Saturday Night is Party Night

This was a busy weekend for me! Besides the Watermelon Times, I also had some socializing to do. Saturday night it was Ali's birthday party. That's him and his lovely fiancee, Linda. (They just got engaged this weekend, congratulations you two!)



We were at ATM Bobino for aperitivo. What a great spot! The bar is alone on a median on a pretty big street, but you escape the traffic by getting up on the second floor terrace. The food was pretty decent, same with the drinks, but the atmosphere was the main attraction. All the folks were super chic, and the music was fun but not too loud. We had a large party, so we had to fight to get good seating! After the aperitivo, we had champagne service for the birthday boy!



We wandered over to the Sempione area to socialize a little more. Ali steered us to Cream Lounge to get giant drinks. Susan and Keivan got the large size, I don't know what happened to Tommi!



Look, these things are huge, right? No wonder the place was packed!



Luckily they're not so strong, so getting home was no problem...

Watermelon Times

This weekend I had at my watermelon. This is a baby watermelon:



However, it was still about four or five pounds of watermelon... a lot more than I care to just eat as melon. So I tried a few recipes inspired by Herbivoracious. I took a trip to Penny to get parsley and these lemons.



One idea I got from the food blogs was to try watermelon where you'd normally have tomato. I saw recipes for watermelon gazpacho and watermelon and avocado salad/ceviche. Due to my limited fresh herb selection at Penny and lack of a blender, I wasn't quite going to get either of these options to work out properly. Hence the plans for watermelon tabbouleh, with that parsley and lemon.



Very simple! Diced watermelon, finely diced red onion, hand-torn parsley, and lemon juice.



I gave it a little time to meld flavors, and served it over quinoa cooked with veggie broth. For something with six total ingredients, it had a pretty exciting flavor. (And you know how I usually cook... I usually throw in a little bit of everything, especially the spices!)

While I was letting the tabbouleh sit, I tried frying the watermelon as suggested by Herbivoracious. I don't think I achieved the searing that he did. Still, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the fried watermelon. It had a little bit of caramelization and a little bit of the general cooked fruit taste. The olive oil and sat gave it a savory flavor. I was almost surprised by how much salt I added when adding to taste, especially when I didn't add any salt to the salad part of the tabbouleh, which tasted fine even without the salt from the broth used with the quinoa.



I actually would make both of these things again. The hard part is cutting up and seeding the watermelon, not the dicing or frying, and eating a whole watermelon will always be a challenge... I know I said this wasn't going to turn into a recipe blog, but just bear with me!

Mmm... Produce

Mmm... Vegetables. Sometimes I feel like I overdo it when I go to the street market, but I always manage to eat everything I get within a week. I bought leeks, potatoes, red onions, a watermelon, mushrooms, and what my mother says is bok choi.



I was not sure, but I guess this is bok choi? There are a lot of varieties of these green leafy things, and figuring out which is sometimes tough. These have narrower, taller stems than I am used to for bok choi. I decided just to cut it up and saute it with some of those onions, with olive oil and paprika.



Oh, and this watermelon has a crest carved into it. I don't know. All the ones at this booth had the crest. I am going to eat some of this in the regular fashion, but I've also been looking at watermelon recipes online for salads, gazpacho, and fried watermelon...

My Newest Food Discovery

So, my latest obsession are these bake-able rolls. Esther mentioned that this sort of thing is very common in Germany, and these ones are meant to have a "German" appearance. Baguette-brötchen, this particular type is called, and the brand has a German-sounding name, 3-Ähren Brot. It could actually be German, the supermarket chain I shop at is German-run. You just pop one or two in the oven, and bake them until they get golden on the outside. And then you put cheese on them. Butter and cheese, if you are German.



When I get back to the US, I am totally going to add this sort of easy delicious thing to my regular meal rotation. Hot rolls and a salad, that would be a nice easy dinner.

(Also, I totally got suckered into buying tiny cans of Coke. I like to have a Coca Cola now and then, but at my store they sell those giant half-liter cans, and then bottle sizes. I really don't want that much at a go... So tiny wasteful overpriced cans that satisfy my soda desires...)

Postal Public Service

This week I had to go to the post office to mail some letters. You can often buy stamps at a tabacchi, but they never seem to know how much stamps are to foreign destinations, and they never seem to have the right denominations... So I decided to actually go to the Poste Italiane near Centrale to get things mailed properly. (Though, let me say that one time I was improperly informed and didn't put enough postage on a letter and it still made it.)

I managed to conduct my business entirely in Italian, and successfully asked how much it cost to send letters to different places! As of now (September 15, 2012):

• Within Italy: 0.60 Eu
• Within the EU: 0.75 Eu
• To the US: 1.60 Eu

So, send letters!

Cooookies

Groceries... I really do go to the store a lot, even if I don't post about it so much. This batch of groceries is quite lacking in vegetables. When I went to Penny there wasn't much along those lines that looked good. And the salad stuff was just gone!



I branched out and tried a new type of cookie, Biscotti di Novara. This bag is huge, but it's so light!



These cookies are delicious! They are lightly crispy, sweet but not too sweet, and have a tiny touch of vanilla flavor. I almost think these would be good in a tiramisu. I'm dipping them into my yogurt...

Fruit from the Trees

While my neighborhood has a pretty urban feel, I keep finding opportunities to pick fruit off of trees. Last week I found a small fig tree on my walk back to my office. Clearly, other people have noticed it, because at a casual glance I only found one fig that was ripe enough to pick. I sliced it and put it into my salad... Pretty good, actually.



Every day, I walk past two pomegranate trees in the courtyard of my apartment. They've had fruit on them for... months, I think. My landlord told me that I would have to wait for November for them to be ripe... The fruits on one of the trees have turned pink, and I am tempted to pick one just to see, but I am going to be patient for another month.



Of course, there was the loquat tree earlier this summer. There was always plenty of ripe fruit on there!