Chapter 11: Adventures in the World's Smallest Kitchen

It's pretty wild that the first time I'm ever living on my own, outside of a dorm, is in a foreign country. At ISU, my building was attached to a cafeteria with a meal plan, and I rarely had to think about buying food, much less preparing it. I've always loved to bake, and make as many creative cakes and cookies as possible at home, but I've never had to consistently provide myself with food. Doing this for the first time in Italy makes it such a different experience, in some awesome and some really frustrating ways. For example, my apartment here literally has the smallest kitchen I've ever seen. I have about a square foot of counter space, a refrigerator the size of about two microwaves, a gas stove, and an oven that doesn't work (yet.. it's complicated). I have two pots, one frying pan, and no spatula or good quality knives. The apartment did come with a wine bottle opener though, so I'll let my resentment go.

These challenges are easy enough to deal with. I live about a two-minute's walk from "mercato centrale", or the central market. This is a huge semi-outdoor produce and meat market where real Italians buy their fresh fruit, vegetables, cheese, bread, pasta, and meat every morning for that day's meals. This would explain why I only need a teeny fridge. I love living like this now! It's so much fun to buy ingredients in the morning, practice cooking something at night, and not really needed much refrigerator space at all, because I only make a small amount of food, and we eat it all that night!

As far as actual cooking, I've been trying lots of different homemade sauces, pastas, and meats, and doing my best not to use any recipes or cookbooks! Being in my Food of Italy cooking class has given me some great ideas, but being on my own in my kitchen is a totally different adventure. Dana and I have been calling me her housewife because I cook a homemade meal almost every day! The two most memorable adventures I've had so far have very different outcomes...

Last week, we made homemade pasta, from scratch! We just mixed flour, eggs, and salt and rolled it out on our desk (the only large, smooth, flat surface in our apartment). I browned beef, boiled fresh spinach and crumbled fresh feta, and mixed them together in different combinations for ravioli filling. We spooned little piles of the filling on half of the rolled out pasta dough, covered it with the other half, and cut little raviolis out with a knife! After using egg yolk to make the two sides stick together, and boiling them for about 4 minutes, we had our most authentic homemade Italian meal yet!

A couple weeks ago, I bought some linguine, tomatoes, and shrimp at the market. I decided to make a shrimp marinara sauce to pour over the cooked linguine, and bought some crushed red peppers to spice up the sauce a little bit. After peeling and deveining shrimp for the first time (I do not recommend this for the weak), and peeling and cutting the tomatoes for the homemade sauce, I added the red pepper. After serving the meal and pouring the wine, Dana and I take our first bite... at first taste, it is absolutely mouthwateringly delicious... after about 15 seconds, we were in HELL. Our mouths were ON. FIRE. I thought my lips were going to go up in flames off my face, and that I would never have feeling in them again. We immediately starting trying to fight the fire: I chugged a bottle of milk, Dana a bottle of water, and she tried in vain to cool her mouth with our oscilating fan (a sight I would have found more humorous if my life were not flashing before my watering eyes)..... Turns out, the language barriers are especially important to break in the market.... "red peppers" and "chili peppers" are, in fact, different foods.

Live and learn, right?