Eating Like a Peasant is Fine With Me!

This weekend's adventure was to Lecce. It is in the very tip of the heel of Italy in the Puglia region-- about six hours by train from my Roman home base! I was only in this charming stone town for about 28 hours, but the food will always be remembered! Lecce and Puglia as a whole are known for rustic-y, peasant-y, and all together home-y food. Carla, my onsite facilitator, promised we would eat well. She was 100% right.

My first Leccese food experience was a delicious, creamy pumpkin risotto. It is weird because I am not a pumpkin person generally. I normally even require an alternative pie at Thanksgiving. In Italy, however, I cannot get enough of it! I think it is the savory flavor as opposed to the sweetness that has changed my mind. It was especially great paired with shaved parmesan and a big glass of the house red wine! Yum!

Clare tried (and shared!) a dish more typical to the region. It was flat, pan-fried noodles with garbanzo beans. It was very different that Roman cuisine but definitely tasty. If you're interested, here's a link on how they make it!

My second Leccese food experience was heavenly. Divine. Ambrosial. Perhaps supernatural. It was, drumroll please, a pastry the size of my head. After all the rain, Clare and I were in need of a little cheering up. A buttery, creamy, powdered sugar-covered treat was just the ticket! While I am not proud of this fact, it took me about three minutes to polish off the massive pastry puff and lick my fingers clean!

Though after finishing said pastry I swore I would never eat again, the next day around noon thirty I had forgotten this vow. I was ready to enjoy more Southern cooking! We ventured into a cute trattoria where we were greeted by oven-fresh bread. That in itself was a meal! It was crunchy on the outside, had a hint of sourdough taste, and was still warm! Because we would be missing dinner on the train ride home, we had no problem devouring the bread, ordering an appetizer, and I still scraped the plate of my main dish. Our appetizer consisted of fried potatoes (which ended up being french fries ha!), fried eggplant with black beans, fried rice with cheese, and something I was unsure of, but tasted like fried ravioli with orange zest. Everything was great!

For my main meal I was tempted to get the chickpea dish, but was won over by the gnocchi con formaggi e pesto. I was not disappointed! The homemade gnocchi pasta was to-die-for!

The best part about all this delicious food was how affordable it was! Without the hoards of tourists that so often swarm through restaurants along the beaten path, the price of food was much less inflated in underrated Lecce. Every meal we had was inexplicably delicious, yet I paid a maximum of 15 euros!

On a more cultural level, another huge difference in Lecce was the number of restaurants available. While in Rome there are thousands of osterias, trattorias, fornos, pizzerias, etc., in Lecce Clare and I walked around for about an hour before we even found a nice, sit-down restaurant. Perhaps the lack of tourists combined with the South's overall less-affluent population make dining out a rarity. I didn't mind the search though: Every morsel in my mouth this weekend was more than worth the rain, walk, and hassle it took to find it!

Ciao!