Bagels!!

Steve has been on a bread-making kick - baguettes, whole wheat seed bread, and now this morning - la pièce de résistance - bagels! We woke to their delicious, freshly made smell this morning. They look like bagels, but the most important - they taste like them too!

That's only one of many things about living in Italy that has helped us become more self-sufficient. Sometimes you just can't find what you are looking for and you need to make your own or simply do without and realize that after a while - it's not something you really miss anymore. In regards to food, our tastes just slowly evolved. In the U.S., you can have whatever kind of food you want, whenever you want it. We've learned to appreciate and prefer local and seasonal. Although we still get a craving for certain ethnic foods - Indian for example - we can also make our own at home and only when we want the particularly saucy, spicy kind do we go out looking for it. We have our own blend of Mexican/Puertorican food nights - Steve makes great flat bread that is infinitely better and without all the chemicals and preservatives you find in the package of El Paso tortillas they sell here at the local specialty food shop Castroni. I make my family's Puertorican style beans and our local organic shop has avocados for the guacamole, and freshly grown cilantro we can find from the Bangladeshi shop keepers at Piazza Vittorio.

For the most part though we prefer Italian or Mediterranean food - things we can find and make with ingredients that are available now and that are fresh and flavorful. It's fun to drive out in the country and pick things up from the local farmers.

We are also supporters of the Slow Food movement. Their fantastic resource - "Osterie d'Italia" is a book that has never let us down. Not every meal has been mind-blowing, but we have never eaten badly. It also always takes us into small towns or borgos we would never find without the incentive of a possibly fabulous meal.

Yesterday we ended up in the nondescript town of Poggio Moiano - about an hour north of Rome - to try a restaurant that was in the guide. Traffic was horrific - all the Romans in an exodus for the three day weekend. We finally got there, and unfortunately, the town itself wasn't very interesting and incredibly quiet because of the holiday. The meal was good, but not spectacular - catering mostly to meat eaters. There was also a huge party because of a child's first communion so after being forgotten by the wait staff - our children got bored and we left without trying dessert. It was fine though - we were happy to leave and walk around the town a bit.


There's always a play ground to be found and our children are young enough that their expectations are low and they can have fun with nearly anything including this incline they found near some shops. Going up and speeding down was something they could have done for hours if we had let them.