long island for a year

With my birthday approaching (and no wisdom in sight), I have to hear questions like "What do you wish?", "What should we do?", which I can never answer because I don't really need anything special...wait, I DO need something!!! I need my peace: quiet, silence, calm. (Ideally a desert island would do the trick, but I'll be contented with something smaller). That I can never have a relaxed breakfast has been an issue for quite some times now, so it's time to have another breakfast outside .Hooray! It'll be an exception, so let me tell you how an Italian - used to either tea-biscuits (those you can professionally dunk to show-off), rusks or double-baked bread (the messy, old fashioned, tastier version of rusk) in a big bowl of lukewarm milk with pure soluble toasted barley - finds her way in this Country to have breakfast at home. My usual breakfast since we've moved is nothing fancy but a bowl of cold milk and cold cereals with a cup of coffee (o...

As if there weren't enough things to take care of, last week our (landlady's) fridge broke; we had it repaired some hours later, so we didn't have to take extreme measures concerning the food that was in it. But now I want to know!!! What would YOU do, if your fridge broke and you had to wait for a couple of days until it could be repaired? Would you throw away fridge and food? Only the food (so you can start a new diet)?Or only the fridge (because yours didn't have a nice design anyway)? Would you ask a neighbor (or ten) to keep some of your stuff and meanwhile curse in Aramaic because you had just bought so much perishable food? Or would you find the time to cook for your friends and their cats?

I recently wrote a post on US food but I tried not to be too  hard in the first place because if there are obvious targets I could hit, there are certain other I don't want to hit. One of this is the American breakfast - at least one style of American breakfast: that with eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast and - if there is still some room in my tummy - pancakes... This isn't something I would have everyday, unless I want to run two or three miles up and down the hills around here; but I really like it once in a while. I am not afraid of eating something savory in the morning or something more than coffee and croissant (I hear most Italian people have this habit - my mom was very impressed when I told her about the scrambled eggs). After months we finally managed to go out to have breakfast - kids are part of the being lazy but sometimes it isn't fun when under your table lay two or more spoons, straws, jam boxes and you are responsible for this mess. Even less fun  it's...