Wednesday, May 2, 2012

Interesting Italian

All semester long I've been bombarding you with delicious looking photos of Italian food and other European cuisine. There's been pizza, gelato, desserts and more pasta than I care to admit. Overall, it's been outstanding, but rather generic. Nothing has struck me as "so Italian," since where I come from, Italian is the most popular cuisine. Yes, Italian-American is vastly different than, well, Italian-Italian, but still. Though I haven't told you yet about suppli.


I thought about making this picture extra-large to show you all the cheesy, ricey goodness up close and personal, but then I thought that that's not fair, cause I can get this at any pizza place and you can't. Basically, if you haven't already put two-and-two together, suppli (or suffli as my dad calls them) are cheesy-tomatosaucy rice balls, that are deep-fried to seal in all the deliciousness. If it's a good one, there's a blob of melty mozzarella cheese in the center. And if it's a really, really good one there's the cheese center AND it's perfectly crispy on the outside. They're the equivalent of our mozzarella sticks, except just so. much. better. The worst part is that I don't even know how I would make these at home. Unless I got a massive deep fryer...


And then there's this. Before you look too closely and get totally freaked/grossed out, let me explain. I shared these with my father at a restaurant when he was here. They were served deep fried, with zucchini sticks and lemon. If you haven't noticed the little eyes by now and figured out what they are, they're fried whole anchovies. Yuck, right? Nope, not yuck. They weren't fishy at all and had the perfect amount of crisp (probably from the eyeballs and bones! kidding, but not really). I wanted to dip these babies in a garlic aioli or tomato sauce, but they were delicious all on their own. Would eating these while casually watching TV on the couch be too weird? Probably. This dish will most likely stay in Italy, since American's aren't all that open to eating things that still have their eyeballs intact. How lame.

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