A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Giulia from Juls’ Kitchen when she was in Rome for the day. Juls knows her food- I am in love with her recipes and food photography. She might not remember, but she promised to teach me how to cook Italian food if I would teach her some Mexican recipes.
Since my gas is still off (for four more days!!), I can’t exactly cook anything right now. But I love salsa, and I had a major fail trying to buy Mexican salsa in Rome, so I decided to make Pico de Gallo.
I was finally able to track down a necessary ingredient:
Cilantro! There is a lot of flat leaf parsley floating around Italian markets, but that won’t do at all. I realized that cilantro is called coriander here. To me, coriander is only the dried seed, but if you want cilantro in Italy, you’ll have to ask for “coriandolo.”
I am terrible at following recipes so I don’t usually attempt to write them. Feel free to play around with the amounts of all the ingredients because these are all approximations.
Pico de Gallo alla Romana:
3 Tomatoes -chopped
1/2C Cilantro – finely diced
2-3 Jalapeños – seeded and diced (fresh would be best, but good luck finding those in Italia!)
1/3 Red onion – diced
1 Small clove of garlic – diced
Juice of 1/4 lime
Chop up everything except the lime! Pico de Gallo is meant to be chunky.
Combine the chopped tomatoes, cilantro, onion, jalapeños, and garlic in a bowl. Squeeze the lime juice over all the ingredients.
Now, here is the hard part. You have a delicious bowl of salsa in front of you. What you need to do next is cover the bowl and walk away.
Let sit for 1 hour.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and Pico de Gallo cannot be rushed. All those flavors need to mingle a little bit. Once you’ve let it sit, serve with warm tortilla chips and don’t be surprised at how quickly it disappears.
Y’know, that would go really well with some shrimp! You did a delicious-looking job. Proud of you, bionda! 😀
XXo,
Neekoh
i am jealous that you found good tomatoes in this season… anyway.. my friends love when i cook mexican for them! isnt it weird that the brand is uncle bens here? anyway.. love your photos! and why dont you have gas?
The Uncle Ben’s thing is SO weird! I think the tomatoes looked a little better than they tasted (bland). Supposedly they are from Sicily right now.
Ugh, the gas thing. I have no idea. This is day 5 of no stove, no hot water, no heaters. They are replacing the gas line to the entire building verrrrrrrrryyyyy slowwwwwwwllllllyyyy in the middle of December.
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! It will be one of my appetizers for New Years Eve!
I love pico de gallo! I took my lil sis to Mexico for her graduation in 1999 and that is when we fell in love with yummy pico de gallo. We ate it on EVERYTHING. It was the cilantro and jalapeno that stole my heart. Yummm!