Cooking & baking

It's fall and what I love more than anything is baking a pie or cake and cooking up some soup. I have some tried and true recipes that  my family and I love, the problem I am encountering though is converting to the metric system, well that and trying to locate my items on the shelf of an Italian grocery store.

For instance, mayo here is not in a jar, it's in a TUBE. With a McDonald's label to make it even funnier. But today, as it is fall and all, my family requested another pumpkin pie. So let's start with the pumpkin. First and foremost, no, i do not use Libby's pumpkin pie from a can. That is blasphemy in this house. My mother's recipe, handed down to me, includes boiling a pie pumpkin down, peeling and then mashing it. Ordinarily, I have no problem doing that, I get the pumpkins and off we go. However, those wonderful little orange pie pumpkins DO NOT EXIST here. So I had to go in search of a substitute, and that would be where I found winter squash, or zucca, as it is called here. This winter squash resembles an acorn squash in color and is a little bigger than it, but the taste of it is sweet. Trial one of the pie making experience included the new pumpkin and the old spices and other ingredients. And since my picky 9 yr old enjoyed it and gave me a thumbs up, it was deemed edible and delicious. Of course, the family ate the whole pie and requested a second one. My car is in the shop and I was out of sweet and condensed milk. Hoping that the Italian store up the road actually carried this item, I peddled my bike in search of the product, with a google translation in hand. Google, you failed  me. There was nothing in the store that looked remotely like the Eagle brand sweet and condensed milk and nothing that read "latte dolce e condensato." So finally, after standing in the aisle for a long time and becoming quite perturbed that I could not find what i wanted, I asked a fellow female shopper, because after all, we bake, right? I showed her my translation and she stared at it for a moment as if to process my request and then I saw a light bulb go on. She knew what I wanted! I nearly did a happy dance right there in the store but quickly contained my excitement when the lady directed me to a TUBE! Yes, no wonder I couldn't find the Eagle brand can, it didn't exist! And to top it off, the name if the product was "latte interno concentrato zuccherato", roughly translated, milk inside concentrated sugar. In a tube, who would have thought? So I a quick calculation of 15 1/2 oz to mL and dang it, it was in grams! I grabbed 3 tubes hoping it would be a enough and went in search of the heavy cream i needed for the soup. Luckily, it translated into panna and I grabbed the panna di cucine in hopes it was the right stuff too! I peddled back home, goodies in hand, and imaging my yummy dinner and dessert.

My mother would be proud because guess what? I have rewritten her pumpkin pie recipe and deemed it 'pumpkin pie italian style'. I have on that recipe the new name of the sweet and condensed milk and the number of tubes, which should be about 3 1/2, as well as the number of grams I needed. I then converted the cup of water to mL, just because I could, even though I do have a few measuring cups. The only other conversions I made were teaspons and the oven temperature, which is roughly 191 degrees celsius rather than 375 degrees fahrenheit. Let's hope the second pie turns out equally as good!

The potato leek soup was fabulous too, even though the heavy cream was different than what I am used to, but hey, that's the adventure in cooking right? Thank goodness I have little cheat sheets all around the kitchen to help me in my cooking. My stove is in celsius and therefore I am constantly converting back and forth between celsius and fahrenheit, and due to this, i have a cheat sheet in the cupboard. Thankfully we got a new stove so the gas marks are gone as well. (Gas marks are a European heating system that just has numbers 1-9. Roughly speaking, #4 equated to 350 degrees) . When reading a European recipe I find myself converting measurements too from milliliters to ounces. I will have to thank Pampered Chef for the magnet converter I have hanging in my kitchen because otherwise, i might just give up on cooking altogether!

So two points to remember, 1) brush up on your metric system before traveling over here and 2) cheat sheets are a must!! For your own curiosity, 250mL equates to one cup. It's the small victories that makes cooking all worth it!