Meats, Fruits, Veggies and Holidays

OK, so it's been a pretty busy 24 hours.  It feels like forever since I last blogged.  Lessons learned since then?  Shopping in a different country is stressful.  Shopping with a woman is stressful.  Shopping with multiple women in a different country is unbearable.  There's a local grocery store about half the size of Kroger/King Soopers/Piggly Wiggly (whatever) and we all had to stock up on food for non-school-sanctioned meals and also for the progressive dinner we have in about two hours.  While shopping, I discovered that some people have very strong feelings about the percentage of fat in milk...VERY STRONG.  Unfortunately, Italian milk doesn't make it incredibly clear what percent the milk was, so it was a crap shoot, though from the amount of panicking involved, you'd think it was more similar to a game of Russian Roulette.

We had our first cooking lesson today.  The lady teaching it speaks only Italian and looks, and acts, like the love child of your mother and Meryl Streep (regardless of who your mother is, it works).  She'll be causally chatting at us in Italian for about five minutes before she stops to let the translator translate, which usually ends up being only a sentence.  I feel like we're missing something.  We made our own pasta, a local specialty known as Pici (Pee-CHee).  We also made a bread soup that was absolutely amazing, and, unlike with the pasta, when I say we I mean she.  So, SHE made an amazing bread soup, a meat stew thing that was spread over bread (it had five meats: chicken, beef, lamb, rabbit, and pork).  And, to finish the four and a half our lesson, we had a type of cookie/pastry made from essentially powdered almonds, powdered sugar, some oil (because unlike the excessive amounts of butter used in a certain someone's TV cooking show that may or may not have lead to her recent diagnosis of diabetes, we use only massive amounts of olive oil here in Italy) and orange extract.  Back to the oil point, we literally polished off an entire bottle of olive oil during this meal.  The bread soup was oil based (with beef broth added) and served with oil drizzled onto it, the bread over which the meat thing was served was soaked in oil before being baked, the pasta sauce (which supposedly was a white sauce since we didn't use tomatoes, even though they added tomato paste (for color...red, not white...crazy Italians)) was oil based.  I guess Momeryl wanted to keep the intestines well greased.

Meanwhile, the nation of Italy is celebrating the end of WWII, well more specifically the day the Allies freed the nation from fascists.  We sort of stumbled into a parade (on right, sorry about the poor quality, it was the only way to get it to upload in under an hour a better version is here), an around a major soccer game (which was an absolutely electrifying experience, even just hearing the crowd) and narrowly avoided a demonstration in the Piazza (per the contract we signed prior to our trip saying that we will not attend riots, demonstrations, or any similar conglomerations of natives).

A brief rundown of some cool facts about meat, fruits and veggies (two classes, four hours, over 100 powerpoint slides, and 20 pages of notes):

• Myoglobin, a relative of hemoglobin (the molecule responsible for oxygen transport in the blood) temporarily stores oxygen in muscle cells, giving meat its red coloring.  The greater the need for oxygen, the more myoglobin, and the redder the meat.
• Animal stress before death causes poorer quality meat, since muscle cells use their energy stores prior to death, decreasing the amount of lactic acid in the meat after death which allows microbial activity (faster spoilage) and decreases the amount of water (dryer and tougher meat).
• Butchers hang meat to counteract the effects of rigor mortis (weird to think that your food also clenches up like a dead body on CSI)
• Green beans, cucumber, corn, and tomatoes are all technically fruit despite the 1890 US Supreme court ruling that tomatoes are veggies because they are "usually served with dinner, in, with, or after soup, fish, or meat, which constitutes the principle part of the repast, and not, like fruits, served as dessert."  Shockingly, just because the government said so, doesn't make it true.  
• We think of rhubarb as a fruit though it's actually a vegetable.
• Apple juice is brownish because the enzymes released during juicing cause browning (similar to browning of an actual apple) of the liquid.
• Don't refrigerate avocados, bananas, or citrous fruits because they will stop ripening, brown, and turn spotty, respectively.
• The amount of tissue damage done when cutting an onion determines the amount of volatile sulfur compounds that are released, so use a sharper knife, and chill the onion prior to cutting it to save yourself some tears.

Sorry for such a long post. There was just so much to say!  Cheers to the daily adventure.  Here are a few pictures till next time.