Bring It!

I just got back from my one month long honeymoon from Europe!

During my time there, I attempted to taste all of Europe so that I could report back to my amazing-incredible (not just amazing, and not just incredible, but "amazing-incredible"--with the hyphen) readers with all of my findings. Well, I also ate like a beast for myself too. But mostly for you. Really!

But I have some really disappointing news that actually took me a few days to digest. When we returned home, we were in the process of uploading all of our pictures onto the computer, when a serious mistake of astronomical proportions occurred, resulting in the permanent deletion of 90% of our honeymoon pictures. It has to do with moving files through the command prompt using an Apple.

Trust me, it took me a full week before I could talk about this like an adult. For the first couple of days, the only thing I could say was repeated expletives. Yea, those dirty words shot out of my surly mouth like a AK-47.

Unfortunately, after countless visits with the tech support at Fry's and hundreds of dollars spent of freakin' useless "recovery software" purchased online, we discovered that we pretty much lost those photos for good. And the pictures included our multiple visits to Berthillion in Paris, France (the best ice cream in the world), Nico in Venice, Italy (the best gelato in that region of Italy). Oh yes, and pictures of us, the honeymooning couple. (For a food blogger, you know I was just a tad more devastated by the loss of those food pictures though. Shh, don't tell the beau!)

However, the limitations of modern technology will not get this food blogger down! No!

This is my new goal. To blog my attempt to try and recreate my most memorable meals and snacks in Europe with recipes. Yes, the pictures were deleted, irretrieveably. But the memories? Still in my head. And I can still use this to my advantage. I don't want to just say, "I had the best paella ever in Barcelona," or "I loved the pizza and pasta in Florence and Rome," but I want to say something like, "Paris was the start of my love affair with excellent coq au vin."

So I am turning this horrific nightmare into something good. Just to give you a roadmap: for the future, I will be blogging about my experiences with (1) Swiss, (2) Italian, (3) Spanish, (4) French, and (5) English cuisine. I know, that is a lot of places, but it was a one month honeymoon, and we exhausted our life savings for that trip. (Oh, and as a side note, upon our return to the U.S., we discovered that the remainder of our life savings in our 401(K) had also been "exhausted," or apparently eliminated.) But thankfully, since I backed up the pictures from Zurich, there will be a few more Zurich posts.

Welcome back to Passionate Eater folks, you will be seeing me more often now!