When In Rome...

Some facts: 1. We have a kitchen in our Rome flat. 2. They don't do real cookies in Italy. 3. Cookies are one of my favorite foods. 4. I am one facebook message away from the recipe for the famous Beth Bridge cookies (the melt-in-your-mouth-cry-your-eyes-out-they're-so-good chocolate chip cookies).

So what do I do? Make cookies of course!

Exhibit A: COOKIE FAIL.

Why? I don't know. But I'm SAD about it. For starters, along with cookies, here in Italy they don't do brown sugar (a key ingredient to the above mentioned cookies). When I asked for it, I was shown brown cane sugar, which is basically just regular sugar that looks dingy. However, in glorious Rome I found a specialty shop selling special English foods--for a very special price. In that shop I found brown sugar! Hooray! So I bought it, and all the other ingredients I needed for the cookies. However, in our kitchen we don't have important tools like measuring cups or hand mixers. But I made an educated guess about a cup of this and that...and beat 4 sticks of butter with a wooden spoon until my arm almost fell off. The resulting "dough" looked, and tasted like chocolate chip cookie dough! Tragically, baking the dough produced Exhibit A, the crispy cookie pancake.

Moral of the story? Eat more gelato.

One thing I've noticed about Romans is that they like big hair. This makes me feel right at home. Just like the sign in Tracy's Hair on Main says, "The bigger the hair, the closer to God." Well, there must be a lot of saints in Rome. I got my haircut near our flat the other day, and post styling I fit right in there with the best of them. The stylist blow dried my hair upside down, and made it enormous. It was hilariously big, and strangely square shaped, and everyone in the salon went BELLISSIMA and sent me on my way. Good news is, post wash I look less like Carrot Top and more like me again.