Around the first of June, we’ll fly to our house in Italy for the summer, but until then I’ll just close my eyes and dream about Umbria in the spring.
The poppies are starting to pop right about now and our whole neighborhood looks like the road to Oz. Everybody’s tucking into abbacchio, spring lamb, roasted in the oven with potatoes, rosemary and garlic.
Or simpler yet, scottadito, lamb chops pounded thin, brushed with olive oil and flash-grilled over a wood fire. You hold the chop by the bone end and eat it with your fingers. Scottaditi means burned fingers.
The thing about the lamb in Umbria is that it tastes better. That’s about all you can say. Americans have great beef and they’re starting to figure out how to raise pork – not there yet, but better — but as for lamb, forget about it; go to Italy.
It has something to do with the way the lambs eat over there, how they live and also how they die — at a much younger age that anyone would allow them to die in the States. American lambs get older; Italian lamb tastes better.
We’d walked past it a couple of times, a simple storefront set back from the street with a small porch, a glimpse of tables inside, unassuming. The Key Lime Cafe. Full at lunch-time, we assumed it was a Maryland version of a diner. We never even ventured up on to the porch....
My Hungarian grandma made the best apple strudel I've ever had. Here in Hungary it's apple season and apple strudel is showing up on many of the restaurant menus. Yesterday, on the Pest side of the Danube, I came upon the Strudel House. I ordered the sweet cottage cheese-filled strudel, mainly because it was served with a rosehip sauce, which I wanted to taste.
Google Maps will tell you that "we could not understand" the location of Las Aradas, Honduras. Weather.com advises to check your spelling. My trip coordinator suggested looking up the "nearest town over" which was a two and half hour drive away. Packing for a trip like this was a bit of a moving target. Las Aradas is a mountain village, six hours out of San Pedro Sula. For those of you who haven't been browsing the State Department's travel warnings lately--Honduras is not a stable country. The PeaceCorps pulled their volunteers out last year.
Anchorage, Alaska has some of the best restaurants in the world.
Especially if you like salmon. Years ago, I spent a summer in
Anchorage-it was the Exxon Valdez trial, and it went on for months. I
remember some things about the trial. I remember everything about the
dinners, which isn't particularly remarkable, as I had the exact same
thing-in different restaurants-every night (except for this one place
where I always ordered venison).