Wikimecum:Easy Ideas for Cooking in Venice
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If you like to cook, or if you want to extend your cooking skills, Italy is a great place to do it. In Venice, you have access to the Rialto Market that offers super fresh ingredients at cheap prices daily. You can usually find most food items in the grocery stores, but some things like dairy products can be expensive. FYI, they don't sell sour cream and cream cheese is really expensive.
With all these fresh ingredients, you have the opportunity to experiment with new things and eat delicious food for very little money.
New Things
Seafood is very popular in Venice. At the market, you'll find all kinds of fish, shellfish, and sometimes unidentifiable creatures. Salmon and swordfish are cheaper, and a safe choice for those of you who like fish. But among the fish, there are all different kinds of white and pink fish that are equally as good, and sometimes cheaper. Its easiest to buy fillets of fish since that elliminates the de-boning process, but if you do buy whole fish, they will de-scale them for you at the market. The easiest way to cook the fish is to fry or bake it. You can add toppings like breadcrumbs or other seasoning, and white wine adds good flavor.
Another good choice for seafood is clams. You might be served baby clams at your dinner at Pampos, and they sell these at the market. You can also buy crabs, mussels, and lobster. For a new change, you can buy squids and octopus. To give credit to my group partner Angelica, we bought an octopus and made octopus salad for our dinner with the professors. You can buy them cleaned from the market, and a really easy way to cook it is just to boil it. To make the octopus salad, you just chop it up once its done (it will turn white and be semi-tender) and make a salad with celery, red onion, parsley, drizzled with fresh lemon juice and olive oil. It's different.. but not too bad!
A great way to have fun cooking is to cook with other students in your apartment or building. Alternating nights is a good way to split the cost and the labor time and its fun to eat together. Everyone has different skills so you'll learn from others as well as try new recipes.
Make use of the cheap and available ingredients. Produce is much cheaper than it is at home, and buying it daily means that it won't go bad! Cheese is also cheaper, and much better than cheese in the U.S.
Below are some really easy meals and snacks.
Sometimes the bread from bakeries in Venice isn't that good, but if you get to the Billa (grocery store) at the right time, you can find fresh baguettes for about 59 Euro cents. To make yummy baguette sandwiches, slice up a tomato, and layer it on sliced open baguette halves. Put fresh sliced mozzarella on top and drizzle with olive oil. Bake in the oven on high until the mozzarella is melted and you have yummy tomato sandwiches.
Soups and risottos from the grocery store are really good and don't require much cooking time. Just add water and cook until the risotto has absorbed all the water and until the soups thicken. If you're wondering about translating directions, the easiest way is to use a translation program like google translate, or if you don't have internet, "mezzo litre" is .5 liters which is pretty much all you need to know for those things.
When we had dinner at Professor Davis's apartment, Mrs. Davis made a really good simple pasta dish for us. Basically you just cook penne, drain it, and then add fresh halved cherry tomatoes, fresh chopped parsley, a little bit of olive oil, and then crumble in mild feta cheese until its creamy and melty. Its really simple and doesn't involve any cooking besides boiling water. You can find the actual recipe here at epicurious.com (this is a good website but sometimes the recipes are complicated):
The recipe above includes dill if you want to add that.
Desserts are sometimes hard to make if you don't have all the ingredients or baking materials, but you can always buy desserts from pastry shops, or what we discovered were semi-pre-made desserts that you can buy from the grocery store. In the first aisle of the Billa right after the produce, you can find several different mixes on the right. Our favorites were creme brule and molten chocolate cake. The molten chocolate cake is REALLY good, and really easy. It also comes with four little aluminum cake pans for individual sizes. I made this for my dinner with the professors and served it with fresh gelato and they loved it. You can buy gelato in larger containers from gelato stands, but make sure to buy one that fits in your freezer, and it melts after about 10 hours so after that its not that good. You can also buy gelato from the grocery store, but its definitely not as good.
--Jkent 00:08, 12 January 2009 (UTC)