How We Spent our Italian Vacation at Home.

Our vacation to Italy earlier this month was cancelled due to COVID-19. After being totally heartbroken for a while, once I came to terms that there would be other vacations some day, I had the idea to bring little bits of Italy into our home during the week we were supposed to be away. Some subtle ways to make the time stuck at home a little more special, and give my husband Andrew and I interactive ways to try new things.

This is a compilation of some activities to make at home date night (or day) feel a little more adventurous and exciting. For this post I’ll just be sharing ideas, not deep diving into recipes, I am 100% not an Italian chef, but had lots of fun attempting! Most recipes came from a cookbook, so I tried my best to link equivalents, but don’t hesitate to reach out for more details!

It’ll soon be evident that the majority of our little odes to Italy were food and beverage focused for obvious reasons - a) that’s a huge part of Italian culture and b) without really being able to explore the scenic wonders of Italy, food and drink are where it’s at. That being said, the third wheel of our Italian staycation was the repeatedly pictured cookbook, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan. I originally borrowed this book from work at the beginning of my time at home with the intention of sharing some recipes on Instagram for the shop. I very quickly started using it regularly, purchased my copy and then used it as the foundation for the majority of the recipes I focused on throughout the week. Would highly recommend, you can shop it here. I originally intended to tie in some of the outfits I had thrifted for our trip, but aside from two beautiful days at the beginning and end of the next the weather was quite gloomy and rainy that I honestly spent most of the time in my sweats. But anyways, dive in, enjoy, I hope this inspires you to bring a little adventure home, and try to explore the places you dream of even if you can’t get there right now!

Homemade Pastries and Coffee on the Patio

We drink coffee everyday, like most, we enjoy it sure, but it’s a very understated part of our routine. But thinking about having our morning espresso with a pastry on a sidewalk cafe in Venice on our first day of vacation made me want to make an at home coffee date a little more special. By sitting outside on our patio (not as glamorous, but pleasant enough) with some homemade Italian pastries and a hot cup of coffee. Just taking time to savor the morning and each other a little more than usual.

For our coffee date I made ‘Sweet Pastry Fritters’ as Hazan calls them, or more traditionally known as chiacchiere della nonna (grandmother’s small talk) or frappe. Full disclosure, prior to making I did not read through the recipe in full, whoops, I had picked them out based on the fact that we had the ingredients on hand, so did not realize they were intended to be more of a crispy treat, and did think I was making something a little fluffier. Live and learn and all that. Aside from not knowing what I was doing, this was actually such an easy thing to make and only took about 40 minutes - so was easy to make fresh first thing in the morning for a late morning coffee date. These crispy fried pastries are great if you’re going the Italian route, but if you’re just having a coffee date un-themed follow your hearts desire and cut out some time for coffee talk with some homemade coffee cake or maybe some air fryer donuts.

Make Your Own Gelato Date

Now that I’ve tried it, I can say ice cream (or in this case gelato) tastes better when you make it. Of course gelato had to be the focus of at least a portion of our tour de Italy - and what better way to truly enjoy it than to spend the time making it. Once again I pulled a recipe from Hazan, with the easy Strawberry Gelato that can be frozen in any home ice cream maker, but here is a pretty equivalent recipe and here is a great recipe for a pistachio gelato - that is next on my list! I used (for the first time, sorry mom) this Nostalgia Ice Cream Maker from Sears. It worked excellently, but if you’re in the market, it’s a bit large so I would suggest maybe this smaller one here, or if you have a Kitchen Aid, this attachment here.

The gelato turned out delicious, and made enough for us to enjoy for well over the course of the week. Almost daily. Which let’s be honest is probably not too far off from what our daily routine would have looked like in Italy.

Pizza Night

Truly a no brainer! This is one of our favorite home dinner dates regardless of a theme. Whether you make your own dough or scoop up some ready to roll dough balls from the grocery store (honestly this night we used Whole Food’s) I suggest having enough for two pizzas. It’ll give you a lot of extra real estate for both of you to get creative and add the toppings that you want. And then you can have a lot of fun trying them all as things come out of the oven!

Wine Tasting

Set up a wine tasting at home! I can only assume we would have been drinking lots of Italian wine during our time in Florence - well, who am I kidding during our time everywhere! We had a lot of fun one evening sipping on three different types of Italian wines from our favorite local wine shop. I knew nothing about any of the wines going in, which made it all the more fun for both Andrew and I. I set up little cards with details about the type of wine and tasting notes, so we could test our palettes as we went, and served them in little 3oz glasses on a tray to make it feel as much like a tasting as possible.

Learn to Make Pasta

Last stop on our vacation route was intended to be a few days in Rome. We were planning on taking a pasta making class from someone’s grandmother right inside their home, with just a handful of other people. I tried to bring a wee small part of that experience home, with our very own self taught (with help of Hazan) lesson on making Potato Gnocchi. I chose gnocchi for our crash course in pasta, for the reason that it has a mere two ingredients, and after previously attempting to make linguini noodles at home weeks prior without a pasta maker, I wasn’t sure I was ready to attempt that again.

Making the gnocchi was easy to do without any specialty equipment and fun to take trade off through the different steps of the process. Clearly we have a little practicing to do with our rolling/shaping, but it was such a fun way to make pasta for dinner, and we made enough to pop in a freezer bag for at least one more meal.

Limoncello Spritz Cocktail Hour

An ode to our most anticipated leg of the trip, Positano. How could we not pretend to be on the Amalfi Coast without some limoncello?! I originally had intended to make our own, but seeing as I planned for our ‘trip’ that was starting on Monday the Thursday prior, we did not have nearly enough time to let it turn into the Italian liqueur of our dreams. So opted for a sweet and refreshing limoncello spritz instead. A combination of Prosecco, limoncello and club soda, making it a light and refreshing drink to sip on for a hot afternoon on the patio. I followed this recipe from Sip and Feast you can see in entirety here. This is also a great recipe to make in batches for Summer gathering. Andrew and I normally stick to wine at home, and don’t make a lot of specialty cocktails so this was especially fun for us preparing, and such a bonus that it was delicious! Cin Cin!

Roman Holiday Screening

One night we ordered take out from our favorite Asheville based Italian restaurant, Cucina 24 and went a little crazy with the amount of food we ordered. Basically ordering way too much so we could sample a little everything, laying it all out over our coffee table and hanging out on the couch eating everything and watching Roman Holiday, my personal favorite Audrey Hepburn film. Even just ordering take out felt a little more special because we over indulged just a bit, and got a little out of our comfort zones, letting one another throw a couple wild cards to try into the mix. It also gave us both a break from the amount of leg work going into all our themed nights, and we could just relax and enjoy good food, one of the high points of any vacation.

This week at home wasn’t always picture perfect, but even as much as we all imagine they will be, traveling isn’t always either. We made a lot of messes, we had our struggles - our first attempt at pizza night, I ended up sprinkling a brand new bag of mozzarella over the sauce and then realizing it was all molded, which resulted in me crying and ordering Chipotle that night. Shit happens. But overall we had so much fun, the week felt a lot different than just any other week at home, and without going overboard eating spaghetti everyday we felt like even for a few moments a day we got to experience Italy. We’ll get to Italy some day, but for now we’ll keep sipping our limoncello and eating gnocchi.