13 Italian Christmas Foods

13 Italian Christmas Foods

It's the most wonderful time of the year! It's time to sit down at the table with family and friends and enjoy delicious meals to celebrate the holiday season.

In Italy, of course, it's the same - except for how it's different. The food, I mean - I've mentioned some of these dishes in my guest blog on Shelley Munro's site, but I think they bear repeating here.

So I present to you 13 Italian Christmas Foods! Enjoy!

1) Baccalà - better known to the US as Salted Cod.

It starts like this:

and often ends like this:

Then there's arrosto. Meaning "Roasted", this can be one of several types of meat, including:

2) Vitello - Veal


or
3) Coniglio - Rabbit


Two other meat dishes, which are similar to each other, are

4) Zampone - a sort of sausage made of a pig's trotter (hoof)


and
5) Cotechino - another salty sausage.


6) Capitone (also known as Anguilla) - Eel


For reassurance, we often eat all of this with

7) Patatine Fritte - Chips/French Fries


There's pasta, too, of course.

8) Tortelli Erbe - Ravioli with spinach filling


or 9) Cappelletti in brodo - small half-moons of pasta folded over a meat-and-cheese filling (which are said to resemble the navel of Venus), and are served in a chicken broth.


Sometimes you'll have

10) Polenta - a sort of corn bread which can also be served fried


The desserts are fantastic, as you can likely imagine:

11) Panettone - eggy bread with raisins and candied fruit baked in.


12) Pandoro - a tall, golden cake with powdered sugar sprinkled on top.


13) Panforte - a specialty of Siena, this is a sort of dense gingerbread cake
- very sweet and quite intense.

The eye candy this week is a little different. I think it's still quite enjoyable, though, and I hope that you'll agree...









So, just scroll down...
























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Here he is ladies (and gents):

An unknown (to me) Alpino.
(One of the elite mountain warfare soldiers of the Italian Army).