Il Gelato San Crispino
With just a few clean clothes left in our suitcases, the last evening in Rome brought yet another unplanned surprise. We were invited to a dinner with Cardinal Sanchez (I didn’t know we had 3 Filipino cardinals, as there are only 2 in the Philippines!) who has been at the Vatican for decades. It was a small private dinner in a stunning private home so I won’t say much 
lest I offend our brilliant and utterly private hosts. The food was terrific and the conversation sufficiently peppered with interesting views on religion and politics (the two typically off-limits topics of polite dinners). But I must say a big thank you to our hosts that evening and hopefully they will read this post… We had a wonderful dessert at that dinner but we had one more food experience we just had to have before we left Rome…Il Gelato San Crispino.
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We answered with a “lukewarm let’s see” but frankly, I didn’t think chances were good. I have been to the U.S. Open before, with a center court seat for the semi-finals, and those tickets were wicked hard to come by…so I just assumed the Italian Open was a tall order as well… As luck would have it, my wife’s relatives asked The Kid what she really wanted to do in Rome and “poof!#@!” – tickets to the Foro Italica two days before we left for Manila appeared! The shrieks, squeals, bouncing up and down, heartfelt thank you’s, smiles and shivering with glee were all signs that this was it…that one moment in a trip that you know she will remember forever. Forget the Van Gogh’s, the Sagrada Familia or massive Zara shops, the leaning tower of Pisa or charming towns of San Gimignano or Siena, let’s go see some tennis stars!!!
I decided to attempt to recreate the 
There were many spectacular choices but the one that immediately caught our eye were the beautiful white peonies. These flowers had enormous heads and the petals were already open and for lack of a good adjective…they looked voluptuous. You only get peonies for a brief period in the Spring every year and they come in white, pink, magenta, etc. We asked the florist to wrap up a nice bouquet of all white peonies and while he got busy doing that (packaging is a big deal in Italy), we looked at some of the other items on offer. It was hard to pass up the roses in a mixture of colors as they looked more like backyard roses (still have character and fragrance), rather than farm grown, anally retentive types that you see so often in florists fridges these days… The huge pots of hydrangeas also looked tempting…
The key is the pasta…bucatini which looks like large spaghetti but which has a hole or tunnel running through it. It’s rather difficult to eat as it can get messy, you sometimes get air when you suck it into your mouth, but it is the quintessential pasta choice for this bold sauce. The bucatini was followed by some excellent Saltimboca a la Romana or Veal Saltimboca which are thin slices of veal with a slice of prosciutto and a sage leaf dusted in some flour that is then briefly sautéed in olive oil or butter. The tenderness of the veal, the saltiness of the proscuitto and the aroma and taste of the sage leaf is a delicious combination! Photo up top is before the dish was cooked.
There are lots of variations on this incredible staple of many Italian homes. At one restaurant in Florence during our recent trip, the version that emerged from the kitchen was creamy, very thick and almost with a tinge of green rather than a tomato-ey red tinge. Add on a drizzle of the finest green olive oil and parmigiano and it was nearly porridge like but incredibly satisfying. My wife is the pasta e fagioli expert in the family. .. and though she essentially uses Marcella Hazan’s recipe, it varies a bit every time depending on whether we have ham bones, prosciutto bones, porkchops, leftover pancetta, etc. which is the basis for the stock…
ideal bean to use in a classic pasta e fagiole (pasta and bean soup), it is meatier than other beans, possess a somewhat nutty flavor and have a creamy texture. Often purchased dried, this bean is excellent in soups and stews. At the markets in Italy, I was thrilled to find so many stalls selling spectacular fresh borlotti beans still in their pods…talk about fresh! Removed from their stunning striated cream and maroon pods, the beans themselves are often cream colored with red/burgundy or black markings. It seems that the fresh beans freeze well and my wife’s aunt often takes home several containers of fresh borlotti that she then stores in her freezer back in Manila… She makes a pretty mean pasta e fagiole that rivals some of the versions we ate in Italy…the best ones were creamy and your spoon could practically stand by itself in the soup!