Dining at Cucina da Enzo

Barb and Karen's Italian Escapades - in Rome

Last week, Barb discovered a blog called heartrome, written by an Australian with Italian parentage, named Maria Pasquale. She transplanted herself to Rome and decided to start a blog to share her Roman life with friends and family back home, and now has around seven hundred followers. Funny, sassy and observant, Maria captures the essence of everyday Italians; their mannerisms and habits, their joie-de-vivre and laissez-faire-ness....Okay I'd rather know the Italian for these sentiments...maybe just Italian is good :)....

Anyway, Maria lets you live in Rome vicariously through her insights and adventures, and she, of course, loves food and writes about it too. (I really love her stories about grocery store cashiers and bagging groceries...) The most recent blog she posted before we left was about a trattoria called Cucina da Enzo in Trastevere, a Roman district (rione XIII), and recommended the burrata and the pasta carbonara.... So Barb and I were determined to find it.

Barb and Karen's Italian Escapades - A Roman Holiday

In our Italian Escapades, Barb is co-blogging and adding her comments in Italics :)

Having said goodbye to tearful (Barb’s) and somewhat indifferent (mine) children and husbands - we headed off to the airport.  (--Elinor's random made up song, sung before I left: " My mummy cannot play with me..she had to go to Italy."  Sob! --B.) My mum droves us which I was especially thankful for since I woke Sunday morning with eyeball pain. It wasn’t excruciating, but would have made driving difficult….. Waiting in airports, and train stations, and just that “getting there” process is like limbo, or purgatory. It seems endless until you are finally on your way to what you hope will be heaven. Waiting areas in the travelling world are uninspiring and dull, at best; at worst they are scary, and dirty, sometimes extremely smelly and run down (Termini Subway station), however, it’s obviously all worth it....

Pina Colada Chicken with Spicy Rice and Beans

Pina Colada Chicken with Spicy Rice and Beans

Steve and I have been lucky enough to be able to travel, courtesy of Loblaws and the retailer conferences they organize every two years, to the Caribbean several times. In February of 2007,  we went on a cruise, where at one Port of Call, in Puerto Rico, we went to the restaurant which claims to have invented the Pina Colada. True or not, it was the BEST pina colada I've ever had. Lots of fresh coconut flavour, and not overwhelming with pineapple.

My Favourite Cookbooks,Tropical Fruit, and Movies??!!

This past Christmas, my mother-in-law told me to go buy myself something with a specified amount of money, and it took about two seconds to think "oooh...cookbooks..." Despite how much I love to cook I don't really own a lot of cookbooks, although I always love to drool over those belonging to friends. I usually like to wing things, or adapt food I've tried elsewhere.

 My friend Pam, whom I met in university, once took a year of culinary school and is a huge foodie, and some of my fondest food memories come from living at her house one summer. Her mother, an Austrian lady named Elke, is a wonderful cook, and wonderful person too. She welcomes everyone with open arms. (Her schnitzel was the best, and so was her pasta sauce, and so was her peach pie, and her amaaaaazing Dutch apple pie....Okay, I'm salivating now).... I think between Pam and I, those were the only things we requested over and over and over..... They have a nice garden in their backyard, and when I visited Pam last summer we went out and picked berries to go in our morning yogurt. I vaguely remember picking our own potatoes too, but I'm not sure if we did, or we just talked about it.  I also love their grape arbor.... Okay, back to cookbooks. Pam has a GREAT collection, is how I got started on that subject. My brother Martin also has an amazing cookbook collection, he likes to collect old ones too, so it's pretty neat to see the old recipes in them.