Cucina italiana

Our home-made macchiato, with CZ's milk-froth (I'll try to get a better photo soon.) She's very fond of cinnamon.

It has taken me a month-and-a-half to blog a three-week trip! But I've got just a couple of small posts to write about little ancillary things having to do with Italy.

This first post is about little cooking items that I'm having fun using now that we're back home. With all the luggage restrictions these days, I didn't want to load up the suitcase with souvenirs, but I did buy a couple of small things for the kitchen, supplemented by a couple of larger things that I knew I could get at home:

I bought this moka pot at Bed, Bath and Beyond, not in Italy, but it's foundational, so it comes first. The Bialetti moka pot is almost a national symbol of Italy. Our tutor Paola gets almost teary-eyed when she talks about how the moka is now being supplanted by the home espresso machine. Nevertheless, our rental house had several of moka pots in different sizes. In Italy, you can even get cans of Illy coffee ground for them (and as you might expect, Illy is much cheaper there, too). We had moka pot coffee every morning in tiny espresso cups, and again after lunch.

Now that we're back home, I have my usual French press coffee early in the morning, but in the afternoon, CZ and I make espresso in the moka pot. We also bought a little hand-pumped milk frother to make macchiato. The glass was very thin and it broke after the first week, but CZ quickly figured out that the pump fit the French press carafe perfectly and now she makes it that way. We've been experimenting with different kinds of milk, but find even the same brands to be inconsistent. We've had the best luck so far with 1% Organic Valley.

A small milk/tea pot

When I drink my morning coffee around 6 a.m. at home, I like to have it while seated on the sofa next to the open living-room window. I do this because I like to be slightly cold when I drink my coffee, but our centrally-steam-heated building is usually too warm for that. I also like the window open because early morning is the quietest time of day in NYC and I like to sit and listen to the quiet. The only problem with my nice routine is that the breeze, combined with my habits of using a French press and of pouring half-and-half in my coffee, made it almost certain the coffee would be lukewarm by the time I got situated.

Our rental house had several small milk/tea pots. I quickly discovered that I could heat milk on the stove in the smallest one and enjoy very hot coffee. So I bought one of these nice small pots in Italy. The one in the photo above is about five inches high. I've just started using it this week, now that there's actually a breeze coming through the window in the morning. It works!

This next item is a mezzaluna, or half-moon. (It has nothing to do with coffee.) There was also one of these in our rental kitchen and I started using it daily. It's just a little curved knife with two handles, very handy for cutting ripe cantaloupe or getting a nice rocking motion going for fine-dicing herbs and onions. I didn't know what it was called until I mentioned to Sra. Bertolani that I used it every day. "Ah, la mezzaluna!" she explained, tracing the half-moon shape across the blade with her finger. So I bought one, for not very much, in the town's kitchenwares store. When I went to Bed, Bath and Beyond to get the moka pot, I also saw them there, too, but I like knowing that mine is from the town where I first learned about them.

And while I was at it, I bought a little icing syringe for cake decorating. I hadn't decorated cakes with icing in recent years (I used fruit instead) because I balked at all the preservatives in the storebought kind, but I hadn't seen a syringe here at home. This one looked easy to use, and it was lightweight. CZ tried it out yesterday while icing Bob's birthday cake. (By the way, she gets sort of giddy after eating a lot of icing.)

The cake reads, "Buon compleano, Roberto di [picture of a bicycle]. This is obviously an obscure joke. It stems from Bob's recent habit of signing all correspondence to friends and family with some imaginary Italian surname, most commonly Roberto di Bicicletta, or "Bob Bicycle." Enough said!

I also bought one large thing for the kitchen, but that was after we got back. A couple of weeks ago, the igniter in our aging oven went out--again. After four repairs in as many years, and living without the most convenient top burner for a year as well, I finally decided to get a new range. It's actually just an updated version of the old one, which I liked, but it has two things the old one didn't, a convection fan and a handy middle burner that can be used either for a Dutch oven (because it's oblong) or to heat a specially-fitted griddle insert. The whole thing heats up much faster too, and is much more reliable temperature-wise. I admit it--I love having a new stove!

Last Saturday Bob went on a seventy-plus mile bike ride, so we celebrated with brunch. CZ whipped up some ricotta-nutmeg pancakes and we put them on the griddle, along with bacon and eggs. Here she is experimenting with pancake shapes:

I'm glad it's cool enough to exercise more now, because with all these cooking supplies, it looks like we'll need it!