We’ve been watching more travel and cooking shows – wishing we were off to Europe or the Mediterranean. I don’t think I will ever tire of travelling – or dreaming about travelling. So many food and travel shows focus on the Michelin starred restaurants – where everyone has tweezers in their pockets to put the plates together. Personally, I don’t care how good the food may be – I can get tweezer food down the street or in just about any city in the USofA. Yes, it’s beautiful, yes, those plates are works of art, but I want to eat where the locals eat.

I’m a street food person, a trattoria or bistro person. I’m a plebeian through and through.

One recipe that caught our eye, recently, was a pasta from Umbria – Umbricelli. The show didn’t give a recipe, but it showed a woman making a basic dough with flour and eggs, rolling and forming it. They call it little earth worms because it’s fairly long and thick.

Victor has made a lot of pasta over the years, so he thought he’d give it a try, tonight. We didn’t have a recipe for the pasta, but it looked similar to his basic dough – and we just happened to have some already made!

How fortuitous!

It didn’t roll quite as easily as the clip we saw on TV, but he’s also not a 75 year old Italian woman who’s been making this since she was 8 years old. Besides, through the miracle of film editing, anything she made would look effortless. Reality TV is not real.

Our pasta, on the other hand, was!

The flavor was excellent! The sauce was perfect – he spiced up a jar of his homemade sauce, cooked a couple of sausages, and simmered everything together.

The pasta, itself, was chewier than we normally eat, but… it was also ten times thicker than he normally makes. It had a great substance and a great flavor – and it went well with a hearty sauce. I could see myself having a plate of this sitting at a little neighborhood trattoria in Citta di Castello with a glass of Chianti and some crusty bread…

Maybe in the Spring…..