Vitto Messicano

In our attempt to save money, we have been cooking most of our meals. Of course, we had been cooking our own meals while in the States, but this is a different beast altogether. Our main dishes were based on black beans, cumin, cilantro, monterey jack cheese, Crystal® Louisiana hot sauce and Morningstar Crumbles™ (a vegetarian ground beef substitute). Here in Florence, we were at a bit of a loss without access to any of these ingredients. So, everything we cooked tasted like olive oil and salt. Except for the first two night were we didn't carefully inspect the spices in the cabinet and were using sugar instead of salt. But after a a week or so here, we found a "Health Food Store" (the sign is in English) that sells fagioli neri—that's black beans in I-tal-yan. Some days after that find, we found Mercato Centrale where we purchased tomatoes, cilantro, (what we thought were) serano peppers (but turned out to be some sort of hellspawn with a spice that gets you in the throat), Mexican avocados, and CHEDDAR CHEESE. Can you believe that? Cheddar cheese in Florence. All the travel books and blogs said it was impossible. (This cheddar cheese has buried it's formidable stank into the fibers of our refrigerator and we nearly pass out when retrieving anything from said fridge.) Later that day we found (overpriced) flour tortillas and (again, overpriced) Tabasco at Il Centro, our grocery store of choice, of the brand name "Casa Fiesta." This has been the best meal that we have had since we've been here. We were both terribly full at one point but continued eating solely for the flavor. We had enough supplies left over to complete the act again the next night.

Lou had the foresight to capture the meal in pixels:








After this, we starved for a week or two. Then, a few days ago, we bought soy sauce and eggs and we've been living on vegetable fried rice.