Honest Food Tales – The Beehive Rome

Convenience “foods”

Growing up, I never saw a fresh herb in our kitchen. My mother came from a generation of women for whom less time in the kitchen was a measure of success and since my parents both worked full time – our refrigerator, freezer and pantry were full of convenience “foods”.  Home cooked meals from scratch were a rarity and when they did take place, it was always using the least fresh ingredients possible. As a very picky eater, I subsisted almost entirely on processed foods:  frozen egg rolls, tater tots, frozen pizza and cinnamon toast. I didn’t respect meal times, or even eat what could be considered “meals”. I foraged in my kitchen – a mix of potato chips, toast, maybe some bacon bits from a shaker jar. I joke that I never had a glass of water until my late teens – if I woke up, thirsty in the middle of the night, I’d open a can of Pepsi. 

Market fresh

When I was 19 years old – that all changed.  I flew by myself to Europe and was met by friends in Paris. Having no budget for eating out, we would instead go the market and buy some fresh bread, cheese, tomatoes, olives and some good beer. As basic as that sounds now, at the time this was a level of freshness that I hadn’t experienced. Good gruyere on a real baguette with a fresh tomato was a whole new sensation.

Traveling around during that trip I wasn’t that adventurous, nor did I have the money to try many things. However, a few years after that initial trip to Europe, I moved to Italy and found out once again that eating out was too expensive for my backpacker’s budget, and there wasn’t a frozen food culture at all that I could fall back on. So by necessity, I had to learn to cook.

Learning to cook

A curious person by nature, I would eat in an inexpensive trattoria and then have no problem afterward asking how dishes were made. The wait staff, or the cooks, would always share how the dish was made – as these were traditional dishes, not someone’s secret recipe. The details of spaghetti alla carbonara, all’amatriciana and all’arrabbiata were revealed to me. At the outdoor markets I’d ask the grocers which tomatoes were for what and they’d explain what was used for a bruschetta, or a salad, or a sauce. Next door to me lived two Italian guys who spoke no English and they once demonstrated how to properly cook pasta: how much salt, how much sauce, and the importance of mixing the sauce and pasta in the pan, adding some cooking water if it was too dry, at the end.

Fast forward 20 years and it’s hard to recognize the fast-food, pre-packaged consumer I used to be. If it’s not fresh, and local, and homemade, I have very little to do with it. I make my own bread, the hummus to dip it into, and have a repertoire that now spans to other countries I’ve visited, and lived in.  For me, there isn’t one dish I’ve discovered while traveling – there are many.  I wouldn’t have discovered food at all had it not been for my travels.

Steve and his wife, Linda, are Americans who have lived in Italy since 1999, where they own a budget, eco-hotel called The Beehive as well as the accommodation agency Cross-Pollinate which finds apartments and B&Bs they can recommend to rent in 8 European cities.  He has 3 awesome daughters and they all live in Orvieto, a medieval hill town in Umbria.  Follow them on Instagram.