Travel the World Through Your Taste Buds: Ciao Italy!
I’m psychic, are you ready for me to prove it? A future comment will say “Miranda, where did you go in Italy and what was it like?”, and I am here to tell that future commenter that I have not been to Italy yet and won’t be going until November. Why then are we going to Italy you may ask and I will answer that in this post.
Where are we going?
Today we are visiting Italy, a large peninsula in the Mediterranean. If I have not been there then why am I writing about Italy or making Italian food for my travel blog. Well folks I am Italian.
This is a picture of my mom’s side of the family, you can see that (excluding the men that married in [3/4]) we all share very mediterranean features, dark hair, olive skin, and the most of us have brown eyes, I am the oddball with hazel colored eyes. This is the Italian side of the family however we only found out we were Italian a few years ago. Growing up I was made fun of for having really dark tan skin and so I always told people I was Italian even though I was told I was Swedish. My mother also used to pretend to be Italian as she was raised with Italian friends and neighbors. After we found out we were Italian we were extremely excited and fully embraced our culture.
What are we making?
Today I made for you a delicious mushroom risotto from scratch. For those of you who may not know I am in love with Gordon Ramsay, the professional chef know for swearing at his chefs and using creative expletives on shows such as Kitchen Nightmares and Hell’s Kitchen, “With American Idol fading, his four shows–Hell’s Kitchen, Hotel Hell, MasterChef and MasterChef Junior–make him Fox’s biggest reality TV star.” this is a quote from Forbes magazine describing Gordon Ramsay.
Why do I bring him up in this blog post? Because one of his well known dishes in Hell’s Kitchen is mushroom risotto which is what inspired me this week. I added some extra herbs to my risotto, thyme and some fresh rosemary from my mother’s garden. Risotto is notorious for being an incredibly difficult dish to make but I actually thought it wasn’t too bad as long as you follow the instructions. It turned out to be absolutely delicious that I plan to make all the time from now on.
I am not the only person inspired to make mushroom risotto because of Hell’s Kitchen, in fact there is a whole thread on chowhound about how to make risotto like on Hell’s Kitchen. You can find the conversation by clicking here.
Join me later this week when I talk about one of my family’s Italian traditions.
And Remember to Take a Bite Out of Life!
Ratings:
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