Cooking with Nick: Italian Cuisine
After spending some time wandering the picturesque cities of Naples and Rome and adopting their exotically diverse diet of pizza, pasta, gelato and wine for every meal, I thought I'd take a stab at writing a comprehensive traveler's guide to reproducing the magnificence of Italian cuisine in your own home with just ten easy steps. Follow this guide, and you'll be eating like a wildly pantomiming mafioso chief in no time!
Steps:
- Spend a couple hours exploring your neighborhood for a market that carries more than cheap candy, alcohol, and cigarettes.
- Eventually realize that there are no markets that sell anything other than cheap candy, alcohol, and cigarettes. Find a spot of wifi and look up the nearest international chain grocery store.
- Walk 3 or 4 miles to the stated location of the grocery you found online, only to realize that it's actually a "to-go" corner-store variant that exclusively carries the region approved cheap candy, alcohol, cigarettes, and pre-packaged sandwiches.
- Locate the downtown market street of your city, and wander aimlessly until you happen across a butcher, pasta vender, or just about any street merchant who looks like they sell food for home preparation.
- Attempt to buy some meat/pasta from them, and watch in confusion as they immediately start cooking it for you on the spot as a walk-away meal.
- Desperately attempt to catch their attention and persuade them to just give you the base ingredients that you might take them home to cook.
- Take on a key role in a dramatic stage play where the now very confused and peeved street vender tells you off for refusing to eat the wonderful food that he slaves away tirelessly to cook, and eventually rapidly lists off a number of other places you could go if you really hate him that much. He'll still keep your money.
- Follow up and explore a few of the locations the street vender pointed you to, only to find that they're all fancy sit-down restaurants for tourists.
- Give up and just order some pasta with wine, probably earning the previously mentioned street vender a referral commission.
- Voila! A wonderful ethnic dinner is ready.
Now, just because I love you all and care about your personal dietary needs, I've decided to write an easy to follow gluten free varient guide tested in the field by fellow hostel-mates!
Steps:
- Starve.
- Leave Italy.