The food episode, Venice chapter!

First, my apologies for making you wait for two weeks since my last post.  This will be the second post since our return, but it's also the one I'm most excited about because the topic is food, and most of us probably enjoy Italian food, whether it's pizza, pasta, or wine.

If you're hungry right now, you should probably wait and read this after you've eaten, because there are going to be many pictures of food.  Nate, regardless of when your last meal was, you should go and get a piece of Saran wrap and lay it over the keyboard, so you don't drool on the keyboard.

Back on October 2, in the blog entry titled "Sunday afternoon update", I wrote about our first meal in Italy from the night before, where we enjoyed a very nice meal at a small restaurant in Venice.  Like most restaurants in Italy, the menus offer appetizers,  first course, second course, and salads.  The first course is usually a starch such as pasta or risotto, and the second course is meat or fish.  You can order either one, or both, but for us, we found that unless we were extremely hungry, we found that we could order both courses to share, and the restaurants seemed fine with that.  That allowed us to each enjoy a more authentic meal experience without feeling as if we ate too much, while also leaving room for dessert and abundant wine.  The second course in that first meal was cuttlefish with (squid) ink sauce, served with polenta:

Besides making the food black, the ink somehow intensifies the other flavors in the food, while also adding a slightly briny and seafoody flavor.  It really adds body and unique flavor, not to mention briefly turning your mouth black, but that doesn't persist.

By the way, drinking water in Italy is not a problem.  We often drank tap water, and Venice and Florence (and probably other places) had public drinking fountains where you could fill your bottle, or just drink from directly, like these in Venice:

Another meal we had in Venice was at a sidewalk cafe on Sunday afternoon, after having spent the morning at the nearby Accademia Galleries, a museum of Venetian paintings.  It was a perfect day and place to eat outdoors, and we had a nice light meal and tasty wine:

Left: Artichokes, tomatoes, eggplant.  Center: prosciutto, mortadella, cheeses, walnuts.  Also, assorted breads, sparkling water, white wine.

Monday morning, as we were walking to St. Mark's Square, we passed through the Rialto Market, which like market in other cities, features very fresh food, and patronized by locals residents, restaurant suppliers, and some tourists.  Everything in Venice is delivered by boat and/or hand cart.  The first picture shows how the food gets to the market;

and the next few picture show some of the food sold at Rialto Market:

The prices shown in the photos are Euros per kilo, which at that time, was about $1.35 for each Euro, and a kilo is 2.2 pounds.  So, for the bundled red peppers above, that works out to $1.23 per pound.

The final food picture from Venice was taken at a small restaurant near our hotel.  The lighting is poor, but the food is a Venetian seafood specialty, served as an appetizer:

Included on the plate was a scallop, a couple kinds of octopus, a couple kinds of fresh sardines (not canned!), a big shrimp, a squid, and a couple kinds of fish.  It was quite adventuresome and tasty!

I'll continue the food stories in the next blog entry, so stay tuned!