Livia's birthday went very well. Bowling proved to be a big hit with everyone, especially Giulio who had to be held back from bowling on everyone else's turn. He even developed a technique of lugging the ball to the begining of the lane and then sort of dropping/hurling it onto the floor, where it would then very s-l-o-w-l-y roll down the lane before taking out the bowling pins. He would then throw his arms in the air in a celebratory V-shape and yell "yeah!" before running back to his seat. My mom and I have decided that the next time he needs to get out of the house we are just going to take him to the bowling alley and let him wear himself out taking turn after turn. After the bowling, pizza, cake and ice cream, and presents everyone came back to our house for prosecco, crackers, cheese, and hummis, and because everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and devour every crumb, I realized how much easier it is to feed people and have them leave happy than it is in Italy.
My mother loves having people over, growing up having 6 people to dinner on the weekend was a common occurence, we had it down to a science. My father would cook, the kids would move enough chairs to fit everyone around the dining room table and my mother would host, and then lead the clean-up effort after everyone had left. I always thought that one day when I was grown up my house would overflow with love and laughter as my many friends and family members sat around my beautiful hardwood dining room table enjoying fine wine and the wonderful food that I, in the intervening years, had learned how to cook, the children playing at our feet.
Fast forward 15 years later and I find myself with a living room/dining room that doesn't hold more than five adults comfortably and living in a country that is nothing but dead serious about eating well. Add to the mix the fact that I never learned how to cook really well and you find that --suprise, suprise!--I don't have people over for dinner very often. I know that we've all seen enough Olive Garden commericals to have this idea that in Italy we sit around tables groaning with food drinking red wine as the men lovingly pat each other on the cheek exclaiming "Momma mia! Thees ees a wonnaful pasta!". And perhaps they do (the cheek slapping I mean.) They just don't do it at my house.
Italian women, generally speaking, are wonderful cooks. Even the ones who swear they inadvertently poison dinner guests somehow are capable of rustling up a savory risotto and a mouth watering roast whenever you are invited to their house for dinner. And these meals always leave me feeling slightly depressed because I am always thinking, what am I going to serve when I invite them back? I had been led on thinking that I would be able to match their culinary talent, only to find that I have been severely out-played. It's like thinking you are going to be playing against the local YMCA in a soccer cup final and you get there and find that actually the English National Team has decided to come by and play instead.
I remember a few year ago I invited a friend/colleague of Lorenzo's named Barbara plus husband to our house for dinner for New Year's Eve. It was sort of a last minute thing, we had just moved into our apartment on Christmas Eve and there was still tons to be done. We decided around 3pm on December 31 to actually make a point of doing something for New Years, even though we were all exhausted from moving and my parents, who were visiting at the time, were both coming down with colds. I spoke to Barbara on the phone around 3:30 and despite the fact that she had hadn't been feeling well for several days she agreed to come and offered bring the actual dinner ("Something very simple"). I was thrilled because I knew Barbara was a good cook and it saved me the hassle of having to try to make something myself, other than the typical New Year's dish of lentils cooked with pork. While this dish sounds complicated all it involves is adding the right amount of water and leaving the thing to cook itself. When Barbara came she was loaded down with all sorts of dishes, all of which involved seafood and being re-heated on my stove or in my oven. At any rate, she was underwhelmed by the limited selection of pots and pans that I had on offer but somehow managed to make do and pulled off a meal that my mother called "One of the best meals that I have ever eaten." We found out later she felt so lousy because she was in the early weeks of pregnancy. Understandably it was hard to feel confident enough to invite them back. Whatever was I going to make them? I have learned how to make a few things in the seven years I have lived in Italy, especially various pasta dishes but I was hardly on Barbara's level. I got around it by reverting to my roots and serving what I called with great fanfair a "True American Hamburger" which they ate and complimented me on. We plumped out the meal by serving pasta as a first course and by overwhelming them with antipasta at the begining, various vegetables in the middle, and a large luscious dessert at the end. What you can't do in quality you make up for in quantity. Lorenzo and I had one of our biggest fights ever about an hour before they arrived because I felt that two kinds of prosciutto was more than enough to offer for an antipasta and he felt that we also needed mortadella and insisted driving 25 kilometers to get it. (It was a Sunday and all the local supermarkets were closed.) All future meals with them have taken place in restaurants.
We actually do a fair amount of entertaining in local trattorias and pizzerias, as do many other people. Space is a problem in many Italian homes and by eating in a restaurant the wife is exempted from the stress and exhaustion of preparing a meal for many people and then cleaning up afterwards. Lorenzo is great, he cooks and cleans up afterwards, but I know men who would be hard pressed to say where their wife keeps the knives and forks. The other fall back is to order pizza, something that is always suggested when people plan to get together, especially among younger people who are not super friendly yet, but would like the chance to try and hang out more. I always suggest pizza when trying to think of what to cook and then, thinking of the fresh, homemade pasta we had at the other person's house the first time we went there, I chicken out and go for the standard three courses with Lorenzo initially helping and then pushing me out of the way and doing it himself. Strange that the only time I feel relaxed about cooking for people is when our good friends Adrianna and Luca come to dinner. She is English so she won't push back her chair in disgust if the roast is a bit dry. Luca, in being married to her, is used to Italian food being prepared by a non-Italian and therefore eats everything.
I'm giving the impression that I do nothing but have tense small dinner parties on the weekend followed by sniping at my husband over how I tossed the salad. We actually do lots of group dinners with friends at restaurants especially with Lorenzo's colleagues. 20+ people sitting around a long table, usually with the men at one end and the women at the other with the men talking about who arrested who and what il dirigente (the boss) said about it, and the kids running around. No one makes any comment about the kids making too much noise or tries to show off with the wine list if there is one. Eating out in Italy is not a status thing like it is in the States. It is about going somewhere to relax, because you don't feel like cooking yourself, and because you want something good to eat, not about bragging where you got reservations for the weekend. One of my favorite restaurants is up near Lake Como and it is also a favorite of famous football players and movie stars. The owners would no more turn me away from the door than they would George Clooney because they know that all anyone wants to do in Italy is to have a good meal.
Which I suppose is where all my stress comes from, I don't feel very capable of providing this aforementioned good meal. I go for the cheap trick of plying everyone with wine, or wowing them with the unfamiliar, like Sunday brunch where I make pancakes and American coffee. Not everyone worries like I do. Terry often has us over for dinner, and they are completely unpretentious meals where 10 of us sqeeze into her living room. Or at Theresa's, where we often have homemade pizza and the meal is about as simple as it can get. Theresa did grow up in the States and is as happy with homemade lasagna as she is with McDonald's. This is under-rated quality. Perhaps the hardest thing about being Italian is that when you leave Italy you find yourself suffering over the poor quality of the food. I remember driving out to Denver with Lorenzo two years ago and we stopped overnight in Lincoln, Nebraska where we found next to our motel a Perkin's Restaurant. Somehow I felt that whatever was on offer at the Perkins couldn't be much worse that anything else we might be able to find in Lincoln, and decided that we just have dinner there. I stupidly suggested we have one of the dinner specials instead of something off the breakfast menu and 15 minutes later found Lorenzo glaring at me as he tried to digest a Perkin's chicken strip. What was he eating, and where had I taken him to eat? he wanted to know. I suddenly had this vision of the four of us in 10 years in a restaurant somewhere in the US with Lorenzo and the kids glaring at me over their dinners. I decided in that moment that the kids would learn how to eat crap with smiles on their faces if it was the last thing they did. They would learn to crave chili dogs and Oreos if it killed them.
Of course some people will never be happy, no matter how good the food is. When looking over the photos from our wedding my father-in-law made the comment, "Oh, there's the restaurant where we didn't get a lot to eat," when picture from the reception came up. If I remembered correctly there had been aperativi, antipasta, two kinds of pasta, steak, three kinds of contorno (vegetable dishes) including platters of fried zucchini, fruit salad, wedding cake, coffee, spumante, and wine. My one regret from my wedding day is that my dress prevented me from eating very much. "What do you mean," I asked. "You didn't like the food?"
"I didn't say I didn't like it, I said there wasn't much of it."
"Did you leave that table hungry?"
He had to admit he hadn't.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Sunday, July 29, 2007
Surfacing
I had every intention of going to bed now, but Livia seems to be coming down with a cold and it looks like it is going to be a long night. I'm obviously guilty of giving her the cold because today I ran my finger over her cheek and cooed, "you're my healthy one, aren't you Livi baby?" compared to all the antibiotics and ear infections her brother had had by the time he turned one. Then tonight she wakes up with the sniffles and suddenly it's looking like runny noses and broken nights are in my future.
I just hope she is over whatever this is by next Sunday, when we have her party because Livia is turning one next week. In honor of the fact that she is my first child to have her birthday while we are in the US, we have decided to hold the party at a nearby bowling alley where the party package includes free shoe rental, chips, one large cheese pizza and a pitcher of pop, it is up to us to supply the cake. I have always thought people who organized parties like this for small children were really only doing it for themselves, it wasn't about the child, it was about the parents. I will proudly admit that for Livia's birthday this is the case. All I really want in an excuse to get people I like all together wearing rented shoes. Instead of a low key afternoon of cake and ice cream among a few highly selected people, Livia will ring in her first birthday to the clatter of bowling pins and the music of The Big Bopper. For Giulio's first birthday, lacking space and the talent to cook a large meal for many people, we invited a few friends to have lunch at our local trattoria. We had a 6 course meal including wild mushroom pasta and carpaccio and then we sang "Happy Birthday" while Giulio blew out the candle on his cake. The meal was washed down with spumante and espresso while Giulio and the other toddler present rode around on the bottom of a lunch cart. In what is one of the few advantages in having a spouse in the police, the meal was heavily discounted, the restaurant's owner was tight with the polizia.
Lorenzo doesn't mind in the least trading in "La Versa" moscato for pitchers of Budweiser. He thought the bowling party was a great idea, people in Italy would flip over a bowling party, it was so AMERICAN, his only regret is that he won't be here for it. Unfortunately, Lorenzo's month long vacation is over and now he is back in Italy while the kids and I remain in the land of air-conditioning, discount shopping, and the free refill.
I have to admit that the initial surfacing wasn't easy, the culture shock seems to get stronger each time I come back to the US. We stumbled into JFK, exhausted from our 9 hour flight with a baby whose eyes only started to close upon descent into the New York area. (Giulio however was much improved--!)We were then bumped from our next flight, leaving us with over 3 hours to take in all the the beauty and splendor of the Delta terminal of the airport. The food seemed huge, tasteless, and excessive and Americans themselves seemed so much bigger than I remembered. I realized how much the Italian way of thinking had set in. I couldn't get over why so many people would sit on the floor when there were chairs available. I could barely supress my shudder when I saw a women who had taken off her Teva sandles and was walking barefoot from one part of the terminal to another-eeeeewwwww. The air conditioning on the plane seemed too cold (me! who loves air-conditioning, always complaining that they should turn it up whenever we go to the supermarkets in Italy-me!), and when I offered ice in my drink during the flight I quickly declined, thinking what a shock to the system it would be.
I also found myself wondering what I was going to do with Lorenzo while he was here. I could only go to Target so many times. Hence the search for something different and "American" and all within a few hours drive from Cincinnati. I wanted to here him say "wow.." to be impressed, to take back something that he would tell people about back in Italy. Initially the thing that impressed him the most was all the hubbub surround Miss New Jersey and these apparently x-rated photos that she was being blackmailed with. Fox News devoted long hours to discussion on the topic. When the photos turned out to be nothing more than her messing around, fullly clothed, with some friends at a bar, Lorenzo turned to me and said, "You guys are nuts, you know that?"I could only meekly odd and agree.
It was from this search for "good" Americana and not our nation's obsession with talent pageant contestants that took us to the aforementioned bowling alley, which Lorenzo loved with its oldies soundtrack and cheap beer. It was there that we came up with the idea for Livia's birthday, as The Four Seasons played over the loud speakers. And when we came outside after two games into the muggy summer's night, there were fireflies glowing in the trees around the edge of the parking lot, and crickets making a racket in the bushes. It's moments like this that I miss when I am in Italy, these sounds and these smells together that always make me feel like I am eight years old again, standing in my yard on a summer's night catching fireflies in my hand and letting them go, before being called inside to bed.
This was not Lorenzo's first trip to the States, but his 7th. He has seen New York, Chicago, Boston, New Hampshire, and driven from Cincinnati to Denver and back. But one of the things he liked the most, not including of course New York, Chicago, or Boston, was the Wright Patterson Airforce Museum in Dayton OH, something my dad has been suggesting for like 6 years that we take Lorenzo to see. Giulio, despite our expectations, was underwhelmed. After the first 20 or so airplanes he stopped being impressed and started running around, luckily an airplane hangar is the place to do that. Lorenzo was impressed. He said "wow....." He had to be torn away from the Cold War exhibit when the kids were starving for lunch and he said he wants to come back to the museum next year. Good suggestion Dad! The best part of our day came for Lorenzo on our way back to Cincinnati after lunch. We were taking the two lane road when we passed an Amish style dairy, which sold Soft Serve ice cream. (Yet another treat I just can't get Lorenzo excited about. We order cones, all he wants is a coffee. Humpf.) I say Amish style because, despite the Amish buggy on display outside the store, this place was obviously not run by Amish. You walk through the door and are immediately met by a wall of sound. The there was an electric train that wound around bins of candy and a large mannequin dressed like George Bush over in the corner. The owner thought it was hiliarious to have the sound of a freight train playing over the store's sound system, so every 45 seconds or so it would sound like a high speed train was passing overhead. Lorenzo loved it. "This," he told me once we were back in the car, "this is what I like about America!" Other things include Goose Island beer, bagels, Reds baseball games watched at the stadium, honey mustard pretzels, cashew nuts, and Juicy Fruit gum.
I just hope she is over whatever this is by next Sunday, when we have her party because Livia is turning one next week. In honor of the fact that she is my first child to have her birthday while we are in the US, we have decided to hold the party at a nearby bowling alley where the party package includes free shoe rental, chips, one large cheese pizza and a pitcher of pop, it is up to us to supply the cake. I have always thought people who organized parties like this for small children were really only doing it for themselves, it wasn't about the child, it was about the parents. I will proudly admit that for Livia's birthday this is the case. All I really want in an excuse to get people I like all together wearing rented shoes. Instead of a low key afternoon of cake and ice cream among a few highly selected people, Livia will ring in her first birthday to the clatter of bowling pins and the music of The Big Bopper. For Giulio's first birthday, lacking space and the talent to cook a large meal for many people, we invited a few friends to have lunch at our local trattoria. We had a 6 course meal including wild mushroom pasta and carpaccio and then we sang "Happy Birthday" while Giulio blew out the candle on his cake. The meal was washed down with spumante and espresso while Giulio and the other toddler present rode around on the bottom of a lunch cart. In what is one of the few advantages in having a spouse in the police, the meal was heavily discounted, the restaurant's owner was tight with the polizia.
Lorenzo doesn't mind in the least trading in "La Versa" moscato for pitchers of Budweiser. He thought the bowling party was a great idea, people in Italy would flip over a bowling party, it was so AMERICAN, his only regret is that he won't be here for it. Unfortunately, Lorenzo's month long vacation is over and now he is back in Italy while the kids and I remain in the land of air-conditioning, discount shopping, and the free refill.
I have to admit that the initial surfacing wasn't easy, the culture shock seems to get stronger each time I come back to the US. We stumbled into JFK, exhausted from our 9 hour flight with a baby whose eyes only started to close upon descent into the New York area. (Giulio however was much improved--!)We were then bumped from our next flight, leaving us with over 3 hours to take in all the the beauty and splendor of the Delta terminal of the airport. The food seemed huge, tasteless, and excessive and Americans themselves seemed so much bigger than I remembered. I realized how much the Italian way of thinking had set in. I couldn't get over why so many people would sit on the floor when there were chairs available. I could barely supress my shudder when I saw a women who had taken off her Teva sandles and was walking barefoot from one part of the terminal to another-eeeeewwwww. The air conditioning on the plane seemed too cold (me! who loves air-conditioning, always complaining that they should turn it up whenever we go to the supermarkets in Italy-me!), and when I offered ice in my drink during the flight I quickly declined, thinking what a shock to the system it would be.
I also found myself wondering what I was going to do with Lorenzo while he was here. I could only go to Target so many times. Hence the search for something different and "American" and all within a few hours drive from Cincinnati. I wanted to here him say "wow.." to be impressed, to take back something that he would tell people about back in Italy. Initially the thing that impressed him the most was all the hubbub surround Miss New Jersey and these apparently x-rated photos that she was being blackmailed with. Fox News devoted long hours to discussion on the topic. When the photos turned out to be nothing more than her messing around, fullly clothed, with some friends at a bar, Lorenzo turned to me and said, "You guys are nuts, you know that?"I could only meekly odd and agree.
It was from this search for "good" Americana and not our nation's obsession with talent pageant contestants that took us to the aforementioned bowling alley, which Lorenzo loved with its oldies soundtrack and cheap beer. It was there that we came up with the idea for Livia's birthday, as The Four Seasons played over the loud speakers. And when we came outside after two games into the muggy summer's night, there were fireflies glowing in the trees around the edge of the parking lot, and crickets making a racket in the bushes. It's moments like this that I miss when I am in Italy, these sounds and these smells together that always make me feel like I am eight years old again, standing in my yard on a summer's night catching fireflies in my hand and letting them go, before being called inside to bed.
This was not Lorenzo's first trip to the States, but his 7th. He has seen New York, Chicago, Boston, New Hampshire, and driven from Cincinnati to Denver and back. But one of the things he liked the most, not including of course New York, Chicago, or Boston, was the Wright Patterson Airforce Museum in Dayton OH, something my dad has been suggesting for like 6 years that we take Lorenzo to see. Giulio, despite our expectations, was underwhelmed. After the first 20 or so airplanes he stopped being impressed and started running around, luckily an airplane hangar is the place to do that. Lorenzo was impressed. He said "wow....." He had to be torn away from the Cold War exhibit when the kids were starving for lunch and he said he wants to come back to the museum next year. Good suggestion Dad! The best part of our day came for Lorenzo on our way back to Cincinnati after lunch. We were taking the two lane road when we passed an Amish style dairy, which sold Soft Serve ice cream. (Yet another treat I just can't get Lorenzo excited about. We order cones, all he wants is a coffee. Humpf.) I say Amish style because, despite the Amish buggy on display outside the store, this place was obviously not run by Amish. You walk through the door and are immediately met by a wall of sound. The there was an electric train that wound around bins of candy and a large mannequin dressed like George Bush over in the corner. The owner thought it was hiliarious to have the sound of a freight train playing over the store's sound system, so every 45 seconds or so it would sound like a high speed train was passing overhead. Lorenzo loved it. "This," he told me once we were back in the car, "this is what I like about America!" Other things include Goose Island beer, bagels, Reds baseball games watched at the stadium, honey mustard pretzels, cashew nuts, and Juicy Fruit gum.
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