Thanksgiving in Macerata

                For Thanksgiving, my site director, Filiberto reserved a whole restaurant and took all 23 of the people in my program to dinner in Macerata, plus all of our teachers.  The people at the restaurant, La Ristorante di Seconda, were really sweet and attempted to make us a traditional thanksgiving meal!  It was fantastic, and sort of funny to see their impression of American food. 

                We had the full Italian 6 course meal: antipasti, primi, secondi, contorni (fruit or vegetables), dolci, and caffe.  Antipasti was all fried: zucchini, cream (yes, cream, like a homemade twinkie), and these delicious fried, stuffed olives called Olive All’ascolana that are a specialty of the Marche region.  Then there was Vincigrassi for primi, a Maceratan variation on lasagna that has no cheese and is molto better than American-Italian lasagna J.  Then they brought out a huge tacchino, turkey, and we all crowded around it and took pictures.  Turkey is not commonly eaten in Italy, you have to order one weeks in advance from a butcher, so it was really sweet of them to make it J  We also had potatoes for contorni, cute little chocolate lava cupcakes for dolci, and an espresso at the end :) all served with wine, of course.  I hated it when I got here, but it’s finally growing on me now that I have only 3 weeks left in Italy and then 1.5 years until I’ll be 21 and able to buy it again.

                The only thing better than this would have been being home for Thanksgiving, I had a fantastic time with my little AHA famiglia J