Food!

By now, over a month of being here in Rome, we're just about used to Italian food (read: we have pasta almost every night, sandwiches every day for lunch, if we eat out we get pizza). On top of getting used to eating Italian style, we also are getting used to having every meal together. Beth is a great cook - my gastronomic experiences in life have been 18 years of my mom's cooking, 4 years of my cooking, and 1.5 months of Beth's cooking. If I had to order the quality of food I've eaten in those times, I can say with certainty that the person who cooked for me for 4 years was by far the worst. Beth has told me that it's not ok to compare her cooking to my mom's, because she knows how good of a cook my mom is. I do love eating my mom's food, but we sure do eat good with Beth cooking the meals.

It's pretty amazing how much time is spent eating, and how much time it takes to make good food! We're so thankful that both of our families insisted on having meals together - it's so natural for us now to take the time to make a meal, sit down and eat it together, talk about whatever is on our minds, and clean up after the meal.

Beth usually cooks and I either read War & Peace to her, read The Economist (which they have here in Italy), or write a blog...like right now. Tonight we're having soup, which, as Oma wrote of in the letter we just got from her today, we've really started to crave now that the crisp feel and smell of fall is in the air. I'm sure it's not as cold here as in Minnesota, but we're both getting excited about the slight change in weather.

After dinner I'm usually in charge of cleanup, and Beth reads Tolstoy or does homework. It's works out pretty well.

We love being here, but we're also so excited to be back with family, sitting around the dinner table or waking up in the morning for coffee and granola, with the people we love so much.

I would write more, but it's just about dinner time and things are about to start happening...Beth insists on eating things hot, so that's all for tonight!