Mi Dispiace

So I haven't really been keeping this up! Every day I come up with a title for the day, but never seem to actually sit down and write about it. So I'll start with the *stew story*.

Everyone at Macelleria Cecchini takes turns making staff lunch, so one slow, rainy, and bone chillingly cold Sunday at Mac Dario I decided to make Stew. This stew has been made in various places including a mountainside in BC and at home in the farm kitchen in Stratford. This stew is a favourite of Sunday's lunch, especially in the winter. Well stew and Dutch soup, but I don't have the spices to make that here.

I started out with some water, potatoes, celery, carrots, red onion, an old tomato, Cecchini beef, alloro, some chiodi di Garofano, Oregano, and a mix of spices I found in the *lunchtime spice drawer* in the kitchen of Mac Dario. I added in some flour to thicken in near to the end of the long boil. Seems stewy enough right? Apparently stew doesn't really exist like this in Italy. (Maybe in Tuscany but only if there is bread mixed in with it) Anyways, I explained to Riccardo what stew was and how nostalgic is it to me. One of those things you make on bone chilling, cold, rainy Sundays. It turned out to be a total sucess except for one problem...

Dante, the famous Maestro Magical spooned some into a bowl, poured olive oil and sprinkled profumo del Chianti all over it. Essentially ruining the entire dish, after which he said under his breath in a totally contented way *Mi piace la zuppa!* and *Questa zuppa è buona!*

Angelo, a plumber who works at Macelleria Cecchini on weekends pulled out a bowl and filled it with the steamy substance. He also murmured how much he loves zuppa.

Later on that day, Dario returned from Belgium with his wife Kim. Extremely hungry, he eyed my stew and I asked him *Dario ne vuoi un po?* He said *Siiiiiii* and took another steamy bowl of my stew downstairs to fulfill his hunger. About an hour later I ran downstairs to grab something and while passing Dario he exclaimed in his loud and pronounced style *Grazie per la zuppa Heidi, questa è buona!*

After hearing that Kim meandered upstairs to the kitchen to also grab some stew. Now, Kim is originally American, and so I assumed maybe she would recognize my stew as what it was, stew.

But alas, all day my stew was labelled as Zuppa - and each time it was stereotyped into soup I exclaimed to Riccardo, *It's not Soup, its STEW!!!* I suppose I should just enjoy the fact that it was edible and I didn't burn anything while attempting to make my stew.