F is for Food

F is for Food

I have been putting off writing this for a long time because trying to organise this in my head, let alone write it up normally feels like an impossible task. There is so much food here of which I have eaten vast quantities that I’m not sure I’m up to doing it justice with my words. There is also a chance that some of this will repeat on various food substances described in the pre-A to Z era of blogging, all those years ago. For this I apologise, but tough, you’re just going to have to read it.

Before I get onto the serious business of writing about food I will relay to you the events that have been keeping me occupied in the past week. One was tragically comical, which was when the key snapped in the lock and myself and Liam were under house arrest for a couple of hours before yours truly sorted out the situation in typically heroic fashion. I nearly climbed down the balcony and got drunk, although in the end I fixed the lock and then went and got drunk. And then, of course, argued with the not-girlfriend.

Secondly, aptly for the letter of choice today, I have been deciding my future. I cannot reveal what that will be at this point because it is not concrete yet, however it is exciting and full of adventure. It will also make a damned fine last post for this travel blog thingy.

Thirdly, I have been out kayaking on the beach where I got to see some good jellyfish, which as it turns out, I have been lying about. I have been telling people, confidently, that they no-one ever gets stung by them. This, as I found out this week, is a lie, as one of the Cosmos reps got stung by one a couple of days ago. Rather ungratefully she didn’t see this as a great experience that was enviable (I wish I’d been stung by a jellyfish), more that it was a painful inconvenience. Some people, eh?

So, onto food.

Really, I’m not sure where to start, so I’m going to do it in the order of the day that I would normally eat, before heading onto some descriptions of a couple of meals I’ve been out for. One reason that I’m okay to write this up now is that I’m actually full, whilst in the previous week/two weeks of not writing this up I knew that there is no way I could do it on an empty stomach…

Ok, breakfast. For me I don’t usually grab breakfast in my apartment other than a pot of coffee that I’ll make using the antique mocha (iron coffee pot thingy) that came with the place and some very good, strong Goppion ground coffee. It is something that can certainly be said for Italy is that they know how to do coffee, be it in café’s or at home - it’s all cheap and damned good.

If I am going to indulge myself with breakfast I’ll usually grab it either at the Hotel Marco Polo or the Ambasciatori Palace, whose breakfasts are pretty standard Italian hotel fare. This consists of a buffet, including croissants (which, confusingly, Italians insist on calling brioche), bread rolls, Gouda cheese, a few types of porky meats (remember, many Austrians), some marmalades and jams, a couple of pots of cereals and then a vast array of sweet biscuits and cookies. Fabio, the manager at the Ambasciatori, who I often eat with, will have a cup of milk and dip everything into it through breakfast (well, the brioche and the cookies) and tells me that breakfast is usually a sweet thing. Hmm, damned suspicious to me…

I usually content myself with a pot of coffee/glass of blood orange juice, a brioche and a roll with ham and cheese. I must confess that I have become quite fond of the European style breakfast, worryingly so the Germanic hams, I blame this solely on being away from home for over 3 months and having no normality to put things into context. I refrain from the milk dipping because I’m not that far gone.

At the Ambasciatori there is also, for the benefit of the English guests, the options of fried eggs, bacon and sausages, all cooked in front of you on a griddle. It is hilarious because the waiters all have a fight each morning on who has to cook it because they hate doing it that much, one of them, Lorenzo, has such a mardy face on when doing it I have to struggle not to chuckle at him. He literally throws the eggs down at the griddle and then looks surprised when the yolks break and, of course, the English are less than understanding about it. Heh. The bacon is much fattier than the English are used to whilst the sausages are some bastard cousin of the Tesco Value Pink Meat Special’s, not because the hotel is cheap just because English sausages don’t really exist in Italy. Just to ensure that this entry is at least vaguely educational rather than one lust-filled ode to greed, I will improve all of your Italian vocabulary by letting you know that breakfast in Italian is colazione.

Fabio reliably informs me that whilst Breakfast is important, and certainly the evening meal is, it is pranzo, or lunch, that is the most important meal of the day. It is when workers return home for siesta and the whole family gather in the kitchen and enjoy their grub. I may have mentioned this somewhere else already in the obscenely vast amount of words that have been written in these blogs (just over 30,000 words now), but I absolutely love the fact that Italy is built around the kitchen table and that TV meals don’t exist. If you try explaining to Italians that the vast majority of English people don’t share their meals around the table the look of horror on their faces is equivalent to telling them that you have recently revived the practice of scalping and keeping your enemies’ heads as trophies to ward off evil.

So, having explained the importance of pranzo it is with some shame that I must admit that I usually don’t actually have any, but that is only because of the styling of my days, in that I’m either at the beach or passed out in my siesta, nor do I have a family to return to and discuss my fascinating life with. If I do grab something then, shamefully, it is something trashy like a hot-dog with a Corona & Lime or a quick burger from the Black Cat.

Ok, so we go to cena or the evening meal, my personal favourite, the opportunity to pig out on food of the finest quality. I may get paid next to nothing but I damn well eat like a King when I can. Due to my life-changing decision to leave the UK I have now eaten Wild Boar (cinghale), Rabbit (very nice, actually), every type of pizza and pasta possible, Tiramisu to die for, a huge amount of salads, huge prawns, clams, salmon that hasn’t been grown with heroin in Scotland, and some flipping amazing Ice Cream.

When I have my evening meal in the hotels it is generally the Ambasciatori I favour. The reason for this is that it is a buffet so there’ll always be something that I’ll be interested in eating, but also because the manager, Fabio, always has me as a guest, which is a very nice thing to do. With him I will get some normalcy back, as I can discuss politics with him, cultural differences between the UK and Italy and other topics that vary from the usual tripe I have to suffer about hair-styles, attractive men, sales, dire music and talk of sunbathing. I’m going to have to get momentarily distracted here, but seriously, as if sunbathing itself is not one of the most tedious activities (if you can call it an activity, I personally will now refer to it as an anti-activity, a non-activity, an activity-less-the-active), but to talk about it? Dear Lord, smite me down now…

Cough, right, apologies, my ranting came back momentarily there, completely unintentionally. Fabio’s friends will also sometimes come to visit and it is brilliant to be in with a crowd of Italians all roughly my age (generally a couple of years older, but all under 30), to hear about university for them, what they do to live and for fun, it was the whole point of me coming travelling, to sample something different.

The good thing about eating in the hotels is that it is where I get all my vitamins and greens, I go completely overboard on veg and salad, to compensate for my otherwise generally appalling diet. Fabio and I always start with a bowl of salad, which of course must be heavily doused in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It’s just not cricket if you don’t…

A point of slight confusion for me, when first arriving in Italy, was how I was always a set of cutlery down on everyone else, but you actually keep the same set of cutlery (except the main course fork, bizarrely) throughout the whole meal, from salad up until the end of your main course. I don’t know if they thought I was some cretinous (real word? Spellcheck doesn’t seem to agree, but then again, spellcheck doesn’t think ‘spellcheck’ is a real word. Is that irony?) pleb (oh good God, that’s apparently not a word either), or just very careless with my cutlery. Perhaps they thought I was stealing it. Hmmm.

Back to the order of eating and such, we return after the salad has finished. We will then grab some pasta as a prima piatti (remember, first plate, the size of a normal meal), my current favourites are the Lasagne, which at the Ambasciatori is to die for, and gnocchi, the potato dumplings, which taste far superior to how they sound. I will put in a good word for the Hotel Trento here, where the fusili starter with ham and mushrooms in an odd sauce was absolutely beautiful. Don’t forget to throw unhealthy amounts of parmesan over all of these, unless, of course, it is fish based, in which case you will do well not to be forcefully removed from the building for desecrating food. I will say that Ravioli, or least the kind that I have had, has been slightly disappointing, although one thing that you must do when coming to Italy is kick out your preconceived notions of Italian food because what you have in England is not even close.

After over-indulging in cheesy pasta goodness it is time to hit the main main-course. This is where, as I mentioned, I stock up on my veg, I’m a big fan of spinach at the moment, as well as new potatoes and the various ways of cooking them. The main courses at the Ambasciatori vary so much, often with a slight German lilt to them, so quite a few options of breaded pork or slices of pork with cheese and tomato on them. Highlights have included veal (I know it’s baby cow but just like Foie Gras, the suffering tastes so damn good…), the rabbit stew, the ratatouille (although not a patch on Mr Wiscombe’s) and…er….the Roast Beef. I had it for the first time in 3 months last week and it was cooked Italian style, i.e. they had skinned it, wiped its arse and put it on a serving dish, it was the kind of rare I like and as I mentioned I’ve been having a bit of a yearning for a roast dinner. The potatoes were a perverse type of roastie, cooked in olive oil and with herbs, but I was prepared to tolerate it for that succulent, meaty beef. Mmmm. Dammit, I’m dribbling now…

Sweet, or dolce, will usually be Tiramisu for me, which Alberto the big drunk chef will proudly tell me he cooked for Princess Diana on a P&O boat, to which I pretend to a) believe him and b) be impressed. I don’t know if either are at all convincing. Otherwise I will have strawberries and ice-cream or I will go for one of the bizarre coloured mousses - don’t ask me what flavour they are meant to be or what’s supposedly in them, I know they’re edible and don’t appear to have any side-effects at all.

Afterwards I will often have a fine cup of coffee, a nice espresso, which is served at drinking temperature, with a little bit of sugar in. Delightful.

I have been fortunate enough to have eaten out a few times in Jesolo due to the not-girlfriend, sometimes we’ve just gone for easy pizza or a quick bowl of pasta, however there is one place that we went that deserves a write-up. The restaurant is called ‘Laguna’ and is in the nearby town of Cavallino, which in itself is a mini-less-tacky Jesolo. Oh, it is more German, which is kind of weird, but you learn to accept that.

The backdrop to heading out to Laguna was that I rang the not-girlfriend, as we were already due to grab some grub, and asked her if it was alright if we dressed up a little bit. The reason for this is that whilst I’m a generally scruffy person I get sick of it, sometimes I have to dress smartly to remind myself that I’m not the tramp I pass as. I wear scruffy clothes as a childish act of rebellion against the conformity of work clothes, that I have to wear a uniform, however, as I said, sometimes I need evidence that I’m not an absolute scoundrel waster and dressing up in a fine suit is my own booster.

Needless to say the not-girlfriend was stunned into silence by how well I scrub up (Spontaneous Quip #42: “Oh, it’s not that I scrub up well, I think you’ll find I scrub down awfully well…”) and no doubt in awe of the dashing young gentleman who had turned up in my place. I rather think that she thought me being smart would mean me ironing the back of my shirt as well as the front. So, this meant we weren’t going to head out anywhere in Jesolo for I was far too conspicuous (and feeling a little foolish myself at this point) and it would draw attention to us. It was, however, a Monday night in which most restaurants close exceptionally early if open at all so we had a bit of a trawl around the outskirts of Jesolo and then into Cavallino where we went past a restaurant we had been to before which was closing, until we came to Laguna.

Laguna features in the good food guide for the whole of the Veneto, it is officially the best place to eat in this postcode, it is damn fine. As a result it is also a little bit pricey, but good God what service you get. We were greeted at the door, where we were then guided into a nice booth and provided with menus, and the sign of a great restaurant, water and a huge amount of different types of bread. There was a kind of breadstick which was frankly disgusting as it tasted of aniseed but you can’t expect these foreigners to get everything right, what what?

When asked what wine we would like I was going to go with my usual tactic of the one with the best name or one that I actually recognised, however the chef himself comes out and talks to you about what fresh catches he got in and what wines would go well with them. We ended up going for a Pinot Nero which was the smoothest wine I’ve ever drunk (although at €30 a bottle you expect it, considering the average bottle of wine in Italy is under ten euro) and it really went well with the food.

Ah, the food. I smile as I think back to it. We made the executive decision that there was no way we were going to able to avoid garlic breath so we had scallops drenched in olive oil and garlic to start, which were absolutely incredible, they melted if you even looked at them, imagine what they were like to bite into. We then had two ½ first plates each (equalling a first plate each), one of spaghetti al pomodoro con vongole (spaghetti and clams in a tomato sauce) and the other one of a tagliatelle, both of which had me close to tears from flavoural overload (that’s right, it was so good I’m inventing new words, damn your eyes). We then went for a mixed sweet plate with a little bit of everything which was just as perfect as expected, overall, the meal was blinding. It was also a lot of money but it was worth it - an evening of sophistication, good food, fantastic company and beautiful wine. You can see why the Romans both had and lost an Empire.

On the subject of eating with the not-girlfriend I did cook for her once, being the wonderfully romantic young man that I am. She has lived in England before so is no stranger to our cuisine, however she will never miss an opportunity to get a sly dig in about the inadequacies of our beloved food. For the most part, she has a point, however there are some parts of English cuisine which I think are great - our Roast Dinners, real Cornish Pasties (courtesy of Greg’s Gran), Pies, Curries (they count as English, not only did we colonise their country of origin, we bastardised the original dish to something unrecognisable outside of the UK), and, of course… Toad-In-The-Hole. This is something, as I mentioned during my great flirting expedition with Fredrica on the train from Florence to San Dona, that is impossible to explain to a foreigner, so now I don’t even try.

With the lovely not-girlfriend she was at work whilst I was at her apartment getting things ready, so I wrote up a little menu in Italian - garlic mushrooms to start, then “Rospi in il Buco” (literal translation: ‘Frogs in the Hole’), to follow with a surprise desert (Chocolate yoghurts from ‘Sma’ supermarket). I made the toad-in-the-hole, English sausages wrapped in bacon, mashed potato, baked beans (that’s right, whole hog) and finally home-made onion gravy. It was actually one of the finest toad in the holes ever made, some would say possibly ever. It went down exceptionally well, but I struggled, it was here that I realised how heavy English food is - and why I can eat so much Italian food…it is light and with the temperature manageable. Anyhow, that is end to my romantic food adventures.

Not much more to go with food, so if you’re still reading, fear not, the end is in sight. If you are reading and not eating now I’m worried, I’ve started a pack of potato snacks. So, quickly, Ice Cream. Gelato is wonderful, in Italy you’ll see shops with 20 tubs of ice cream in the window, all rippled like it is liquid and utterly delicious. You can get flavours of every kind and it is traditional to go for two scoops and mix flavours. My current favourites are Biscontini and Nutella (mmmmmm, they pour hot nutella over the milky vanilla flavour and it all hardens and….mmmmm). Anyway, if you come to Italy you have to have some. So there.

My final subject is Pizza, which is available in huge quantities in Jesolo, sometimes for very cheap. My pizza of preference is the Capricciosa, which is a tomato and mozzarella base (of course), topped with ham, mushrooms and artichokes - it is jolly well fantastic. I’m also partial to Wild Boar, Prosciutto Crudo (a cured ham), Tuna, and, bizarrely, the vegetable feast ones. This might be because I’m a fatty and I’ll eat anything, but the real reason is they are all so damn good and different to pizza in the UK. I fear for my return (which incidentally will be the 26th September), for not only will I be coming back just as it’s starting to get really cold, but I will have to leave all my beloved food behind…

Anyway, this is quite enough jabbering for now, so I hope you’ve enjoyed my observations on food, next entry will be the good gossipy one, for that is the much lauded G for Girls. In the meantime, have fun, stay out of trouble and stay in touch.

Love you long time,

Monty xxx

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