Rhode Island 100 mile

…On our walk to the conference we found a store called Eataly. This was just not any old store, however. At first glance, it appeared to be the Italian version of a fancy Whole Foods. Upon multiple visits throughout our stay, we found this place to be much more- a restaurant, a bar, a bakery and a place to get really good locally produced food. Outside of the store you could buy pizza cooked in wood fired ovens (pictured left) and inside there were copious amounts of food, drink, kitchen supplies and even a museum. I also found that this was the only place to really sit down and enjoy a couple of Italy’s up and coming breweries…they had a full beer bar and the largest microbrewery section that we could find. One of the things that we were most impressed with was the fish section…the large swordfish head greeted us at the fish counter and everything was pretty much sold whole…which you don’t see too much of in the US. Word has it that there is an Eataly planned for New York City in 2009, so it will be interesting to see how that store works out.

-Josh

…while Ingrid was at the conference, I decided to check out some of the street markets that were going on in Turin. One was on Via Nizza, between the conference site and where we were staying. This market turned out to be rather “small” compared to the others, but I was totally surprised by the size of it- it dwarfed our little farmer’s markets that we usually frequent in Rhode Island. One thing that I quickly noticed was that these markets weren’t limited to just produce- you can get everything under the sun: toothpaste, underwear, shoes, meats, cheese, toilet tissue, salt cod (picture below) you name it! I had my trusty messenger bag with me, so I decided to pick a few things up for our stay. The clementines looked really good, so I grabbed a few- along with some grapes. I also found carne agnolotti, sausage and tomatoes for dinner. As I was leaving, there was a vendor who was selling 3 bottles of wine for 5 euro…so I picked out three and headed home. All of those purchases turned out to be fantastic and were a great ending to our first whole day in Turin.

On Saturday, Ingrid went back down to the conference and I headed to what is supposedly the biggest market in Europe. I walked down to the Piazza della Repubblica where the Mercato del Balon is held. This market was absolutely huge- there were separate covered pavilions to wander through…some just had meat, some had fruits and vegetables and all were packed to the brim. Outside of the pavilions, there were open air vendors as far as the eye could see selling anything and everything. I tried not to get too carried away, so I focused on trying to get some food for dinner. I ended up picking up some mushrooms and baby zucchini along with some apples, peaches and plums for snacking on. My goal was to get back to the apartment before the other street market closed to pick up some meat and mozzarella- since the walk back from this market was pretty far. I ended up doing fairly well squeezing through all the feisty old ladies- although a lot of vendors were upset that I wanted so few items since everything was priced by the kilo. I took one last round through the market and headed back to the apartment to drop of my goods. I ended up getting some thinly sliced beef and buffalo mozzarella at the other street market and whipped up some sauteed mushrooms and beef with baby zucchini and tomato…everything was great except that our stomachs didn’t agree with everything the next morning- I blame the mushrooms! Next up- EATALY.

-Josh