Birthday!

So, I know it has been a while since I have posted. I ran out of space on my blog as just recently added more space to the blog so I can continue sharing pictures. I will try to post one a day until I'm caught up and, since this is all the way back in March, I’ve got a way to go, but Thanks for following! Now on with the show!

Wednesday was my birthday. The 22^nd birthday is no doubt far less exciting than the 21^st and birthdays in a foreign country are also slightly less exciting. That is not to knock it down a notch at all but there is something to be said with being able to surround one’s self with their friends, family and all that is important to them on their birthday. It was also a little sad knowing I was missing some of my good friends Birthdays who had just passed or are coming up.

However, the sadness quickly evaporated as I made my walk to my cuisine class. There is something about a class entirely about food that is nice and comforting, let alone a class about Italian food. Today, we learned about the different kinds of pasta that exist in Italy. There are literally so many kinds of pasta that they stopped naming them and just gave them numbers. There are hundreds of kinds of pasta, which I didn’t know. Italians divide pasta into long and short pastas. Long pasta is spaghetti while the short pasta is the Penne, Fissile and various other shapes. I also didn’t know there are like 15 kinds of Spaghetti noodles. Most pasta is numbered and Spaghetti garners the first chunk with Angel Hair pasta leading the charge, Spaghettino coming in at number 3, Spaghetti that we all know and love at number five, Vermicellini is number 7, Bucatini is number nine. As the pasta gets thicker, the numbers get larger.

Another fun thing is that Pasta is a very broad word. If you ask most people what pasta is, they will tell you it pretty much means noodles but in Italian, Pasta simply means dough and can mean a pastry! I don’t think I would like a doughnut with meat sauce but whatever floats your boat I guess…

Pasta alla Amatriciana

The shells are kept in to prove the freshness of the dish

We cooked Pasta Amatriciana, which is named for a small town near Rome that gave us a taste commonly found in the central part of Rome. This is a red sauce that has bacon in it. We also cooked a white sauce to give us a broader taste. Salsa Alle Vongole e Cozzi is a sauce that has clams and muscles in it and tastes very good.

Ugly sucker isn't he?

For the Secondo piatti, we made Nasello alla trapani which is a dish commonly found in Sicily’s costal town. This uses a fish native to the Mediterranean and spices that would be traded for with the North Africans and is a pretty good dish but the fish we had was fairly boney and I had forgotten how sneaky fish bones are to find!

Before we made desert, we made the antipasto dish which immediately made me think of Lauren Roaldson. Insalata d’Arance is a dish that I will definitely pass on to her when we get back because the flavors seemed to mesh with all her favorites, from a red onion to the parsley, as well as the orange. As soon as we opened up the oranges, the smells of Ivrea came flooding back and the dish was a fun dish to make for that reason.

Now, I know that nobody reading really wants to hear of the desserts I made but I’ll let you all know just for finishing the dinner’s sake. We made one of the least favorite deserts among all my friends; Tiramisu. Ok, so I led, its not one of the least favorites. It is Italian for 'pick me up' and was a fun dish to make, though it seemed to be an exercise for the professor to tell us we were doing things wrong. I did not know that this is a very tough dish to make because too much of just about anything, the wrong movements and things like that can make for a lumpy, tasteless mess of a dish. Also, I found out that the recipe for the dish isn’t very old (when compared to other things in the class).

Leaving class with my belly full and my birthday off to a good start, I headed back home, cleaned and tried to get as much as I could in preparation for Molly’s trip to Italy in a couple days. I got a bunch of homework done and tried to relax and enjoy being in Italy. When my roommate finished class, we headed downtown to Lobalux for Aperitivo and celebrated with a buffet of awesome food and good wine.

By the end, It ended up being a good birthday. Aperitivo is always a great way to end a night and it will certainly be something I miss when I go back home. I look forward, however, to seeing family and having familiarity surrounding me. This has been a great experience but things like my birthday do bring some of the more important things into focus and that is something awesome about getting to study abroad.