Now that you've come to terms with the fact that your eating and drinking might get in the way of some of your more ambitious site-seeing goals in Italy, you might as well take a few minutes to learn some more about what your options are. We all know about pizza and pasta because you can get those at any Italian restaurant in the US or UK. So what else is there to know? A lot. Is the answer. And it's all delicious.
Italians are rightly proud and passionate about their food and so it's no surprise to learn that you can find more information than you could ever need through a simple google search. Distilling all that information for our wedding guests would take a lifetime -- admittedly, a delicious one -- but since we don't have that amount of time, we thought you might be interested in the selection of sites below that we've found useful in learning more about Italian food, but specifically, Tuscan cuisine.
Tuscans are known in the rest of Italy as mangiafagioli or bean-eaters because so much of the traditional rustic cuisine of the region is based on beans -- white beans, fava (broad) beans, and sorana beans -- but there is much more to the Tuscan diet than that. Tuscany is also famous for its chianina beef, pecorino cheese, proscuitto and hunters' sausage (salami alla cacciatoria), black cabbage (cavola nera), mushrooms and truffles, and perhaps most of all, its olive oils.
We would encourage you to get stuck into the local food while you're there, not just because it'll make us feel better about stuffing our own faces, but because no matter how good the chef or restaurant in London or New York, the food somehow always tastes better in Italy.
ItalianMade.com - the official website of the food and wines of Italy is an excellent place to start
Castello Banfi - gives the low-down on Tuscan cuisines' ancient Etruscan roots
Tuscany Dream - if you can't wait to get there and must order some Tuscan specialties right now
Tuscan Recipes - gives you the know-how to try your hand at authentic Tuscan dishes
Enjoy!
2 comments:
Following the SeppySills simile-theme and since this blog has about as many comments as straight teeth in Britian we thought we needed to fire off a few responses from here at the World Famous Jersey Shore.
Thanks so much for all the food info, but just a few culinary questions. Do you think we could have one night of good ole' B-B-Q and Freedom Fries? And do you think this whole antipasto/secondo thing is going to be as good as the never-ending Tuscan Garlic Chicken at the King of Prussia Mall Olive Garden?
Be back soon with more posts,
FunBobby and the "Cooler by a Mile"-Crew
Funbobby,
as you know, bbq and freedom fries are always on our menu, and you'll not be surprised to learn that Olive Garden has its test kitchens in Tuscany so the fayre at king of prussia mall is about as authentic I-talian as it gets.
You will have to bring your own Chris Chee, however. The wisdom of this fabled condiment has, shamefully, not yet reached the Old World.
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