A number of years ago, Bill and I were chatting at a cocktail party with another couple who had recently returned from a trip to Italy. It was their first visit to our favorite travel destination.

“How was your trip?” we eagerly asked. “Did you have so much fun?”

“Well, yes, it was beautiful,” they said gravely, “but we would never go back. The food in Italy is awful.”

Stunned silence from Bill and me.

“Why, we couldn’t even find spaghetti and meatballs at a single restaurant,” said Mrs. I-Probably-Shouldn’t-Ever-Leave-the-United-States-of-America. “And one day we ordered their fresh fish of the day and it was some little scrawny fish that we didn’t even recognize.”

Yes, and probably pulled out of the Mediterranean Sea that very day. Sigh.

I don’t think it’s particularly uncommon for Americans to be surprised at the cuisine in Italy, or, in fact, the entire dining experience. What we call Italian food here in the United States is entirely different from what you see while traveling in Italy. I assume when Italians immigrated to the United States, they couldn’t find the same ingredients and life was just busier and cultures were intermingling and food just changed. So, no, you won’t find spaghetti and meatballs in Italy. You will find spaghetti cooked with tomatoes and garlic and basil, and you can order polpetti – little meatballs – on the side, but you won’t find any pasta drenched in red sauce and topped with meatballs the size of a baseball.

Don’t get me wrong. I love spaghetti and meatballs and order them often. It’s just that you can’t go to another country and expect to get the same food as you get here in the United States. That’s one of the reasons you travel – to learn how others eat. Right?

In Italy – and really all of Europe – you dine late in the evening. That took a bit of getting used to for us. We are used to dinner around 6 or 6:30. In Italy, dinner is around 8, or even later. We had some embarrassing experiences before we finally learned that lesson. But I’ve been told about a friend of a friend who went to Rome and dined EVERY SINGLE NIGHT OF HER VACATION at the Hard Rock Café because most restaurants didn’t even open until 7 or 7:30 and she wanted to eat at her regular time.

I began thinking about some other things that are on the menu of most Italian restaurants here in the U.S. that you wouldn’t find in Italy. Garlic bread is a good example. You get bread in Italy, but not toasted and no garlic. In Tuscany, the traditional bread is baked without salt, so the bland flavor takes some getting used to. And it will not be served with butter but instead, you will be given a plate for olive oil and balsamic vinegar. You can get butter if you request it, though the waiter will grimace.

And no Italian salad dressing. For the most part, if you order a salad in Italy, it will be served at the end of the meal. It will consist of mixed fresh salad greens, and you will be given olive oil and red wine vinegar.

Fuggetaboutit if you are looking for a pepperoni pizza in Italy. In fact, if you order a pepperoni pizza, you are most likely going to be given a pizza with pepperoncini  — those spicy little yellow peppers. Italian pizza is absolutely delicious, but I’ll bet lots of people are surprised when they get their pizzas. Very little cheese, if any; very little sauce, if any; fresh ingredients and herbs and greens such as basil and arugula. You can get salami, but I never saw pepperoni. The pizza is baked in a wood-fired oven and it takes about 7 minutes.  My mouth is watering.

I began thinking about this because my recipe for today is from one of my Lidia Bastianich cookbooks – Lidia’s Italy in America. In this cookbook, Lidia traveled around the United States to cities with large Italian American population, and writes about just the sort of food about which I’m blogging today – the food that immigrants began cooking after coming to America. One example is Caesar Salad, and Lidia’s recipe is such a good one. Try it once and you will never again buy the bag!

Caesar Salad, courtesy Lidia’s Italy in America, by Lidia Bastianich

Ingredients

2 c. ½ inch cubes of country bread

½ c. red wine vinegar

Yolks from 2 large hard-boiled eggs

3 garlic cloves

4 anchovy fillets

1 T. Dijon mustard

1/3 c. extra-virgin olive oil

½ t. kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

3 heads (1 package) romaine hearts, cut into 1-inch pieces crosswise

½ c. grated Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano

Process

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Scatter the bread cubes on a baking sheet, and toast until crisp throughout, about 8 to 10 minutes. Set aside to cool.

Blend the vinegar, egg yolks, garlic, anchovies, and mustard in a min-food processor. Process until the dressing is smooth, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. With the processor running, slowly pour in the oil to make a smooth dressing. Season with the salt and pepper.

Put the romaine and croutons in a large serving bowl. Drizzle with the dressing, toss well, sprinkle with the grated cheese, and toss again. Serve immediately.

Nana’s Notes: Bill and I aren’t crazy about croutons, so we didn’t bother making them. A sacrilege, I know. Also, I didn’t hard-boil my egg (I halved the recipe so it only involved one egg). Instead, I coddled it, which means I brought water to boil, then dropped in the egg and cooked it for about a minute-and-a-half. Traditional Caesar salad calls for a raw egg, so I thought this was a nice compromise.

One funny story about Caesar salad. Bill and I had friends for dinner one night, and I made a homemade Caesar Salad. It wasn’t this recipe and not quite as good. Anyhoo, my friend, upon learning I was making Caesar Salad, begged off, saying she couldn’t ABIDE the flavor of anchovies. I assured her there was not a single anchovy in my salad, as this particular recipe didn’t call for anchovies. She was doubtful, but agreed to try. She tasted it, pushed it aside, and insisted there were anchovies in the salad. I couldn’t convince her otherwise. Later, after they left, I looked at the ingredients for the Worcestershire Sauce that WAS part of the salad dressing, and, sure enough, one of the ingredients is anchovies. Finely tuned taste buds, that one!

Buy Lidia’s Italy in America from Amazon here.

Buy Lidia’s Italy in America from Barnes and Noble here.

Five years ago today, Joseph Dean Hibbert McLain was born in New York City. It was a joyous day for us all, though we were far away. Now he and his moms and his brother live happily in Vermont, where Joseph is an inquisitive and infinitely sweet boy — tall, happy, supremely smart, and as curly-haired as can be.

The other day, they Facetimed with us. Joseph immediately asked to speak with Papa. Barely even a “hello Nana.” This boy had business to conduct.

Face to face with Papa, Joseph came right to the point, “Papa, how do you fly an airplane?”

His papa was happy to provide him with the answer.

Happy birthday beautiful boy!

Riding high on a tractor with Papa.

Watching the stock car races.

Have a good weekend.

I got a telephone call from our step-grandson who is 19 and trying to earn money for school. We don’t  hear from him often as he is as busy as most 19-year-olds, so when his name showed up on my telephone, I prepared myself for the inevitable news that something horrible had happened. This propensity for assuming the worst runs in my family. We got it from Mom. It’s why we all start every telephone conversation we initiate with, “Nothing is wrong.” Most people say, “Hello.”

Just as an aside, Bill would never go immediately to the worst. Instead, he would assume that the call was going to bring the wonderful news that a mysterious billionaire had died and left our grandson enough money to not only go to college, but to BUY the college.

Anyhoo, the real reason he called was not to tell us about a horrible accident or an unexpected windfall, but to tell us that he was now selling Cutco knives, and could he meet with me to discuss. Oh no. Danger. Danger. Only marginally better than a horrible accident.

I of course said yes, and we set up an appointment. I immediately began doing research on Cutco knives. From what I can tell, the general consensus is twofold:  First, the company’s marketing stragety is to use college-age kids to sell their wares because said kids can appeal to their moms and dads and grandmothers and grandfathers and aunts and uncles and neighbors and, well, you get the picture. And who can say no?

But, second, the knives are pretty darn good. And pretty darned expensive.

So we met, and I managed to limit myself to a trimmer and a spreader. It could have been worse.

But the whole scenario got me to thinking about that question we all ask each other on occasion when we are gathered as a group: What is the worst job you ever had?

For me, the answer is simple – the job I had during college working at a Circle K store in one of the northern suburbs of Denver. Now, there wasn’t really anything intrinsically terrible about the job itself. I waited on people, I stocked a few shelves, I accepted money for gasoline purchases. What was terrible about the job is that the store itself was located out in the middle of freaking nowhere. My assumption is that a subdivision was planned in the area someday. But at that time, it was blocks away from the nearest homes, and except for the parking lot, it was dark as a cemetery. And just as scary.

And that’s not the worst of it. My shift was 6 p.m. to midnight. And this was in the days before 24 hour shopping, and the store closed at midnight. So the final job of my shift was to take the day’s earnings and place them into a bank bag, walk all by myself to my car, and drive all by myself – at midnight – to the bank and make the deposit. Someone thought that was a good idea. I didn’t.

And neither did one other person. After I had worked there a short time, a nice police officer took to stopping in the store around 11:50 p.m. and waiting while I gathered the cash and walking me to my car. No one asked him to do this. He was just a nice cop. Who didn’t want a murder and robbery on his shift or his conscience.

Bill will tell you his worst job was as third helper on a steel-making open hearth furnace at US Steel in Chicago. The furnaces were hot enough to turn molten iron into steel which then poured into giant ladles as liquid steel. Part of his job was to shovel manganese into the liquid steel as it poured into the ladle. Of course, if you didn’t shovel the manganese directly into the stream of steel pouring out of the furnace, it would splash small bits of the molten steel out of the ladle and to heaven knows where. Bill says once a molten piece of steel set his shirt collar on fire. He didn’t even notice until the person next to him pointed it out that his shirt was burning. He put the fire out, but because it was so hot and he was sweating so profusely, he didn’t get burned or even get a red mark on his neck. As an aside, our suspicion is that this handling of manganese may have contributed to his Parkinson’s. Just sayin’…..

Anyway, I wonder if one day our grandson will say that selling Cutco knives was his worst job ever. Maybe not. He gets to eat a lot of pineapple and cucumbers after the demonstrations.

Oh, and sorry to all of you people he contacts following yesterday’s demonstration. He held my feet to the fire for referrals……. They seem like good knives.

I’m really curious. What was the worst job you ever had?

For a time when I was growing up, my mom went to the hair salon every Saturday morning to get her hair styled. A set and comb out she would say. Regular color and perm. I would imagine it was as much a social event as anything else.

Then, during the following week she would spray her hair nightly and wrap toilet tissue around her head while she slept to keep the hair in perfect shape. I can’t imagine that it – any of it – was very comfortable.

She certainly didn’t do this her whole life. I think that weekly set and comb-out stage took place mainly during the 60s.  During that period of time, I think most women got their hair styled weekly at the salon. For much of Mom’s life she kept her hair shortish, but took care of it herself with a simple hair dryer, hot rollers and maybe a curling iron.

Her hair never became very gray. It’s hard to know what would have happened in her later life because she died at the young age of 68, but up until she died, she kept her hair perfectly coiffed in a soft, simple style. What gray she had looked like highlights – very pretty.

I thought about Mom the other day, as I often do, while I was getting my hair cut. I wear my hair very short and get it cut every five weeks. It’s one of the high points of my month. I’m not sure why. I love the feel of the cut itself and get a sort of strange satisfaction as I watch the gray hair fall to the ground, as if all of the gray is being cut off and when I look in the mirror, I’m going to look just like Amy Adams or Jennifer Garner. Or someone else without gray hair. Instead, my hair is still gray, only shorter than it was 15 minutes earlier.

For a time I had myself convinced that my hair was like my mom’s – you know, the gray looked like highlights. My grandkids called me on that, as they have kept me honest about a lot of things in my life. I recently applied one of those temporary colors to my hair, sort of getting my feet wet before I take any big steps. I still had gray hair, but maybe a little less. I don’t know. I can’t decide if I should worry about it at all. Am I just self-absorbed?

My hair stylist is somewhere in her early 20s with a hairstyle that includes a partially shaved head and a nose ring but kind of an old soul. I like her because she always tells me she thinks my hair color is pretty. I’m quite certain she would tell me that no matter what my hair looked like because she wants me to leave a tip and come back again. She uses only a razor to cut my hair, but, unlike the hair stylist who yanked at my hair with a dull razor when I was a small child – usually leaving me in tears — I think she actually uses sharp razors. No yanking. No tears.

I might continue to experiment with the temporary color, but I am going to have to work to convince myself to do anything permanent. The last time I permanently colored my hair was in high school when I used a product called “Summer Blonde.” It was supposed to gently lighten your hair just as if you had spent a day in the sun. That’s what Seventeen Magazine said. Instead, it turned my hair a brassy yellow, and every time my hair would grow, I would reapply in an effort to color the roots. Do you remember the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show when Laura Petrie bleached her hair because she thought Rob was growing bored with her? That’s how I looked. “Oh Rob.” (If you don’t understand what that means, you’re not a baby boomer.)

I’m not the only one thinking about haircuts these days. On Sunday, three of my granddaughters – Addie, Dagny, and Magnolia – all showed up with haircuts. Maggie got a couple of inches trimmed and Addie added some bangs.

Dagny, my friends, went all in. Cute as hell.

In this day and age of medical specialists – dermatologists, cardiologists, rheumatologists, gastroenterologists, obstetricians, pediatricians, on and on and on – I am an anomaly.  I have a doctor. A family doctor. No –gist or –cian at the end of her name. Just a family doctor.

Believe me, I am not passing judgment on medical specialists. I have a brother-in-law and a sister-in-law who are specialists, and far be it from me to suggest they are not important people in the lives of their patients. And darn good doctors.

I am simply saying I have just been happy with my family doctor.

She has been my doctor for 35 years. She delivered my son. She was his pediatrician. She has always been my OB-Gyn doctor. She was my first husband’s family doctor (I got the doctor in the divorce.) She is Bill’s family doctor and has been since we married 22 years ago. She didn’t do my shoulder surgery. She didn’t do my colonoscopy. She didn’t do my bowel resection. But there is little else she doesn’t do for me medically. She has poked and prodded and snipped and medicated me for half of my life. There is almost nothing she doesn’t know about me.

Except for one thing.

Every year for oh, I don’t know how long, I have gotten an annual physical. She does a very thorough job, examining nearly every part of my body. And every year for, oh, I don’t know how long, at the end of the physical she has handed me a packet to take home that contains the materials necessary for me to take the steps that will allow a lab to determine if I have colon cancer. I don’t want to go into a lot of detail, but it involves getting up close and personal with a bodily function about which I’d just as soon not talk about.

Every year for oh, I don’t know how long, I have taken that packet of information upstairs and set it on the counter that is literally steps from where I perform the bodily function about which I don’t want to speak. Every year I fully plan on THIS being the year I actually do what I’m supposed to do. And yet, every year it sits there for the entire year until the next year when I finally throw it away in order to make room for this year’s new packet. And every year, I smile at the doctor when she gives me the packet and promise her that , yes, of course I will perform the test. I think she actually believes me.

But guess what? This year, I ACTUALLY DID WHAT I WAS SUPPOSED TO DO. I gathered the necessary, well, material, put it in the little plastic tube, placed the tube into the addressed and stamped envelope provided, took a 15-minute shower, and tried to figure out what to do with the envelope.

“What should I do with the envelope?” I asked Bill (who, I feel compelled to add, has historically done EXACTLY the same thing as me with his little packet).

“Put it in the mailbox and put up the little flag,” he replied.

Which I did.

But I can’t help but wonder just how absolutely THRILLED our friendly neighborhood mail carrier is when she opens up the mailbox, takes out the envelope inside, and sees this……

“Oh Lord spare me,” she undoubtedly says. “The Civil Servant exam didn’t have a single question dealing with this particular type of mail. I am definitely not paid enough.”

Having conquered this particular fear, I am ready to begin monthly breast exams. Any day now.

And on a happier note, aren’t my tomato plants pretty? One cherry tomato, one Early Girl, and one heirloom tomato. Keep your fingers crossed. Last year my tomatoes were sad. I’m optimistic about this year.