I’d been to Il Grecale with friends in the past and also taken a stroll around the charming port area of this small seaside town in southern Lazio. That was in the summer and today was quite a different atmosphere. It was a blustery February day and we chose Anzio as we were searching for…
Category Archives: Rome-ing Around
Lunch at Roscioli, Dessert at Roscioli Bakery
Thelma returned last night from Turkey and Annie from Washington, so my lunch buddies and I convened once again for a plunge into Roman cuisine at its best: Roscioli. We were four so we split an assortment of classic Roman pasta dishes: cacio e pepe, spaghetti alla carbonara and rigatoni all’amatriciana. All three divine. Before…
Sunday lunch at L’Ovile Restaurant
The plan when we went out this morning to run a few errands was to come right back home to make a light lunch. Our errands took us right past the Ovile Restaurant and it immediately triggered an almost primal desire for some hearty Roman comfort food. For me that spells pasta all’amatriciana. Errands finished…
French Cheeses at Vera’s – Good for the soul…and the body!
Perhaps my favorite part of dinner at Vera’s was the cheese course. I’m a cheese aficionado so the assortment of French cheeses she served was nothing short of thrilling. We were a small group and two of the guests were visitors from France. They’d brought the cheeses with them, carefully selected from local cheese producers…
Whole wheat, honey-filled cornetti & cappuccino
There’s one reason I like to get to my local coffee bar first thing in the morning: for the freshly baked cornetti. There’s nothing like them when they’re freshly out of the oven. I usually end up having two, along with two cappuccini. Not all coffee bars serve freshly baked. There are pastry companies who…
Raspberry crumble bar Friday food snippet…
These delicious raspberry crumble bars were offered up by dessert queen Denile, served in her penthouse dining room overlooking the Pantheon. The recipe can be found in the Barefoot Contessa’s latest cookbook: Foolproof, chock full of recipes that are just that. Thank you Denile for so pleasurably steering me still further from any hope of…
Polenta and Pangiallo festival in Riano
A beautiful and brisk, and very windy 7C Sunday is the perfect kind of a day for the heartiest of Italian comfort foods: polenta. We’re one of the smaller towns immediately north of Rome; our tiny historic center is composed of two streets that meet at a small piazza where the polenta festival took place….
Rome’s best gelato, artisanally made by master gelataio Claudio Torcé
There’s gelato, and there’s gelato….and then there’s Claudio Torcé‘s gelato. Everyone who visits Rome wants to try a great gelato, and there are so many gelaterie out there (hundreds) that the unknowing traveler can easily stumble upon bad gelato. It’s easy to weed out the gelaterie displaying puffy, whipped products in colors that Mother Nature…
L’Occhio Ammira e Rimane Incantato; In praise of the Merangola orange
Yesterday Isabella della Ragione’s book, L’Occhio Ammira e Rimane Incantato, was presented in Terni. Isabella Dalla Ragione has spent her career as an agronomist protecting rare fruit tree varietals, many that she and her father located and began to propagate with care. Together they dedicated their time to scouring the Italian countryside searching out these rare…
Broken tableware becomes art
So, what do you do with mismatched plates, teacups, broken china? I throw it away or else it hangs around forever in my “to repair” box. My local morning coffee bar has another take on these throw-aways: they turn them into a work of art. Clever, charming and in the end perhaps a nicer way…
