Pasta – A True Love of Mine

What Katie Ate in Milan: Eataly, Light of My Life

As I sort though all my travel memories to decide which ones to share with you, they’re basically all related to food. I defy anyone to go to Italy and pass any moment of the day with an empty stomach. It just wont happen. Mostly because of places like Eataly.

Eataly is everything you want in Italian food under one roof. The three level building combines a bookstore and cookware shop with myriad dining counters, a deli, bakery, fishmonger, grocer, olive oil dispensary and many, many more culinary delights! We were too late for lunch here but stopped by to pick up a few things for a casual dinner before going to the opera that night. Actually, considering the time we spent wandering through the store, its quite amazing that we made it to the opera at all. Let me walk you through some of the highlights…

First you can buy all the flour to make your pasta, breads and Italian sweets

Then you fall into a trance while staring at the mesmerising display of chocolate and caramel sauces

Until you hear the siren call of the chocolate hazelnut spreads (think super fancy Nutella)

Then you might try to break yourself out of your sugar coma by visiting the bread counter
(they also sell offcuts of loafs used at the sandwich bar earlier in the day if you don’t want a whole loaf)

Only to be sucked back in by the hypnotic sway of the hanging legs of prosciutto
Swoon!

A little bit of cheese makes a more balanced meal

Oops… did I say ‘a little’? How about a whole fridge full?
Berlin, eat your heart out.

And by now you’ve decided that you can’t be bothered to make your own pasta
So you buy some fresh pasta from this counter

Don’t think you’re getting out without a bottle of freshly decanted olive oil
or vinegar.

Seriously, Italy, well played.

Walking through Eataly was like disappearing down the rabbit hole. The delicious and mesmerising rabbit hole. We must have spent hours there annoying the poor workers who were trying to restock from the lunch crowd to prepare for the deluge of diners that would inevitably descend in the evening. It took all my strength not to fill my suitcase with jars of olives, chocolate spread, oil and try to sneak in a few cheeses. Surely customs couldn’t begrudge a girl a leg of authentic Italian prosciutto bigger than her head? Surely!

But instead we satisfied ourselves with a hotel-room picnic dinner of bread, crackers, cured meats, cheeses and tapenade.

stop drooling

And I bought the world’s tiniest bag of pasta.
No, its a magnet. But it is actually filled with real pasta.

Dear Eataly, I love you and i’m coming back. I promise.

Eataly
Address: Piazza XXV Aprile, 10, 20121 Milan, Italy
Nearest Metro: Garibaldi
Opening Hours: 10am-midnight

Lunch At Your Desk: Sneaky Leftovers and a Sweet and Salty Snack

And it’s time for another edition of Lunch at Your Desk! Hooray! This week i’m sharing a sneaky and super easy way to use leftover bolognese and sweetening the deal by throwing in a delicious snack to keep the munchies at bay. Enjoy, my lovelies!

I have been thinking about this snack for so long it’s genuinely ridiculous. When I was amping up for my European Holiday I was starting to think seriously about all the delicious German food that I was going to eat right at the beginning when I was in Berlin. Naturally, pretzels were number one on the list. Well, actually strudel was but thats not really related to this post so we will just ignore that. I picked up a fairly substantial packet of pretzels from the supermarket for $1 then spent weeks and weeks trying to think of the perfect dip to pack it with. Ultimately the answer was super easy and staring me in the face. Who could resist the siren call of the salty sweetness that comes with peanut butter and nutella? And those salt encrusted pretzels!

One scoop Nutella + one scoop peanut butter + a handful of pretzels = salty sweet heaven in your mouth

Try it. Seriously.

And on to the main event!

This lunch is really all thanks to my super dooper mother in law who kindly stocked our fridge (amongst doing many many other things to make our apartment liveable again) with delicious home cooked food for us to eat when we were too jetlagged to go to the shops. One of those dishes was a tub of bolognese sauce beefed up with mushrooms. Im still adjusting to the whole cooking-for-two malarky so I always underestimate how much pasta to cook to feed hubs and I. The few scattered pasta shells you see above are the only ones left from dinner the night before. It seems super efficient but unfortunately there is almost always a fair amount of sauce left over.

In the morning fog of tired eyes and lethargic limbs, I definitely couldn’t sum up the energy (or the mental capacity) to boil some more pasta so I called on that other carb staple, the good old crusty bread loaf to help me out. A few slices slathered with salty butter was the perfect vehicle to get the bolognese from the container into my mouth. It was a godsend on that awful cold and rainy week that welcomed us back to Sydney. You know, that week when it snowed in places that it has definitely never snowed before?

So, what have you been having for lunch this week? And do you have any other sneaky tips for what to do with leftover pasta sauce?

Easter Reset: Tagliatelle with Zucchini and Peas

So you ate all the chocolate on the weekend? Now you’re feeling a little soft around the middle and guilty from indulging? Well just stop that right now! There’s nothing wrong with a bit of indulgence now and then and I will certainly not feel guilty about eating bucket-loads of chocolate at Easter, the nominated day of all chocolate eating. But, in case you feel like you need to hit the ‘reset’ button after your Easter splurge, I thought today would be a good day to post my first ever savoury post and help you through it.