FOOD

Someone asked me to record what I've been eating, so here goes. For the past four days, this is what we've had:

Breakfast: Everyone has different preferences. My host parents eat biscotti and drink green or black tea. Martina has a pastry. I have a piece of fruit and English Breakfast tea (which my host mother bought especially for me), and Sara usually sleeps through breakfast, so I'm unsure what she eats, if at all.

Lunch: On the 14th we ate a pasta dish (Jumbo ziti noodles with cooked ricotta cheese and zucchini), cold cooked spinach saturated in olive oil (As almost everything is), and we each had fruit at the end (Usually seeded grapes, sometimes apples, bananas, peaches). On the 15th we ate a rice dish-- sticky brown rice cooked with vegetables (peas, and something I couldn't recognize), and again we ate fruit (Pretty much fruit is always eaten after lunch and dinner). On the 16th my host parents and Sara all ate spaghetti cooked with white beans. Martina hates beans, and it's not my favorite dish, so we ate spaghetti with a red sauce. It might be interesting to note that whenever we eat pasta, my host family always has chilly peppers or peperoncini on the table, which you can cut open to add spice to the dish. I don't really partake, but Martina and her father almost always do. On the 17th Martina and I went on a fieldtrip to Napoli (We visited the catacombs! I'll write more later), and so our class ate lunch at a giant mall that is modeled after Mt. Vesuvius in shape. I have to say, Italian mall food sucks. It doesn't at all compare to American mall food, which isn't exactly my favorite thing in the world, either. There were a bunch of fast food areas serving cold pizza and quiches (Almost all were topped with meat of some kind), one serving weird potato-meat substances, a McDonalds, and quite a few expensive sit-down restaurants. We ended up doing the pizza (I got a square of margarita-- a.k.a. cheese--, Martina got a quiche type-thing with ham, and one of her friends got a pizza topped with hot dog slices and french fries (Known as the americano). Everyone else got various pizzas and McDonalds. To drink, mainly sodas and a few waters. When we eat lunch at home, there is always natural water and mineral water on the table, as well as a bottle of wine.

Dinner: On the 14th Sara and a friend brought home pizza, and a few other various items from a pizzeria in the city. It was pretty strange (There were pizza squares topped with mozzarella and potatoes with no sauce; eggplant, olives, and red sauce with no cheese; and sausage, cheese, and red sauce). They were odd combinations, but I enjoyed the one with eggplant. The non-pizza items included: mashed potatoes which had been rolled around a stick of mozzarella, shaped into spring rolls, breaded, and fried (called crocchette) and fried breaded rice balls with veggies inside (called arancini in the South). I liked both of these quite a bit. For dessert we all had fruit.
I forgot to record dinner on the 15th, and I can't recall it, tragically.
On the 16th Martina and I went out, so we ate Margarita pizza squares from a local pizzeria for dinner. They have amazing pizzerias here. You can buy a single pizza square (like a slice), or a whole personal pizza (About an inch larger than a Totino's Pizza). If you buy the latter, it is cut into four, and you fold the pieces, eating them like sandwiches. I think it's better that way. My host parents and Sara all ate fish cooked with vegetables.
On the 17th we had a soup of sorts; these tiny little pastas, barely bigger than rice were cooked in a vegetable broth. Very good. For dessert we had pastries from a local shop; my host father had selected some earlier that day. The pastries are hard to describe; the ones that looked familiar to me tasted differently (I keep forgetting that they use nutella for everything instead of real chocolate!), and some were cooked in rum.

Other notes about the food: There is a cheese for every dish, pasta and otherwise. Usually Parmesan, although sometimes ricotta or others (I'm afraid I don't know my cheeses very well). As portions go, usually everyone goes back for seconds, and sometimes thirds. Everyone eats a lot during meal times, but there is little snacking outside of these times. Dinner is usually eaten at 8 or 9 PM, sometimes later, and lunch is around 1:30 or 2. My host father has a few hours off of work for lunch before he must return. My host mother usually gets off work around one, so she generally cooks lunch the night before. We don't have a microwave.
As you can see, we eat lots of pizza.