Italy!

Last Saturday, my CEA group had an excursion to Italy. Unfortunately, the weather decided not to cooperate by raining all day. The first city we visited was San Remo. This is where we spent most of our time. Every Saturday, the town has a market which consists of a lot of clothes, some jewelry, and an inside food market. Europe in general has an incredible amount of markets, for example there is one every morning in Antibes with the exception of Mondays. I didn't buy a whole lot of the market, just a puma coat and an umbrella in order to prevent from getting too soaked by the end of the day.

After our free time was up, we headed to a traditional, family-owned Italian restaurant. In total, we got to eat 5 different types of pasta, including some ravioli, gnocci, and spaghetti. After we were full off of that, we got to choose between tiramisu, panna cotta, or creme caramel (which is more of a French dessert). I opted for the tiramisu, and it was heavenly!

Oddly enough, I decided I did not like the Italian language. Maybe I just got the wrong impression of it, I am not sure. I still think that my favorite language I have heard so far is German.

The next town was Dolceacqua, which is a little town made "famous" by a Monet painting of the bridge. It was a very cute, older Italian village.

Menton was our last stop, which is the last French city before entering Italy. It was pretty, but they said it is very incredible when the weather is nice. It is a place I would love to go back to when the weather is better. We had free time here as well, which most of us ended up using by going to a little caffe/bar. Several of us tried the "hot wine"--which I was skeptical of since I am not a wine lover--but it was amazing! I am going to try to make it sometime.

The other day, me and Caitlin had a conversation with Francoise about how French breakfast differs from American breakfast. She was intrigued about pancakes and wanted to try our version. Later that day, she made us crepes. One of them was more similar to a casserole: it had a crepe topped with cheese, ham, and creme fraiche, and then another crepe placed on top of that, multiplied X4. We also had plain crepes that we put nutella, speculoos, jam, etc, whatever our heart desired. Last night, I made Grandma's homemade buttermilk pancakes. Let me tell you what, this was not easy. Finding buttermilk was my first task. They didn't have any true buttermilk, at least down in this region, but more of a fermented milk which I ended up using. But the real issue was finding baking powder and baking soda. I think I found baking soda in the grocery stores, but not baking powder, which I have found trying to find even the most familiar items that are listed in French can be tricky. I ended up going to the British store, and since everything was in English, I found them both there. There were a lot of other American-type things in the store that cannot be found in the French stores, but everything was very expensive. So I finally found the ingredients, but then when I went to make them, we had to convert all of the measurements. This was also very complicated. Nevertheless, Francoise learned how to make buttermilk pancakes. She said she preferred them to her mom's recipe, something about those being too thick/dry/dense, something along those lines. And they even tasted pretty close to the ones I make back home, just with a little less buttermilk flavor.