On Wednesday night, Amanda and I stopped by the grocery store on our way home from the Vatican. (Yes, we can walk to the Vatican - more on that to follow.) We had been into GS the night before, but only bought a few small items. This trip was what I would consider to be our first "real" trip to the grocery store. We had decided to make a simple red sauce and cook up some pasta. So gathering the ingredients shouldn't be that hard, right?
Okay, so first, you can't just grab a shopping cart - you have to pay to unlock them and use them. To save money, we decided that we didn't really need a carriage, we'd just grab a hand basket. Of course, we couldn't find them inside, and to be honest, we still don't know where you can pick them up...I guess that's something for another trip. Anyways, shopping is relatively easy...if you know Italian. Which we don't. For most items, we were okay. The packaging is pretty much the same, and most objects are identifiable. Except tomato paste. This is not tomato paste:
As we learned the following night, it is actually peeled tomatoes: whole tomatoes packed in liquid preservatives. Yum. When we dumped the can into the pot for the sauce and realized we had whole tomatoes, we figured we would improvise - just cut them up and make chunky sauce.
Also, when shopping for produce in Roman grocery stores, it is a MUST to weigh it! Wrongly assuming that it was just like in the US, we finally found an onion, put it in a bag, and brought it to the register. The cashier, upon coming across the onion, simply held the bag out to me. I was utterly lost for what I was to do, until he kindly informed me: "I wait here. You go weigh." Unlike in the US, their scales have buttons for each type of produce, so after you weigh the produce, you select the type and it prints a price sticker to then bring to the register.
Buying the spices we needed also seemed to be something that would be easy...until we realized that we didn't know what the words are in Italian! Luckily, the translation is pretty close, so it wasn't as bad as we thought it might be.
But, after all was said and done, we were successful! And the pasta and sauce were delicious! We're planning on using the tomatoes again for sauce (though next time we know to drain the liquid, haha).
Ciao for now!
2 comments:
Impressive! It actually looks appetizing. I am thankful Amanda's mom gave her cooking lessons before you two left. Ya know I can't cook much less give lessons. And as for the grocery store...you did better there than I would do here (haha).
Hey...I also like the imprinted dinnerware...can't forget where you live that way.
Have a great day.
Mom
Sounds like everything is going to be an adventure over there! So glad you're blogging about it! These are going to be wonderful memories 20 years from now!
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