Melanzane...

Lunch was made up of lots of bits and pieces (yes, including pasta) so I won't detail them all, but here's one of the things we made...

Sorry for the rubbish picture... I'm without a good camera at the moment.

Melanzane (aubergines) with a parsley and garlic dressing:

3-4 aubergines
1 garlic clove
3-4tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1 handful of parsley
Large pinch of salt

To make the dressing...
Remove the thick stalks from the parsley.
Add the salt to the parsley leaves and chop finely.
Peel the garlic and chop finely.
Mix parsley and garlic with the olive oil and set aside until needed.

To make the aubergines...
Top and tail aubergines and slice vertically into 1/2 cm thick strips.
Griddle on a hot, dry pan.
Remove and place in a dish/empty ice cream tub with the dressing - About half a tsp of dressing over each slice.
Set aside to cool and allow the aubergines to soak up the juice.
Serve alone or with salad or bread.

Oh and I did learn one important detail about eating like an Italian... Never eat pasta with salad, apparently it's a quick an easy way to scream "look at me, I'm English!" Is this coming from direct experience you may ask? Embarrassingly, yes. My first lunch with my Italian hosts was begun by a friendly but incredibly definite "No, no, no"... and I thought it was only my language skills that were giving my 'Englishness' away! To eat like an Italian, you should eat the salad first to prepare your stomach, then eat the pasta. On a similar vein, another apparently English thing to do is to drink cappuccino in the evening. Italians find this laughable - cappuccino is only drunk in the morning and any time after that they only drink espresso.

Back soon.