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Posts from the ‘Italy’ Category

Crêpas de Castaña con Miel

I hope I’m never too old to play in my mother’s room. Stocked like a beauty counter at Saks and filled with back issues of ¡Hola! (similar to the UK’s Hello! magazine but with fewer Windsors and more Grimaldis), my sister and I treat it like a duty free shop where everything is actually free. Searching through her neat drawers and tables, we call dibs on new masks and eye creams, bracelets and rings we’re sure our grandmother would’ve wanted us to have, charms and trinkets that we casually discarded like the wicked stepsisters when we were younger but now want to reclaim for sentiment, or irony, or both. Overcome with the mami-can-I-haves from the moment we land, we can be pretty tough to take, though in our defense, she gets pretty spoiled when she comes to visit us. Read more

Cortado

After a wonderful fall break, I thought it was appropriate to wake up my blog the same way I wake up myself – with a cortadito.  Landing in Paris was exhilarating, tinged with pink and capped with gold, the city smells like butter.  From the first moment, I wanted to go in twenty directions at once.  Exhausted but not wanting to lose the day, we went to the closest cafe for a quick lunch before heading out.  Ordering in broken French, our waiter responded in broken Spanish.  We weren’t getting very far until he hit on exactly what we were looking for – a cortado.  Relieved to be understood, I finally  felt awake. Read more