Restaurants

Oh, that’s just me. Eating the best gluten free pizza in the world. In Florence.

Italy was, in a word, awesome. I’m still working on uploading those couple days worth of pictures (but you can see the rest here). Since this is, ostensibly, a food blog, I figured it was time I share with you some of the highlights of eating gluten free in Italy.

Fair warning – a long, and picture-heavy post follows.

First though, the lowlight. Plane food. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Anyways, you’ve already seen the highlights from Rome. Once in Assisi, I had this pork tenderloin with herbs and black olives. We split a side of baked sweet peppers.

A couple of nights later, at the same restaurant, steak with a balsamic reduction.

And a side of mixed grilled vegetables.

One of our favorite meals was one of the simplest – a salami and (unpictured) cheese plate, washed down with several glasses of prosecco.

Grilled Umbrian sausages (I think these were wild boar meat – a specialty of the Umbrian region).

Radicchio salad with Parmesan cheese and walnuts.

This was, if you can believe it, the only pasta I ate in Italy. Most of the restaurants we visited had gluten free pasta (or “Celiac pasta,” as it’s called there – no one in Italy goes gluten free if they don’t have to!) but I was more excited about the meats and cheeses.

Mom and I were both planning on eating olives at every meal – we were surprised to not see them on menus for the first 12 days we were in Italy! We kept walking through olive groves – where are the olives?! In Florence, it turns out. Yum.

This grilled tuna salad was to come with yogurt sauce – I declined because I couldn’t understand whether it had gluten in it, or if our waiter thought I couldn’t eat the dairy. Let me just say that, while in Italy, any rules I may have about how much dairy I do or do not consume went right out the window. There was too much delicious cheese to eat, and I don’t think I saw soy milk at a single coffee shop we went to.

A google search for “gluten free Florence” led us to Ciro and Sons, known for the best gluten free pizza in the world. The pizza requires a reservation a day ahead of time, so I had pork chops with applesauce and barbecue sauce.

And we split this gluten-free Nutella stuffed crepe.

But then did the only sensible thing, which was to reserve a gluten free pizza for the next night. A.K.A. our last night in Italy carbfest (and for the record, we climbed somewhere between 800 and 1000 stairs that day, so it was well deserved).

And ended our trip on a sweet note – gelato affogato.

Buon appetito!

September is the month of travels for me … this year anyway. I’m hours away from my next adventure, so before I depart, I’d like to cap off my Labor Day weekend trip to Portland by sharing the favorite restaurants we found along the way.

As I said in my last post, eating gluten free in Portland was incredibly easy. It seemed, however, that while restaurant servers had a good understanding of what gluten is, several of the spots that we visited did not have a good understanding of cross contamination and how just how strictly gluten free those of us with Celiac have to be.

Nevertheless, I escaped the city unscathed, and enjoyed a number of really excellent GF meals. Here’s where I had the best ones …

Hawthorne Fish House

They bread all of their fried items in rice flour, so everything that went in their deep fryer was strictly gluten free. Joel and I split cod and chicken strips, and I ate sweet potato fries while he munched garlic fries.

Por Que No Taqueria

This was far and away the favorite restaurant that we visited in Portland. We ended up going for lunch two days in a row, and eating pretty much the same thing both days Pictured above is a carnitas taco and an al pastor taco which was pork in pineapple sauce – the perfect combination of sweet and spicy. All of their tacos are served on housemade corn tortillas, which even Joel, who usually refuses to eat anything but flour tortillas, loved.

Old Wives Tales

This restaurant was recommended to us by our server at the Hawthorne Fish House as a place that was good at gluten free. We ended up there almost by accident, but I was thrilled that we did because their menu had GF items clearly marked, and in addition to the usual bacon and eggs, omelettes, etc., were a dozen or so baked goods including gluten free raspberry bread pudding. So good.

Tula Bakery

This was our last stop on the way out of town that weekend. A google search turned up several exclusively gf bakeries, and we gave this one a shot, mostly because it was right up the street from our hotel. As you can see, we loaded up a box with things for the road, but hands down, my favorite was the current scone that I ate in the bakery that morning (in the middle right of the above picture).

So, there you have it. I feel very lucky living in the city of Seattle where there’s a Thai restaurant around very corner as it’s a very easy place to eat gluten free. Well, the dining options in Portland kind of put us to shame. Now I’ll just have to wait for the gluten free version of Voodoo Donuts (which Joel tells me, are amazing).