My Vacation in Sicily, or “Almonds Gone Wild”

By Kelley Lindberg

Ah, Sicily. Land of mythology, history, Godfather t-shirts, pasta, lemons, pistachios, and almonds.

Lots and lots of almonds.

Almond and pistachio cookies greeted us
in our hotel room in Sicily.

If you’re not allergic to almonds, pistachios, or lemons, you’ll love Sicily. If you’re allergic to almonds, pistachios, or lemons, you might want to plan on doing a lot of your own cooking if you go there.

Almonds, lemons, and pistachios are some of Sicily’s biggest crops, but stranglehold trade restrictions from Sicily’s parent country, Italy, make it difficult (if not impossible) for Sicilian farmers to sell them off-island. When you have a lot of something and you can’t sell it, you use it in everything.

My mother and I enjoy a day visiting
Greek Temples in Italy.

In May, my mother and I traveled to Sicily for a badly needed vacation. Truly, it’s a breathtaking place. We were on the eastern coast of the island, in the town of Taormina. From our beach-side hotel, we took day-trips to see the ancient and storied town of Syracuse, the Straits of Messina (where Odysseus and his crew met with scary monsters), the active volcano Mt Etna (which graciously did not erupt until hours after we’d left its hillsides), an ancient Roman villa with magnificently preserved mosaic floors, ancient Greek temples, and other Sicilian marvels. Throughout history, the island, which is strategically located off the “toe” of Italy, has been over-run by a steady parade of better-armed empires, like Greece, the Byzantines, the Romans, the Spanish, the Arabs, the French, and of course both sides of WWII. All that history and all those conquering cultures have combined in Sicily to produce a land and a people who seem to accept that “stuff happens” and you just have to roll with it.

That extends to their cooking. With a plethora of almonds on the island, they’ve learned how to incorporate them into almost every meal. I had almond cookies, almond gelato, almonds sprinkled on my pasta, and fish breaded with crushed almonds. When almonds were missing, pistachios took up the slack.

Because of the constant presence of those tree nuts, I was often glad my son wasn’t with me on this trip. Sure, it would have been possible to talk to chefs and waiters and request special handling to make sure he was being served almond-free foods, but the constant vigilance would have made this vacation more stressful than most we’ve taken. Since my mother and I are not allergic to tree nuts, we were able to enjoy the food without worrying. (Although I must admit, I felt a pang of guilt every time another dish arrived in front of me with almonds sprinkled liberally over it.) (And I guess I should also admit that those almond cookies were DIVINE. Don’t hate me.)

I'm telling ya, lemon granita is a highly civilized way
to end a breakfast. I could get used to this!

On the other hand, if my son HAD been with me, he would have loved the lemons. There were jars of lemon marmalade, lemon syrup, limoncello (a lemon-flavored liqueur—okay, that would not have been for him, but definitely for me!), a lemon-cream pasta sauce that was out of this world, and scoop after scoop after heavenly scoop of lemon granita (Italian ice). Lemon granita was even served in the breakfast buffet every morning at our hotel, which my mother and I agreed was a very civilized way to face the day.

All of which just goes to show… when life hands you almonds, make lemon ice!

An iconic Sicilian view: the active volcano Mt. Etna
(notice the plume of smoke coming out of its vents),
seen from a path through a lemon orchard.

Lemon Gelato – A Scoop of Italian Heaven

by Kelley Lindberg

Buon giorno! (Good day!)

I’m back from my trip to Italy (with a brief stop in Paris), and I have eight million photos to prove it! Lucky for you, I won’t post them all. Maybe just a couple…

Our trip was, of course, fantastic in every way. We spent a day and a half in Paris seeing the usual sites (Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre, and the Arc de Triomphe).

 

Then we spent ten days in a 100-year-old villa in the tiny historic town of Positano, Italy, on the Amalfi Coast (just south of Naples).

We spent our days wandering up and down the Amalfi Coast, visiting places like Pompeii and Herculaneum – both cities were buried under so much ash from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that the houses, buildings, streets, and other structures were incredibly well preserved. Today you can stroll through Roman-era houses with painted frescoes still on the wall, mosaic floors still brilliantly colored and intricate, public bars with their terra cotta wine vats still intact, and even gardens still boasting their reflecting pools, columns, and statues.

It was an incredible experience for my son, too. It’s one thing to read about history in a book. It’s quite another to wander through an ancient, excavated Pompeiian shop and see the containers that held Roman “fast food” and signs still painted on the walls advertising everything from politics to wine prices. 

My son loved every minute of it – even if it seemed at first that he was destined not to indulge in any Italian gelato. He was really looking forward to Italian gelato. (My fault: I’ve been telling him for years that Italian ice cream is the best in the world!) But most of the gelaterias we encountered were cross-contamination nightmares. All the flavors were in small bins very close to each other, and the fanciest places piled their bins high with the frozen treat, topping them with real pistachios, hazelnuts, and other hazards.

Eventually, though, we did manage to find two or three gelaterias where my son could indulge. Fortunately, his favorite flavor is lemon, and lemon doesn’t get double-dipped with nutty flavors very often. So when we found a gelateria close to our villa where the proprietor made an effort to serve him an uncontaminated scoop of lemon gelato, we quickly found ourselves making repeat visits there (sometimes twice a day!). We also found a place in Amalfi that served nothing but lemon flavors of gelato. The owner claimed he used lemons from his own trees (the Amalfi Coast is famous for its lemons) and promised there were no nuts in the whole place. My son was in heaven!

Here’s a photo of him enjoying his very first gelato limone.

Next week, I’ll tell you about our experience finding safe breads and pastas. (Sneak preview: I’m still not certain how wide-spread the use of lupin flour is!)

Ciao!

Summer Nights at the Ice Cream Stand

My childhood memories of summer include lots and lots of hot, muggy nights driving to the ice cream stand with my parents and my younger brother. My dad loves ice cream with a passion other men might reserve for things like women or NASCAR racing. So when the temperatures rose to somewhere around “blistering,” we’d be in the car headed for a favorite ice cream haunt.

Where we went depended on where we lived. When I was very young, we lived in upstate New York, and our favorite place was a stand that served fresh peach ice cream. I remember driving there in the dark with the car windows down, the smell of lilacs streaming by in the night, then standing around the parking lot waiting with other patrons for our hand-dipped treat. There were probably fireflies and the sound of crickets. There was sometimes heat lightening. I know there was giggling, and drips we tried to catch before they fell from our cones onto the hot pavement.

In other places, our stand-by was Dairy Queen or Baskin-Robbins. You can’t go wrong with 31 flavors.

When my son was born, I looked forward to keeping our ice-cream-stand summer evenings going. But then we discovered his nut allergies.

Baskin-Robbins went right out the window. Can’t trust all those scoops in the same murky dishwater, moving from the Rocky Road to the Mango Sorbet. Dairy Queen has a big sign on the door saying everything they sell may be contaminated with nuts.

So, our ice cream evenings changed. We buy safe ice cream at the store and serve it at home on the patio. It’s nice, but somehow it’s just not the same thing as piling in the car, headed for a delectable treat, noise, and other good-natured ice cream lovers. But it’s just not something that was in the cards for us and our allergic son. It was easy to let go, because he’s more important than a hot fudge sundae (most days), but still, it was sort of sad.

But guess what? There’s a new place in town! Zeppe’s has opened up on Main Street in Layton, and they serve Italian Ice (gelato – kind of like sorbet, in wonderfully rich fruit flavors). I had some of their Italian ice last week at a birthday party, and it was delicious. So I stopped by there this weekend while out running errands and checked out the place, and sure enough, they have a few tables, a couple of chairs on the sidewalk, and a whole array of luscious-sounding flavors.

The best part is this: because their Italian ices are nut-, egg-, and dairy-free, my son’s best friend can also eat there.

Suddenly, I foresee a Friday night in my future that involves all of us – and my son’s best friend – piling into the car and heading out for a frozen treat, just like I did when I was a kid. I’m so ready for my long-lost summer tradition!

Now if only Utah had fireflies…

Food Allergy Snapshots

Sometimes I’m amazed at the places I go and things I do that make me think about life with food allergies. Here are a few snapshots of things that brought food allergies to mind in the last couple of weeks:

• On the Metro in Washington D.C., as well as on TRAX here in Salt Lake, you’re not allowed to eat or drink anything. That’s a blessing for food-allergy sufferers – one less place to worry about getting spilled on or sitting in crumbs.
• At a birthday party, the mom served Italian Ice from a new place in Layton called Zeppo’s – it’s milk-free, egg-free, and nut-free, and quite yummy!
• Another friend called twice to check on ingredients for a birthday cake to make sure the two allergic boys there would be okay at that party. Don’t you love friends who care?
• In the ultra-cheesy movie “The Game Plan” starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson (not my usual movie fare, but it was late and I was too lazy to find the remote), the big climax is when his newly discovered daughter suffers an anaphylactic reaction to nuts in a dessert that he fed her without remembering that she’d mentioned her nut allergy earlier in the movie.
• At the Utah Arts Festival, a vendor was hawking free samples of those roasted almonds – and my son was nervous about standing at the art booths next to the vendor’s stand because the smell made him worry he might have a reaction. (He didn’t.)
• Southwest Airline’s peanut policy makes me nuts. (Ha.) They hand them out to every passenger without even asking. I had to be quick to tell them not to give us any before they plopped them down on my tray. On a longer flight, they also offered other snacks as an additional treat, but nearly every one had a nut warning.
• Hershey’s Dark Bark recipe makes great chocolate for making S’mores:
  1 (8-oz.) package of Hershey’s Unsweetened Baking Chocolate, broken into pieces (if you can’t find Hershey’s baking chocolate, substitute 3 T Hershey’s cocoa melted and blended with 1 T shortening or oil for every ounce of baking chocolate); 1/4 cup plus 1 tsp. shortening; 1/8 tsp. vanilla extract; 2 cups confectioners sugar.
  Grease 9x9-inch pan. Set aside. In medium bowl, microwave chocolate and shortening on high for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes, until mixture is melted and smooth when stirred. Add vanilla extract. Gradually stir in sugar. If mixture becomes too thick, knead with clean hands. Spread out in prepared pan. Cover tightly. Refrigerate until firm. Break into pieces. Store, well covered, in refrigerator.

What are some of the places and events that have made you think of food allergies this week?