Thing that don’t fit any other category! We have a salad with a burrata of mozzarella and cured meat – the cured meat is everywhere; Panini all have cured meat, except the grilled vegetable ones…
We have a whole fish and a Catalan-style lobster dinner… seafood is big.
We have a plate of figs and cheese… yum…
We have a roast suckling pig salad – pig is another Sardinian specialty. And finally a nice cheese tart. Those last two were for Xopher’s excellent birthday lunch.
My pictures of sweets are dark and blurry, because they’ve come at the end of the meal, of course. The cookies on the left include a Sardinian amaretto, my favorite – an anise-flavored cookie*, but big and soft, mostly egg white. On the right is another traditional delicacy, seadas, again many possible spellings. Kind of a fried sweet cheese ravioli covered in honey.
*Basically all Italian cookies are anise-flavored, of course. I tried a lot of them.
Here are just some – I’ll narrow it down to the filled pastas. A particularly Sardinian filled pasta is called “culingiones”, with various spellings. It’s dialect – Sardinian has such a different dialect from regular Italian, in fact, that Sardu is really its own language. Seemingly paradoxically, but not if you think about it, this means that the classical Italian they speak in Sardinia is some of the purest you’ll hear in the country. Since they don’t have a near-dialect muddying up their speech, when they speak Italian it’s textbook. This was helpful to me as I strained to understand things… but I am digressing from food.
Culingiones are stuffed with potato and cheese, like a peirogi, and often a hint of mint.
Check out the pasta shown above with the shrimp – this was a seafood-stuffed pasta, and they were shaped like little fish!
And below, is a typical Sardinian pasta meal … after it’s been in front of us.
It’s Italy, so there’s always pizza. Problem was, one was always too much for one person and too little for two.
What’s it like in the shops? Well, you can fill up your wine jug with red or white from the bulk tin. And pick up some pasta!
Drinking in Sardinia…
a) Water – always bottled. You get a big one-liter bottle with your dinner and go from there. “Naturale,” if you don’t want it fizzy.
b) Beer – the local beer is “Ichnusa.” The basic model is not very good, kind of like Bud. The “Non-Filtrato” is very good. The lemon radler is basically a lemon soda. We never felt any buzz from it whatsoever.
c) One good beer not pictured here was called “Friska”. I think that was also local.
d) The wine is OK. The only one we were really taken with was a dessert wine we never found again.
e) We discovered a wild soft drink called “Chin 8”, pronounced “kin-AUGHT-o”. It was kind of a Moxie meets Dr. Pepper. Also available in Diet!
f) Summer afternoon, hot… drink, drink! Alcohol, sure, but it doesn’t have to be. Limonata, Chin-8, granita (ice slushy), smoothie (lots of smoothies)…
f) Late afternoon: Apertivo! Spritz! Drink, drink!
g) After dinner: Digestivo! Grappa! Drink, drink!
Popular way to have pasta – with shellfish. I’m not really a shellfish person. I usually avoid dishes with “too many mussels” (reference). But when in .. um.. an island due west of Rome… it was always tasty and I never regretted getting a pasta & shellfish dish.
An unusual presentation of the usual vegetables. The grilled vegetables: always zucchini, eggplant, peppers.
And the mixed salad: always a chopped iceberg-type lettuce, with some variation of tomatoes and/or carrots and/or cucumbers. Always with a bottle of olive oil, a bottle of vinegar, and salt on the side. Incidentally, this was the way my mother always had her salad. I kind of like it.
And the tomatoes. Always tomatoes. Always cherry. They came on everything. And since X doesn’t eat them, I always had to eat both his and mine (it’s the law). So I came away feeling like a big cherry tomato.
This is the “bread” that comes with every single sit-down meal. It’s a super-thin cracker. It’s really only good when coated with olive oil and salt. Otherwise, it’s a mindless pre-meal munch.
My favorite Sardinian dish, fregula! (FRAY-goo-la). Read about it at the Page-a-Day calendar:
https://christinestaffa.blog/2018/07/21/day-5-a-oristano-e-fregola/
Here we have it with mussels, tomatoes, and garlic… in a broth with clams… and with tomato sauce on a bed of Carta da Musica – the ubiquitous cracker-y bread.
