Would You Like Some Carbs with Your Carbs?

In Italian, this is called Tarallini del Re con olio di oliva.

In English, it's called crack. You can purchase these in any Italian market. We have often seen them in La Stalla market in Newtown, but have never caved in to temptation. These little darlings are freshly made here, and we pop them like M&Ms. Like crack, try one and you are instantly hooked. In my humble opinion, the people who created these are the Sacklers of Italy.

The Florentines love their carbs. Every morning, when we embark upon our first of several daily walks, the locals are lined up at our favorite cafe, Serefini, waiting for their first carb of the day...a mouthwatering croissant ( I personally favor the one stuffed with lemon curd while Harold prefers the pistachio cream. "Yum," he says with a giggle.) or a cheese danish or cinnamon bun.

I ordinarily have nothing for breakfast. Nothing doesn't work here. We have trained ourselves to have a small scoop of yogurt with fruit and a little honey for breakfast on most days, but sometimes the clarion call of the croissant simply cannot be ignored. We figure 12,000 steps will mitigate the deleterious effects of that particular sin.

Lunchtime provides another opportunity for gluttony. Man, the Italians love their paninis! This is the line for the most popular panini joint in Florence. It stretches around a very long block.

The vast majority of people queueing up are Italian. Americans don't have the patience to wait an hour for a sandwich. Hubby and I decided to see why this particular panini shop is so favored. This was the payoff after waiting in line for what felt like a year.

The paninis are as big as your head. No wonder so many establishments are closed between 1:00 and 3:00. Who could work after packing away one of these? They are truly delicious. The focaccia is heavenly. We each ate half of one and with no small amount of self-righteousness, discarded the rest. This was a once and done experience. It's not just that I am worried about gaining a ton of weight, though that is a concern. I am also fearful that at some point my vital organs are going to rebel. What choice do they have? In bed last night, I tried to cut a deal with them. The terms were that if they just grant me these three months of culinary hedonism I promise to treat them respectfully forever after. I pray the terms are accepted.

On to dinner. Our plan was to begin and end our three-month stay with a very special dinner, and spend the rest of the time eating at small, local trattorias or osterias, or cook dinner at home. Our inaugural special dinner was spectacular! When we sat down, the sommelier handed Harold a book we assumed was the wine list. It was not. It was the water list. Not kidding...an entire book of water options. This is the wine list.

And this is the oyster appetizer. Yes, there is an oyster in there somewhere, and it was delicious.

Art on a plate. And this arrived AFTER dessert.

Needless to say, our Farewell Florence dinner will not be nearly as extravagant.

Florentines love their meat. They just love it. We are not big red meat eaters. I never cook red meat at home, and we rarely order it out, but they are so proud of their bistecca here, that Harold felt compelled to order a steak one night. It was a cow on a plate...a jaw-dropping, truly shocking display of meat, fat and sinew. It will not be ordered again.

But oh, the pasta! Pasta is another food I never make at home and never order in a restaurant. It is so sinfully delicious here, however, that we have been gorging on it. Ravioli with spinach and fresh ricotta, tagliatelle with wild boar ragu, pappardelle with pecorino cheese and truffles...you could just die. I don't know what the life expectancy of Italians is, but I bet they die happy.

The pasta is so ethereal I wanted to learn how to make it at home, so we signed up for a pasta-making class at the Lorenzo de' Medici Cooking School on the top floor of the Mercado Centrale. It was a lot of fun.

Fun notwithstanding, I doubt I will be making pasta from scratch in this lifetime...just too labor intensive for a senior citizen who has already put in forty years of meal prep and has earned her retirement from the kitchen.

Oh, and the pizza! How can you not have one of these every day?

We are committed to eating at home at least three nights a week. Our fare? Scrambled eggs one night, a large salad a second night and a roast chicken and veggie for the third night. We have to summon whatever small shred of discipline we have left.

A Word About Gelato

I could get a PhD in gelato. Here is what I learned: The gelato with which we are familiar looks like this.

It is quite beautiful and enticing. However, it is pumped up with so much air in order to get it to look mountainous in the display case that the flavor is negatively impacted. Also, as you might imagine, natural gelato is not that vibrantly colored. A copious amount of food coloring is used to delight the eye.

This is how unadulterated gelato is presented.

The steel vessels keep the quality pristine. As for the color, this gelato comes in various shades of blah, but oh how splendid the taste! As luck would have it, this shop is a hop, skip and jump from our apartment.

Today, we went to the Jewish quarter to see the Florence synagogue. You know you are getting close to it when you see the guard with the uzi.

You do not see the likes of him at the Duomo or Santa Croce!

The synagogue is beautiful, not on the grand scale of a Medici edifice, but truly lovely. Florence is lousy with tourists right now, but only five of them visited the synagogue while we were there. There is a population of only 1000 Jews in Florence. This building houses the synagogue, a yeshiva, and a day care center.

"What does this have to do with food?" you may ask? Well, like Italians, Jews enjoy their food. There are two kosher restaurants in this unpretentious neighborhood.

Ruth's is a kosher vegetarian restaurant. This seems redundant to me. Vegetarian food is, by nature, kosher.

A Few More Random Thoughts and Pics

One of my goals for this sojourn was to wean myself off of my Diet Coke addiction. The good news is that I have been doing very well with that. I have reduced my Diet Coke intake dramatically. The bad news is that I have substituted the aperol spritz for the cokes. I don't think that's good thing.

This is our mozzarella dealer. He is a great guy. Mozzarella pairs well with scrambled eggs. And salad.