Food: Amazing Honeymoon

I'm not really a foodie. I can take food or leave it, and really most of the time I eat because I need to. But as we traveled I wanted to experience and taste the local foods.

Once we got settled into our hotel in Athens, Greece, we made our way out to find lunch. Our first meal there was a Gyro. It was good, but not that much different from the Gyros I've had here.
However, the Greek salad I ordered for dinner was amazing. It was so good that it has ruined me. I can't eat a Greek salad in America. And it frustrates me when I go to a Greek restaurant and still they try to serve me a Greek salad with lettuce. Americans just don't know how to make one. I've tried to make them at home, and I get really close, but there's something I'm missing.

Plus, in Greece, the Kalamata olives are so much better and milder, and the goat cheese is delicious. It's mild, the texture is firmer yet softer at the same time, and adds just the right amount of flavor to the salad.

This is what a Greek salad really looks like. No lettuce, and drizzled with olive oil. This one was at the restaurant in Athens that was nestled just below the Acropolis.

It was so hot, and I didn't want anything hot, so I stuck with the Greek salad in Greece. Except for the dinner cruise in Santorini, which included a warm meal with really good food as well. That meal included a Greek salad, and some potatoes.  Greek potatoes are really good.

Dinner on the dinner cruise.

I've already raved about the breakfast, and it was great in both Greece and Italy. It was buffet style at the hotels, and all of the foods were high quality and well prepared. There were lots of meats, especially in Verona. And there was cheese, fruit, muffins, breads, and the most amazing croissants. I'm surprised I didn't gain weight.
We ate a lot of yogurt, and the yogurt in Greece and Italy was very creamy, light and tasty. It didn't have that yogurt twang that I taste in the American yogurt, even when it claims to be Greek yogurt.

Breakfast at the B&B in Venice included toast with butter and jelly, fresh fruit, yogurt, and juice and tea.

In Italy we ate pizza a couple of times, and they do not cut the pizza. They don't even seem to know what it means to cut it. At least that's how it was in Verona and Venice.

Good pizza, but I don't eat sausage and thought I could just pick it off. Plus it was big enough for both of us. We saved this one and had leftovers the next afternoon for a snack.

I had spaghetti one night, that was super good. I ordered it special without meat, and I couldn't even believe how tasty it was. We were in a neighborhood restaurant in Venice that was really good. The menu was in Italian and we had to ask the waitress to explain the menu items. This was not on the menu, but the waitress asked the chef if he could make this for me.

Soooo good.

And while we were at the Bed and Breakfast one of the guests told us about gnocchi. I decided to try it and it was really good, too. It's a potato dish, made with mashed potatoes the consistency of potato cakes, and I think it is boiled like a dumpling and served with tomato sauce.

Gnocchi is pretty tasty. 

The snack foods are also different than American snacks. In Europe we noticed a lot of milk chocolate, and Nutella. It seems to be used in a lot of snack foods. We even bought some packaged croissants at the grocery store that were filled with Nutella.

The potato chips are so good. They are made with a different type of potato, and are buttery tasting, and the salt content is much less. They have just enough salt to make them perfect.

We bought a small box of cookies in Greece. I don't know what they are filled with. They are sort of like a chocolate covered oreo, but the filling isn't the same. Chuck said they have a definite Greek taste.

Overall the foods we had were much less intense than American foods, and I liked them much better. Especially the yogurt, the olives, goat cheese, and the potato chips. Soooo good. I wish I had taken a picture of the bag. We fist found them in Greece, but also saw them in the Coop in Venice.
I drank a lot of Coke because I wasn't so sure about the tap water in Greece, and when we ordered water at restaurants it was served in large blue bottles to share. Then when we got to Venice I wasn't too sure about that tap water, either. I preferred bottled water when it was available.