il pranzo, il gelato, and overuse of the word delicious

Today I'll talk about lunch, or pranzo (just one more blog about dinner tomorrow and then I'll stop talking about food. for the most part). The first day I made our lunch here in Passignano, we had sandwiches on yummy white-bread rolls which were all that the panetteria had. After lunch, John quickly fell asleep. So we decided to try and make lighter lunches. The next day I made salads with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, some kind of sweet green peppers (which look like anaheim), a bit of ham, and some shredded parmigiano. Delicious! The tomatoes here are so good, that you can pretty much eat anything with them and it's delicious. So we switched to salads for a few days. But you know what? John still fell asleep after lunch. And because we were eating so light, we were always peckish by 3:00, which meant, inevitably, that we needed to go for gelato.

Then finally I discovered a panetteria on the other side of the shopping area that sells black bread (my favorite route into town in the mornings is now the staircase that passes right by the ovens of this bakery! yum!). So then we started making sandwiches with prosciutto, mozarella, cucumbers soaked in vinegar, lettuce, tomatoes and peppers. John calls them Dagwood sandwiches, and if I may say so myself, they are delicious.

The black bread loaves are like small footballs with pointed ends, so I can get a few slices for sandwiches out of the middle, but inevitably you end up with two un-sandwichable heels. Yesterday we struggled our way through chopping up these hard ends, some of them many days old, diced a cucumber and two tomatoes, added some basil, and had a panzanella salad. All these years I've been throwing out french bread when it got hard. Why didn't I know that you could add some oil and vinegar and it would transform into something amazing? Delicious.

We also started buying wedges of watermelon so that we could snack on that rather than gelato. But you know what? The gelato is really good. Unfortunately Ann Rinaldi, the wonderful woman who rented us this place, told us which place in town had the best gelato, and it's fantastic. So despite beefier sandwiches and watermelon slices, we still can't always resist. John typically mixes mint and dulce de leche, or straciatella and limone. I've fallen in love with Zuppa Inglese (like a custard) and Amarena (sour black cherry). Delicious. Okay, enough delicious.

Today I'm putting slowly sauteed peppers from last night's dinner on focaccia with a little mozarella. Hopefully it will be up to snuff.