The Cooking of Ancient Rome

It’s about time we finished our Ancient Rome studies, we’ve been plugging away at it for several months now. Most enjoyable was our daily readings (aloud) from Famous Men of Rome — those were some interesting characters and the kids had tremendous fun making up impromptu dialogues as we read aloud, esp. the more outrageous ones like the guy who burned his arm to prove a point (LOL, I forget his name — Paco and Migi haven’t).

Last night we put a dinner together — I should have taken a pic of us in the kitchen. All five of us chopping, mixing, kneading, cutting. We tried to cook from

but ugh, the recipes were hard to read, there was no easily searchable index to put together a nice menu, and some of the translations were questionable. We chose instead to cook from Jeff Smith’s

because we already had it.

We had an antipasto platter with salami (rolled up by Yena and Migi), little mozzarella cheese balls (not for Dad), chickpea salad, roasted red peppers, artichoke hearts, and a selection of olives large and small.

Then there was grilled deviled chicken (Migi mixed this up) topped with tonnato sauce (made by Paco).

There were two pastas — the safe brown rice one from Tinkyada and our favorite De Cecco spaghetti — done alla’matriciana, with lots of bacon. Yum!

For dessert we had almond cookies made by Aisa. I was thinking of getting a vin santo for dipping, but the grocery didn’t have it, and I didn’t want to drive another 20 minutes to get one. So we had sorbet and coffee instead, not ancient but oh well…

As usual, Mom’s not done. I think we’ll have a return-to-Rome evening sometime in October, so we can try out dishes from

Next time, we *will* post pictures.