Ham, Cheese and Pizza

If you are Felix and you like something, you want to do that thing as much and as hard as possible until you’ve completely worn it out. Before we left home he had himself on a strict grilled ham and cheese sandwich diet. For breakfast with an egg on it and for lunch with no egg. Sometimes for a snack too. Not the healthiest choice, but we could definitely do worse so I’ve been going with it. Now here we are, in the land of cured pork products, faced with more choices in ham than I know what to do with and my kid likes none of them. I’m batting zero in the ham sandwich department so far. And there is also nothing resembling cheddar cheese as far as I can tell, let alone Tillamook medium orange cheddar. Eight varieties of Parmesan (not including the prepackaged stuff)? Sure. Gorgonzola so ripe it’s more liquid than solid? Of course. Pecorino with a suspicious looking black rind? Yep. Goat cheese wrapped in straw and aged for a decade inside a sweaty sock? Probably. But no cheddar. So Felix’s eating today involved a lot of focaccia and two servings of gelato, the only real substitutes for an American style grilled ham and cheese.

Digression: When I was in Tuscany in 2002, I went into a cheese shop in Pienza, which is famous for sheep’s milk cheese. Part of it was an actual cave and it had been a cheese shop for generations. That place smelled so profoundly atrocious that I actually started gagging and had to leave. I love cheese, adore cheese, but man, there is some cheese in this country that is absolutely terrifying. There is a line between “aged” and “garbage” and not everyone agrees on where that line is.

I just discovered this beauty – a Gorgonzola/Mascarpone combo! Can you imagine anything better with pears, walnuts and endive? I don’t think you can.

So no ham and no cheese for the boy. But there’s pizza, right? He can live on pizza. Wrong. What person, besides Felix, has ever said, “I don’t really like the pizza here in Italy”? And I’m thinking ‘you’ve got to be fucking kidding me’ and just barely managing to not say it out loud. It turns out he doesn’t like the fresh mozzarella, or the sausage, or the sauce or the fact that the olives have pits in them, or pretty much anything. And “The crust just isn’t like yours Mama.” It’s sweet that he likes my pizza better, but fucking hell. If I rolled my eyes any harder I’d pull a muscle.

Thank god the land of cured pork products is also the land of pasta. You can find some kind of amazing ravioli or tagliolini with butter and sage or meat ragù at pretty much every restaurant and he loves it. So all hope for his culinary future isn’t lost quite yet.

Yesterday we went to the beach and our usual lunch place was closed (by usual I mean we’ve been there twice and successfully eaten food). It was almost a disaster. I convinced Felix that we are BRAVE! We can try NEW THINGS! And so we went to the very casual snack shack next door. After a “disastrous” experience in the Amsterdam airport on the way over, Felix is wary of foreign hot dogs. But he pulled it together, gathered his courage and gave it a try. When it arrived it was another test of strength because the hot dog was sliced, and it was served on a square bun, like a sandwich. But low and behold, “This is actually pretty good!” And the whole thing got eaten. (I had an amazing tomato, mozzarella and basil panino which I was not afraid of at all.)