It’s dirty. The city puts the trash and recycling bins on the street for communal use, and that sounds like a great idea but they’re often overflowing and sometimes very stinky. It seems as though everyone smokes and throws the butts on the ground, and no one picks up after their dogs, so there’s shit—whole and in smears, where some unfortunate person has dragged their heel through it—all over the sidewalk. I’ve seen at least two men taking a piss on the sidewalk in the five months we’ve lived here.

The smog is terrible; I’m fairly sure the car pollution will take a few years off my lung capacity (assuming I’m not actually hit by a car first).

It’s inefficient. Italian bureaucracy is legendary for a reason: it’s because it’s so confusing that even Italians don’t always know how to make their way through it. There’s often a transit strike on Friday. The rumor is that that’s because people just want a three-day weekend (and in that, who can blame them? Especially when you consider how low the average Roman salary is).

Romans takes the whole “caput mundi” thing too far. Every single person here seems to operate under the impression that they are the most important person in Rome, so you had better get out of their way.

There are parts of the city that don’t seem like a city at all. Villa Pamphili is enormous and green. Some of it is busy and full of picnickers or exercisers or teenagers faffing off, but if you go further in, it’s lush and wild. I like to go there early, to stand on a certain hill and watch the sun come across the sky, where on some mornings I can look all around and not see another single person.

It’s good to be a morning person in Rome. I get up early to run before the streets get too crowded, watch the little cafes open up, hear the espresso machines whirr into action for the first cup of the morning. On the weekends, we go to our favorite bakery before the crowds and have our pick of the pastries. Everything there is a work of art, but their croissants integrale are some of the best croissants I’ve ever had, and believe me—I have made it a point to have a lot of croissants. On early dog walks, I stop at the fruit and veg market up the street from our apartment and for fresh produce. And what produce! I’ve never had mandarins so good, never been able to buy pears that you can take home and eat for breakfast that day, rather than letting them ripen in a paper sack for a week.

One day in December, I took the dog to the park in the morning, and could not believe the color, the quality of the sunlight. It hit the yellow leaves of a ginkgo tree and they shone. It hit the yellow walls of the Escher house and they glowed.

It’s good to be a night person in Rome. Dinner doesn’t really start here until 8:30 p.m.—most of the restaurants don’t even open until 7:30 p.m. I like the slow meals, the polpettine and conversation and wine, the plate of pasta and conversation and wine, maybe a dessert and conversation and then a digestivo and then a final espresso, and then the walk home. The streets are busy enough that I feel safe, but not so crowded that I can’t open my stride, enjoy walking hand-in-hand with my partner.

It’s good to be a foodie in Rome—see aforementioned croissants, produce, and dinners—but not if you want anything besides Italian food. The spice aisle in grocery stores is depressing, a few sad jars of dried basil and oregano, some chili flakes, salt and black pepper. The “international” section is three small shelves, partially hidden behind a post, with Skippy peanut butter, ramen noodles in a package, and hideously expensive coconut milk (if you’re lucky).

We took our friends to the Colosseum and in doing so saw an extravagant sweep of human history: looking out of the amphitheater, over the Forum, to the Vittorio Emanuele Monument, the streets closed off for construction of the new metro line, the streets lined with tourist shops and gelato places. It’s uncommon for an American to see so many years in one vista.

This is all Rome, and only a small part of it. It is the tourist dream (romantic cobblestone alleys and spritzes before lunch and beautiful ruins), la dolce vita. It is trash, noise, traffic, smell, and inefficiency. It is abundant contradiction. It is wholly itself, and in that, it is beautiful.

When is the last time that you made a cake from scratch?

Until recently, if you’d asked me, I would have said that I only ever made cakes from scratch, and I would have believed that to be true. But if I were making, for example, an apple cake, I would have employed a number of little tricks to do it. I would have peeled the apples with a vegetable peeler, shredded the fruit in a food processor. I would have softened the butter just a bit in my microwave, used a hand mixer to cream the sugar into it. I might have even (gasp!) used Pam to grease the baking dish.

In Rome this fall, I found myself without recourse to any of my usual tricks. I had no food processor or hand mixer; I didn’t even have a vegetable peeler (although one did come in our shipment, which finally arrived in late November) and cooking spray is not on any of the grocery shelves I’ve visited. So when I decided to make King Arthur’s Old-Fashioned Apple Cake with Brown Sugar Icing, I had to do it much more “from scratch” than I’m accustomed to.

Let me tell you, making a cake completely from scratch took forever. Peeling the apples with a paring knife, then fine-dicing them by hand, took the better part of an hour. Creaming together the butter and sugar was a learning process that involved a spatula, a spoon, a fork, and a fair bit of mess. Beating in the eggs was easy enough, until I realized that my creaming method needed work, and had to systematically mash out every stray lump of butter. By the time I got the cake in the oven, my forearms ached, the kitchen was a mess, and I’d used almost every tool I had at the time. It took me as long to clean up as it did for the cake to bake, and then I still had the frosting to make.

It was an epic pain in nearly every way. It didn’t cut well, wasn’t even very pretty, and yet… damned if it isn’t one of the best cakes I’ve made in recent memory, or at least one of the ones I’m most proud of. I suppose it all goes to show: sometimes the things that are the hardest are also the most worthwhile.

My Chief Recipe Taster and I are now nearly three months into the great adventure called, “Let’s Pack Up Everything We Own and Move to a Country Where We Don’t Speak the Language,” and I am finally writing this from our own space, rather than an Airbnb. Let me tell you, no matter how nice a rental, there is no place like (your own) home, where you can accumulate condiments and spices with abandon.

I’m thrilled to be able to fill the cupboards, but my relief at being in our apartment is much greater than that. We’ve been nomadic since August, soaking up time with friends and family before heading to Italy, where we went from rental to rental. Now that we’re in our own space—where we plan to be in for the next few years—we’re both coming to grips with how stressful the last few months have been.

You might wonder why we feel that way. Moving to Italy is a dream for many people, and it was—still is!—for me, too. But let me be real for a minute: it isn’t all Under The Tuscan Sun. When I pictured my Chief Recipe Taster and I moving to Rome, I knew it would be difficult and that the learning curve would be steep. But truth be told, I also pictured us always being in the sun, laughing and drinking wine and just being really happy all of the time. There has been a fair amount of laughing and happy and wine drinking and a LOT of sun (until the start of November), but it’s also been hard to start a new life, in a new city, with new jobs, in a country where we know almost no one and don’t really speak the language.

Food remains a way to ground ourselves and to explore our new city, whether that’s going to new restaurants or simply navigating the grocery store. We’re trying to find the middle ground between what we know and what exists, retrofitting recipes we know and love with what’s available; learning new ingredients and ways of buying and preparing food. Recent experiments have included using piadina flatbreads as tortillas and sampling every flavor of stuffed gnocchi we can find. Befitting my interest in all things culinary, my knowledge of Italian food words is far larger the rest of my vocabulary.

It will take time to bring it all together, to really make a life for ourselves that feels exciting but comfortable. We’re still assembling the ingredients, but I’m confident that this is one experiment that will turn out deliciously.

We’ve now lived in Italy for one month. It feels absurd to say that.

We’ve been in Italy for one month. We’ve been attempting to create a life in Italy for one month. We’ve been wrestling with Italian bureaucracy for one month. Each of these seems more accurate than saying we’ve lived in Italy for one month, because that denotes some form of comfort with a place, or at least (semi)permanence, and this still doesn’t feel real. There’s still an ephemeral quality to our existence here, as though a good strong wind would blow it away.

This feeling wasn’t helped by shifting from one Airbnb to another, as we wait to move into a longer-term home. Getting to explore a new neighborhood has been fun, but also a bit tiring. After two months of moving around, I want to settle in one place.

In the meantime, we’re enjoying our Airbnb’s lovely terrace; we’ve managed to eat outside each night. The food we cook is still very simple, and we’ve discovered the great Italian invention of pizza al taglio, essentially pizza by the slice. The bakeries make meter-long pizzas with a broad array of different toppings. You buy as much as you want by weight and, if you’re us, take it away for dinner. It doesn’t get much more easier than that, and when you’re wrestling bureaucracy or trying to make a life in a new place, there isn’t much better than easy.

* Originally posted on social media on 13 October 2023.

In early September, my partner, our dog, and I moved to Rome.

It’s such a simple sentence to contain so much: months of waiting and of frantic action, of intense excitement and of fragility, the sense that it could all fall apart and that this thing we’d been acutely hoping for could fail to materialize. Throughout it all, there was a sense of unreality: was this really happening? Were we truly planning to pack up all our possessions, leave behind our flat and our friends and our lives, and move to Italy?

We’re here now, but in many ways the sense of unreality remains. Our first week, as we explored different neighborhoods and searched for apartments, we kept turning to each other and saying, “We live here!” It was and remains a way to ground ourselves, to claim this new space and place.

One of the other ways is through food. It exasperates me sometimes, how I need to keep caring for this body of mine, providing it sustenance three (at least) times a day, but it is also a way to anchor myself in the present. Nothing makes you feel reality like needing to go to the grocery, or cook a meal, or eat it.

We’re staying in an Airbnb as we look for a more permanent home. While the kitchen is perfectly adequate, it’s a bit small and sometimes challenging. The stove burners are finicky. The refrigerator temperature was set too high and kept freezing our salad greens (if you’ve never had frozen arugula, there’s a reason for that: it isn’t good). There’s only one cutting board and little counter space on which to place it.

Befitting the space, the meals we’ve prepared have been simple: faro with sautéed eggplant and tomatoes, pasta with broccoli rabe and spicy sausage, fish curry with rice. Still, it’s enough to nourish us, and to allow us to act—until we truly feel—as though we’re at home.

* Originally posted on social media on 22 September 2023.

A recent Sunday morning started with a squeal—mine—at an hour that pained my partner (if the look on his face was anything to go by) and at a level that pained the dog (if the look on her face was any indication). “Lookatthoselayers,” I enthused, jabbing a finger toward the tray of sourdough croissants proofing on the counter. The dog and my Chief Recipe Taster took a dutiful look. Truly, they were beautiful: what looked to be hundreds of layers of dough and butter are stacked perfectly, proportionately, on top of one another and then rolled into crescents. I basted them carefully with an egg wash; slid them lovingly, into a hot-but-not-too-hot oven. I set the timer, suffused with satisfaction. This time, this time, it would be different. This time, they would turn out.

You see, my baking history is littered with numerous decidedly less-than-perfect croissants. In my decade plus of serious amateur baking, I have produced croissants that could be used as cruise ship anchors, those marred by improperly incorporated butter packages, and others that have been too wet, too dry, or not at all flaky. Mind you, those were the croissants that I made with commercial yeast, before the idea of using sourdough ever occurred to me. Substituting one leavening agent for another did not, unsurprisingly, alleviate my problems; it added a whole new set of variables. Was I using enough starter? Was it active enough? Was it properly hydrated?

On the Sunday in question, however, I was supremely confident; my unbaked croissants had never looked better. So I poured myself another cup of coffee and sat down with a crossword puzzle. I was already anticipating how they’d smell and taste when I smelled something I’d not planned on, something not so delicious, something decidedly like burning butter. Panicked, I rushed over to the oven and found that, sure enough, my croissants were spilling butter like the Exxon Valdez spilled oil. So much butter had leaked out and onto the bottom of the tray that my poor croissants were frying on the bottom and baking on the top. When the timer went off, I pulled them out and dropped the tray onto the stove, frustrated. My Chief Recipe Taster nabbed one, singeing his fingers and tongue as he stuffed a bite in his mouth. “Mmmph,” he said. “Not bad!” I appreciated the support, but I knew the truth—once again, my croissants were a flop.

Given how those croissants turned out, as well as the many other croissants I’ve made over the years that have also not turned out, it might be easy to conclude that I am a failure at croissant making. I have not had much success in croissant making; ergo, I am a failure at making croissants. Right?

As a recovering perfectionist, I am pretty much allergic to failure. In fact, I am so averse to failure that I am loathe to even try things that I think I might not succeed at. Take a martial arts class? No way. Sign up for an ultra-distance bike ride? Nope. Volunteer for a work project that feels way over my head? I’d rather not, because trying something I “know” I could fail at seems like a great way to get hurt. For a few years now, it’s seemed safer to not try. But increasingly, saying “I’d rather not” has started to feel less like I’m keeping myself safe and more like I’m holding myself back. So over the course of a few weeks, I set out to examine failure: what it is, what it means to me.

My thought experiment ran into trouble almost as soon as I began. I’d started in what seemed like the most obvious place to start: by defining “failure.” Well, I thought, that was simple—failing is not succeeding. I thought of times in my life when I had not succeeded. I remembered the class in which I’d gotten a “D,” the marathon I couldn’t finish, the fact that I wasn’t accepted into my first-choice college—even this food blog, which pretty much only my mom reads (thanks, Mom!). But as I went back and dwelled in my memories of those perceived failures, I realized that what I had felt had names besides failure: disappointment, regret, the uncomfortable sense of having made a mistake. The more I thought about those experiences, the less they felt like failures and more just like experiments in the world that didn’t go the way I’d hoped. I realized too that I had learned something from each of those experiences, so perhaps they were less failures and more… growth. None of those experiences had been fun or comfortable, but when is growth either of those things?

I also realized that this is the way I already think about things in the kitchen: I don’t see baking flops as failures, but as valuable experiments. I turn into a mad scientist in the kitchen, taking risks all over the place, always asking “what if,” or “could this be better?” Sometimes, those risks pay off; sometimes they don’t. Somehow, I rarely get upset, even after a flop: I might be disappointed, I might have made a mistake somewhere along the way, but it isn’t a failure—for me, there is no such thing as failure in the kitchen. I tried something, I have a result, and that gives me new information to use when I repeat the experiment.

I decided to extend my reasoning. What if I entertained the idea that there was no such thing as failure? Just thinking that thought did funny things to my brain. It was like opening a window and letting a bracing breeze swirl in a clear away the fog. If there was, for me, no such thing as failure, then there was so much less fear of it, and so much less to lose if I took a chance. Thinking like this makes me want to sign up for a 150-mile bike ride, just to see what I can do. It makes me want to try. It makes me want to tear down every one of those “what would you do if you knew you could not fail” signs and replace them with a new slogan: “there is no such thing as failure.”

This is all easy to say, harder to do; I’m still working on applying this concept to my life outside of the kitchen. In fact, figuring out how to do that has delayed the writing and publishing of this essay for a solid month, because it would be neat and tidy to end with a rousing paragraph about how I learned to banish the concept of failure from every aspect of my life and you can, too. But that isn’t what’s happened. I’m still experimenting, still learning to push myself from that “I’d rather not” mindset to the mad scientist one. It’s slow going, but it is going—and it continues in the kitchen, too. Just one week after I made the croissants that managed to both bake and fry, I made another batch. Because of that experience, I knew to not let my croissants get too warm while proofing. I’d learned. I was careful with the next batch. And you know what? They turned out great—a successful experiment.

P.S. Want to try making croissants yourself? This recipe was the basis for my sourdough experiments. And recently—after my trials and tribulations, of course—the New York Times created this guide.