colazione

I swore I wouldn't turn this into a food blog, oohing and aahing about every glass of wine and amazing tomato. And I promise I won't, but it does seem like I should talk just a bit about what we're eating.

Today I'll talk about breakfast, or colazione. In the States, John and I like to start healthy with fresh fruit in greek yogurt with a high-fiber cereal mixed in. Here in Passignano we get great fruit and yogurt (banana flavored, a favorite of ours), but high-fiber cereal has proven scarce. They have oats, and muesli-like cereals, but there's often odd things like bits of chocolate in it. Really? Does that still count as healthy? So, trying to be healthy, we skip the cereal and eat just fruit in yogurt in the morning.

But a few hours later? We're hungry again. So we walk down the hill to the main cafe and have a spremuta (fresh squeezed juice), a cornetto (croissant), and a cappucino (frothy yumminess). Now the biggest decision of our morning is what kind of cornetto we're going to get. They have cream filled, jelly filled, honey filled, rice cream filled, and chocolate filled (what's with chocolate and breakfast?). There's probably more options, but this is all we've discovered so far. I try to eat mine neatly, holding it in the napkin like an Italian, but John likes to slowly tear his apart, getting filling all over his fingers and showering his shirt with the powdered sugar sprinkled on top. He then informs anyone paying any attention, "che casino!" which means, what a mess! (I'll include a picture tomorrow) Surprisingly, they still seem happy to see us in the cafe each morning.

Someday we will find a supermarket with a better selection of cereal (perhaps in Perugia), but for now, we feel that the climb back up from the cafe probably works off the extra calories of our second breakfast.