Italian Themed Dates

My husband and I went to Italy a few years ago and I wanted to recreate parts of our trip at home. So I organized three dinner dates, one for each city we visited.

Venice:

My favorite dish, on our trip, was the bacon carbonara I had in Venice. The smoky salty flavor from the bacon was so good infused in the cream. I decided to recreate this dish for our date. Here's a recipe that tastes just like the one I had there.
For dessert, I made the popular fisherman's bread cookies sold there. The chocolate ones are called moretti and the pistachio cookies are called pan pistacchio. I added to this recipe. See details below...

Chocolate cookie - I added 1/4 cup cocoa powder and reduced the flour by 3 Tbsp. I added 1/2 cup of chocolate chips and omitted the nuts/fruit. The cookies bake in 15 min at 350 degrees.
Pistachio cookie - I added a few drops of green food coloring to the batter, 1/4 cup coconut, and 1/2 cup chocolate chips instead of the fruit/nuts. I painted the outside of the cookie with green food coloring after it had finished baking and covered it in glaze.
Glaze - 1/4 cup honey, 2 Tbsp sugar. Heated.

 

Florence:

In Florence, we went to a sandwich shop that sold paninis. I recreated paninis at our house using this method . I filled the sandwiches with spinach and artichoke dip, roasted tomatoes and chicken.

For dessert, we had the popular street food in Florence, waffles with gelato (ice cream.) It was a pretty easy dessert to put together. I got pre-made waffles at Winco and snickers rocky road ice cream from Roths.

 

Rome:

We spent a little more time in Rome. It's a bigger city and there's a lot to see. When we got there, we were so hungry, that we ate at the first restaurant we could find. My husband ordered ravioli and they brought him out one big ravioli that was the size of a plate.

I decided to recreate that dish at home. I made two large ravioli's, boiled them in a sauce pan, and to my surprise, they held together and tasted great. 

For dessert, I made a baked version of cannoli's. I tried to make them look similar to one that I tried in Rome with pistachios. I think they turned out great. See recipe below...

I used a tuile recipe from this cookbook to make the cannoli's. I used my cannoli tubes to shape them. The ricotta filling recipe came from this site, but I left the candied fruit out.

 

Italian Music:

Here are some Italian songs that we listened to during our dates.
1.) Fascination
2.) Bella Notte
3.) Via Con Me