Why I have a crush on Jamie Oliver

If you live in the States, I'm a little jealous. Not just because you're closer to my family, but because you can watch a television show that I am completely in love with:  Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.

I am not the kind of girl that watches television--in fact, I've never owned one until I moved in with Guido, and we only used our basic cable once to watch the World Cup (Hey, I'm in Italy, what can I say?). So, thank goodness for airline entertainment. I was fortunate enough to watch the Food Revolution while traveling over the Atlantic on the way back from the United States. After watching the forty-minute pilot episode, I was totally inspired and moved by Jamie's mission to transform the unhealthy eating habits in the United States. Now this is the kind of television I can get behind.

Here's the premise of the show: Jamie travels to Huntington, West Virgina (population 50,000), recently named the unhealthiest city in America because of its high rate of obesity-related deaths. A 2008 report from the Center for Disease Control reported the following facts on Huntington: 45.5% of the residents over 20 were overweight (that's half!), 21.6% of those over 45 reported a diagnosis of coronary heart disease, and 13% of those over 18 had diabetes (the national rate is 7.8%). Jamie's goal is to try to get the residents to change their addiction to fast and unhealthy food and show them that with just a little extra effort their lives can be healthier and much, much longer.

Super Orgasmic Slow Food Festival

Today Guido and I went to Caglio, a small town super close to the Swiss border (which explains why I had "The Sound of Music" in my head). A friend of Guido's told him about a Slow Food festival in this little mountain village, and Guido, being the amazing boyfriend that he is, knew that we had to go.

Tucked into the foothills of the Italian alps about ninety minutes north of Milan, Caglio was the perfect location to display locally handcrafted foods from the province. (You can see a fun blog about Caglio here--but the photos are taken in winter.)

There were so many sweet things to see. First we had buckwheat polenta (recipe for that later), followed by the most amazing gelato I've ever had (it was some of the best Guido has ever had too, and since he's Italian, that's saying something). The three flavors we tried: mandorle di Noto, almonds from Noto, a Sicilian city famous for its almonds; riccota and amaretti (a type of cookie); and zucchini (!). They were all amazing, but I have to say that the ricotta and amaretti gelato was totally orgasmico.

Slow Food and La Cucina Orgasmica

There's only one way to start a blog, and that's to start it. So what better way to start off than a little background on the Slow Food movement and my vision for La Cucina Orgasmica?

A quick history of Slow Food: The Slow Food movement was founded in 1989 by (Italian) Carlo Petrini to "counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world."

And I super like this last line: "To do that, Slow Food brings together pleasure and responsibility, and makes them inseparable."

Ah...leave it to Italians to combine pleasure and responsibility. Che miracolo! I don't know where I got my fabulous guilty conscience from, but I've spent most of my life feeling guilty for pleasure, as if the only meaningful thing I could do was be responsible for everything and everyone, instead of actually having a bit of fun.

Boring!