First Dinner in Genoa

The internet - named "alice" - or as Jeff says, "ah-lee-chay," does not like to work in his apartment. He and I are thus unable to post pictures of my first dinner in Italy and of his Fibonacci scarf. Fibonacci, incidentally, was Italian and may have been from Pisa. What an appropriate scarf pattern.

Despite the inability to post pictures, I will, as promised, write a bit about our meal. We went to a place called "I Tre Merli," which means "three blackbirds." [Jeff's dictionary said "zoo. blackbird" - but apparently "zoo" is just an abbreviation for zoological.]

Our meal started with a nice aperitif of a crisp, sparkling, white wine. Jeff and I both thought it was pretty tasty. We ordered a cheese plate to start. Having been burned by the tiny cheese plate selections in some SF restaurants, I was expecting a small portion, but this was a MASSIVE (Jeff says "substantial") cheese platter. One was delicious and truffle-y and spotted and somewhat grey, one was creamy and blue, one was somewhat harder and might have had mushrooms in it, one was somewhat soft and tangy and white, and one was a little creamy and also delicious. All of them were scrumptious actually and they were served with yummy bread, mustard, honey, and walnuts.

For the primi - I had some hazelnut lasagna noodles with pesto and potatoes and green beans. Very good, very filling. I thought the pesto was excellent, but mostly unintelligible as authentically "Genoese." Jeff had ravioli with "cheesy and maybe some fishy stuff" along with mussels on top with tomatoes. The mussels were bombtastic. Jeff convinced me to order a secondi - which was FAR too much food. He had a dried cod stew. Jeff ordered it because it's a Genoese specialty, but found it "serviceable," although the olives were tasty. My "cioppin" seafood soup was very tasty - especially the mussels and the giant shrimp. Overall, if the various dishes in our meal had been in a gladiator fight, the cheese plate and my pesto pasta would have been the victors.

We were too stuffed for dessert, but I am baking a pumpkin pie tonight. Hopefully it will turn out, the oven does not have a working temperature gauge... Happy Thanksgiving!