Join twowildtides on the country challenge. Each week, we’re going to be heading to a new country (in spirit). Primarily, we’ll be cooking a meal from each country; but we’ll also be watching travel documentaries, reading travel blogs, and listening to music. During the global pandemic, travel is largely inaccessible. We want to reignite our wanderlust, satisfy our travel bug as much as we can, and learn some new things along the way. I have a feeling our bucket list will have a number of items added to it through this experience as well. We created a simple alphabetical spreadsheet with all the countries of the world, and each week we will draw a random number that corresponds with a country on the spreadsheet.
Roman Catholicism is the only religion to have its own sovereign state. Vatican City is technically its own country, located within Rome, Italy. I spent a day in Vatican City while on a school trip in 2012. It was absolutely beautiful but incredibly busy and crowded. The Sistine Chapel blew me away. You can get a tiny glimpse into that trip here:
After a quick Google search, I learned that Vatican City actually does not have a national dish. So what foods do they enjoy there? Mainly Italian fare, unsurprisingly. The Vatican has very few restaurants and most tourists would eat outside the walls of the Vatican. This article by iExplore and this article by Global Table Adventure helped us understand the food of the Vatican.
We thought “when in Rome” and decided to go all out and make a 3-course Italian meal. Vatican City also has the highest wine consumption per capita so… we embraced it!
We started with bruschetta as an appetizer. We followed this recipe:
It was so easy to make and tasted amazing. I had never had bruschetta with mozzarella and had also never cooked with fresh mozzarella, so we had a lot of fun with this recipe. It also looked super pretty on the serving plate.
For our main dish, we made chicken and mushroom risotto. But I’ll admit that my sister did most of the hard work with this one. We had a lot of fun cooking together. She followed this recipe:
Risotto is not an easy dish and requires full attention, but my sister nailed it in my opinion. It was creamy, smooth, flavorful, and so satisfying. It paired so well with my favourite wine, a malbec.
Finally, for dessert, we made something neither of us had tried before but heard lots about: tiramisu. This is also our first dessert of the country challenge and the success of the tiramisu made me want to try more as we keep going. We followed this recipe:
The tiramisu turned out so good. It’s even better left over and I’m digging into some as I write this. I seriously have to limit how much of this dish I consume! I’m definitely not the world’s best baker, so I was glad that this was a no-bake dessert.
Overall, this meal was a huge success. We learned a lot, had a lot of fun, and filled ourselves up with good food and wine. We set the table really nicely as well, which is something I don’t do enough. I am so grateful to have the ability to enjoy wholesome meals like this one. Join us next week for our next country!
Let us know what you think!