preparing good ingredients and fresh made pesto

When I am in Italy of course I love to check out the art, the museums and the ruins but my second favourite thing to do is to eat. I am a foodie after all. The great thing about Italian food is that I can dine without adverse effects.

Some of the sites we visited before cooking a delicious meal back at our apartment.

The Colosseum Rome

Julius Caesar pointing the way

Victor Emmanuel monument Rome

They have good food in Italy…it’s cleaner than here in North America.

Food from the markets and shops in Rome

I have to be very selective when eating out in Canada because most of the restaurants lace the food with chemicals, and sulphites seem to be in everything these days. Most places even soak their French fries in sulphites before frying them! What is that about?

In Italy I eat out anywhere I want to without having to discuss ingredients before I order.  I had many plates of food even some that contained salt and gluten. I know that isn’t a good thing to do for my health, but it just feels so freeing to not get a migraine, or asthma attach, the way I so often do when I eat out in Canada. I order with abandonment.

I even tried things like wild boar and Parma ham. This is not something I would do often if I lived there, but for a holiday it sure feels good.

cooking wild boar

Surprisingly my arthritis does not flare as much as one would think. Their bread is made with different types of old grain flours that contain less gluten than ours. I do swell from the salt so I will have to be more careful of that on future trips.

buffalo milk motzeralla

Al (my husband) said that the best meal had been one of the dinners we cooked for ourselves. It was fun to shop at the local food markets for the ingredients and everything was so fresh and delicious. We were staying in an apartment through home exchange so we had a nice kitchen and a balcony to enjoy our dessert outside after dinner. It was a simple pasta meal with a side of asparagus (it was in season at the time). We just threw a whole mess of ingredients together and I made a pesto with fresh basil. An easy dish to make after a day of seeing some sites.

Pasta dinner

Even when we purchase our own ingredients at home I have to be careful as GMO is not labelled. I do check the little stickers as they tell you if it is conventionally grown when it has four digits starting with the number 4. It is GMO when it has 5 starting with the number 8 and organically grown also has 5 digits starting with the number 9. And I check the ingredient list on the bottle as you can not trust what it states on the front label.

I never even gained any weight even with all the Gelato I ate almost dayly. I think it is because it is real food and of course all the walking we did most likely helped.

I hope that Italy never changes and always will have good clean food to eat.

Related articles

• Italy Q&A: ‘Are you worried about GMOs in Italy?’ (theepochtimes.com)
• Italy kicks out Monsanto’s GMO corn. US can’t even get LABELLING. (redgreenandblue.org)