Sunday, 28 August 2016

ELDER HOLLAND COMING, what's for dinner?

When President and Sister Allen returned from a mission president's conference in Germany this week, they informed us they learned that Elder Holland will be coming to northern Italy during mid Sept.  We will have all of the missionaries meet with him at a stake center in Milano.  Since they will come fasting, and be hungry afterward, Myrna and Sister Allen have started planning for how we are gong to feed them. So, with that knowledge, we went to Metro yesterday evening to see what we could get to feed our almost 200 missionaries.  Metro is a large store like a Costco, where apparently owners of restaurants shop, because they sell things in large quantities.  I did not intend to take pictures, but I took a few, mostly to remember prices and sizes for comparison shopping.  All we bought were about €200 of American Oreo cookies, to put in the sack lunches we will make for the missionaries as they head home after the conference.

Myrna took this out the car window with my cell phone as we crossed the Po River on the way home. There are many bridges over it, you can see a train bridge.

At the Metro store they had these large wheels of cheese for sale.  They sell both Grana Padano and Parmesian cheese like this.  It is €8.99 a kilo for Grana Padano and €11.99 for Parmesian.  These wheels weigh 38 kilos each (84 pounds).  They do sell it cut up and also grated.

There is a room with the hams from Parma and other locations.  These are whole, uncooked, but cured in air for at least a year, and are very good.  Italians eat them very thinly sliced either on panini or with melons, etc., like we served our outgoing missionaries (although the sisters are afraid of raw ham, so they bought boiled, which our Italian AP chuckled at.)

The salamis, and this was only one wall of the salami rooms, there were several.  Italian families would not buy these this big, they would buy them cut up and sold by the kilo or gram. We generally buy ours in 100 gram packages at the supermarket, paying from €1 to €3 per package,depending on the type.

This is commercial strutto, or pig lard, used for baking.

This is cured (not cooked) pork belly, which I suppose we would call bacon, but you have to slice it up yourself.  Italians do not eat bacon, fried and crispy, like we do.  They would slice this stuff up and eat it raw or make things, like Amatrice spaghetti, sauce with it.

This famous sausage is called Mortadella, and comes from Bologna.  In the US it is made without the large pieces of white fat, and is called bologna, but this tastes somewhat better than American bologna, I think, but Myrna does not like it.
 
This is in a refrigerated room, and is full of ripiena, or filled fresh pasta, which we would call pasta like ravioli and tortellini.

They had very large frozen rolls of Doner Kebab, which I have already mentioned in previous blogs. It is the favorite fast food meat of missionaries, who go to these pizza and kebab shops to get it.  They (Muslims, of which there are many here in Italy) make panini as well as put it on pizza they make in their wood fired ovens.  They cook the kebab like Greeks cook gyros, with a gas fire, and then they shave it off the large roll.  I was curious about the meat, since no one knew for sure what kind of meat it was.  On these big packages, which sell for €83.69 each, the ingredients were printed on the side, which I took a pix of so I could enlarge and show the missionaries.  It is made with turkey meat, 57%, veal (which is expensive), 30% and water, dry milk, yogurt, spices, etc. And it is Halal, which is Muslim kosher. The ingredients sound okay, inspite of what some people think. President Dibb boasted that he went home after three years in Italy never having tasted it, but President and Sister Allen had some during their first month here, and liked it. Myrna and I have had it several times and also like it, although we will not have it often because it is pretty filling/fattening. We took Amy's family to get it, they liked it and lived to tell about it.

Metro had this display of Italian truffles, or mushrooms that grow under the soil in forests and are harvested by dogs or pigs, depending on where you go. I think they can only be grown wild, and they are very expensive.  They grate them up and use them for flavoring, although I have never had truffle, yet.

They seemed to have no problem advertising the price of these white truffles from Piedmont, of which the capital is Torino (where we went last Saturday and will go again). These cost only €1,590 a kilo, or more than US $1.700.00 for about two pounds--pretty expensive little mushrooms indeed, they must really be good. (I have heard about Piedmont all my life, and only learned this week that the word, in Italian, means from the feet (pie) of the mountains (monte), which this part of Italy is literally at the foot of the Alps between France and Switzerland, which is where Amber's Italian ancestors come from.

These are porcini mushrooms from the Rome area.  They are only €12.90 a kilo, and they also sell them dried.  I bought some a few weeks ago, dried, to make ragu alla Bolognese. They sell the "regular" white mushrooms in stores, which are gown on farms, for about €3 a kilo, and we buy these all the time. They do not sell cream of mushroom soup here, as in for cooking, but I figured out that for .79 I can buy a can of sliced mushrooms in oil, drain the oil into a pan, heat it and then add flour (make a roux), cook it and then add milk, then add the mushrooms, and you have cream of mushroom gravy or soup, depending on how much flour and milk you use, and it tastes much better than Campbells cream of mushroom soup. I make this sauce while the pasta is cooking, and add a can of tuna, put a hand full of frozen peas in the pasta at the end, dump them together, and we have a pretty quick tuna and whirleygiggs, which is what we called it when the kids were growing up, and which we still like, except Amy, who does not like tuna for some strange reason.  Italians actually eat a lot of tuna in cans. We went to our bishop's house for dinner last week and they fed us tuna in tomato  pasta sauce, over noodles, which was pretty good.  

Obviously, I will write more about Elder Holland's visit in a few weeks, when he comes. We just had Elder Christofferson this spring and that was also a big deal for our mission.  Being in Italy I suppose we get more than our share of general authorities.  President Uchdorf was in Rome a few weeks ago to see the progress on the temple, but he didn't come here.