Speaking of cooking

I need to document this somewhere. For my BIL and FIL, I'm suggesting Nolay and I make giant food baskets. Ideas we've had, given our strengths and cooking appliances:

FROZEN:
Chicken tamales
Stuffed chicken breasts (not sure what they'll be stuffed with....probably prosciutto, sage and cheese)
Beef ravioli
Spinach and cheese tortellini
Gnocci
Spent grain (from brewing) bread loaves
A soup of some sort (That chicken and corn chowder on OT looks great, but not sure it would freeze well?)
Frozen cookie dough (anyone have tips on this? I've never done it)
OTHER:
Sun Dried Tomatoes I made this summer
????

Tuscan dinner

I'll be cooking a big Tuscan dinner for one set of in-laws (the foodie ones) on either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Potential dishes that reflect our dining experiences:

-Roasted veggies
-Roasted lamb or Wild boar (we'd just use regular pork unless I could wrangle up some wild boar)
-Tagliatelle with beef and tomatoes or Lamb ravioli or Shrimp spaghetti (using ground shrimp-surprisingly good) or Gnocci with cheese and tomato sauce. I'll likely pick two.
-Panna Cotta with blueberry red wine sauce

In other cooking news, I have a potluck party as my boss's house on Thursday. I'm making the crockpot butternut squash soup I love, and drizzling it with honey because Tummy told me to last year.

Things I miss

It's been almost two weeks that we've been gone. Sunday I start my conferences. :-(

So what do I miss about home/the U.S.?

Regular coffee. While lattes, cappucinos, caffe americanos are ok, I do miss sitting down with a full pot of coffee in the morning.

Eggs. For breakfast they generally have bread, butter, jam and coffee. Luckily a few places have also had yogurt. The good news is, there's almost always some kind of cake or cookie, and I love a country that has cake and cookies for breakfast. This morning we skipped breakfast at our seaside lodge, as we were traveling early to Genoa. We knew we'd be passing a McDonald's about 15 minutes into our trip and planned to stop in for breakfast. I was looking forward to something egg related. Instead, they had nothing of the sorts. Only pastries and various coffee items, and not staff working the counter in sight. Boo, maybe you should go whip these European McDonald's into shape.

Normal dinner hours. Eating at 8pm almost every night sucks.

Wash cloths. You get these giant towels-bigger than our hand towels. Handscrubbing my face doesn't get it fully clean, so I end up making a big mess with these giant towels that are similar to the "tea towel" material we use for some lightweight dishtowels in the U.S.

I know, wah, wah, wah. Miss you all!

Tick tock!

When preparing for a long trip, it's all the little things that take up too much time!

• Food. You don't want to waste food, and it's CSA season for us. I've still had to cook meals to use up things in the fridge, so no quickie frozen pizzas for us!
• Renting the international cell. It wasn't that hard, but it took a fair amount of time to research and understand things. We went with a company online that shipped the phone to us, so we are ready to go.
• GPS/maps. Downloading & plotting points. Still a thousand times better than printing off a bunch of maps.
• Leaving instructions for the cat sitter and making sure there's enough food, etc. for three weeks.

Today I have to figure out train reservations from Prato to Rome. Should be a fun lunch hour. Not.