I want to share with you an example of Italian lunch in the Beneforti's family during a Sunday ^_^
In this case, I'm talking about the Beneforti's family as a family where there are my parents too, because the family name of my father is Beneforti like my hubby! Don't worry, I didn't marry one of my relatives, it's just a random case! My name is Silvia Beneforti because "Beneforti" is the family name of my father and I married Paolo Beneforti (who were not my relative before), but in Italy a wife DON'T takes the family name of her husband, so my name is Beneforti just because I was born with this name ;)
Today I want to talk you about a "traditional" lunch here in Tuscany, a region placed in the center of Italy! You have to say that in Italy there are 20 different regions, from Valle d'Aosta to Sicily, sometimes they have very different dialects and very different cultures (about food, rituals, history, etc), so this "typical lunch" is not the same for all parts of Italy ;)
At first, we started with the "antipasto" (the appetizer) that in this case was some crostini toscani, little slices of bread with a souce made using the chicken liver.
On the table you can see a bottle of wine, but in this case this is not a tuscan wine. In Tuscany we have very excellent wines (do you know Chianti, Brunello di Montalcino or Nobile di Montepulciano?), but in my family we usually drink just few wine and my mom love to place on the table also different wines. ^_^
After the antipasto, we eat pasta with vongole (sorry, I don't have a pic of the pasta). Well, pasta and vongole it's not typical in the place where my family live because we live not close to the sea, but my parents love to eat some plates of fish and so my mom cooked this pasta today. Here we call this part of the lunch "Primo" (the first), because in a traditional italian lunch (or dinner) we have at least 4 kind of "plates":
the antipasto (appetizer)
the primo (usually pasta or something similar)
the secondo (meat or fish with veggies)
cakes and/or fruits
As the secondo, we eat a turkey roll (with eggs inside) and turnips, plus some fried potatoes.
At the end, it was time of something sweet! My mom cooked fo us the castagnaccio (using chestnut flour and nuts) and some cookies with her jams!
About the castagnaccio (with nuts, even if in other places people use the pine nuts), you have to now that is really typical in the place where we live, because there are many many chestnuts trees and in the time of the second world war, when all italian people who lived in the cities suffered from hunger, all the families who lived in this little village out of the city can cook something thanks the flour of the chestnuts (and thanks the fishes in the rivers).
My father is really happy to have his family with him and he love to tell us about the times when he was more young, even if he's a little deaf and we have to scream. It can be strange, but he looks like more deaf when my mom say something to him :D
Well, now I need digestive!
See ya later
Silvia
