We had quite a week of food to kick off our Italian fall! We took a cooking class as a family, where we prepared two different types of pasta, made with two types of grain. It brought back happy memories when the Italian side of my family decided to take on the task of making pasta and ravioli from scratch. It is a beautiful, labor-intensive process that always leaves me with the same conclusion: it’s great to make the sauce from scratch, but buy the pasta from the store! The fresh pasta selection at the markets is so fantastic, that I think “pasta making” will not be on a to-do list here anytime soon. However, the two sauces we made were delicious and I will post the recipes once I get the energy to translate them from Italian:)
Torino is the host of an incredible food exhibition, the Terra Madre Salone del Gusto. It’s a multi-day, multi-location food festival celebrating the slow food movement. For those not in the know, slow food is defined as “food that is produced or prepared in accordance with local culinary traditions, typically using high-quality locally sourced ingredients.” The movement actually began in the eighties and has its roots in a city south of Torino, called Bra. The festival is literally a culinary feast, with the largest part of the festival winding through nearly two miles of a park, with 900 booths representing countries from around the world.
Today, on a busy, sunny fall Sunday, we made our way slowly through the booths, stopping, tasting and staring at the incredible food bounty. By noon, Josh had a beer, I had an aperol spritz and Noah and Sylvie had strawberries covered in fresh chocolate from a huge fountain, topped with homemade whipped cream. My food highlight was finding lemon-filled sfogliatelle from a Neapolitan pastry maker called Sessa. If you have never tasted this type of Italian pastry, I hope that someday you do.
For lunch, we had our hearts set on finding tamales, a food not easily found in Torino. We found a mobbed booth from Peru, where we found empanadas, but alas, tamales were already sold out. As luck would have it, a booth from the US, the Sioux-Chef, had a menu promising tamales. The kids were thrilled! Success! As we lined up to get them, I asked the (Italian) guy helping out what kind of meat was served with them. His answer? Rabbit. Yikes. We sat down in the park to enjoy our tamales. I asked Sylvia how the “chicken” was. She barely looked up from her plate and responded, “I know this isn’t chicken, because I speak Italian and I heard what that guy said the meat is.”
This was a great moment for three reasons:
1) Sylvie understood Italian clearly and casually.
2) Sylvie knew that there was rabbit meat on her plate and didn’t say a word about it.
3) Sylvie ate the aforementioned rabbit without pause.
So, to summarize, we had booze before noon AND the kids are eating exotic foods in stride. This is shaping up to be a good year.