Old Year’s Night feast. Welcoming the New Year with food. Capodanno a Roma.

This New Year was spent in Italy so it was spent eating. What else do you do? 5 courses were consumed. I would have taken photos of each course, but I was trying to be polite. Blogging gets in the way of living at times, certainly of enjoying a celebratory dinner with friends. To photo or not to photo, that is the question. So you’ve got the menu instead. In Italian, Russian (I think) and English. I can’t read menus here in English, I don’t understand the dishes through translation. This one is quite good, but usually cacio e pepe translated as pasta, cheese and pepper just doesn’t have the same appeal.

   So we started with a huge plate of burrata (soft and squidgy cheese) and ham; followed by a soup of black beans with lobster and shrimps. Delicious, but it did remind me of a New Year’s Party spent with Wiganers and Chris who decided to cook the traditional black peas eaten in his home town. Despite the packet reading ‘not for human consumption‘ (?) we enjoyed them all the same. 

   Pasta of pumpkin ravioli and sausage (too sweet for my tastes) was shared. You have to pace yourself through five courses. Fish course was basically poshed up fish and chips. Yummy, but drunk with wine of course, rather than my preferred mug of tea.
Mum’s champagne to see in the New Year
  
   As 12 o’clock arrived, we were served lentils and pig bits (cotechino a spicy sausage or zampone pig’s trotter, not sure which and didn’t ask). Eating lentils is said to bring wealth, the shape representing coins and the pork the richness of life. So we tucked in. Extremely tasty, but just after semi-freddo and hot chocolate sauce, a bit difficult to stomach. 

   And like a proper Bradford lass, we continued to drink long into the night – obviously the best way to see in the New Year is with a hangover, right?

2 comments

  1. Sounds delicious. We had nibbles then a takeaway curry for 8 once the kids were in bed. Then Champers, watching the London fireworks on tv… Pretty idyllic, especially as the weather was foul! Happy 2014! Kari 😉

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s