This Sweet Life - QUESTA DOLCE VITA

The Wednesday Recipe: Key Lime Pie

4/29/2015

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I recently had an unorthodox craving for Key Lime Pie. It was one of my favourite desserts back home because there's a chain of restaurants called Cactus Club that features it as a signature dish. Surely there was no hope in finding one here in Italy (the cheesecake isn't even the same!) so I knew I'd have to find me a recipe and make one of these bad boys! The result was completely satisfying...!

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Weekend Catch-Up: A Garden Party

4/28/2015

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I've never really had the chance to have both a flower garden and a vegetable garden back in Canada, obviously due to the very short sunshine season. It's definitely possible, but you're a bit limited to what you can grow successfully. Being in Italy and in our new house, we are fully indulging in all things garden-related so this past weekend we headed out to join the masses of Italians to literally shop for flowers! It's so popular that we had to get up early on Saturday morning to beat the insane crowds that tend to accumulate during the afternoons. I do not have a green thumb at all, but Massi's dad has quite the passion for gardening (luckily!) and so basically did most of the work for us on Sunday morning. In addition to the flowers, he enriched our vegetable patch even further with tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, and sage, to name a few new additions. It is such a novel concept for so many North Americans to be able to eat what you grow in your own backyard but that is what is done here (and likely the reason why waistlines remain so trim!). For our light Sunday night dinner, we just popped outside and cut ourselves a nice salad. But wait, in Italy you don't pour on the Ranch, Caesar, or any other cream-based salad dressing...it's simply oil and white wine vinegar! So your beloved "Italian" Caesar salad is not quite so Italian after all.

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Una Preghiera Per Nepal - A Prayer for Nepal

4/27/2015

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The times spent in a world away from May 4, 2007 to June 29, 2007. Nepal is a place beyond words and my life will forever be intertwined with the lives of the people I worked with. I volunteered at a women's wellness clinic called NAHUDA; the sisterhood there touched my heart and I know that I will return one day. These words were written almost eight years ago when I had just returned from a volunteer trip to Nepal. It's one of the places in the world that really became like home to me. The Nepalese people are simply some of the kindest and happiest you will ever meet, I consider it a true privilege to have met some of the people I did and I am sending out my prayers to Nepal today.

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Blog News: Foreign Correspondent for PINK PANGEA

4/24/2015

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Hey all...Happy Friday! I have a new gig to announce and it's that I will be writing a total of eight DIFFERENT & UNIQUE articles (ones you won't be able to see on the blog) for the women-focused travel website and community: Pink Pangea, check them out here. Of course the articles will still be about all things Italy! I will let you know when the posts are up via the blog and Twitter .

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The (Belated) Wednesday Recipe: Gnocchi di Castagne con Burro e Salvia

4/23/2015

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This week has literally FLOWN by and I didn't even have the chance to do a proper Wednesday recipe so here it is, albeit belated. This recipe comes from the book Two Greedy Italians Eat Italy and is just fantastic, although I found the chestnut flour to be the most challenging ingredient to track down back in Canada. Be warned, while gnocchi seem really easy to make, they are actually difficult to get the hang of in the sense that you need to develop an understanding of when the texture is correct (otherwise they end up overly floppy or overly hard and chewy). Have fun, see you in the Recipes sections!

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One Lucky Californian Expat's Enchanting View from Bergamo's Città Alta

4/22/2015

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Katie is a true California girl who is the most recent North American expat to join our fair city of Bergamo, pictured here with a glass of something delicious on her apartment terrace in the upper city that she shares with Italy native and boyfriend, Gianmarco.
Photo credit: Gianmarco N. You can check out their Facebook page .

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10 Fun Ways to IMPROVE Your Italian: My Personal Tips, Tricks, and Tactics

4/21/2015

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Checking out the Italian word for "shopaholic" on WordReference...

So you're living or studying in Italy? Whooooo hooo, you're now a member of a very exclusive club of expats that will forever start conversations with either "Sì, mi trovo bene in Italia" (the response when people ask you how you're finding Italy) or else "This one time, in Venice/Florence/Milan etc...." Do you tell yourself just because you're here, breathing in the Italian air, you're probably learning the language by osmosis? Hate to burst your bubble, but you're not. Yes, being surrounded by Italian and having to do your daily errands in Italian is helpful but it's also not the be-all and end-all. You will not improve unless you are constantly trying to add to your vocabulary and trying out new verbs. I could get along with a list of probably 10 verbs and be completely coherent but since my aim is to sound like I've been here for years rather than months, I'm always using little tricks and tactics on the path to self-improvement- now I'm sharing them with you!

My Top 10 Tips, Tricks, and Sneaky Tactics for Improving Italian

Watch Italian movies on Netflix with English subtitles , my particular favourite is (the amazing Tilda Swinton did the entire movie in Italian though she technically does not speak the language, she "learnt" it and is just amazing. Also, the clothes...the film was outfitted by Raf Simons for Jil Sander).
Read Italian gossip magazines and write the translation of each word above in English. Despite how long it takes you, you'll soon realize you're looking up fewer and fewer words. I recommend reading CHI (Italy's version of HELLO!) or TuSTYLE.
Have a little notebook to write down particularly interesting words, verbs, or expressions that you don't want to forget and review on a weekly basis. I used to carry a little black book but now I use the on my iPhone.
Sign up for About.com word of the day in Italian, I still get them in my e-mail inbox daily!
Check out the website called The Iceberg Project, See previous posts about it here.
DuoLingo and Babbel, I tinker with them anytime I'm waiting around for something.
Watch kids' shows like Peppa Pig in Italian. I know it sounds ridiculous but if movies or television is still too challenging or physically hurts your brain, kids' programs tend to speak using simpler vocabulary, verb forms, and (sometimes) they speak slower or more clearly.
Watch the dubbed Italian movies of your favorite English movies. It's helpful because usually you already know the lines by heart and can pay more attention to how they translated it into Italian.
Translate song lyrics. The first Italian song I ever translated fully (looking up every single word) was .
Converse with kids. They don't judge you when you mess up your grammar and are totally less intimidating!

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An Instagram Photograph of Bergamo Looks Like a Dream

4/20/2015

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Photo credit to fellow English expat: Katherine Howe. You can follow her on Instagram at @kkhowe or click .

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Reasons Why Italy is #Winning: Amarene by Fabbri

4/17/2015

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There are a number of things that I just can't stop eating in Italy, my personal list is very eclectic and includes: any gelato with caramelized figs, any pizza with anchovies and capers, piadine with prosciutto cotto, mozzarella, and tomatoes, pasta allo scoglio (seafood pasta), olive all'ascolana, and finally...these. In English, I think we call them Amarena cherries, they are small, dark, and sour and delicious. This brand, Fabbri, is famous for preserving them in a kind of hyperglycemia-inducing syrup that you can pour over gelato or just slurp by the teaspoonful like me.

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Travel in the USA: Seattle

4/16/2015

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In an attempt to distract myself from getting overly Italo-centric here, I've decided to write some posts that don't involve Italy at all! Although Italy is our home base now, Massi and I both have a passion for travel and we certainly did our share of it when based in Canada. I went back to dig up good photographs of all our North American adventures which includes places like Los Angeles, New York, Seattle, and Vancouver to name a few. We were in Seattle, USA in the summer of 2012 when we did a kickass road trip from Edmonton all the way to Vancouver, taking a two-day stint down to Seattle to check out a KISS concert nearby. Let me tell you how fun American border control is when you're a Canadian citizen travelling with an Italian national...! Seattle is known for its coffee-shop culture, being the birthplace of Starbucks and all, rightly so. Unfortunately, being with an espresso-drinking Italian does not let one enjoy the fruits of Seattle's labor because what kind of coffee culture can you experience by downing a shot standing up at the bar? For me, the highlight of this particular city is Pike Place Market and the surrounding areas. It's probably the most stereotypical choice but I adore markets in general and at Pike Place, you can watch fish being thrown around (literally they fly through the air, you can YouTube it) which is beyond entertaining. I'm also a sucker for any city that's near a body of water where you can catch fresh seafood and Seattle is one of them. If there's a famous Clam Chowder place (Seattle's is Pike Place Chowder Co., go early or they run out of the classic), then I'm happy as a clam. So basically to sum up Seattle- it has good coffee and good chowder, so it's a good'er in my books. Now for the fun stuff...