Edible Italy: To market, to market.

On Saturday mornings, there's a market not to far from our apartment. Usually, there's the typical fruits & veggies, several cheese-men, and a couple of carts selling roast chicken. Now that we're in August, most Milanese have skipped town and left us with slim pickings at the market. Instead of the multitude of stands, there's just a couple. Luckily, the cheese stands were selling meats (salami, prosciutto, mortadella, etc) along with their normal wares and the fruits and veggies all looked fresh. We love the roast chicken that they sell so I was disappointed to see that there wasn't any this weekend. In any event, it gives me another reason to look forward to the Milanese returning to town in September!



Here's a showcase of my market purchases for the weekend. They had normal tomatoes but I couldn't resist the heirloom Brandywine tomatoes that I spotted. I was particularly thrilled since the recent issue of 'Cooking Light' has a huge section on heirloom tomatoes but I hadn't seen any in the grocery store here. The plums still need some ripening but, last night, I enjoyed some ciabatta bread with olives, salad, tomato, and some Tuscan cheese that tastes like hard cottage cheese. It's actually delicious, though probably difficult to imagine!

The next day, we joined my boss and her husband at a local Chinese restaurant for lunch. She did all the ordering and we enjoyed some delicious dim sum along with other offerings. Below was my favorite dish. I believe those are soy noodles (my Italian language knowledge is not yet sufficient to translate a Chinese menu back into English) and behind them is the most amazing eggplant dish I've ever had. They cooked Japanese eggplant (see the vivid purple color?) with garlic. Yum.

And, of course, no stroll around the city (even Chinatown) is complete without a stop for gelato. Below, on the left, is my gelato - green apple and coconut. Totally fresh, you might be able to make out the flecks of the green apple skin in my gelato. I must say, it wasn't as refreshing as I expected...probably should've gone with mango. The coconut, however, was great. Mark (on the right) stayed traditional with chocolate fondante and stracciatella. The chocolate was rich and smooth and stracciatella flecked with the right amount of chocolate. Delicious....but still not as good as Bianco Latte.