Where in the world is Val?

Monday through Thursday of this week, I was on the road in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany visiting some of the folks who produce foods we sell. Foods like balsamic vinegar , olive oil , and pasta . (More on those soon.) To reach the small towns where those producers are located, I rented a car. Before I left the US, I made a reservation to rent a cute little Smart Car. I chose it because it was small, and cheap, and, most importantly, it has an automatic transmission. I can't drive a stick shift. When we got to the car rental agency on Monday morning, the man at the counter told me that they had made a mistake. They didn't have any Smart cars. "You drive a manual?" he asked, hopefully. "No," was my emphatic reply. After a few minutes of searching his computer, he told me, "the only automatic we have is a Mercedes Vito." With a chuckle, he asked, "you know what it is?" Again, my reply was, "no." I know approximately nothi...

All over Bologna, you see pasta. The serious food shops with bountiful cheese counters and a dozen kinds of cured hams hanging from the ceilings have displays full of fresh pastas. Most bakeries have a selection of bagged dried pastas behind the counter - and not necessarily the fancy stuff. Down the street from my apartment there's a little shop that sells nothing but homemade fresh (uncooked) pasta. Pasta here is usually made with egg, so it is very yellow in color. (Sometimes it's made with spinach too, so you see a few green pastas as well.) All pastas start with the same dough. If you just cut the dough into long, thin strips, you've got tagliatelle. If you leave the strips fatter, you've got lasagna. If you decide to stuff your pasta, you can make little navel-shaped tortellini, or large navel-shaped tortelloni, or occasionally triangular ravioli. Most displays include several varieties of tortellini and tortelloni with different stuffings: ricotta, truffle, ...

1. Buy bread at Atti .  Discover that it is delicious but that you have way too much. Decide to make French toast. 2. Buy milk and eggs at the grocery. 3. Remember that your apartment is not equipped with a bread knife. Buy one at the 99 Cent store. 4. Dig through all the cupboards in search of a bowl large enough for beating eggs. Above the stove, find a large tupperware that will suit this purpose. Also find a large frying pan. Consider this a major success, given that your previous inventory of pans consisted of one large pan for pasta and one metal cup for boiling water. 5. Turn on some music (preferably Beethoven piano sonatas). Slice up some strawberries, sprinkle them with sugar. (You did remember to buy strawberries this morning at the Ugo Bassi market , didn't you?) 6. Assemble all your ingredients and tools. Now you are ready to begin making French toast. 7. Slice the bread. Mix together the milk and eggs; one recipe I found online sugge...

Everywhere you look at markets and grocery stores and floating vegetable boats there are piles and piles of carciofi [artichokes]. Big and small, green and purple, whole and trimmed and just the hearts. I forgot to pack my Personal Artichoke Chef to prepare them all for me. A rookie mistake; I won't make it again. Last night I ate my first artichokes of the trip. (Unfortunately, they weren't nearly as pretty as the ones in the market, so I don't have a picture.) We picked them up from La Baita , an excellent little cheese, meat, and dry goods shop in Bologna. The hearts were simply prepared with olive oil and vinegar, and yet they were so outstanding that they forced you to sit up and take notice. Bright, rich, acidic, supremely flavorful. Best artichokes I have ever eaten.

Milk boxes filled with milk to eat, not drink Apparently, gluten free is a Thing over here, too. "Organic meat? Sure, it's over there, between the chicken and the horse." Juice boxes. Filled with wine. In the cured meat counter. I don't know if this is fun or creepy.

"Every Thursday," writes Fred Plotkin , "[Pasticceria dal Nono Colussi] makes focaccia alla veneziana ... It is sold until Sunday but is best sampled on the day it is made." My only Thursday in Venice was yesterday, which was also the day I arrived. So no matter that I was jet lagged and dopey; my one and only goal for yesterday (okay, my goal after finding our apartment and taking a shower) was to hike across town from Castello to Dorsoduro and get some focaccia. Focaccia alla veneziana , or fugassa alla venexiana in the Venetian dialect, is not the same as the focaccia we're familiar with in the US. That flat, savory bread, topped with olive oil and herbs, is a product of Liguria, a region on the Italian riviera. Focaccia alla veneziana is a sweet yeasted cake. It looks a lot like panettone , an Italian cake eaten at Christmastime that's shaped like an oversized muffin with straight sides and a puffy top. In the picture above, the things that look ...

A few weeks ago, during a long weekend in Baltimore, I dragged a friend across town to Fell's Point. I needed to visit a shop  that I was hoping would have a certain map of Italy in stock. My friend indulged me, in part because she is a good friend and in part because a visit to Fell's Point was also a good excuse to pick up some gelato . Our trip was a success; we both got gelato and I got my map. Now it's hanging above my desk, just beyond my computer screen as I type these words, a happy distraction. Italy has been a happy distraction for the better part of a year now, ever since I started imagining the month I'll be spending there this spring. A few months ago imagining transitioned into planning, and since then every shelf and side table and spare flat surface has been buried under stacks of guide books and tomes of Italian cookery. Now that my trip begins in two weeks (!!), many of those books have been buried under to-do lists. Here's the plan as it st...