In Piemonte, si mangia da Dio!

In Piemonte, you eat like God.

That is, if God likes to have 4 hour meals!

Today, my family and I went to a place near Torino, in Piemonte. Every year, around the time of the Day of the Dead, they have a family reunion. They meet at the cemetery, honor the dead, and then go eat until they can't eat any more.

I'll start by describing the meal: we arrived at the restaurant at about 12:45. There were about 30 of us, alltogether, 10 people at 3 tables. At each table were 2 platters of bread, like the one below. Only the picture below is after we had eaten most of the bread, if you can believe it. Each table went through 4 platters of bread!!

And at each table, there were 2 bottles of wine. Everyone had a glass of red and a glass of white. I don't remember how many bottles of wine each table drank, but I assure you it was more than 2.
After everyone had sat down, eaten their fill of bread, and sipped some wine, the appetizer came. Well, one of the appetizers.

The name of the first appetizer escapes me, but I know it was raw ground veal. Not bad, but not my favorite, either!
The second appetizer was tartufi with melted cheese. Tartufi are like radishes, and I think the cheese was Fontina, I'm not sure though. The bump in the middle is a boiled egg, with a runny yolk. You're supposed to break the egg, and mix the yolk with the melted cheese. This was better than the raw veal, but not as good as the rest of the meal!
This is how parmeggiano is served: grated fresh! Delicious!
Finally, we were finished with appetizers, and started on the first course. These were spinach and ricotta filled ravioli.
And after the ravioli, we had gnocchi in cheese sauce. Done with first course, on to second!
Veal in some kind of sauce, with an unrecognizeable vegetable. I was full by then, so I didn't eat much of it. And to continue the pattern of 2 parts to each course, we kept eating!
Can you guess what that is? It looks kind of tasty, doesn't it? They're called "lumache" in Italian. I ate one, and then someone said "In French, it's called 'escargot.'" I didn't eat any more.
My favorite part of the meal! Dessert! Budino, gelato, and cream puffs with chocolate sauce!

And because you can't have just one dessert, we had little platters of pastries, too. Thankfully, the meal ended there.
That's me, between my nonna and nonno. I love them!!
My Aunt Chicca (pronounced "Kika") and older sister, Camilla.
Again, Nonna and Nonno.
Monte Rosa, Italy's tallest mountain! I think.

The views were breathtaking. My camera cant capture the light, and the smells, and everything else! It was a beautiful, comfortably cool day, too.
View from the car!
This is what Italian cemeteries look like.. Everyone has a family tomb.
Another view of the cemetery
Last night, Saturday, my other nonna (Paolo's mother, not Giovanna's) had an art exhibition at the local museum. This is one of the pictures I took. Part of the exhibition was a really big room, filled with pieces of cloth. The idea was to take a piece of cloth, cut off a bit, write your name on a tag, staple the tag to the cloth, and use a clothespin to hang it up on a wire. You could do whatever you wanted with the rest of the cloth. I saw a lot of people leaving the museum with bundles and bundles of cloth! I didn't qute understand the concept of the exhibiton, but it was fun!

I have to cut this post short, my host mom needs the computer. A domani!