Carnevale

Carnevale in Trento

Carnevale Time-
 Looks like it's Carnevale (or Carnival) time in Italy! What exactly is Carnevale? Well, it's a lot like mardi gras: a winter festival with entertainment, balls, and parades that takes place before Lent. It's a time to eat fatty and delicious food while you still can. The official date for Carnevale this year is February 12, but the activities start up in late January. The picture seen above is Piazza Fiera in Trento, where some Carnevale activities are already taking place. This particular set up is mostly for kids-- they have a ferris wheel, merry-go-rounds, and other typical carnival games.

People of Trento enjoying Carnevale

 Despite the fact that this carnival seems set up for kids, they still have this horrifying clown ride:

"Hop on in kids...I promise I won't eat your face."

Venice is the place to be when it comes to Carnevale--they have boat parades and lots of cool masks and costumes. I'm not sure if we'll make it to Venice for Carnevale this year (we're definitely going in April), but maybe another year.


Food & Cooking-
Now that we're in Italy, I cook 6 days out of the week.  The 7th day is reserved for delicious pizza from a neighborhood pizzeria.  I'm getting a lot better at cooking just from getting so much practice.  One of the things that I found surprising here was how orange their eggs are!

Brightly Colored Scrambled Eggs

 I'm not sure this picture does justice to how orange the eggs are, but trust me, they are definitely a different color than U.S. eggs.  I'm told the reason for this is that the chickens here eat a more natural diet and it gives their eggs more Vitamin A, but I'm not 100% sure on that. I do like to think the bright color is indicative of being nutritious!

Tyson's Italian colleague taught us how to make a delicious authentic pasta sauce. The trick of it is to make something called a "soffritto", which is an aromatic base for the sauce. Soffritto means "to fry slowly" and you essentially heat up some olive oil with things like garlic, onions, salt, basil, etc. Tyson and I like to use a base of olive oil and garlic cloves.  After you make the base, you can add the tomato sauce and cook for up to 4 days!  I've only cooked the sauce for hours, instead of days, and it was still very delicious and flavorful.

Tyson's colleague also (very sweetly) bought us a giant chunk of parmigiano cheese.  He's from Parma, so he wanted us to try it.  It's very good! We grate it on top of our pasta.

Parma Cheese

Another thing we just tried is peach grappa, which is very strong and delicious.  It's kind of like limoncello, but with peaches.

Peach Grappa

Finally, we also picked up some Sicilian cannoli, which has candied oranges inside (yum!):

Sicilian Cannolo

*Trivia/Fact of the day: Cicero was a huge fan of the original cannoli.


Neighbors/Friends-
I've been getting Italian lessons from my neighbor, she just comes over and talks to me for hours.  It's a great way of learning a language.  Last week when we were talking, I mentioned to her that I'm working on writing a book.  She got excited and told me that she has a friend at work who is a published mystery writer in Italy!  She gave me two of his books and I'm working on translating/reading them now.  In Italy, mystery books are called "giallo" because of their signature yellow covers.

Gialli

Reading the book is time-consuming for me, but it's teaching me a lot of vocabulary and grammar already. My neighbor thinks her friend will be pleased that I'm learning Italian through his books. :)

Johnny Texas-
Last week we had a repairman over to fix our heating and we made some small-talk and I told him that I was from Texas originally.  He got excited and told me that his friends call him "Johnny Texas." hahaha. Apparently the reason his friends call him this is that Johnny is an American name, not commonly used in Italy.  I think this name is completely awesome and deserves to be a character name in a book someday.  The funniest part is he asked me, "How do you say Johnny in America?"  And I was all, "Johnny."  His family taught him to say it correctly, after all.

Miscellaneous-
When Tyson came with me to the Questura to get my permit of stay we saw this:

Sexy Soda Machine

....and that is all! :)