Food Journal: Spring Break

3/7/18

My first food moment occurred when my mom made pizza for dinner.  She likes to make her pizza with shrimp, cheese, and pesto sauce.  A tad unconventional, especially since pesto sauce is apparently only supposed to go on pasta, but nevertheless it tastes great.  At least, I think it tastes great.  My mom has been learning a lot about cooking based on what I have told her about my experience in this cluster course.  One technique about which I told her was putting ice cubes in the oven when baking bread to make steam so that a crust forms.  When she made pizza, she tried this to give the pizza more of a bite.  Unfortunately, it did not do very much, and the pizza still came out chewy, like it does every time.  She’s going to keep experimenting with her pizza, as she always does, and hopefully it will come out better next time.

3/9/18

My second food moment occurred when my parents and I went out for my birthday dinner.  We went to this big, fancy Italian restaurant called Alfredo, and the experience made me think about what I have been learning in class.  I ordered this big pasta dish called paccheri alla napoletana, which was composed of wide rigatoni with braised short rib ragu.  It had a lot of pasta, and a lot of meat, which made it very filling.  Eating this dish made me think about our discussion of traditional Italian food versus Italian-American food.  I thought about the poor Italians not being able to afford meat, and then meat becoming a staple of Italian-American cuisine, since it was so much more affordable in the United States.  A dish like the one I had would never have been eaten one hundred years ago in Italy.  It just goes to show how much the world can change in that amount of time.