Today on Food on Fridays we consider an assortment of tasty Italian bites that Chris and I encountered today.

First, my apologies: as Chris correctly pointed out, now that I’m officially a “tourist”, I should be taking more photos of the foods we eat in restaurants. In the past, I’ve always been hesitant to do that, but he’s got a point: when in Rome – er, Verona – as a tourist, I should be taking photos of the foods, no?

Unfortunately, we didn’t have this epiphany before lunch, so there are no photos of lunch. Instead, I’ll just have to describe a few of the of tartine —slices of bread with toppings — that we had for the first course for lunch:

• Red raddichio mixed with nuts and cream cheese
• Bacala (salted cod)
• Some sort of smoked cheese with an almond and candied orange peel on top
• Shrimp salad
• Plus at least 5 other things that I can’t remember; I really need to be better at both taking photos and writing stuff down!
• Plus there were two  little meatballs, served cold on toothpicks

For a second course, we had a plate of assorted cheeses:

• fresh buffalo mozzarella
• Giallo blu, a yellow blue cheese
• Monte Veronese cheese
• Another firm, aged cheese that I don’t remember the name of

The cheese plate also had a variety of jams, etc. to accompany the cheeses: fig jam, sweet onion relish, something really sweet with a maraschino cherries, and also a simple honey drizzled over the Monte Veronese cheese

We washed that all down with a glass of Valpolicello Ripasso, a local red wine.

Quite the feast, all in all.

Getting a nice glass of Italian wine and an interesting selection of tartine and cheeses is a perfect lazy way to lunch in Verona. Not a bad way to mark our first Plan G “Food on Fridays” post.