to our table. First there were some extra pieces of focaccia, then some extra toasts, and finally an orange dip that tasted like roasted red peppers. We tried to turn down each of these when they brought them since we worried we'd be charged for each of them. When we were done, Giovanna went to the register to pay. The total price? Four euros, including the drink.

After an afternoon hiking to the Castel Mancino--or actually, an afternoon wondering around Pescasseroli looking for the trail that went there--we were hungry. We found a restaurant whose menu was scribbled on a piece of graph paper out front. The cheese plate we started with had two hard cheeses and some jam, and this satisfied our immediate hunger. Giovanna's pasta was really terrific: a bright, fruity tomato sauce on top of ravioli stuffed with eggplant. My pasta was good, too. It's traditional to Abruzzo, as I read in many tourist pamphlets. Here's an article from the New York Times about it. Each strand of pasta was long and rectangular with funny little bumps. It was wonderfully chewy, something I've never been able to achieve in my own homemade pasta. The sauce was made from oil, pancetta, and an enormous amount of pepper. It didn't look like much but it was incredibly flavorful. Last we had some broccoli, which was served as its own course because I hadn't quite figured out all the details of Italian dining. (More about that later.) A broccoli course is silly, but it was delicious, garlicky broccoli.

This restaurant was tiny and completely abandoned. Unfortunately, I have no idea what its name was or where it was, and I cannot direct you to this undiscovered gem. But if you're in Pescasseroli and see a tiny, empty restaurant with a handwritten menu, you should go there.

Italy, Day 3, 6/17/2008

• breakfast: cappuccino and pastry; fruit
• lunch: porchetta sandwich
• dinner: prosciutto and melon; pizza with olives, anchovies, oregano, tomato, mozzarella; pizza with tomato sauce and raw cherry tomatoes, arugula, mozzarella, and corn from Pizzeria Ristorante da Nonna Cristina

Porchetta--a whole pig deboned and roasted on a spit--is the perfect combination of pig parts: juicy meat for depth, herb-scented fat for richness, and crispy skin for, well, crispiness. Some arugula would have been nice on the sandwich to cut into the porchetta's saltiness, but the place in the market where I got the sandwich only had meat and rolls.

The pizza at dinner wasn't particularly good. The memorable thing about the meal was how the France-Italy soccer game had transformed the restaurant. A projector beamed the game onto a wall, and the patrons had moved their chairs to the same side of the tables to watch it. We left in the middle of the second half. The waitstaff thought we were crazy.

A church in L'Aquila

Addresses:
Pizzeria Ristorante Da Nonna Cristina
Via Paganica, 36
67100 L'Aquila (AQ)

Italy, Day 2, 6/16/2008

• breakfast: cappuccino and brioche
• lunch: spinach and mozzarella sandwich
• dinner from Ristorante Ernesto: plate of local cured meat; lamb with saffron and artichokes; saffron pudding; fruit

On the metro as we were going to the bus station, we saw a large family speaking Hungarian. After a few minutes, I got up the courage to talk to them in Hungarian. They were bemused by the sight of two Americans speaking Hungarian in Italy. Two of them turned out to speak excellent English, which made communication easier. They were actually from Transylvania, not Hungary. Their summary of Rome compared to eastern Europe: "It's a different world here."

We bought our bus tickets and sat down in a cafe for lunch. I got a sandwich with beautiful cooked spinach and mozzarella. The spinach had some red pepper flakes mixed in with it. Giovanna had a sandwich with prosciutto, pecorino romano, and lettuce, which reminded me that pecorino has plenty of uses besides grating.

We spent the afternoon walking around L'Aquila on the routes designated by our tourist map, which were designed to show us all the sights. These were mostly churches from the 14th-16th centuries, along with a lovely 13th century fountain.

The Fountain of the 99 Spouts

We started dinner at Ristorante Ernesto with a wooden tray of cured meat, including a dense, black liver sausage that tasted alternatively bad, good, and then bad again, as Giovanna said. Our next course was lamb in a lemony sauce with saffron, rosemary, and artichoke hearts, which tasted as good as it sounds. Alongside this, we had beautiful tomato wedges, pink tinged with green, served with olive oil and basil. My dessert was basically panna cotta that was bright yellow, with some currants on top. The fruit plate wasn't great. But besides it and the liver sausage (which I'm sure some people would have liked a lot), everything we had was terrific.

Addresses:
Ristorante Ernesto
Piazza Palazzo, 22
67100 L'Aquila (AQ)